Global Star Party 45

Transcript:

can that would be nice definitely will
shows liam we are live i still don't see anything
it takes there's a delay okay i will go to youtube is up
we are we are live youtube is up on rask as well oh nice
fantastic how do i see it on rask i go to the rask and that's it and there's nothing there rask montreal channel it's
there it's the first one and it shows live video now i see small satellites big
stars i see mark i see russell
but i don't know how to see it on my screen so i can monitor the chat don't worry i can monitor the chat i'll
take care of it but it should be easy
all right happy astronomy day everybody
yes [Music]
really well astronomy is so unique as a science because anyone anywhere can participate
you don't need to have a phd or a special certification just a desire to know
what is out there i loved astronomy as a science for about as long as i can remember
but i didn't get into observing myself until 2015 when i received an incredible gift of a telescope
when i turned it to look on saturn on my first night out with it i just about fell over at all and quickly got my
friends to take a look my next thought was i have to share this with the world two weeks later i figured out how to
attach a camera to the telescope and it was all downhill from there it's so amazing to me that i can capture
images of enormous stellar nurseries clouds of stars and galaxies millions of light years away with gear that i can
pack in the trunk of my car it seems like you need to use one of those giant research telescopes or the
hubble space telescope to witness such wonders in fact you can see so much with amateur gear especially if you use a
camera the universe is full of mind-boggling wonders hot ionized gas left over from long dead
stars giving birth to new stars the remnants of ancient supernovas clusters of stars so close that if we
lived on a planet inside of one of them our sky would be filled with stars as bright as serious
distant galaxies being ripped apart by their neighbors stars not unlike our sun that we dip
down their interiors out into space in their death rows and so much more and it's not static and still but
ever-changing and evolving with an amateur telescope you can see giant hurricanes and jupiter forming
and disappearing you can track the motion of asteroids or distant pluto across the sky
you could stumble across a comet never seen before or a star going supernova or meteor crashing in the water
and the best part is everyone on earth we all live in our one night sky on this
tiny rock hurtling through the cosmos all you need to do is look up
happy international astronomy day
hello everyone i
to wish am a happy international astronomy today is truly an
international fireworks
hi everyone i'm terry mann and i'm the secretary of the astronomical league and
i'd like to wish everyone a happy international astronomy day i hope you have a good day
international astronomy day hi this is john doss former president of the astronaut
happy astronomy day from the pacific northwest hi i'm caitlin aarons at the goddard
space flight center and i wanted to wish you all a happy international astronomy
day ahoy boy it's turner from plateau astro wishing you a very happy international
astronomy day good evening my name is chuck allen and
i'm vice president and the past president of the astronomical league and on behalf of the 18
500 members and 305 member societies of the league i want to welcome all of you to this gsp
and wish you all a safe and happy international astronomy day
hello everyone i'm siri i am deepti golden the head of executive and founder of astronomy
enthusiast in nepal and we see you all happy international astronomy
thank you
[Music]
well hello everybody uh we have made it this is international astronomy day and
i'm very very pleased uh to be here with the royal astronomical society of canada
montreal center as uh as host uh with kareem jaffer and uh russell
frolic prelidge right fragrance
so anyhow we have a incredible lineup of people here including um
uh david levy who is the honorary president of the uh resc montreal center
i uh and many others including doug burger the founder of astronomy day and so
we're so honored to have him here with us i am going to
since the montreal center is the official host of this uh this program
and created this lineup i'm going to hand over the program to
them and uh and we'll go from there who's going to take it first uh kareem or russell
i'm going to take it first okay thank you very much scott and thanks
everyone uh welcome to international astronomy day 2021 global star party 45
we are really excited to be here and uh i was actually talking to one of the presenters earlier today and we realized
it's kind of a smorgasbord of astronomy that we have for you because each little astronomy story is kind of
in a digestible little bite to leave us really nice and happy and full at the end of a potluck which is the way we in
montreal love celebrating all of our astronomy events we tend to have our swap sales our big towns and lectures
everything with a small buffet of potluck and uh sit chat talk have coffee and just enjoy
each other's story why we look at the night sky the way we do so tonight before we get started one of
the things that we've been doing lately uh in both the montreal center as well as our partners here in montreal is
we've been doing a land and sky acknowledgement the land acknowledgement very much when we're doing things in person
but the sky acknowledgement is something that we've been adapting to because we know that the sky is for everyone
there's no borders with the sky and it's also been there for our generations after generations for the
indigenous people and when you look all the way back to the mayan culture we look at the dresden codex you see
that things like the annular eclipse that we're going to see next month and the lunar eclipse that we're going to see later this month
are shown side by side in their drawings in their etchings and carvings and you
see the symbol for the sun and the moon separately but overlapping during these
eclipse events when we talk about the peoples whose lands we are on the algonquin is one of
the groups that we really look to their legends of the sky and their annular eclipse legend they're actually eclipse
legend is a snaring of the sun it's the idea that there was a young algonquin hunter who was setting snares and he
found a set of tracks where the snow had melted and he set a snare there and the next morning when the sun tried to come
up it got caught in the snare so the sun was blocked out and every animal was at a loss for what to do
until the muskrat came along and the muskrat or the beaver mouse as it's called as well
chewed through the opening in the snare to release the sun and bring it back to give its warmth but in doing so it
burned its teeth and that's why the muskrat has brown teeth and so we look at these legends and we learn a lot
about the way in which we saw and we still see the sky in its relationship with us
now i want to start off with this eclipse because it's a great thing that's going to be coming up here in canada so i want to share with you a
little bit of what's going to be happening with the annular solar eclipse on june 10th from our outreach coordinator at our national center jenna
hines this year on june 10th there will be an annular solar eclipse passing through eastern and northern canada the path of
annularity goes through northern ontario up towards none of it and then over into russia for most of us here in canada
we're going to be seeing the eclipse first thing in the morning right at sunrise so in toronto that's at 5 45 in the morning
and the whole eclipse is going to be over by 6 38 a.m you're gonna have a different view based on where you are so
the further east you are in canada the more time you'll have to see the eclipse and a callaway view is going to be great
because you're basically in the middle of the path of the eclipse and so you'll see almost a perfect ring of sunlight
that'll look something like this remember never to look directly at the
sun if you want to learn more about how to observe this eclipse and maybe image it you can follow us over the next month
or so and we'll be posting videos about how to do that thank you jenna and our national center
works very closely with sky news that's the old fire sorry about that
[Music] always have these little glitches when we're doing something online live
so i want to talk to you a little bit about what the royal astronomical society of canada is we've been around for a bit over 150 years we are the
largest most active astronomy group in canada over 4 000 members and russell's
going to tell you briefly about the montreal center in a few minutes but i want to tell you about what we offer at the national level and
what we offer to the public because there's a lot that you can access no matter where you are in the world
so what we do in terms of our centers across the country there are 29 centers ranging all the way from west coast to
east coast north all the way down to the 49th we have a vision of trying to share the
night sky with everyone and learn about astronomy learn about space science and support education outreach even research
and just enjoyment within the community it's open to everyone who's interested in astronomy no matter your background
no matter whether you're a professional or a hobbyist we invite everyone to join in and our club in montreal is actually
representative of this diversity of backgrounds locally we offer observing nights public
events beginners activities and center meetings we also do school outreach programs locally and nationally and we work on
protecting the night sky with dark sky initiatives that we've been really building forward again after a few years
kind of on the back burner when you join in as a member you get not
only a subscription to the sky news magazine and the ability to participate in sky news i've actually had students
published in sky news successively the last couple of years and the next edition is going to have students doing
citizen science you get members benefits such as discounts on some materials and every
rask member gets an observer's handle and this observer's handbook is so fantastic and russell's holding it up
for everybody to see there's a us edition available as well with the units that are more comfortable
to us observers and some more southern objects as well and one of our speakers tonight has
founded the next gen committee which is the committee of youth within the rasc and they've introduced two scholarships
to help students to actually pursue space sciences at the post-secondary level
within those members discounts we've now introduced several new things for astrophotographers we have the annual
calendar that you can participate in for people who don't have access to dark skies but want to be able to work with
dark sky data we have a remote telescope in california and you can purchase data sets for that telescope
and then we have specific observers programs where you can purchase workbooks and guides to help you and you
can earn explore the moon explore the universe or even more intense and
more expert level or even intermediate level of
certificates in the ik williamson lunar observing the messier objects and the ngc objects
observing certificates since covid began the rasc as a whole
has moved a lot of our material online to make it as accessible as possible to our members and to the general public
our national office does multiple weekly events you've got the moon at noon which is a new one to help
anybody who's interested work through the explore of the moon together with a guide coming out every week helping you
through different sets of moon challenges and objects that you can look at close to the terminator further away
from the terminator but since the start we've been doing insider's guide our our
self-isolation star parties and then we've been using this robotic telescope to enable us to access research level
materials for high school and college classrooms so my students have gotten to do exoplanet transits we've had other
groups do astrophotography and we've been working with high schools from the bc that have been doing this as well
with a more simplified version where they don't have to do the full processing of the images
next month we have our general assembly where we're going to be talking about the stars belonging to everyone with a
day dedicated to young astronomy enthusiasts and then we have our general meeting
where we really discuss kind of the ins and outs of the actual uh the rasc
but myself i get to work on the national education public outreach committee and we're just starting a new program that i
want to tell you about called creation station now creation station is a location on
our website for kids ages 5 to 12 to really express what they love about
space so what we invite kids to do is to submit short stories drawings poems
comic books whatever they feel enhances their actual expression of their
interest in the night sky and we are not limiting this to canadians we are actually going to post
anything from international enthusiasts as well kids ages 5 to 12. if you want to share
your imagination with the world we are providing a space for you now this idea is one that we've been
working on long and hard at the national level and with center impact from the montreal center so to tell you more
about our local center i'm going to pass it over to russell great uh thanks karine i'm going to
share my screen too and uh get this going here oh yeah thanks uh hi oh just a sec uh my name is
uh russell and uh just want to get this going here wanna make uh want to continue and make
a nice welcome from montreal can you see this uh properly oh just a second i'll use that
so i just wanted to say a few words about welcome from montreal and oh where did it go
i don't see it there we go uh so this is our hometown it's montreal
we're very happy and proud to live here and i wanted to say a few words about uh uh arrasque montreal center so for those
of you uh from canada you'll recognize this map this is our country and where we are in montreal we're tucked away in
the in the southeast corner eastern time zone for those of you less familiar with our geography uh put it this way we're
about an hour flight north of new york so we're pretty close we got lots of visitors and they're usually keen to go
to new york as well uh something else we share from new york is like the island of manhattan montreal
itself is an island this is a picture taken at night from the international space station montreal is an island in
the middle of the st lawrence river uh in order to
ready to go in order to introduce a little bit more about our little town i have a one-minute video here
that uh we would i'd like you just to show for a second and this is saw no it's changed
can you see this yes yep good all right
yep
[Music] so you can see the mountain you can't see the video all right
we'll work before all right um
um
[Music]
okay oh how's that
better [Music]
do [Music]
[Applause] [Music]
nice okay so uh you got a good idea we're very proud of our city you like it a lot and as i think the video makes
clear i'll just go back to my slides it's amazing russell how much it's
developed in the last the last time i was there in montreal was about 30 years ago and this is it's amazing
incredible that's nice
but it's also amazing how little has changed in many important parts of the city yes
right onto david the feel of montreal really stays genuine it's really it's
just wonderful to be at and all the different towns and areas of montreal they all have a distinct
different vibe to them they do every we really like it here it's really nice so um montreal center so kareem showed you
the national stuff and of course we at montreal center we contribute to it to our very active group we were established in 1918 so we actually
celebrated our 100th anniversary in 2018 which is not not too far after the
montreal canadiens hockey team uh we're a strong vibrant center we've got more than 160 members and as you're going to
find out tonight we're quite active we're quite keen we have lots of interest and we're really excited to
share them with you tonight as kareem said like other uh
brass centers we have events but we're we're so active actually we can't stop the events in monthly or even weekly so
we actually have bi-weekly so uh it's pretty cool and it's been continuing even more as a result of uh during the
coven lockdown we have a lot of programs we have a newsletter could be called skyward it's
great for our change exchanging ideas we have lots of members who actively contribute to the content we have a long
series of public events and talks i'll talk about that but more of course uh during normal times we have observing
events we have star parties that normally are not online we have a lot of workshops we have houses that are our
bellevue observatory furnished with a 14 inch meat lx 200 we have our uh dark
site woolly woods which is a 16-inch explorer scientific uh light bucket
we have a library at john abbott college where kareem is we also have the possibility if you're
new and you don't know what to do you can actually rent a telescope from us and try it out and i think last week we
had a swap sale too so that was pretty cool more information is available on our
website i will put the website in the chat after if you wanted to know more information
uh for this summer uh in spite of the pandemic we still have a busy schedule so we have our members clubhouses every
wednesday and saturday again because we're so busy and keen we have lots to do and lots to share and of course our
guests are always welcome to join us it's a lot of banter it's a lot of fun
uh next week is actually me talking about getting started in astrophotography followed by nikola
lavon later this evening but she'll be summarizing the highlights of the night sky for june of course there's also the
partial lunar eclipse at our moon set at montreal location and as kareem already mentioned we have a partial solar
eclipse but i don't know if we're going to be able to see i don't even know what's going to deal with the horizon for us
we also have monthly public zoom events uh we have well today we have today's
presentation our next presentation is actually done by a prominent member of athena forza and
she's going to be talking about the theme about encouraging girls into the stem
by fusing art and astrobiology she's an artist in residence at the seti institute program director and
educational researcher and she's been a prominent member here and is well known for her art her astronomy based art and
if you're interested again we'll put the link here the bitly link in the chat
we also normally have outreach events that we're gonna we normally work with local schools and local libraries uh our
next uh scheduled event is for the perseids in uh and uh normally like to have in-person
events but of course those are on high data
so if you're interested in doing this stuff we would certainly welcome you to join us at montreal center if you're
interested it's a regular membership is only 97 canadian dollars so i what is that 33 american i don't
know it's probably pretty cheap uh we have our youth membership so special price you and if you want to
join as a family bring your kids and stuff we encourage that with a special price as well lots going on it's a lot
of fun we hope to see and we have a lot so we think it's a
pretty good deal probably the best deal in the universe all the goals and objectives and
things that we like to promote the part of rask national we'll also do here in montreal and it's your chance to try it
out if you want to see what more about what astronomy can offer for you come on over have a chat with us and
we'll be really glad to show you great thank you
thanks russell and uh now we've got one of the neatest parts about kovid i mean a lot of covet has
been tough on many of us but one of the things that we've been really lucky about in the montreal center is we get
to spend time with our honorary president because i don't know how many of you are aware but you if you're at
the global star party you probably know david levy he has been at every single global star party that they've had so
far all 44 of them this makes 45 and he has been our honorary president at the montreal center for a long time
now we normally are lucky to have him come visit a couple of times a year give a talk be there for one of our outreach
events it's just fantastic and now we get to see him talk to him and
enjoy hearing his stories about the night sky twice a week at our clubhouses so
david starts most of our events with a wonderful welcome and a reading so i'm going to pass it over to dave we're all
yours thank you so much kareem and bolswara at the avenue uh the
associate astronaut lead to canada associated with us coming to canada
and welcome all of you to tonight to say that i am having kind of a very
emotional reaction to the nice particular global star party would be an understatement as i'm looking
across my screen i'm seeing so many people and the memories are just flooding back
there's uh stella kafka the director of the aavso and with her comes the long long history
of the aavso since 1911. there are people here
uh from uh from all over canada all over the united states and on our other
platforms all over the world we probably have several thousand people right now
and each one of you is giving bringing back memories for me
uh i i joined the montreal center or i i didn't join it until i was old enough at
the time one had to be 16 i remember counting the days till i was able to join when i first walked into
the observatory and met miss isabel k williamson on october the 7th
1960. if you can imagine how many decades ago that was
and um she got me onto the lunar training program which i completed in 1964.
in 1967 there was a somewhat unhappy event with the montreal center when some
of the members tried to have me expelled that didn't quite go as far as they wanted to
but i did i figured that cost me my friendship with isabel williamson
when i was doing my graduate work at queens in ontario number
about it was in the late 70s so about 10 years after that i decided
to write a letter to mrs winston just asking her how she was doing figuring she'd open it up laugh and
never respond she did respond immediately and it was a beautiful beautiful letter
that ended with if you should ever return to montreal i should like to visit with you
turned out i was going back in just a couple of weeks and so i started visiting her we became
far better friends than we ever were in my youth and uh
the observatory which no longer exists now was named after her
and for her wonderful enthusiasm which i still have and still retain
as i'm enjoying the night sky how do you become an astronomer i'm sure
there are thousands of people out there who want to know why well they're two ways one of them is you
get a phd in astronomy and that's hard you need a lot of math a lot of physics but there's another way
borrow your parents binoculars you go outside tonight
you sit outside and you point the binoculars at the moon you might actually have a friend that
you show the binoculars to and you have them look at the moon as well
then you can say i have now seen the moon through a pair of binoculars then you are an astronomer that's all you
need to do i always begin with a quotation
the quotation right now comes from a column that i'm writing for the montreal center's
newsletter called skyward and many other publications and it's called skyward a
name taken from the publication itself and uh i decided to write this time
about gravity gravity is not an easy concept
but i remember that when isaac newton was sitting outside in his
orchard and the apple fell from the tree the legend is that the apple hit him on the head
there is actually no evidence to back that up but there's a lot of evidence that newton was walking through his
origin orchard and saw the apple fall down and wondered why it did why didn't
it why did it fall down didn't go forwards or backwards and his theory of gravitation as a force
stood sway held's way for over 200 years until einstein came together
and he came up with a special theory of relativity which was just specific
and did not address the question of gravity in 1915 he came out
with a general theory of relativity and was partly the result of the fact that mercury's
orbit was strange it would speed up a little bit and then it would slow down a little bit
could not be explained by newton's law einstein came up with his general theory
about relativity and he made the calculations that showed that mercury's orbit
actually followed the new theory of relativity in einstein's theory it's not a force at
all gravity is simply geometry and abraham pais has the quote that i'm
going to end my little presentation tonight he wrote that an einstein
einstein discovered that his general theory of relativity explained the
unusual orbit of mercury he writes this discovery was i believe
by far the strongest emotional experience in einstein's scientific life
perhaps in all his life and the next five words i think
are among the most important five words in the history of science and they are
nature had spoken to him and thank you kareem and back to you
thanks dave that was inspirational as as as always we we love just
getting a chance to hear from that perspective and i don't know if you've ever had a chance to hear uh david levy
presentation but the mix of literature and art and music and science and
observation just really brings across the full steam spectrum and it's just it really is
inspiring thank you so much kareem i appreciate you saying that very much my pleasure now for the next
speaker or we're we're really honored to have him with us i'm actually going to turn the floor over to scott to do a
small introduction for us sure sure well our next our next uh
guest is someone that has has started it all
it is mr doug berger and doug had started the
astronomy day event in 1973 he was inspired by john dobson
uh doing sidewalk astronomy and
you know he uh well he can tell the story best himself but uh um what i can say is that we are all so
honored and uh so amazed to have uh uh mr doug berger on with us today doug
is your uh is your video on are you yeah i'm here if you're gonna there you are okay all right so
um this is the first time for you to do a a global star party with us and uh
uh you know where i i'm i'm pinching myself that you're here uh you know i i
know that you know we we're talking to someone that started a worldwide movement uh
you know astronomy day has been practiced by millions of people around
the globe and continues to grow with excitement
and anticipation now twice a year and so it's it's fantastic
maybe you could give us a little insight to how you know what how it all started for you
well i think you put you hit the nail on the head when you mention the san francisco sidewalk astronomers because
that's pretty much where the whole thing got started through uh to john dobson i sometimes refer to this as sidewalk
astronomy on steroids because that's what it is we used to set up the telescopes over in
san francisco here delhi square various places like that and there'd be people from coming out of
the restaurants and their fancy clothes climbing up the rickety ladders to look
through the telescopes and to me that was a real big thrill see people who had never seen a telescope
and a lot of them didn't even believe that what they were looking through was the telescope they'd see saturn and
they'd have to go to the other end of the telescope to make sure we didn't have a photograph hanging in there
and that was pretty common right so uh the idea was uh well
why don't we just try to take this to a larger scale and originally it wasn't planned for uh
for a national or international event we had a group called the astronomical association of northern california which
was an umbrella group of about i think 13 or 14 different clubs all around the san francisco bay
area so the first astronomy day that we set up was with that particular organization we
had 28 stations scattered around northern california including
street corners observatories planetariums
uh just about anything to me it was always about you know getting getting the telescopes to the people
and so what i did is went ahead with the aanc and put together a news release
to get together as much publicity as i could for this we got tv stations and
local newspapers involved and got some pretty good articles but what was kind of interesting is i
was surprised at how few people came because they saw it on television and in the newspapers i
would say maybe 10 percent of the people that showed up actually came because they'd heard about it
whereas the other 90 were people that were just naturally in places like here
at delhi square jack london square in oakland and places like that so to me
the idea was uh don't count as much on the media as get the telescopes to where
the people are normally and that worked out pretty well right um
i i heard that uh in in talking i i met john dobson and talked to him a couple of times uh
and he was always big on you know go where the people are and that must have been a uh a shared uh philosophy with
your group and and with this with the uh sidewalk astronomers doug were you also
part of these sidewalk astronomers as well yeah i i went up with john a few times
and uh i got to know john pretty well i never actually paid my dues to join the
sidewalk astronomers but i was you know involved with the group and um
and there was a few times we gave john a ride down to the riverside telescope makers conference and
so it um you know i was pretty much involved with what they were doing right um
and then you know what happened was after the first year you know i wrote an article for sky and tell telescope
magazine and they kind of pooh-poohed a little bit i guess maybe it came in a little bit late form and they thought it
was a novel idea but you know thanks but uh no thanks but since that time you know i think the
thing that's really taken off on this is well well first of all i took a trip
about a year and a half two years later to in the naa convention the national amateur
astronomers convention and i gave a presentation there and uh some of the people there got
pretty excited about it including a general gentleman by the name of joel you
from hong kong who took the idea back to hong kong with them and did something there he built the hong kong observatory
or planetarium up there so uh after that it was just a matter of
uh sky and towel and uh astronomy magazine and the big
the big guys picked up on it started running uh ads or i started running
articles about it ahead of time and then afterwards there was always pictures of
observing stations with lines of people set up and uh it just took off from there went uh went
international wow wow so i mean uh i mean it's just amazing um
you know that uh you know a lot of people have asked me well you know how many how many people
what groups started astronomy day what what happened and i didn't really have
good answers for them until i had started reading it there's an entry in wikipedia that that
attributes you to starting astronomy day back in 1973
but then you know i've learned over my life that a lot of times it is one person that uh that starts uh
something big um you know you look at the national parks in the united states
a lot of them one person you know uh you know with their inspiration and vision
uh got it started uh and and other people uh you know were able to climb on
and make it uh something that was sustained um but
you know i would uh you know i am well i know that all of us here the
audience uh all of us that are our presenters here we're very honored that you uh came on to our program today to
talk about this i did also want you are also a comet discoverer could you talk a little bit
about that boy that's a long time ago back in 1975 i was involved with the
discovery of comet kobayashi burger milan which actually was a pretty pretty
bright comet it was it came in on the heels of
comet um thank you my wife's sitting back here
cheering me on here yeah it came on the heels of cahotec which was a big flop because it you know they made a big deal
of it and it never turned into much in in the case of kobayashi berger milan
it was actually more visible than kohotek because it was much higher in the sky
and unfortunately the media didn't jump on that one because they'd kind of got their fingers burned on kahootech
right now a year later i went over to europe and i met with lubos kohotek so i was had the honor of meeting with him
and that was kind of a good thing for uh just uh touching base with the other part i know david's
in the comments very heavily very heavily but a little bit i would like to say
that i had the honor of looking at kobayashi burger milan
just after shortly after this discovery and then when it got very nicely nice and bright from our original jarnak
cottage i really really enjoyed doing that and i just wanted to also add that last
night a very faint comet polomar it's pretty faint little guy but it's nicely visible
right next to m3 and i just wanted to point that out just
last night it kind of reminded me of kobayashi burger milan nowhere near as bright but a comet to me as a comet and
i love them all yes i agree with you completely
well wow that's that's wonderful uh uh doug i
again it's a huge honor uh we're so excited that you were able to join us
today and and share some of this stuff uh next year will be the 50th anniversary of um or
is it 1973 so it's either the next year or the year after uh but the 15th
it's the year after okay so we hope that you're uh back with us
again uh uh and every astronomy day i i would love it um so um
you're such an inspiration and uh you know i for one is someone that i believe
that astronomy is is good for for people i think it's good for their for their health for their minds uh
um for their you know i think that once you start that along the path of really
exploring and letting letting all those uh you know the
fake facade of what we might present to uh strangers you know once you're out
late enough and you have uh really started to look uh deeply at the sky um all that stuff
kind of sheds away and and uh and you start to take the journey and uh
you know something is switched on and uh and you're you're an explorer at that point
so well you know scott one of the biggest thrills i've ever had is when people come up to me and they say you know i'm
into astronomy or i've gotten into astronomy because of seeing a station set up on astronomy day
somewhere wow and doing that that really gives me a big thrill that i've had that
much of an effect on some people you have you have and it's it's something that you've had on an effect
on millions of people around the world and it's now happening at least twice a year so
uh and it will for a very very long time doug thank you very much i'm going to
hand this back over to um to kareem and uh
i think that he is going to introduce the next speaker here just before kareem
takes over i do want to add that i was at cellophane in 1975 just
just after the announcement of the comet kobayashi burger milan and i remember that cellophane may tease
canadians because canadians tend to come to cellophane and win all the prizes
but i think that in these difficult times there's a little maxim that they have in canada which i think we should
all hear definitely in honor of the royal astronomical society of canada and that
is that the world needs more canada and we're getting hotline [Laughter]
oh thank you i would also agree with you wonderful i do have to mention for doug
that uh in the chat while you were talking all of the people on the panel were
sharing their sidewalk astronomy stories their international astronomy day stories and and just the the jubilance
and the the impact that this has had has just been phenomenal for all of us
we really appreciate you joining us tonight well thank you i appreciate it it was great to do
thanks we are going to be moving into our part a which is observing stories and we've
lined up a few montreal astronomers and friends of the center and of explore alliance to share
with you a little bit of not just what we do in the night sky but also why we do it and how we do it and so
these observing stories are little snippets to give you an idea of
what we look for when we look up at the night sky or even the daytime sky some
of us do solar astronomy as well but we're going to start off with a amazing individual i mean i i don't know
that i could actually truncate an introduction into just a few moments but stella kata has been the
steering force behind the variable star association for a long time now uh i was
mentioning earlier when we first got on that my wife and i had a chance to meet her at stealthing a few years ago
and she talked to my wife pastor a book that was by sailor payne on the way in which she determined the
chemical structure of the sun and it was just inspiring and it made us
really want to just know more about spectroscopy and we now do spectroscopy at our local center which is partly due
to the fact that we started discussing it at every single clubhouse after that for i think three months before david
schuman our director of research and development said well let's buy a grading let's start and so we do that now in the classroom
we do that everywhere so stella we'd love to hear from you a little bit about your story of how you see the night sky
so thank you for having me today uh you know i i was just thinking while you were talking i first joined this star
party about a month ago as a guest speaker and it seems that i can't stay away from it this is a this group is
addictive and we're having so much fun celebrating each other's interests and celebrating the fact that we are under
the same night sky so um happy international astronomy day
it's uh for me this is an opportunity to celebrate again our diverse international community
reminding me of the avso's mission to enable anyone anywhere to participate in
scientific discovery through variable star astronomy this tells me that astronomy and the
night sky has no borders it provides us opportunities for professional and amateur astronomers to
explore discover and learn together all together this year the night skies present for
international astronomy days and nova novacast 2021 that is easily observed through
binoculars from another hemisphere so please look at the abso web page and so more information
for me every time that i look at an object that is changing in time it brings me a sense of all it's more of
an um of an explorer's kind of feeling of oh
my gosh i'm gonna see something different something unique something that perhaps no one else is looking at
and actually i i dare say that my favorite object ever is our sun
it's the closest star to the earth it's highly variable and based on what we know from our sun the entire world of
astronomy is basing its its knowledge and stellar evolution stellar properties
tell our everything and even trying to understand how life appeared around those other planets
so with that i wish you all happy observing clear skies be safe and keep looking up
thank you stella thank you so much stella that was those that was fantastic and
if you haven't joined if you're on facebook the oas astronomical spectroscopy group is just
a fantastic place to see some of the variable star observations that are being done by
members of the aavso yes and we have a very active actually spectroscopy observing section all kinds
of resources there we're providing webinars and online um mentoring um our
database has more than 7000 stars in a year and a half right now 7 000
observations of stars in a year and a half right now one of which is beetlejuice it's a very very popular
target so uh please join us in that quest alongside photometry spectroscopy is
providing a very unique insight on stars and now i'm not going to promise you that we're going to understand everything what i'm going to promise you
is that we're going to make good progress that's all exactly exactly that's all all you can hope to do any day is to
understand just a little bit more than you did the day before and with variable stars if you haven't had a
chance to bring out your binoculars or your telescope and look at the nova and cassiopeia i highly suggest you do it at
the moment it's visible brightness and it's really worth the look i've gone out with binoculars just to be able to say
that i said hi to the nova and uh see it brightened just a little bit these last couple of days has been nice to see
so our next presenter is our local montreal center members liaison nicole laporte
and before i pass it over to her i just want to tell you a little bit about nicole because
she's been a member of the rac montreal center for a while now but since just before the centennial year she jumped on
board our board of directors as a new category of members liaison somebody to bring
new content new activities and new events for members of the center now the reason i'm pointing this out is because
when we moved into covid measures last year one of the first things that we did as a
montreal center is we moved on to zoom and nicole along with a couple of other board members carl our secretary david r
d specialist and paul our current president they work together to really make these
clubhouses happen and they happen twice a week with more than almost two dozen members most nights
just joining in sharing their observations sharing their love of astronomy and over the last few months nicole's
added in wednesday presentations by members and this was a suggestion by one of our members greg
beaton and nicole just took it on and just added it in right away
if you consider it it's twice a week zoom meetings kind of organized controlled chaos but it's a blast and
she's been able to continue doing this for over a year now longer than any of us expected to
now when i first got to know nicole was under the telescopes under the night sky with her small refractor and just doing
amazing work that's what she's going to talk to us about today she's going to talk to us about astronomy unplugged
taking a break from technology and screen time using a simple setup to star
hop observe and draw the celestial wonders of the night sky so nicole we are all yours
well thank you karim and so welcome everybody i will share with you my presentation
um i'll try to do it here it goes okay
so my presentation i'll be talking about observing and sketching with the small telescope
um my setup is a simple astronomy set up to
star hop and draw the celestial wonders of the night sky so it's
don't need any wi-fi for this setup when you have a small telescope there's
certain features that are that will help you for star hopping the useful features are to have a six by
thirty finder scope over here and and if you have small
eyepieces you can get um diagonal with an adapter so that you can fit in
1.25 inch wide angle eyepieces i use wide angle eye pieces but any plaster will do
and also another good thing is to have is slow motion control see this is an old
yoke mount but it has slow motion controls for both both alt and as which is rare nowadays
but this is um a newer telescope on a vintage mount
and these are my sketching tools um this is my asteroid
manual astro imaging setup um i have pencils so i have the white for deep sky objects
this one here um colored pencils for double stars and planets those ones here and graphite for
lunar and i use black
three and a half inches cards for a deep sky and i use a similar white cards for
lunar and sometimes planetary as well this is my observing setup very basic
some things that help you would be red lights so you can see what you're doing and the setup i showed you
last slide this is it under the telescope i use star or moon atlas some people use
um applications on their telephones but i use the old fashioned books
an adjustable chair is also very good because depending on the targets instead of um adjusting your telescope all the
time you just need to adjust the chair i have a big fancy observing chair but it's too heavy so it stays in the back
of the garage and i use this little stool instead and a carpet it might seem silly but
this is in case you drop stuff if ever you were changing eyepieces and you drop that little screw that keeps the
eyepiece into the diagonal and then you spend 45 minutes looking for it in long grass you learned your lesson and then
you use a carpet as well
so this is some lunar drawings on white paper with pencil graphite pencils
and this part here you might see the difference um i actually found out that some you
can get watercolor pencils so that you draw and then with the paintbrush and
water you can make it shading much easier and these were all done with the little 60 millimeter
refractor and i use some
white coloring pencils on black for open clusters
star clusters so any of the brighter deep sky objects and usually i finish off indoors with the white gel pen and
so i can see more what i'm doing so i do the rough work at the eyepiece and then sometimes i finish it off indoors
um and um for the fainter deep sky object i use
white but i also use gray um this is m2 with a little 60 millimeter
refractor um for the fainter messy objects i'll use my 90 millimeter
refractor because i i really like my little telescope but it does have limits when the
objects get too dim it's uh difficult to see so i use a bigger telescope
and and i used to think oh um double stars are a bit lame because they're just two white dots but no
they're not they're very colorful a lot of double stars are very colorful so i like to
sketch them and use different colored pencils and
double stars the brighter ones are very forgiving some of the sketches i can do on a full moon and you can still see the
double stars very well and then finally i have i use the color
on black or white for the solar system this is comet neowise last year and it
was so big i couldn't get it all in the eyepiece i tried to sketch mars on black paper
but i didn't get it bright enough so now i use
what i did here is i sketched it on white paper and then i just with a sharpie uh blackened it out
and finally this is the mercury transit and if you're looking at the sketching and you don't see much so i don't see
mercury it's this little tiny dot right here and again in this case i knew mercury is going to be tiny so i used my
larger telescope for this and and if you're wondering what all the smudges are it's because it was partly
cloudy and i said well i'll still take a chance and in between the clouds i was able to see the sun obviously i used a
solar filter and so thanks for watching and clear skies
and if one day you you want to do your big setup and but
it's partly cloudy and say oh never mind well take out your little telescope you might
have gotten many christmases ago and look at the night sky thank you
awesome thank you so much nicole that was fantastic and there are a lot of
comments coming up in the chat of people mentioning just how amazing the sketches
are but also about your setup being so really nice and straightforward
one question that came up in uh one of the chats was for your moon sketches of the craters
how fast you have to go to be able to see the shadow as you are seeing it at
that moment is it um usually what i'll do it also depends if you're very close to
the terminator then it's very hard to go very fast so what you do is you do a very rough sketch
of the shadows and then you finalize it after but yeah when you're close to the terminators the
the shadows do move so it is tricky um so you try to
do a rough outline and you'll get tricks on how to um
blacken stuff you'll just put a b in that and also um for like for the double stars it's hard to s when you're
sketching it's hard to see with the red light to see the colors so sometimes what i'll do is i'll just put a dot a
white dot and i'll put like y for yellow or b for blue and then when i'm indoors
i finish most of my sketches i'll find them finish them indoors with good lighting
that makes sense and that probably makes it a little bit easier outside also to see a few extra targets yes
and a few people have asked in terms of sketching is how much actual sketching
talent do you need versus just being able to try and keep trying until you
get good at it um you don't need any talent i'm not an artist at all i'm just like somebody who likes to watch the
night sky and um you can start with the some sometimes open clusters just dots
or you can even go out if you want to try with your without a telescope just your eyes look at the big dipper and
draw it on a little paper or leo or some of the easier constellations
but if you can draw dots you can draw deep sky objects or even um
um a galaxy it's just a little gray smudge so
fantastic and your double stars actually reminded me that we locally at our center have a double star observing
program and so a lot of our members are currently working on those double star observations that uh that program uh
david is actually one of the recipients before of that certificate and it's good if
you're in light polluted skies a lot of the double stars are very forgiving of the light pollution you might not see
anything but when you point your telescope you'll see something
one thing that i'd like to add to this and that was a very interesting talk nicole thank you is that uh one of
the uh one of the drawings you showed was messier ii i wanted to point out the mess m2
happened to be very very close to where doug burger found kobayashi burger milan in 1975 i wanted
to add that but that was a wonderful wonderful presentation
that's all you need is something simple it doesn't have to be expensive good morning
thank you lily thank you nicole that was fantastic um
about your carpet i think we've got lots of people who love your carpet
yeah yeah when you lose a little set screw or something in the uh in the grass that
makes it uh very very challenging at times so
and those who haven't been out observing at night i mean how would you look for it you'd have to turn on a flashlight but there goes your night vision if you
do that right so it's really hard if you don't actually think ahead and
like i said my first experiences with nicole was actually i think it was a scout's night that we were doing and you
were set up with your refractor on the moon and you had a little picture of the moon and then you had your blood your
carpet that was the moon carpet and the scouts were just lined up at this small refractor and ignoring the
big 14 inch of the observatory because they could see more detail they could actually
see what like understand what they're seeing yeah it's fantastic
so our next speaker is another one of our board members uh we have several we have actually a very active uh club so
we have a very active board but uh carl patrick is a relatively new board member and relatively new member
but he's our member for special projects and when i say special projects i actually mean special projects uh one
example is that this past year my students have been doing spectroscopy for one of their labs
and carl went ahead and made me a little nice compact spectroscope really well built so that i can use it for demos in
class and then the students go home and they build themselves a little cd spectrometer that they have to do actual
observations with and so carl is really our gadget man and uh as our gadget man
one of the things that he was working on before covent hit was a workshop to allow members to build their own
telescopes and of course you need a guinea pig for that so carl was his own guinea pig so i'm going to turn it over
to carl and he's going to talk to you about building his own first telescope just one thing before you start is that
wendy would like to say something about nicole's talk just before oh absolutely hey wendy hey guys um nicole this is
specifically to you i was i listened on all of david's you know
meetings when he goes in i'm never very active in them but i just listen and and all the montreal meetings i
listen to you and you question question question you ask everybody how to do things and it almost sounded to me like
you were a beginning astronomer and then i listened to your talk and it was phenomenal it was clear it
was it was right to the point exactly what people needed to do right now as everybody said we love the carpet um it
was it was wonderful you should be really doing more talks than you do you got to let those guys stop at the
montreal meetings you need to be a better participant you were great okay thanks randy sweetheart thank you
that was very sweet wendy thank you and don't worry we whenever nicole is talking we stop and listen there's good
stuff going on there so again without further ado i'm going to turn it over to
carl and he's going to give you a bit of his astronomy story working with his own
plans to make a dog like john dobson intended so that he can share the night
sky with others alright well i guess i start with this
[Music]
can everybody see that fantastic all right
well um [Music] everybody that i know is curious about the night
sky and uh when i look at the history books and
see what was done hundreds of years ago i figure well
this is a brave new world there's thousands of new materials and if
that kind of inventing was done that far back in the past well i should
be able to make something uh with the new materials that are available
so this was what i ended up with eight inch composite scope
and it was an interesting learning process all around because instead of using a tube whether it be cardboard or
plastic i work in the aerospace industry
and uh there's all kinds of extra material left over at the end of
an aircraft project so the first thing i did was find out as much information
as i could about what's needed to build a telescope
so the the first thing that kareem told me about was stellapham
it was a fantastic resource and just for a quick view when you go to
stellafine.org this is the first page that opens up down below build a telescope
great and from that point onwards it's just going through
all the different pages for information
to see what you would like and acting on
so the most important was to plan what you want to do
and put all of your materials together and make sure that your target
is inside and you know exactly what you want to do because if you start
halfway through changing things well you might end up with a little bit of a problem and you don't want your missus
to catch you throwing out lots of money in the garbage again don't hurry take your time
the calculations are all available on the cellophane page on you for the web
you put in your dimensions uh you
follow what it says measurements are precise so you have to
be equally as precise when you're working with your materials
aerospace cabinetry whether it's commercial or private
all the furniture inside of it is made with composite materials and luckily for me my company had
enough extra material that was not for any particular aircraft
that i was able to get some so i chose a quarter inch fiberglass
honeycomb which is really stiff it's lightweight
and using the measurements from the cellophane page i did all my layouts make made sure they
were where they were supposed to be measured everything before cutting and drilling
and proceeded from that point onward
while the joint blue joints were setting up i had uh former
boards i guess you calm templates at each end to make sure that it maintained its shape and didn't
warp or twist
inserts are the special little attachments and i was able to get a few
that didn't have any uh traceability to them and i don't know if you can see this on
the video there but they basically look like grommets they're made out of metal
and if i turn it on and there's there's many many different types and shapes and
sizes they're installed with glue and again i used epoxy glue throughout
the spider assembly was cobbled from all kinds of trash material um the
extrusion i'm sure a lot of people have seen these that form
on bulletin boards and other uh displays i just cut the ears off and
got some steel pallet strapping it's available just about in every
commercial trash can that you can find and a couple of rivets to put it all into place
the secondary assembly was made with a couple of large washers that i drilled
in four places i tapped the bottom one and just
some dome nuts and other nuts to lock everything into place
so they wouldn't lose it after that i just bent the flanges of
the spider to shift the inner dimensions of the tube minus a couple of thou to uh make sure
that the spider assembly remained rigid and would not flex
the primary mirror was uh again something else that i did a lot of
looking around on the web for to try to find the easiest quickest design that was the least painful to
build and i settled on three three adjustment points with one main
pivot and it's again it's a similar idea that i used on the
secondary mirror excuse me
i pre-painted everything gave it enough time to cure so nothing would peel or flaked off or otherwise make the mess
and the rest was just spacing out everything i used popsicle sticks to make sure that everything was even and centered
and you can more or less see that the silicone glue created sorry the popsicle sticks
created a nice space for the silicon adhesive
to create a nice bumper between the backing board and the glass itself and
it's the same thing for the side brackets as well uh the main pivot point is obviously in the
center of the mirror and some cheapo uh hardware uh springs bolts
etc is uh what i use to keep it all anchored together
for collimation it's a very simple matter of just loosening up the wing nuts
and either tightening or loosening the nuts to bring it into proper pollination
paint day again spray paint krylon's a great uh brand
great goes on easy and i didn't make a mess so everybody was happy
the amount uh i went for a trunnion type of mound which is like a an old pirate cannon
uh simply because it left me with a few options
i'm able to add some different locations along the optical tube
for those same type of in inserts that allow me to change the balance
point of the scope depending on what lens uh or whatever i managed to
attach to it plus if i decide to be a little bit more crazy i might be able to
put teeth into this add a belt and some stepper motors and just go
nuts i don't know a little bit more review of the amount
is a pretty simple affair every five degrees i've got some
some markings all the way around the whole thing pivots on a big lazy susan i got from lee valley
uh the rest on in this particular case is plywood
um after that everything was painted i had some leftover honeycomb uh this from the
same tube which i just turned out uh sorry inside out to give me a proper
diameter fit pond for a a dew shield
a homemade laser pointer with again just plastic tubes uh crazy glue end caps and
odds and ends a little bit of a front view sorry for
the the sideways clip i couldn't find the the right shot to give it right way up
um again that the flat black paint on the on the composite
is a really nice matte color no shine at all at the end of it i was able to
get some end caps stitched together out of a vinyl material
i also had a carry bag made with the help of an upholstery department
i put a mounting rail on the bottom in case i ever get a gem
and uh it it gives me more options to play with so i can basically put it on anything and bring it anywhere
at the back of the scope i was uh again i had the extra material left over
that i made a 12-volt cooling fan and there's no hardware required
to put it on it's all done by magnets this way if i have to do any collimation it's an easy thing to just
pop it off and it'll keep the bugs uh off the mirror and stop things from crawling around when you least want them
so at the end like i said maybe i'll put encoders on it maybe a wedge
i haven't decided how far i want to go with it um if you're interested in making your
own project there's millions of places you can go and look for information
get your materials together find what you want to do and take your time don't rush
universe isn't going anywhere uh again have fun at everything that
you've done and what you've accomplished everything is a learning experience in
life and this is no different so everybody i hope you enjoyed my little spiel and the clear skies and
keep looking up thank you so much carl that was
fantastic and those of you who think that you know building your own telescope or
designing or cutting material or anything is way beyond you one of the big things
that carl has been talking to my students about who've been trying to work on this is really just try it try your hand at it
you'll be surprised with how far you can get once you start working on it you learn as you go and it really
becomes an amazing process and carl has been just a great mentor for the student groups before kovid hit giving them
advice giving them materials to use and sharing with them where he found that he
had difficulty in the process so thanks very much again carl for sharing that that was great thanks
so our next presenter is another gadget person but this is a different type of gadget person he's going to be talking
to us a little bit about some old-timey ancient astronomy tools that he's been working on and it's pierre
paquette now a lot of our audience knows pierre not everybody does but he's one of our
astronomy ambassadors with the rasc nationally and he's affiliated with our montreal center but locally he does so
much more than that he has been a magazine uh editor slash the actual
pilot of the magazine website and facebook page astronomy quebec which is a french astronomy enthusiast magazine
he's the main presenter at national geographic's outdoor planetarium called the night sky odyssey or observer 12
it's in sutton quebec or glen sutton if you've had a chance to visit the
quebec area over the last couple of summers it's an amazing place to go and experience it's an outdoor
planetarium where they actually do active um really just overlay on the night sky to
show you what it is that you're seeing and how to navigate the night sky but where i got to know pierre most was his
work in ancient astronomical instrumentation but a couple of summers ago he did a fantastic workshop at the
agakon museum in toronto on building your own astrolabe and he's been working
with metal to work on his own and so he's going to share some of his story of
working with these equipment uh these ancient techniques with us here we are all yours
thank you kareem um welcome to uh international astronomy days so as kareem said i make smaller
equipment than uh carl i i did i did make a telescope back then but uh i
changed my um my perspective on the size of things i could make so um astronomy started a
very long time ago uh actually we could put probably say that prehistoric people
were looking up at the sky and trying to figure out what it was but because they did not write or
anything we don't know what they did or what they thought
one of the first instruments that we have a trace of actually comes from egypt
and it's called a merced it's basically just a
sundial so you would point it west in the morning because the sun is
in the east right it's rising in the east and you would just look on the top of it
and see where the shadow falls and basically know what time it is from
there very easy to make uh just um
put a piece of wood on top of another and uh just
make graduations every 15 degrees for uh modern hours but
we have a hint that egyptians also used uh that kind of hours
then many years passed not to say centuries and one of the other instruments that was made was the
noctur labe which is basically a dial for the uh pole star and the uh big
dipper so you would aim at the uh pole star uh through the center here which was back
then a um hole not a uh rivet like i put and you would just point one of the
lines here at the big dipper and around here you see the graduations
for the calendar and by aligning the precise date
of your observation with the the handle you would know
what time it is exactly just by looking at the stars
and another invention that was done in the 1600s was this
universal solar clock sundial
it's uh adjustable for your latitude and date because the sun is not exactly at
the same place in the sky depending on the date it's higher in the winter and higher in
the summer and lower in the winter so you adjust for the date and um your latitude and then
you just measure here for the place where uh the uh
midnight uh the the noon sun would be and you just adjust this little bead here
to put it in line with the uh date and then you point with the little
pointers here you point to the sun don't look at it through uh with your
eyes just make it a project or something and then with the where the beat is normally
doesn't slide off uh where the beat is tells you the time
that's really nice when you have uh the sun another option is the quadrant which
is engraved with basically the same kind of information but is only available for
one latitude so what do you do at night okay i did say that you could use the
nocture label before the pole star but for some reason maybe that part of
the sky is hidden from your view so there's a house there's trees or back then maybe there they had some pyramids
so the other invention was the astrolabe uh this one is the first one that i made it's really small as you can see it's
about the size of my hand and would you believe that it was actually the harder one to make
nowadays you can buy a pre-printed astrolabe or you can print your own using computer software it's very nice
and fun but the whole fun was actually using and building a real one
if you go in a museum you'll find the astrolabes and they're normally worth a lot of
money i saw a ted talk where the speaker brings one out and says
that it's worth as much as his house and the next and the next and maybe uh
houses across the street and maybe the school um i obviously don't have that much
amount of money in my hands so i decided to make my own i just bought plates of
brass and i started making holes and like our said measure twice cut once
and uh basically each little triangle or piece here is a
star pointer um you have for example here the um
the summer triangle vega then eben out there and you have uh here uh arcturus
for example uh big dipper here i actually
made the whole dipper part and um orion is
on the other side here straddling the equator so how does the
astrolabe work um it's you can use it with the sun or with the stars so the first part is you
look in the back there are more engravings that sadly don't show too well on camera
and uh you adjust the um you find the sol the longitude of the
sun the ecliptic longitude of the sun for the date so for example today may 15
i put it here and i find that the sun is in terrorist around let's say 25 degrees of towers
keep that in mind and then you measure the height of the sun in the sky let's
say here and you get let's say 35 degrees again don't look at the sun directly
it's dangerous for your eyes now here that's the ecliptic you just
align the bar here with the degree that you found which was
me uh taurus 25. so uh terrorist 25 is here you set it up
and we had measure a height of 35 degrees so we put it
at 35 degrees there are lines engraved at the bottom of the plate here each line is 5 degrees so i set it on the
seventh line and i see that on may 15 at uh when the sky when the sun is 35
degrees up in the sky it's around eight eight in the morning
what if it's the afternoon well then it's on the other side of the plate and you find that it's for example at 3 pm
you can use it with also the stars as i said and the way to use it then is instead of
measuring the height of the sun you measure the height of the star now you can look at it
through the instrument without fearing for your eyes and instead of aligning
the sun with the height lines in the back you align the
star so for example if i measure vega i just take my little pointer for vega here and
i align it at 35 degrees keeping in mind that the sun was on taurus
25 degrees so here and i see here that for example um the um the time is
9 pm there were there was a book written
around the year 1000 that gave up to 1 000 users for the astrolabe it's not
only for telling the time i can find the time of sunrise sunset i can find where
on the horizon the sun will rise and set uh you can find the height that the sun
will reach in a day you can find the height of the stars will reach in a day you can know the right ascension of
declination of the sun there are a bunch of uses for the astrolabe so it was really nice
to make um it was a lot of patience it took me uh in uh
very very uh different times up to five years actually to make it uh
obviously i would make one much faster now uh because i have my own workshop and everything
and uh i learned a lot about astronomy so um and history so yeah you can get your
astrolabe anywhere you can find them rather easily on the internet
there are not a lot of makers of brass asteroids i'm one of the few that i found in the world
and to make them by hand we're like three or four so that's a
lost art which i hope that uh talking tonight will help rekindle that and that we will find
more astrolage makers in the future thank you very cool very cool
thank you scott thanks so much pierre and i do have to mention that pierre actually has written
a book about building the astrolabe and about the history of the astrolabe do you want to mention a bit about the book
yeah it's called the the secrets of the astrolabe and um i think i still have it on my website
but i can send printed copies for uh 35 dollars it's a small booklet that's about 35
pages and uh details how to make one how to use it and where it comes from
fantastic there was a question in the chat actually about taiko brahe's instrumentation and whether you've tried
your hand at recreating any of that i wish eventually uh taiko had some very
large instruments he had a quadrant which is basically this kind of instrument the uh quarter of a circle
hence the name quadrant his was a few meters in the size so obviously well my small living room is
not enough for that but i could probably make a smaller one um
it was uh all made in wood back then uh taiko's instruments some metal i
guess but uh basically all made in wood and uh it was it would probably be easy to make
except that the price of lumber went up so much recently but uh yeah it's um on
my to-do list and uh stella asked about the anti-cathedra mechanism
i would love to make one uh however it's uh it contains a lot of gears which are
um basically circles with teeth in and uh
a lot of work is required for doing that so my goal with my astrolabe was to make
it the way that ancient astronomers would make it so i
yeah i made the big holes with electric kit tools but the small pins uh each one
for a star i hand filed because back then they did not have computer assisted
design they did not have laser engraving or anything the engraving i also did myself by hand
uh so doing the antiquity mechanism i would love to but that one i would have
to use computers and laser engraving excellent thank you and we are actually
gonna no pun intended switch gears a little bit right now and we're going to be switching over to a different type of
astronomy story i want to introduce you to our local director of research and
development david schumann long time member past president of the center and david is a
space enthusiast extraordinaire like you you would be looking at the entire range of
everything to do with space whether it's solar whether it's nighttime observing whether it's
astro imaging whether it's spectroscopy or space exploration that's what he's
going to talk to us about a bit today he has had an amazing exp set of experiences just in terms of
launches everything from shuttles and satellites all the way through the rockets now and he is our center guru
when it comes to understanding the vehicles that go out into space so dave is going to share with us
a nice digestible morsel of exploring space as an enthusiast so
david we are all yours hi there and uh thanks karim for hosting and uh what a great event um
i'm gonna share an experience that i had back in 1994 that's like before most of
the internet was the way it is today and um i was fortunate enough through my
passion of photography as a matter of fact to photograph thunderstorms lightning
you know as well as astrophotos and because of that i was published and because it was published i had the
privilege of getting media credentials with nasa to actually photograph a shuttle uh mission um so
uh with my luck though because i had my day job i could only go during my summer
vacation and because of that i was able to get the accreditation for the entire mission which was sts-65 back in 1994 in
the summer and what happened was i was only in florida for the landing so what i'll do is i'll
share with you what it looks like to have those credentials what exactly i was able to photograph and a couple of
other uh quick tidbits from my um uh you know trips down to florida because going
from montreal to florida you still have to fly down it's not exactly like a half a day drive um but i was fortunate to
have parents that have an apartment in miami so i'm going to share my screen
uh can you see this
okay so uh i'm going to share my screen and here's a little adventure
so just for uh for those that are not familiar the kennedy space center uh has
a visitors complex which i highly recommend uh when we can go back and travel again
that you um that you visit because not only are there amazing artifacts from
the actual space uh um you know race from all the way from the 19 late 1950s all the way until
today as a matter of fact the delta ii rocket was just installed in the rocket garden these are real hardware uh
items that are on display including the space shuttle atlantis um but i was not
there this time as a tourist i was there as an accredited media
personnel and the the photo that you see on the left is just a slide that i have scanned of
what those roads look like as you go over the indian river towards the kennedy space center from titusville and
essentially titusville and cocoa beach really became what they are today because of the burgeoning space industry
at cape canaveral uh cape canaveral or kennedy space center including the military portion of it is huge it takes
at least a half an hour just to drive to the va beef from the visitors complex
uh here david we're we're only seeing the title slide we're not seeing the the show oh
okay so uh sorry let me uh uh i'll stop sharing and i'll share i'll
try to share the proper
no worries yeah
uh give it a moment give it a moment
try again yeah okay my problem is when i press f5 that
i can't see the screen sharing i'll let you know
you know it's just the title side uh if you can uh yeah okay there yeah just go through manually
okay yeah sorry about that guys uh i thought if
can you see that they can't yes that's perfect okay perfect okay so yes so as i was quickly thank
you as i was quickly mentioning on the left uh that's an actual slide that i took because there were no digital cameras in 94
and uh this is a wiki image of the vehicle assembly building and that's where i parked my car
uh for a couple of days uh with my press credentials so this is what a press uh pass looked
like back in 1994 and they're quite similar even to today um just a quick antidote when because
i'm canadian i had to uh ask for my credentials about a month and a half before with washington in the uh
foreign affairs department uh sent over my passport and i was accredited the same day i received the fax yes a fax uh
with my my uh pass number and i was told to go to gate number three at three in the morning because the shuttle was
actually coming down from orbit at 6 30 in the morning so it was still dark and this was july 22nd when i got there it
turns out they couldn't find me in the system but i did have that paper from the uh us
foreign affairs so they actually created this temporary nasa contractors badge the one you see on the upper left uh
with the nasa worm so uh when i got to the actual press dome they all looked at
this and they said where'd you get that i said gate number three officer or whatever gave it to me no no no you're
supposed to get one of these green cards uh for three weeks so they finally looked and they found out because i had
uh gone too early to register they actually put me in the wrong mission and so then they corrected
it and gave me the right credentials so i was lucky because on the 22nd of
july the shuttle did not come down thanks to a thunderstorm which florida is very famous for
and the next day now that i have my right credentials i was able to go at three in the morning
no problem they bust us out to from the vehicle assembly building press area all
the way to runway 33 where the shuttle was coming down and because of another thunderstorm it was delayed an hour and
a half and i got to take photos when the shuttle was coming when the sun was rising so i know these photos are grainy
but this is color film back in 94 and you see the columbia you can even see the actual uh contrails from the
columbia contrary popular belief uh although it's a essentially a glider it makes a lot of
noise when it when it lands actually and the parachute actually popped open right in front of where i was standing where
you see those cars in the in the foreground with the parachute image on the right uh i was literally in that
field not even a hundred feet away it was just unbelievable
what was also amazing for me and what made this so memorable was that also was not only the shuttle mission that i was
able to photograph the landing very close up it was the 25th anniversary of apollo so i was given press kits and uh
and a whole bunch of uh souvenirs that they were giving out to people uh for uh members of the media
and another amazing event was of course uh shoemaker levy of course david's here
with us tonight and um the comet actually struck jupiter during
that week and i was able to spend some time at the brevard community college that evening
before that shuttle ended on the 23rd and i went to the university and saw the impact of
jupiter's uh the results through a very large i think it was a 25-inch reflector
when they knew i was from the rac montreal in canada they said you're not you're not the joe public come and help
us uh with the astronomer so i have a shuttle to catch at 3am and uh so i
stood there until about midnight went back to my hotel in titusville slept for a few hours and went back to gate number
three anyways it was just a magical week all that to say over the years i've gone uh
just like any just normal quote-unquote tourist where if you write in advance you were able to get uh
like a lottery and then you can get these uh passes for causeways so uh jetty park is a famous place which
you still go today of course and uh back uh in 1997
uh i did see a delta ii launch a gps satellite at midnight was the loudest thing i've ever heard of in my life and
i do fireworks professionally as a side hustle and uh trust me this was amazing it's like
looking at a blowtorch because of all these solid rocket motors and what you see here is an actress slide i took in
the summer of 2000 in july it was atlas 2 with hot bird a a
television satellite and um from jetty park that is the image that you get of an atlas 2as taking off
um it's like a million jet airplanes roaring simultaneously and it just gets
louder and louder even if you're 10 miles away uh it's just unreal to see these things in real life so i know you
can see them on youtube and everybody vlogs and blogs but unless you go there and feel this just rumble right through
your body like through your chest it's just unbelievable it gives me shivers to think that human beings have actually
left the earth from this place so i find the kennedy space center kind of like the uh like um you know a very sacred
place in human history here uh so um
these are actual uh passes and uh and uh tickets that i've collected over the years when i've gone to the kennedy
space center i've gone so often i don't even remember how many uh times i've gone it's uh
i swear if i can move there i would it's just incredible here's um another
quick thing to tell you on one time the shuttle columbia uh had come in from a landing and we
were there uh as tourists with my friends we went to the saturn five visitors complex early in the morning
the shuttle landed we took photos and then they took a a tour bus headed back to the visitor center
and i said to my but we've got to get on that tour bus forget the souvenir stuff
the heck with that let's get on the tour bus now we get on that one of many tour buses
what do you know our bus had to be stopped because they had to tow the shuttle columbia from runway 33 which
just came in from space like an hour before a few hours before they towed it in front of our bus and this is the
result on the right you see a picture that i had to pull my lens back from the
zoom that was taken through the window of our tour bus i couldn't believe the luck as a shuttle enthusiast i was just in
heaven um unfortunately as you all may know the shuttle columbia and its crew
uh were demised in january of 2003 um and today you can see remnants of that
at the kennedy space center um so that's just a sampling of some of the things i've
seen i have others but they're on film like you know 35 and 70 millimeter film
so it's a little hard to digitize right now but i'm really happy to share some of my
other worldly night sky or daytime sky observing aside from astronomy thank you kindly
oh thank you so much david and you'll be happy to know that in the chat on youtube and on facebook people are
reminiscing about their latest trips to cape canaveral and how inspiring it is
to see the shuttles the the old uh the old pods that they would come back in all of
it in person and as david mentioned i mean he is
our guru at this he's presented i believe at this point since kovid started you presented seven times on
different aspects of exploration is that about right yeah it seems like it
including the history of mars exploration for outreach that he's done with a couple of groups
so thanks again and uh we love it and you're gonna see actually some of david's pictures later tonight in a few
of the outreach talks that we're going to have now before we reach our break for the session we've got a couple more
presenters that i'm just i'm so excited to have here tonight and the first
is somebody who i actually have only gotten to know through the global star parties and it's libby and the stars
she has been presenting i believe in i think almost 20 of these star parties is
that about right libby yes that's fantastic and she's 11 years old she does a ton of outreach in astronomy
and it's just oh my my daughter and i love just sitting and listening to some of your sessions so
without any further ado i'm going to turn it over to libby and the stars thank you um i have a presentation to
share just a second i actually got a new microphone and camera so
improve that because i've seen some of my last talks and i've seen that it's been a little bit glitchy so i'm very excited about that
and happy astronomy day to everybody out there
so i decided to do my presentation on the messier list which was created by charles messier so what is the master
list so the messier list is um a list that we probably all know about which is just a list of different objects in the
sky could be really anything in the sky that um it was all created on
a list and um that's how a lot of our nebulas get her name other than the sided part
like some nebulas have nicknames like this is the crab nebula
but it has a professional name too because it's on the messier list and um
so that's how a lot of our um stars in our stars and different um
galaxy objects in our um universe got their names
so the messier list was created by um french astronomer charles messier a very
very very long time ago and so um this is just a list and i don't think a
lot of people really paid attention to the astronomy stuff so a lot later on because so many people
were adding on to it later and later and later and more into the ages when there was more astronomy than there was before
so um there um charles messier went all the way to 103 objects and then um
it people um kept on adding on some more from what they discovered
um so what is inside the messier list so um inside the master list there
are all different objects um so really there's just a whole bunch of
different objects in there because there's not really a classifying ning
to be on the messier look the messier list um you're just so this all the objects on the list are
from the northern hemisphere so every um so really everything on the list is just whatever
is in space a cool thing to look at which is really just part of this list
so i just wanted to wish everybody a happy national toronto day um i wanted to talk
a little bit about astronomy and think it a lot because um i think astronomy plays a huge role in everybody who is
into astronomy and even everybody who isn't into astronomy in their everyday life um i think it affects a lot about what
we think about our universe and so many of us go out to the stars and
that's how we you learn from it you learn a lot from doing astronomy and
you sometimes in your mind you're just like wow i can't believe
i'm on planet earth a rock floating in endless space full of all these supernovas and stars
that are bright colorful they're bright they're colorful and we're just a tiny speck of dust in this
solar system and to just think that we're that tiny and we've only explored the smallest amount of our whole entire
universe is crazy and i think astronomy is something definitely to
celebrate because it brought it brings joy to a lot of people and it brings education um i don't know what would happen to our
whole entire world if there was no astronomy because we wouldn't be able to study our solar system
how would we be able to know that we're on earth how would we be able to know that we're on
a round planet how to be able to send rockets in this space we wouldn't really
have a lot of knowledge and i think astronomy determinates a lot of that stuff and um
i think it's a very special thing to appreciate so i just wanted to wish everybody a happy astronomy day um
i hope everybody has everybody has a good astrology day and if it's not i hope it's not cloudy and if it's not
cloudy then i hope you enjoy going out and deserving
wow that's great that's great thank you thank you so much libby that was that
was inspiring and humbling i mean the nicole wrote in the chat right away when
you started talking about the dust floating in space carl sagan's a pale
blue dot that's that's what it brings to mind thank you i also am very happy when i hear that
other kids my age are listening into this call because i know a lot of kids aren't into astronomy that
are really my age because many people don't think it's an after-school activity i can do
a lot but thank you for saying that you listen to my talks because when i first got into astronomy i was hoping i'd get people
interested who are my age and to astronomy because i think that's a
passion that needs to be brought back up because that's how pluto was discovered no one even knew that there was
something back all the way back in the solar system and the child discovered it
and i think that that's kind of crazy too in the galileo scope the first idea was from children
so i definitely think that people who are young and old
can definitely have in a have an effect on astronomy too
because we discover stuff every day and and i hope if more kids get into astronomy we discover
more about our solar system and our whole entire universe because no one ever really ever knew there was pluto
back there no one really knew or thought of the idea of the galileo scope until
kids were on the street playing with eyeglass lenses looking at stuff in the sky
absolutely and and really it's an untapped resource it's it's kids have
the imagination to think outside the box that a lot of us are in when we start doing astronomy because for a lot of us
i mean we learn it in a book first or we learn it in somebody else telling us first whereas you just get to go and look so let me
ask you what's the first thing you remember seeing in the night sky through a telescope through binoculars or
the first thing i remember seeing was probably i'd say saturn
and um i had it over at my friend's grandpa's house across the street from mine
and me and my dad were out there with my friend and my friend wasn't really paying attention she was just
she had her dog out with her and um we were just having so much fun um and i
pointed towards the sky and i said looks there's saturn and really when i look at scout saturn in
this sky with just your eyes all you see is just a small little shiny dot but i
could really see the holes in between saturn and always just seeing saturn
as pictures on google of just what nasa's taking and stuff
i just get to see it with my own two eyes and that's my work that i put into my telescope to see it
so that was the first thing i remember seeing then it was jupiter than the moon
what would you what would you give as advice if there's kids listening right now that want to start out in astronomy
or want to actually just tell their parents like look this is something that i want to do i want to see i want to i want to see this for myself
what advice do you have for them well really don't be afraid if anybody calls you
like a geek or something because really i would go to school and they'd be like why do you study space so much and i'm
like i don't know why do i i'm like
it's a fun thing to it's a fun thing to do um i think a lot of kids just think the only after school activities they
can do is sports or play an instrument or they can read books but really there's a
lot more to that because i think that doing astronomy is such a big thing and you have to be adult or to work with
nasa and stuff you have to be adult to meet new friends and join astronomy club
because they don't think they can do all that by themselves because really there's
they just think the only activities that i can do are this this and this and they
have to think outside the box and you have to educate yourself because my
school we don't really talk a lot about space or really a lot about that stuff
and um you just really have to educate yourself and believe in yourself like hey i can
educate myself about astronomy and hey no one will think it's weird if
i start talking about astronomy or anything because a lot of people nowadays at my school think it's weird
to be smart and i'm like it's not weird to be smart you get all these you would like being
smart is just fun if you know i mean not even that just observing the night sky you don't even
have to be smart all you have to do is look and just look at the sky and think oh my god those are like
a millions miles are away from me right now just floating objects in space and i'm
on my trip around the sun right now as the year goes by
and it's just fascinating to think about and many kids don't think of it as an activity to do but really it is an
activity can just smart it can just start from anything just stargazing with your own eyes or
binoculars or just buying a small telescope off of a website online or even just in a store
small telescope anything to get started looking and i i really hope that this is starting to
change some of that opinion stella even wrote that i mean she agreed with you saturn was the first thing she
saw and she wrote that you study space because you're smart curious and super cool there's there's nothing of this
like bias with nerdiness and geekiness and i'm reminded david at the very start talked about the fact that when he was
starting out 16 year olds were not old enough to be part of the rafc montreal
center and now we have eight nine ten-year-olds running telescopes at public events so
you're you're not alone there you're making an impression and you're really setting the stage for a lot of people to
follow you and if i am to say something i've always been a nerd and i wear it as a badge of
honor there's nothing is more exciting than knowing how the world around you works
and it's actually a natural curiosity that has led uh science and progress to
the point that it is right now and people like you that's gonna push it further more so
um yeah a gazillion years ago yeah i
definitely want to add to this i mean libby one thing for everyone out there your mom i believe is supporting you
in your you know quest to study the stars i mean there's there's very important that
parents if your child like libby is interested that you support them so many a child if the
parents and the closest people around them are the ones that are
discouraging you you lose it all and you know libby you're very fortunate that your mom sees this in you
and is supporting you this whole way and has enabled you to grow in your knowledge of all things
astronomy and you're you know as much as i do if not more and i started much later in life
um so that i mean a message out there at all they're watching if your child is like libby
younger older and uh has this interest and space please support her do not allow
all of those all of us that are here might have had to fight that whole
you're a nerd tendency or you know all whatever else everyone says thinks it's important
and we made it here and our love of the stars living you know of course we are your extended family and are going to
continue supporting you in your quest i mean it your ceiling is endless
and you know there's hopefully you you can go as high as you
as much as you uh want to studying the stars is always something different like i
told you about cygni 61 cygni for instance there is always something
different every single night the space is endless if you think you've studied it all or
seen it all there's something else to look up so that you have plenty you have a life's
work ahead of you yeah my mom is the one who bought me my first telescope and i remember
it was off the facebook market so um i remember it was a used telescope and it
was a 60 millimeter me telescope and i was so excited
to um i was just so excited i was in the car and we were going to go pick it up and i
was like oh my gosh i'm going to go look at this tonight if it's not cloudy and i remember and it was a really rainy day
and um i remember i was sitting out on the doorstep of the person you were picking up it up from and i just ran up
to a doorstep and i grabbed it and i was like yes it's here it's finally here i can observe the stars
that's awesome that's awesome it is sad that your first experience was learning that when you
buy new equipment it's cloudy and rainy that's what we've all learned the hard way and you learned it right away
uh that was fantastic thank you so much and libby if you're able to stay on for a little while um in our first start of
part b you're going to hear from two young ladies that are really inspiring in terms of what you can do with your
career if you keep going in space and astronomy because they're now studying space and astronomy in university and
they're moving forward with it and so i hope that that shows you that there really is a path forward in careers
looking at for astronomy for kids so thanks again and
sorry go ahead i said yeah i'll definitely stay on for that fantastic and we're going to end part a
with how we started part a talking sidewalk astronomy and we are very lucky to have with us a dear friend of both
the centers in mind trevor from plato astro and trevor i actually met two
years ago during international astronomy day and it was at the planetarium we did a incredible event with a bunch of
student groups several different clubs from the montreal area english and french
and trevor was starting to do urban astronomy and he actually had a cool anniversary yesterday that i'll let him
tell you about but i was just throwing floored by the amount of energy that he comes in with
and the connection that he has with people and so i'm going to let him tell you his story and so trevor we are all
yours sure thank you i guess first the phrase of 2020 and 21. you can you all hear me
it's good i'm not muted oh yeah ads are bobbing okay good i don't know how to follow up with that presentation that
was awesome libby this uh hopefully that can be okay but it won't match yours so thank you
again for for that um i will share my screen here um there we go everybody can see the
screen head bob good good good good um yes as uh karim said
uh my name is uh my name is trevor uh i live here in montreal and i do run a little thing
here called called plateau astro it's a little little company i i i run here i've been into space for a long time uh
uh this is me when i think i was eight years old uh you can see some pink milk cap bottles on there this is a halloween
costume that uh my mother kathy definitely helped me make um i've been to montreal a few years but
in 2013 a year after i moved here i started doing this event i loved space and i wanted to
share with people uh it's called moonrise moonrise and what i would do is we have a mountain in
montreal that's how montreal gets its name mount royal and i would bring people up and we would uh watch the full
moon come up uh rise uh from behind the horizon and come up and be red when it first comes above the
horizon it looks red and it gets it gets higher turns orange yellow it's a really fun event uh people really
like it um as cream was saying um i have an anniversary uh four years ago
nearly to the day i got this message from a friend and she sent this image
you can see it says may 14th uh 2017 up there that's my friend uh fareed and she
sent this and she said afterwards uh hey trevor would you like to use slash have
forever this telescope in exchange for teaching us and our progeny they were pregnant at the time how to use it uh
about the uh about the universe and i'd always wanted to buy a telescope but i never knew which one to get and free
telescope i mean sure i'll take it basically they were saying we don't know how to use it
uh do you want it and uh uh uh when somebody asks you that you say of
course you you take it you take it and uh less than 10 days later i sent them this photo and it's jupiter and
it's four big moons and this is just with my phone with that that same that same telescope so as soon as i got
it i was i was taken in by it i'm sure that is a very common theme with with folks
um and they were sort of amazed through the telescope no way no way you could do that
um ice cream was saying yes i started bringing my telescope in the street soon soon after this uh uh
uh remember when we could do this it it it looks so uh disgusting to be so near
people but i can't wait to do it again uh i would bring to the street show people um i have this little adapter i'm
gonna show in a second to be able to take photos of the moon it was really really fun to be able to to do this so
here's a photo i took with the moon this is in montreal okay in light polluted area here's another photo
another photo um jupiter you can see the four big moons of jupiter there as well
saturn see that um and mars of course you can see you can see mars there i want to focus on
this just for a moment this is the moon i love when the when the moon is in this phase uh uh uh like this
how do you take a photo of the moon like like like this and how much does it it cost we were talking just a bit about
telescopes libby was telling about her telescopes you got a facebook marketplace i got mine for free i got
mine for even cheaper than that so i got lucky um how much does this telescope
cost don't handle your telescopes like this uh do as i say not as i do this telescope is actually really affordable
uh it looks big it looks expensive this is about 300 bucks okay canadian so you
know with taxes that's about 350 canadian so if there's parents watching and that they're a lot of parents don't
know how much telescopes actually cost they can be really affordable really affordable this one may be a bit more pricey but this is the one that i got
how do you take photos um i assume a lot of people think you have to use a fancy camera uh
smartphones smartphones there's some people who've been doing astronomy here in this chat for a long time and the
last 10 years uh uh uh photography has just gotten amazing with with the things
we have in our in our pockets and most folks already have a smartphone and if you don't you know you can use an old
smartphone or even like an old ipod touch you can take photos like i was just showing before with this
how do you get it on the telescope you can find lots of these this is one i use this is one is a little more expensive you can find cheaper ones out there this
just clamps the phone onto the telescope okay now i took this photo
about an hour and a half ago when it was kind of light out i was supposed to do this at the beginning of the show but it wasn't dark enough so luckily we moved
this a little bit later on um so that adapter a little bit more expensive you can find cheaper ones out there um
but for less than 500 bucks and even less than that okay you can get started
taking photos like this uh with your phone ipod touch a pretty affordable telescope
so let's go and let's go and see it hopefully this works i've been i've been practicing for the last two hours making
sure everything works uh making sure the wi-fi is all good we'll see it's a waxing crescent out there so i'm gonna i'm gonna move like this i'll try
not to make too too much noise here uh you can get a little view of my house you can see some
halloween costumes behind me uh there uh that is the thing that is a story for another time uh i'm gonna move you out
over here and in my front door right over here okay
still see me there i'm gonna switch cameras here so i'm gonna stop sharing right there hopefully you can still
still see me i've got my telescope um um right here and i'm just gonna point it to the moon just give me one moment
and we're gonna get a live look at the moon i'm just gonna change my camera
to this okay you can see that all right that is the city right there okay
montreal i'm gonna put this on to the telescope like this
just give me a second to get all focused and there we go can people see that yeah
okay i'm just gonna play with a little bit i'm gonna play a little bit with the uh uh the zoom and stuff just give me a
second here uh get a little bit bigger like that i'll move it
just a second
there we go we can see the moon um uh right there beautiful yeah yeah yeah
now hopefully this is a time where somebody can maybe butt in because and tell me like a story about the first time you saw uh crescent moon uh like
this i see some friends here i see koa in there maybe you have a story i don't know uh maybe somebody
can help me with uh uh uh padding the content a little bit here because uh i'm not sure this should be the end of the
show or not okay well i can um i've got a little bit of a crescent moon story that i'll always remember
absolutely um i had set up to basically i'm taking my kids and i to
see the total solar eclipse in 2017. um i remember
and this would be a waning crescent moon you know very similar i remember
taking an image like this of that waning crescent moon that was heading
to intercept the sun i think a day or so before taking the trip maybe two days before
taking the trip looking at that moon and saying it's going to be in front of the sun in a couple of days
and just just sort of remembering that moment anticipating
what i was going to see down in tennessee and we got to tennessee and we were able
to see excuse me that total solar eclipse um when the moon drifted right in front
of the sun so it was i had basically begun preparing for seeing the my first eclipse
by looking at the waning version of that crescent moon through a telescope
i think i took a few pictures of it through a telescope at the time and uh just imagined
um you know this is how i'm gonna it was a small telescope same setup and that's how i took pictures of the total solar
eclipse as well through a telescope and a lot of people watched the total solar eclipse on my phone through that
telescope so so this this technique is it's effective it works and it allows
you to see the moon and it allows you to see solar eclipses as well
um so it's a wonderful memory for me
it's also been really good over the last year and some change with with with code of doing live streams and and putting
your phone onto the telescope and narrating what is going going on there and the good thing about it and i forget
if it was you adrian yeah it was you yeah you just said if you think you've seen everything every night it's kind of
a different thing the moon is like that too you know you get sort of a different show different craters yeah let's move it a little bit there uh different
craters uh each night so you can get a a a
favorite craters or or favorite nights and sometimes it's cloudy and you don't get to see it so that's part of the thrill too is uh uh
watching the weather a lot and you can watch the moon at noon with the rasc to know which craters to look
for on different days when it's actually clear you can go out and do this and trevor can you mention to people uh
what you were able to do with the iss transit of the sun with just your cell phone and your telescope
sure actually i got a a slide for that so that's the waxing crescent we've uh we've seen that okay
um but yes uh back in february uh the space station flew in uh front of the sun here in montreal i actually did it
two days in a row i don't know what the frequency of that is but that was pretty interesting um and yeah i was able to
put my phone on cellscope use a filter that i made out of a cornflakes uh box maybe not the
best thing but it didn't work um and so yeah i was able to get a video uh of it so it's gonna start on the left
there go to the right it's gonna look like a little little little dot right there okay you might not be able to see
that don't worry i'll zoom in in a moment here okay that's slowed down quite a bit
um but there it is a little bit closer and you can see it uh moving i think it went by
across the sun in about 1.4 seconds so that's slowed down quite a bit um and then once you do a little of you
know a little enhancement of it i was able to uh play with the colors a little bit and then if you really really really zoom in
you can start to see the solar panels uh of the iss there
with a phone you know with a phone um and you know this is a what a three-year-old iphone so it's not the
not the best thing but uh um it's amazing what uh um what phones are able to do these days
three-year-old iphone and five inch reflector and you've got it yep yeah yeah and i i gotta say too i
remember uh you sharing that video with me trevor and uh i guess i'm kind of feeling like we're missing
out because we didn't hear the enthusiastic screams that uh that came with it when you caught it
that's true that was more my friend uh uh david yeah it was uh uh it was it was
pretty pretty crazy who who here has put up your hands if you've seen the iss transit the sun through a solar
telescope before david yeah others if you haven't it goes by really quick
um but it is um really really fascinating to uh to watch um that's a bit of a bit more you know
an advanced um thing to do um but boy is it is it uh is it cool to see yeah i've
seen it pass through the moon in uh not far from here montreal about five six years ago and i i got the solar panels
and everything so the sun being equivalent to the moon in diameter so
yeah it's very fast yeah totally absolutely yeah that's
fantastic trevor yeah great i think that's might be all i have i can keep the moon up here uh but if
anybody wants to i don't know take it away or ask questions or what we're actually going to do is i'm going
to turn it over to scott we're going to do just a little bit of a very interesting little uh
thing that the astronomical league does to support these global star parties which is just fascinating they're fantastic um we are going to afterwards
have a short break and when we come back to the short break we're going to be entering the part b which is the outreach stories so scott take it away
okay all right so well that's great and and the views of the moon uh with your setup uh trevor look amazing um you know
just uh i mean my my whole interest in uh astronomy starts off as a as a kid this this little
telescope right here was is was my first uh telescope it's a 40
millimeter kmart with still the tag on it and uh from 1970
and um you know so i i i got into it because of
the uh apollo landing of the moon and later became friends with uh buzz aldrin
so who knew okay but um uh small telescopes can can do a lot
and uh just getting a view um really can change your life and so
um you know there have been other fits and starts in in going on on my astronomy
journey and it's far from over yet so and you know i i love it uh you know as as you might be able to
tell anyways um another thing that that i love is the uh
you know the association and connections that we have through explore alliance through the rasc and
also through the astronomical league and other individuals and clubs and stuff
that have participated on our our our events that we put on almost uh
we put them on weekly you know so this is the 45th one it started august 4th
uh 2020 and we've reached over a million people in doing so so it's it's been a lot of fun
and i think that the audience has gained a lot from all the amazing people who have
been on global star party including this amazing event so um i am going to turn this over uh to
chuck allen from the astronomical league uh chuck perhaps you can tell them a
little bit about the league how people can get involved
okay okay remember some noise there was that
uh simon tang uh just just oh okay i'm sorry first first of all uh it's a real
pleasure to join uh all of our friends in the rasc tonight and i'm really excited especially to join you tonight
i've had nothing all my life but great experiences in canada and that goes from
mountain climbing to traveling to astronomy and i'd just like to mention first of
all to david if he's still here i'm not sure he was talking about his shuttle experiences and i i had the opportunity
to see three apollo launches 14 15 and 17 from the first two from the causeway
and the third one from the vip area at the vab uh the vertical assembly building and uh
the most distinctive thing i remember from that was these the feeling that some very large person was
slapping me in the chest as hard as he could it was a just a clapping sound that was
just rattled you to the core during the launch it was absolutely incredible um
again with regard to my experiences uh let me share the screen here for just a
moment if i may
okay hold on one second
okay this is not working
okay am i still sharing not yet
we saw it start yeah for some there we go okay uh one of the experiences i had was
can you see this all right yes okay
all right this is not right i'm sorry folks give me just oh we can see we could see that yeah but that's not the
right powerpoint oh ah okay okay we're stuff
this has never happened before and i'd like to know why it's happening hold on one second
well everything has happened to me before so yeah worry it's not showing up at all maybe this is
it here we go okay sorry about the integration folks um i had an opportunity to judge at the
international science and engineering fair for seven years and the first one i went to was in hamilton i showed up in
toronto without a passport because the rules had just changed and i didn't know it and so my first experience there
was typical of ones i had in all 10 provinces during travels earlier
total friendliness they just looked at the science fair credentials and sent me on the way
and i also had the opportunity to help a young man in british columbia set
a world record even from louisville kentucky i was able to arrange all of the
proof that was necessary for the jump to be certified as a world record with the surveyor with coaches with the ski
jump construction with the ski passes and credentials with affidavits videography and photography
that was necessary to send to london england to uh to get this certified and so that
was proof positive of all of the helpfulness that i got from people uh just over the
phone uh in in helping this young man get this record which still stands today by the way
um i would like to say a little about the astronomical league's virtual convention this will be
the first time we've ever had to go to a virtual convention and hopefully will be the last but it's going to be a three-day event
on august 19th through 21st it is open to anyone in the world it is free
registration the website is can be found on the top of the astronomical league's main
webpage or by going to alconvirtual.org and we have a headline speaker
keynote speaker dr jocelyn bell burnell of course the discoverer of uh pulsars she'll be coming to us from
came from oxford rather and we have a whole line of astrophysicists
we have a slew presentation we have an international star party that scott will be uh helping us with and
he'll be hosting the whole event for us on his platform which we greatly appreciate as always
we'll be doing all of our awards and we have door prizes to beat the band this year
instead of asking vendors for door prizes and of course that happens every year with conventions
we decided to go to our clubs our 300 in february five-member societies and asked if they would
sponsor one really nice door prize and so far we've got close to four thousand dollars in door prizes donated by the
clubs and many others are still in the process of meeting with their boards to decide this these door prizes are open to anyone
members of the league or not in the united states or not
so please consider watching it'll be a great lineup of events there will be two sessions a day at 3 p.m and 8 p.m
starting on thursday august 19th going through saturday august 21st this year
and we would certainly love to have you join us if you can i will say that when i returned to
national office in the league in 2019 i stumbled on an email that
somehow had gone unresponded to and it was from someone in the rasc i
don't have access to the name right now i'm sorry talking about the possibility of holding a joint convention and that
is something that we would definitely like to look at sometime perhaps in the next five years
we would love to meet hopefully if we do it in canada it won't be the same temperature and humidity i
experienced in 2000 in toronto when it was 38 degrees centigrade and 100
humidity uh probably the hottest thing i've ever experienced in my life total stutter but uh we would love to
have a joint convention with you and i hope we can arrange that um i think that would be fabulous next few years
and i'll be in touch with uh officers uh of the rafc very shortly about this
uh we usually before giving the questions for the door prizes we do give a solar
warning because we think it's just a good habit to get into with amateur astronomers around the world who may be
new to the hobby and that is simply to point out that you can't
detect that you're looking at something too bright through a telescope before retinal damage occurs
so you have to avoid that from happening you never observe the sun without professionally made solar filters that
include energy rejection filters at the front top end of the telescope and that are firmly planted there never
use a solar filter or welder's glass it attaches for example only to the eyepiece where heat can build up and
shatter the lens never leave a telescope or binoculars unattended in in a public place in the
daytime where children might get a hold of it and try to access the sun if you're getting eclipse glasses make
sure they're certified with iso international safety standard seal and
probably ought to make sure that you get them from a reliable source because there are counterfeit glasses that have
the iso seal that are not safe never use eclipse glasses or viewing
cards to observe the sun through an optical instrument they're just for naked eye viewing only
and always consult with local amateur astronomers who are experienced in solar
observing they can help you with this process our answers from gsp 44 and again our
questions are basic and we hope people will respond to them and make themselves
eligible for door prizes that are announced at the final gsp each month the winners from each question are
compiled and we do a drawing at the end of the month for them the question number one from gsp 44 is
what is the name of the nasa helicopter that has made very recent history by flying on mars the answer to that was
ingenuity question two the next total lunar eclipse is visible from the western half
of north america parts of south america and southeast asia what is the date and that would be may 26th
2021 and that's coming right up now we understand there was a typo in
this question before so we'll be accepting any response that is reasonable to this question
question three if one weighs 200 pounds on earth how much would that person weigh on mars
the answer is 76 pounds it's a 38 earth gravity on the surface of mars
okay these names will be added to the door prize list these are people who answered these
questions correctly and they'll be in the drawing at the end of the month
all right tonight's questions for may 15th gsp 45
the greek mathematician astronomer geographer and librarian eratosthenes
who live between 276 and 194 bc is famous for measuring what distance to
within 10 accuracy note that your answers get sent to
secretary at astroleague.org that's terry mann's email address
is the answer by any chance the distance between his mouth and the fork
don't think so [Laughter] i haven't seen that in the literature no
okay question number two which of these images abc or d is the famous crab
nebula again send your answers email to
secretary at astrology.org final question tonight what famous
french comet hunter or what french commentator became famous not for his 13 comet discoveries but for making a list
of objects that might be mistaken for comets
okay and that will conclude the questions for tonight and
again we will be back online with scott roberts help on june 11 2021 with
astronomical league live event number seven at seven p.m eastern daylight time
and we look forward to having you join us for that event as well and with that scott i'll turn it back to
you and thank you all again for your hospitality in the past and tonight
all right sounds great okay so we've had you know amazing talks
uh i have to say that the uh rasc montreal center has done an amazing
job uh with uh some incredible speakers and uh
um you know it's just as much fun to present i think as it is to watch all of
this so um so anyhow let's take a ten minute break you can go and get a sandwich uh
you know take a walk uh whatever short one because 10 minutes goes by fast
but anyhow time to stretch those legs and we'll be right back
so simon do you think there's a chance to get that what's the skies looking like um yeah i'll show you guys right now
it's it's really hitting this because it's windy we've got a low pressure coming in
but right there is the patch of blue sky but right where
it wants to be you can see there's a big pile of cloud [Music] so it's i'm going to set it up
regardless i'm optimistic um i mean i tr the sad part here is i
tried a couple of days ago and it claimed it was a magnitude 2.4 we didn't see a damn
thing so this could be a complete bust but i don't quite understand because this is
new to me i don't understand how we follow this because so many people
um and i've looked on youtube have managed to get it and it's all varying times of night but the only thing that seems to matter
is is does the sun hit it okay if the sun we're talking about here is a the
starling train okay uh of satellites and so we're gonna uh simon's gonna see if he can uh pick it
up so we'll see yeah there's gonna be 36 of them
okay so it'll last for a fair amount of time i mean if we did monday there was 53 but
they're so far apart it's kind of pointless yeah so 36 should be a pretty good damn number
they passed over here about four hours ago i'm in the uk it's what time is it here now
2 30 odd yeah but again is it there's no guarantee that we see it that's the
problem they have to strike in a certain angle yeah i don't know i don't know enough
i'm going to make a cup of coffee i'll be back
sorry for those of you guys who don't know me my name's simon hi simon i call myself this stupid astronomer for
a reason because i do the stupid thing so you don't have to ryman where are you
i'm actually in los angeles don't be fooled by the sound of my voice have you met pete williamson he's
actually from uh across the pond uh where is he across the pond from the
uk yeah i'm just on the north welsh border oh okay
i've been here since 2006. i've only gotten into astronomy four years ago
yeah so by comparison i probably wouldn't even even know who you were when i was
back home don't worry that's what kobet is good for we get to meet each other virtually
from all over the world it's amazing i i did a talk the other night for a group in japan and had a translator it
was quite strange it must have been yeah i was going to say that must have been weird well it was very uh the talk should have
been an hour it went on for about three i think yeah i mean that's a good thing about i
like what i like about all of this stuff is because we get to meet so many people from all over the world that we just
normally would never get to see yeah and we're
we're able to make presentations in different places of the world one after the other i did one in brazil
a few about a week ago and a few hours later i was doing one with ottawa i mean
try to do that in real right did one before live you'd probably be
happy if you had like 12 people show up we are having a really hard time hearing
you is it possible to increase the pickup of your mic how about this no it's really really
soft volume maybe it's the settings of the mic yeah maybe strange okay it was working better
yesterday okay and we actually don't hear any difference whether you hold it close or
not okay how about that oh yeah that's totally different it wasn't using the mic at all was it it
was just apparently not no wow okay because it's on but okay well yeah is it stereo now
i even bought one like for all my classes [Music]
wow yeah so um just to give you guys a quick idea while we still got five minutes left um
if you want to see some of my stuff you can look on instagram uh actually i'll just just put it here what the hell am i talking about just do it in the chat
you're all here yeah so instagram [Music]
and then i i heard somebody talking about the iss and all the solar transits and all that kind of crazy stuff i do
that like literally almost every time i get a chance to wow
so yeah i'm right now everybody knows me for my solar stuff that's that's my thing right now
[Music] okay i'm looking at your instagram so i mean the stupid astronomer yep because i
do the stupid thing so you don't have to that's the tagline in other words the way the way i've kind of you know
gone through everything is anything you can think of i will try at least once
doesn't matter how dumb it is just for the sake of going through it so if i see somebody else doing the same thing or
they come across a similar problem i'm more likely to be able to go hey try this believe me because i've done it
before and i do i gotta have a chat with a couple more people about this before i do it i
really do want to show what happens with a telescope when you point it at the sun with no filter and just show people what
really happens i know some people say nothing happens or it just gets really hot i'm like
yeah well try it with a 14 inch dobsonian and tell me that's the truth
wow but before i do it you know the problem here is it's going to show people and they go okay that's a cool safety thing
but now you get a bunch of people going oh that's a cool way to make a really stupid weapon
yep wow so wasn't there like a show on mtv that did like these guys would do like these crazy things that you were
never supposed to do oh geez yeah is that your role model then you're
doing the astronomical version of that uh i probably shouldn't do something as
silly as that oh that's good that's good yeah no that's that's not what my uh intent is but you know i've been on the
fence about showing that one because like i said i don't want to show people and then they realize oh this will be a cool
thing to do to burn someone's house down and then blame me for it i don't know
well pictures are amazing wow well guys i'm bringing us back um a
little early here we uh have been running a little bit behind
so i thought a full 10 minute break might uh might be a bit long
so anyhow uh got my coffee and uh
so scott who's ben is did you find my brother for me your brother yeah ben tang
oh yeah yeah right well we'll have to see maybe ben chu does have a long-lost relationship
yeah right hey man we've got the same last name who knows
well you're going back later on tonight as presenters so maybe we just pair you up and you present
together does he even look like anything like me i don't even know what he looks like yet
you'll have to wait for that that's the surprise that's a surprise the big deal i get it big reveal
that would be so awesome if he does look like me that would just be that would be brilliant
he had a uh we had a little video here from richard grace who uh wanted to wish everybody a happy
astronomy day so i think i'll run that i just had people run like selfies with their their iphones in front of them and uh
some did a little bit better production than others but uh i just wanted the the greeting to be out there so here's
richard richard has been on our show many times um and uh
as soon as he gets his up his personal observatory finalized and everything he's going to uh
come back on but i think he's out he actually i think he shot this out where he's building his observatories
here we got
so there we go and i got maybe one or two more like that to uh to show so
but uh where are we going now come here
all right so i'm taking over from kareem cream that gets a well-deserved break but he'll be back uh for part c
hi everyone my name is russ fralick i'll be yeah yep and i got my microphone working so i
think can i get a thumbs up for the microphone yes it sounds good yeah i just had to
push the magic button and uh very inspiring for the observing stories and i i really like the stories about uh the
sidewalks and stuff and i used to have a telescope when i was a teenager back in the in the 70s and 80s and people were
saying oh people would come up and they'd be oh i've never seen saturn before and i had a few of those but i also had two neighbors who called the
police on me because they thought it was a weapon and then last summer during the the lockdown i went to my local park
with my new telescope and taking pictures and stuff and uh two guys came up to me and they wanted to talk about
they tried to how i was deluding myself because the earth was actually flat why can't i face
reality so you guys get the nice people and i'm getting the crazies i don't know why
maybe it's i don't know but is it my look i don't know what it is
but uh let's just starting so part b is about outreach uh so i'm the outreach of the new outreach director for uh rasc montreal
center i'm i'm relatively new so i'm still meeting a lot of people and i'm always impressed of the people that i
meet i joined uh just a little after the pandemic started last spring
and i signed up to be a director on rasc montreal center around christmas time so
i'm this is really great and uh karima and i are beginning to know each other a lot preparing this and some other
activities as well we work quite well together and uh i hear a lot of pride in kareem's voice
and kareem's answer when he talks about some of his former students at john abbott college and we're going to start
with two of them i think they're probably among his pride and joys he's very proud every time the name emily or
virginia comes up and we'd like to start with uh two uh
younger people who are starting uh what uh we certainly expect to be a prosperous and a really a successful
career in astronomy first is emily laflesche hi emily nice to see you i like the
aurora background and uh you're graduating with honors planetary science
at mcgill university congratulations that's great and uh he also tells me that you're entering a phd program at
purdue very impressive yep uh you were also the parted no sorry just looking forward to
that a lot well well so you start in sept you start when do you start yep in the fall so
august yeah okay wow wow and he said and you're the founder of the john abbott space club
indeed that's pretty cool um and you're the chair of our next gen next generation next-gen committee cool
all right so uh we're very excited i'm very happy to meet you and uh we'll let you uh
talk about pursuing astronomy through education and outreach
awesome let me just share my screen all right can everyone see that
perfect so yeah thank you so much for that introduction that was so sweet um so today i'm gonna be talking about my
journey uh through astronomy and my path through academia
but also my path through education and outreach and how that kind of led me to get to the point where i'm at in my
career um so for me it all pretty much started in elementary school and i usually like
to start my talks off with like a positive note to kind of get everyone excited about what's to come
but unfortunately i didn't actually have the best experience in elementary school i actually really really struggled with
math and i loved science that was one of my favorite subjects and i would get so excited at school whenever a science
experiment was mentioned but i was always told by my teachers in elementary school that if you weren't good at math
you couldn't have a career in science and so i took that to heart really hard and i kind of started to not be able to
foresee myself ever becoming a scientist until high school struck and i realized
that i actually had this massive passion for space i'd always thought you know astronomy
was incredible but i never really thought seriously about it as a as a career or as a research
field until i met an amazing teacher in high school who taught me about astrobiology and or you know life on
other planets for those who don't know what that is and so i fell in love with the topic but it you know in the back of
my mind i was still thinking how is this gonna work i never really thought i would go into science because i
struggled a lot with math so in the end i ended up working extra hard uh in all science topics so i call
it stem right so science technology engineering and math um and i started to feel a little bit more confident like i
could start to see myself actually studying science in cgep which is basically a pre-university program that
all quebec students usually go through and so in cgep unfortunately i ran into another kind of
self-doubt and imposter syndrome loop where i started to question the amount of work i was putting into my
studies and how to you know to me it seemed like my peers were getting things so much easier than me and i had a lot
of trouble actually seeing myself as a fit in the field i had chosen until i
started to get involved in extracurriculars and volunteering especially with respect to
space outreach and that's actually thanks to kareem you can see in the bottom uh corner there that i've got all
my friends that we actually organized this incredible event that i'm going to be talking about in a couple seconds um
but i met so many amazing people during my time at john abbott and that was
you know essential for me to be able to realize my own worth and my own potential and so i ended up speaking at
the montreal space symposium as the youngest speaker at their inaugural event up here you can see that awkward
pose i was so nervous but it was one of my proudest achievements at that point and so in
university i decided to pursue planetary science and i led some incredible space
research that i'll be talking really briefly about in the next slide and i decided to continue my studies in
grad school i'll be pursuing a phd in astrobiology in the fall and uh you know to me this
really would not have happened without outreach so you know all this cool research i've
worked on i just wanted to mention it especially for libby's sake because i'm sure you want to see kind of what careers you might be able to encounter
in space and so i love astrobiology and i also love planetary science which is a
bit more geology focused um you know it's kind of like mapping the earth but
just applying those skills to other planets and so i've done a lot of work on lunar sample return missions i've
actually mapped out this traverse with my team and we were able to present this at the lunar and planetary science
conference earlier this year which was super cool and i was so excited to do that and i also presented
this work i did on exocartographer which was a python tool to map the surfaces of
exoplanets and so that's obviously in its beta testing phases we don't really have any data yet to actually run it
through but that was such a cool moment for me um and the zoom bar is unfortunately hiding this video from me
but i also have worked on uh synthesizing some experimental martian clays uh with bacteria included to see
what it would actually look like if we were to find bio signatures on the surface of mars and so that's a video of
me just shaking up an erlenmeyer flask but hopefully you get the gist of it
let me see if i can skip this that is cool thank you i think so too
so my biggest question throughout my entire experience thus far and the
guiding question that has led me to pursue so much outreach in my life has been how can we bring together people of
all ages and backgrounds to appreciate space because to me space has been something that opened up my eyes to the
possibilities in you know my ability in stem but also in sharing a hands-on
approach to learning about science to you know a very wide audience astronomy
is this thing we can all relate to we're all under the same night sky as a lot of people like to say and it's this
beautiful observational science and so how do we bring that to the general
population in a way that they can digest so my very first attempt at this was the
solar eclipse event that i organized on august 21st 2017 and it was led by an
entirely student composed team um and you know we didn't really expect it to be this
big of an event we and i say we because kareem is in the call right now and he's laughing because we really did think it
was going to be a small scale event but it ended up being over 2 000 people in attendance and over 500 of those in
attendance were not from the campus so we actually attracted members of our
community to come to this event and it was incredible we were able to
spark a joy in learning about astronomy and so many of our community members and that was so cool for us
it eventually led to the creation of the john abbott college astronomy club which is now called the space club
i love that name even more it's even more inclusive and it also reinforced the pre-existing
ties between the rasc and jack because they had been there for many years but this really kind of
strengthened the bond that the two organizations had shared throughout the years and that has led to so many cool
projects that i'm sure virginia will touch on in the next presentation so really outreach is key it's so
important not only for making sure that everyone gets a fair chance at pursuing a field like
astronomy but it's also so important for astronomers to partake in outreach
because it actually ends up teaching you so much about yourself and gives you the confidence not only in you know being
able to set up a scope or say something about the moon but just in feeling like you have a place in this
incredible group of people and it has just been inspiring for me to be part of the rasc
throughout all these years and be able to see kind of my own growth alongside the growth of my peers in this process
so you can see a lot of my different outreach initiatives that i've done here this one was probably one of my favorites we did it with the girl guides
and my my friend sam is there as well and he's showing them how to use a scope indoors because it was raining
um we also did a lot of moon sketching activities outdoors that's me over there
and here's me with the mcgill space group i actually am the education team lead for the mcgill space group which is
a group that designs cubesats and so we also have a very strong outreach focus in that group and we were doing some
outreach with the cosmodrome center in laval and here of course is one of my favorite images
i actually have a first favorite but this is probably my second favorite image from the solar eclipse event because it just shows that we can all
support one another in trying to observe the stars and observe space and it really does take an effort of its team
to be able to do that my most recent endeavor was the rask next gen committee and i am extremely
passionate about making sure that youth members and youth in general feel
supported and engaged in the field of astronomy because i think it is such a massive untapped resource
as we were talking about before after libby's presentation and so the rask next-gen committee actually addresses
the and represents and supports and everything under the sun really the needs of all the youth members in the
rask and it's actually a quite recent committee we only founded it in august 2020 um but we've already been able to
accomplish so much we've actually instituted scholarships and project funding for any youth member who wants
to apply for them to kind of give them a boost in pursuing a career in stem we've also taken an active role in
planning the general assembly youth day now the general assembly usually happens
once a year but the youth day is actually something we're newly instituting this year to really make a
focus on including and highlighting the voices of youth members in the society
we also have a social media series currently at nextgen rask on pretty much all the social media platforms
highlighting all of our youth member contributions because we believe it is so important to not only stand up for
them but also showcase them and you know show the world what we're capable of
because we really are capable of so much and we've also hosted a couple of speakers and panels here you can see one
of my very favorite that we've hosted so far with dr farah alibay who works at the jet propulsion lab at nasa
um and she's just fantastic she was able to give us so much career advice and you know how to get started as an early
career scientist or a researcher and she was amazing to speak to and of
course there's so much more to come we can't actually disclose certain things yet because they're
sort of under wraps but uh i hope you follow along our journey and we are just so so proud of our our work that we've
done so far and i'd like to just finish on this quote it's actually the quote that's on the ga planning website
currently so you may recognize this um but it's space is for everybody it's not
just for a few people in science or math or for a select group of astronauts that is our new frontier out there and it's
everybody's business to know about space and i don't think i could have said it any better um so i hope this resonates with a few
of you and i'd love to answer any questions that you may have for me thank you great thanks very much emily that was
wonderful well you've already triggered a big tsunami of responses on the chat line
there so we've got lots of people also admitting to a reluctance about math and uh and what they did to get around it
and still pursue astronomy so i guess there were lots of stories about that some uh we've got people like beatrice
heinzer she has a qual background in quality different jobs worked in different industries that are associated
uh we have a few other oh gi bill someone use the gi bill to do that's very cool um so you talked about you
guys do cubesats have you launched a cubesat we're actually working on it right now um the
mcgill space group has not been along around for too long um i think it's only been four maybe five years that we've
been around um that being said we are in the canadian satellite design challenge
um which is sort of like encouraging cubesats to be built by design teams across the country and we unfortunately
uh were not able to enter this year's competition because it got cancelled because of the 5-2 as i like to call it so it's
been a little bit uninspiring if you will to look at our progress but um we do actually have a
working model of it so we're really proud of that we don't have any
timeline as to when that can be entered in the composition to the competition but um our team is fantastic and we've
been doing a lot of outreach initiatives in the last year to kind of keep that up at least since you know it's so it's
more important than ever to make sure that people are interested in space wow that's wonderful wonderful and you're in
like exobiology and martian soil so what's your view of the movie the martian with matt damon how realistic
was it could you really grow on on martian soil i okay so i looked immediately a curry
when you said that because he remembers when i got interviewed for the very first time on the radio um while we were
doing the solar eclipse event and i was so stressed so i was mentally preparing all my answers to all my questions and
the radio announcer asked me what are your thoughts on the martian
and i i love that movie it's straight up one of my top like two favorite movies i'd
say um the other one is probably some cheesy rom-com so please don't ask me about that but i absolutely adore that
movie i try to put aside the scientific accuracy of it when i'm watching it
because i am aware that there are probably a couple of um you know sketchy things going on but i
think creative license they would call it right right creative license you know poetic license even if you want to call
it that but i really think that mark watney is an inspiration in terms of how he
approaches problem solving and how you don't always have to be this perfectly formed human being in order to
be an astronaut and you know figure things out you don't always have to have a plan you know you can come up
with one on the fly as long as you have the best intentions in mind and uh yeah
i think as a perfectionist that movie is so cathartic to watch because he is the opposite of a perfectionist he's
constantly a mess but he makes it work and i love that macgyver spirit yeah that's cool well i mean you're very
enrique comments uh he says i have a quiz on the martian i give potatoes to winners in my class that's great that's
very cool i adore that actually once i was doing an outreach event and we were
organizing sort of uh plan your mission to mars with the kids that we were doing the outreach with and i think this was a
group of teenagers i shouldn't say kids because this next part won't make much sense but one of the groups suggested that in
order to make the money back from all the money we'd spend on such a uh you
know a project a mission if you will we sell martian vodka made with martian
potatoes i laughed for a good five minutes behind
the door because i just i did not expect that at all but i thought it was so cool and so like interesting so i had them
write up a little mini project report about it and they really did it they really wrote an entire project report
about making martian vodka and so i think i still have it somewhere i'm never throwing that away
um but i just i love the energy and the inspiration that outreach gives me and
all the team members i've ever done outreach with pretty much share the same sentiments so i encourage anyone who has
not participated in outreach already although most people in this call are technically participating in outreach to
try it you know it doesn't have to be perfect your first time around but the benefits that you can get from doing
outreach far outweigh any of the minor embarrassments that you might encounter along the way
here here yeah great thanks emily well speaking of energy we can really hear it from you so i can see where it comes from and it's
definitely from you very inspirational and thank you very much thank you wow that's great oh we're going to continue
with virginia hi virginia are you are you there hello can you hear me yes i can so uh
great uh you're you're someone else that uh when your name comes up uh kareem beams with pride so another former
student who's doing wonderful very flattering yeah and you you were i don't think we've met because i think you were
a director with rask montreal center and you were moving on to other things and just when i joined so we have yeah
this is the first time so you were at bishops yes i'm currently um doing uh the honors
physics program and a major in math with a minor in philosophy wow that's a good combination and uh and
you're also a member of or a founder of the bishop universe so bishops is a university here in quebec and it's about
what about a hundred hundred fifty kilometers away from montreal yeah so it's in the lennoxville which is just
outside of sherbrooke it's a very nice area very very nice area and you're a founder of the university's astronomy
math and physics society yeah so it's actually something that we just created like a few months ago because uh bishops
actually has an observatory on this roof and but there was no astronomy club and
so me and some classmates who were also in physics and uh interested in
astronomy we decided to create the club uh because it's a great opportunity especially in sherbrook since we have
like much darker skies than in montreal super jealous super jealous
great to see where this leads okay great and you're going to talk to us now about stories of observing for fun and science
yep great well we'll take it away thanks virginia
just sharing my screen
uh cool i don't know if you can see
all right so hello everyone today i am going to be talking about um as russell
said earlier uh stories of observing for fun and science so um i guess i'm gonna start off by
essentially talking about my experiences in terms of observing like in different contexts like you know for fun or for
projects and whatnot so the first thing i want to talk about is this location woolly woods
um so woolly woods is i think really cool uh
in saint christos dome actually on the south shore uh from montreal it's really
not that far and it has these amazing dark skies and it's where the ras
montreal center has observing lights uh so
uh as i said it's um well first of all it's called woolly woods because i believe there are sheep
on the property um it is a private property and um it's just the view is
amazing it was actually the first time i had uh gone observing which was in my
second year of seizure um and i had just uh you know i was
actually in um kareem's class astronomy class and he mentioned wooly woods and i was like oh
well i i'll give it a i'll give it a try and see how it goes and i was um
really awestruck it was the most beautiful sight i had ever seen
um these are actually some of the pictures that uh we're taking at willywood so
this one was taken by david schumann who gave this amazing talk uh in the earlier part and the this is the quality of the
dark skies and it's only like i think less than an hour away from
montreal and it's just beautiful what you can see there i remember uh sitting
back and having a santiago another member from rask um teaching me kind of star hopping and it
was really amazing because you could see the whole milky way arm and i thought it was just a great opportunity uh to do
some observing here's another image of wooly woods again by david schuman
and as you can see you can see the milky way galaxy and everything and it was really awesome
um and yes as again rask we're essentially just a bunch of people who like
astronomy uh and um yeah that was taken by maury
portenhoff our past president from the rask
um i the second thing i want to talk about is kind of a more um sciencey side of my observing
experience so this is for a project that i did uh with uh three other classmates
um again for karine's astronomy class um and it was finding star spectra so
that was actually a great project like um i think kareem mentioned earlier how
uh the ras montreal really got into using star spectra and we actually used we
borrowed the filter from the from the center they had a
diffract diffraction gradient um and we used that uh to do our observations so
many lessons were learned during this project about astronomy and observing uh
first off uh finding a dark sky relatively close to where uh we lived on the island so if
you can see i don't know if you can see my arrow but right here this is where morgan arboretum is on the island of
montreal and i'll be talking about that later um so but we we essentially ended
up getting our pictures in point claire and beacon steel where's which are somewhere around here and as you can see
it's still fairly close to montreal so it's still bright uh but we actually got some good quality
images so this is a picture it's really blurry that's me trying to align the telescopes before incoming
clouds uh block everything which they ended up doing
um so that was the first thing we uh kind of discovered that by the time you get
to adjusting your telescope oftentimes the clouds decide to move in and block your view
um but overall it was a really interesting experience um also another lesson we learned
yeah so i remember that semester every single time it was a clear sky out it
was like the day before one of kareem's uh exams for the course so we had to
stay indoors studying and every other day was cloudy so another lesson we learned about
astronomy the clouds don't care about our feelings when it comes to observing
but we did end up getting very good spectra out of it and it was a really
interesting project we pre went on to present it for the uh center
um and we also actually won a prize at the kafka for the research and it was
all thanks to the fact that ras had a filter that we could borrow which i
think was absolutely amazing um morgan arboretum i mentioned before so
it's this really um kind of really nice spot uh
really close to john abbott college was really convenient it's actually where um the center holds its observing uh nights
so we have there's actually uh the bellevue observatory so it's a dome there's actually a
telescope uh there and it's really this wide open field it's in like the darkest part of
the island so it has the darkest skies um and it's a really great environment
to go i i i haven't been able to go as much as i wanted to um and now with the whole pandemic like that's been on hold
but hopefully once everything starts going back uh a bit to normal
the sessions will um restart again and it was really fun to
first i didn't even know there was an observatory dome there and it's just really cool um to be able to see there
again like um it's really nice because it's kind of like a community so like all the rasp
members are there kind of showing us like everything they know and they're like oh look at this
thing through the telescope it's really nice it's like a really nice way of bonding like under
the under the stars and it's just like beautiful um
again these are some images from inside the the dome uh maybe later david or someone could
answer i'm not sure what kind of telescope is in the is in the dome uh but it's it's just really cool it
gets some really nice views um and it's just absolutely lovely
the mead 14. meet 14. all right thank you
um so now um maybe you're wondering how do i start
observing and we've had like lots of great advice so i'm afraid i'm gonna sound a bit
repetitive but uh astronomers starter kit so um
as libby said in her presentation earlier the reason the first thing you need is really just to step outside and
look at the night sky and there you go you have just observed the the sky you
are now an astronomer and eventually you can move on if you want to get binoculars i was actually
surprised um i did not know that you could just look in such detail at stuff
in the sky with binoculars and the first time i looked at the moon through them it was like really amazing and you can
see all the craters and like such a great detail and it's honestly such an affordable piece of equipment like
compared to telescopes and everything so if you're looking to go the next step i guess i would totally
suggest getting uh binoculars also um i cannot speak for everywhere else in
the world but at least here in quebec and honestly in the entirety of canada
it gets cold at night even in the summer as i also discovered
the first time i went actually to wooly woods i had brought a toque and a light jacket and i was very cold
so i suggest really important to bring lots of warm clothes
um this unfortunately i couldn't find an image of a person wearing
a warm clothing but don't do like her if you're in in a in a colder climate uh
put on layers honestly uh you will not regret it and worst case you can just take off layers
um and so really like it's it's it's really easy to just go and observe uh and it's
a wonderful experience that i suggest like everyone should do and i assume like most people here have had the
opportunity to do so um and it's actually also a really great activity to
do with family and friends so if ever you're looking for some bonding time highly suggested
okay so um where would you want to go observing um well from my experience um anywhere
kind of works it's a bit harder if you're in the city because of light pollution
so it might it will depend for people but a backyard or balcony those are work
really well and they're just out the door so those are good uh park as well
um parks um also just another thing i i learned from doing the uh star spectra project
actually was um that they do actually like security does
actually check around parks and we were actually kicked out of the park once
because it was closing um but um other than that especially like
may in the winter if it's not too cold out like the sun goes down early so parks are a great place to just go and
observe um if you're in montreal or anywhere near
morgan arboretum the rask has a bunch of a bunch of public events there um
especially um for example like the geminids and the proceeds there's always
an event being hosted not now because of covid but usually
there are and it's really great you can bring family friends children
everyone um wooly woods also uh if again you're around here is a good
suggestion or any dark site uh there are multiple websites where it masks
it maps light pollution in the sky and that's a great tool to figure out if
there is like a darker sky near you and there's some for all over the world
so that's a good way to find good observation spots uh i learned
and also join local astronomy clubs like there's some everywhere because everyone
on this planet likes you know looking up at the stars this international astronomy day is proof of that
so for example as emily mentioned earlier in her wonderful
talk uh jack space club so she founded it in 2017.
i was also an executive member of the club and um
well not anymore because i graduated but there's always a bunch of activities that the club organizes and we work
really closely with rask montreal actually space club members are honorary
members of the montreal center so that's a really cool partnership that we developed with the center and i think
it's really nice because it gives students the opportunity to attend all these talks and events
that are often also hosted at john abbott college there's talks that are hosted there and also
um at the library there are library events because that's where it is at john
abbott um also as mentioned earlier um some
classmates and i we created the bishop university um
astronomy mathematics and physics society so bishops is a small
university so we decide to combine astronomy mathematics and physics clubs i guess
all together because you know it you can't really talk exclusively about
one without you know talking about the other they're like connected um but we
i mean we haven't started up yet a lot uh because we created a few months ago
but we do intend on doing lots of like interdisciplinary things so it's not
astronomy and all that it's not just for like super mathy people um that is just a
very huge misconception it can you can also combine astronomy and art as um
nicole showed us in the present in her presentation earlier um so there's all
sorts of different things and astronomy is really a wonderful field of science because i think it's the most accessible
for people um and so that's something we intend to work on
um and of course there's clubs like the rask and the french the french equivalent of montreal
and many more just uh you know do a quick google search you're probably
gonna find a bunch of astronomy clubs near you so
yeah that's it um for yeah that was it uh image credits again
david schuman wonderful images maury portnov and danielle richard who uh was
one of my teammates for the star spectre project i had mentioned earlier
so yeah that thank you great thanks very much virginia that's really wonderful wow and
uh your talk us i had a little storm you slow lots of
storm about weather discussions in the chat and also about appropriate clothing options in the evening so that was great
yes uh hard learned lessons that um hopefully
uh people don't repeat because and i think you touched a nerve too
early on and you talked when you mentioned about uh astronomy and philosophy and how they were closely tied and i think this audience really
appreciates uh good feedback about that i think people really appreciated it and you've got me thinking maybe i should
take a philosophy i think it's also like kind of important because people i think tend to forget
how much you can connect different disciplines together and you know again for libby
uh if you uh were wondering like if you're interested in and for all uh everyone who's watching
like astronomy isn't just you know one field it like branches out and
interconnects with different disciplines so that's another way you can approach it is like trying to mix oh i i
i'm curious to see how i could look at astronomy but from i don't know a
philosophical perspective for example you know so there's so many different opportunities yeah and pierre pacquette
in the comments says astronomy is connected to everything yep i certainly agree well thanks again virginia
and uh and libby if you're still watching oh there's some great examples emily in virginia um and you know
the future is for you too so go go get them it's like go go get them thanks very much emily in virginia we move on
and we have a next next speaker is a cesar brother um and he's been waiting patiently
thanks cesar hi how are you good night everyone yeah good evening so you're
contacting us from buenos aires upside you're upside down on the planet relative to us or the other way around
yeah south enemy fair and uh today is a little glowly nice a mix of of a bunch
of of clouds and normally i'm uh show the sky
from the balcony from my balcony i am in the middle of the city and with a very polluted uh
skies but today is not an excuse to don't make astronomy uh because the
technology uh support a lot for for
amateur astronomers to use in middle of the city with filters cameras
maybe you can see so much but with at the naked eye but
you know that you can try with different different
different single accessories and uh single telescopes uh cameras but
something that is uh we that we think that um
i i'm working uh in my uh in our store a
telescope an astronomy product store from 25 years
ago and i am an optician uh amateur astronomer too
and i'm working all day uh
pollution cleaning repairing restoring optics telescopes uh
binoculars while of course selling products or um
especially a a huge a huge work a lot of time working
in support technically today to our customers and this is something that
um normally i i make i work in our in the third parties of
the association that our our customers and uh uh
we are totally rapid in involved sorry in in the in the
organization of this uh star parties uh for many many years
argentina have a lot of of a huge community of amateur astronomers
and well it's it's something that that is great because it's a country where
it's not easy to live uh we have a like a train of different uh
economical crisis every every decade or well it's our national sports and uh
and uh but the people especially in the last time uh
find uh things to make like astronomy uh this is great and
actually i am involved in in the restoration of of uh [Music]
complex very all complex and very historic astronomy complexes
is a mix of solar observatories uh from from the beginning of
of the 20th century and of of the or end of the 19th century
um is on is maybe the only one observatory
that was abandoned in the last decades and uh i'm involved in working actually in the
restoration of different lenses telescopes um
i have uh if you like i can share screen and show some pictures and explain
this work actually
let me let me uh know uh if you can see the the entire
screen here yes here we started to to to
to enter into the this is the celeste uh mirror you know that you have two
mirrors uh uh in the celeste celotato and uh
this is a 40 40 centimeters or uh 16 inches
like you prefer i don't know in canada you you speak in
metric okay like me okay but for
is very very common speak in diameters in 16
inches you know but well we have we found three years ago the the first time that
we went to the observatory we we found an uh observatory in in very
abundant uh situation um [Music] this is
actually uh in in each mirror of the celestial have a cover metal cover but this is how we
found the the the mirrors actually we are going to clean the first cleaning but are okay
because it's a chromo uh chromocoating that is very hard and don't have problems we test a little to see
something that is okay they are very in very good conditions but of course that
we need to clean we need to to change the motors here is is was uh before
um before uh removing the the covers
and uh was our first visit to the observatory opening the the
the doors maybe in i don't know maybe in 15 years
only some people from the air force they they visit to see how the of course that all that you
see in the in the in the floor is um
pigeons well pigeons i you understand i don't remember i i prefer don't
remember the the word for for this uh but this product of the pigeons
full full of of pigeons and uh
we uh actually we are working in maybe in the next months to
to make a a extreme cleaning for this area
but i'll show you um in what part we are working actually
this area is is the the the area of the spectrometers here do you have the objective is this area is is the the
vacuum tank um unfortunately in our between our first visit we uh found that
many things was stolen and broken uh when we start to work like
like in in our project of of restoring for example
you can see in this in this telescope let me see if i can make some
zoom with this i don't know if uh well sorry i i can don't i can't make uh soon
here what uh i'll i'll show you uh this picture of this car size 18
centimeters how we found the first time um
unfortunately in the last in in the last time that that we found the telescope
again we found that was stolen all parts in bronzy
and uh but the only thing that was saved was
the objective wow and uh of course that we need we
thought in the essential uh in the essential uh
work of remove the lenses because anytime we we can
we can have more problems if you if you lost the lenses uh come on it's
you you it's impossible to recover the the recover these type of telescopes are
aside from from the the beginning of of the 20th century and um and it's a very very rare piece
because it's a it's a a short focal uh racing razors are
is is uh one uh two and a half meter uh focus for
uh 18 centimeters normally um this type of telescope have more than uh 20 uh
focal ratio um the focal razor uh 20 in this time and
this is a very good quality uh instrument well this is our facilities in in our
optics where we have this box is is for cleaning instruments our office and another part
of the laboratory this is my this is two pictures but we
are returned to the to the observatory this is another thing that i make in every
global safari from the balcony my setup for for every trustee that scott roberts
know uh sometimes many many uh so windy that it's impossible to hurt
me and you know but this is my my setup for for the normally my global surprise
uh activities showing live image from from the city uh
in the global subaru returning to the observatory this is from the from the terrace of the celestato this is the
part of the celotato building here you can see the the difference
the difference uh observatories domes it's a very huge complex as it is like
uh it's so big that really we are worried about uh we was
worried about the the possibilities to to work in something or restoring
something so big for us because it's in and of course that is not like uh
uh the the californian observatories but
for argentina is something uh very important and it's a piece of history of
astronomy in argentina this one is a blocking filter car size
blocking filters from the from the the same telescope that fortunately we
found in another welding we are repairing now this actually
this is the the for the from the people that sp
speak french [Music]
it's like a h alpha telescope uh with a mono for monochromatic uh
for monogrammatic spectrometry and i show you how is the instrument
well this is i show you how is actually the instrument actually i don't clean this because because i
my our next telescope to restore is this i'll show you
because it's a real uh it's a very very different type of telescope
um is this is the telescope we are uh
working in a project to to make a digital system in the back of
the back focus of the telescope and it's a very very an excellent piece
to to study the spectrometry and age alpha that's a very interesting
of course that any any suggests about the history or or any people that know
how uh have manuals or or information about this uh this type of uh
of of instrument that i show you it's it will be very very
uh welcome from us because any information is is great for us it's
very important fortunately we found a lot of information but uh
really we need anything that can people uh support us
uh well this is our one of the surprises that we visit this was in the
in the last year the eclipse in patagonia a
very windy situation it's me my son
people from the observatories and miguel well in another picture is it's uh
people from from the another group of cities that i have my my t-shirt
this is an ester party in in the observatory san miguel uh
as i tell we are involved in every sort party we
work in the organization it's it's a work that we make in argentina not only
cell telescope if not we are really involved and really near to the amateur astronomy activities
this was this is the the the in the the same store party that we project uh in
the wall of the of the wheel of the celostato here are the mirrors of the celostat or
probably the sole estate that i i tell you and in this part of the welding of
course are the is the the spectrometer the the vacuum chamber
is very very interesting instrument that that our final objective is is really
uh restore restored well this is how
how uh for today we come we could remove this
this is the the objective cell of the size the car size telescope
that actually was totally uh vandalized one year ago and uh today uh
we uh well two two or only two weeks ago we made this the the work that i showed you
is uh removing really you know that um of course any
any scoop of this was really impossible to remove
we was a really long work to
to removing this because for example you have we found a
hornet nest inside this area for example
yes yes we i i was i was
really really uh worried because uh first of all i thought that i was not
really sure if some lens was broken of
because it's too dirty that they say okay is that the objective complete with
with two elements because i i know that car size cars have mega chromatic uh uh
chromatic uh objectives in this time with two options perfectly but maybe i thought this is
maybe they make you know another um another i was worried because i say
maybe another lens like apochromic or maybe something to um
to uh how do you say to [Music] make a flat feel or something maybe
i don't have some information because i thought that that only two lenses i can sew but i i
can i could uh be something really clear about how was the
objective imagine without with a heartedness or
full of of of dust i i was really um
really worried before disassembling the cell from from the the
tooth here's another telescope and we are returning to the to the work
this is the telescope that we have ready only we need to paint the telescope um
clean and paint the dome uh actually we uh we have this
completely operative um this is a gustav
hayden dressen telescope from 1897. i i don't i don't have but i think
that this 98 89 is because we we found in a catalog
the old information is to tell our two telescope this one is a car size
to for photographic plates here and uh actually uh this uh this is
uh the director of the observatory um the chief of of the group of uh beija
vistal cohmos his name is santiago mayese so i actually i have my my my shirt of of uh
besavita alcohomos astronomy club and uh
is at the association that work in the restoration of the observatory
um and this was two weeks ago uh before this assembly the
the another telescope will return to this to make something of fun and make some
pictures of the sun uh actually it's great because uh we
make the all um they all for for example pieces like
this i make this i make the m42 um
m42 adapter here do you have uh the car say the cars
uh size uh ariel's focusing this is one something that we can
working in restoring completely but uh is like this is for for us
photographic plates it's something that maybe we um we keep like something historic you know
for the kids show the in the focus uh the solar disk but uh
we restoring uh this telescope uh with um
a filter of uh obsidian a filter it's a it's a it's a stone
uh from volcanic or volcanic stone and it's a field solar filter obsidian of
with made with this and stone it's very interesting and the quality of of the image are really great
well this is a detail of returning to the to the objective this is the detail when
we can we could remove the the objective here
and we clean a little of dust or you know we we listen we we can rail car
size jaina the number one the number and uh the focus
well of course that we we needed all of this all that we was really concerned
and very worried was if we have the completely objective
and if this make the the focal length that we read in the in the cell
and here uh santiago mayesi
put the the you know very easy the first that we can
make without laboratory or something that say okay it's observative it's okay
work was uh make a focal
a focal image of the sun here was me we really we uh was
really happy to remove this without problems and without a lot of work one
completed a day to remove each screw without knock without you know without hauling
drilling uh and uh this is something that was really really
really happy for us well this is here do you have how the
the the bundles uh broke everything in the in the
equatorial mount but we have uh fortunately we have
in in good conditions the wheel the the worm
and in another place we we can found here some places where we can make
stepper motors and we are in in
interesting in make a pams a pmc8 system
with a very very great quality and strong motors to make
this uh this um a great uh
a great um polar equatorial quater
mount to to make a return to the life and be a go to mount
well here is is a picture of the sun that i took this day
is starting to use reflex camera directly with the filter
and the the resource was really great this was uh two weeks ago with a part of
of course that this is in reverse uh how uh was in the in the north
hemifer very interesting we we can make a
a a a picture for white light in of course that is not h alpha
telescope and really we we found that were really really great with reflex camera
well here to to have an idea of the size of the telescope
size here is only now is only uh
this is i think that this is before remove the objective here you can see that we don't have any more uh back
focus system they stole everything this is horrible
no no no it's yeah if somebody if somebody
knows something about of about back focus telescope on this time
or any any help is is great because maybe we can
remake this but we need some uh [Music]
some uh how do you say it's called airplanes uh or uh yes well draw a sketch yes decided
well it's possible it's possible yeah i think that yes sure but uh it would be
nice to have the plans that's for sure you might uh contact john briggs
absolutely yes yes well here is more pictures of me
[Music] working with the with the now empty tube santiago
yes uh it's working too we when we when we just
remove the the [Music] the the hornet nest um
the the objective
look that how is that the cell is completely rust is
i have a i have yes yes um i have in next week's i have a hard
work to to disassembling completely this washing the lenses
it's very interesting yes here here we were watching more more uh
you know web spiders and well full of all that you can imagine
and it's very great it's very great dome it's it's all is is near to to save
to save it is is is it is in bad condition but it's possible
to return to life this is really great
here well here is we found a lot of information of the celostato here is a is a sketch with a
completely completed uh you know size and we have a a lot of
information for the celosta that is uh it's very very
for me it's very uh hoping because i think that
we actually we we have the first uh telescope the 18 centimeter telescope
the first one that have the two telescope the gustam hayden with the the size for the for the
um for the photographic plates um and
uh actually we uh restore completely the the system
of uh uh of tracking of course that is not with motorists is with uh um
completely mechanic uh um work work i i i can't i could um
i couldn't know sorry i could i put it i made a picture of uh
oreo nebula with uh five minutes of sorry not five minutes sorry five
seconds uh of tracking that is it's okay because it's a mechanic
mechanic uh telescope but we found that we can restoring
much better the the mechanism and make a a a great precision for for
tracking for the the first telescope that that not the first element of the the
the good of height and the telescope that we are with that is in functions in functions again
[Music] and i'm sorry sir
presentation cesar yes something that is very important to to say is that the the the san miguel uh
government in this area the the major is very interested in uh
in restoring the complete area of the observatory and this is very important because when you have
um if the measure the majors came to our star parties with with a
her family his family sorry and he told us that that really he support
a lot everything that uh that we we work and santiago
the the man that is is in the in the
the chief of all of this is making a great a great work and we are
uh encouraged to to to help and work with with him yes yes
that's great that's great cesar thank you so much thank you i know that there's there's more
there's more to come uh with uh your your project and so we'll we'll follow
on in the future global star parties uh so um
uh who's up next russell okay well yeah just uh uh cesar you're a regular here
but you certainly uh enlisted a lot of interest in the chat line about uh uh source of inspiration the restoration
uh people are wishing you luck and they look forward to uh seeing the telescope in action
so yeah yeah it's great yes yes yes
yes it's great for me absolutely yes it's a pleasure for me working this be a part
of this yeah great thanks very much for sharing it with us now susan uh we're gonna move on to uh peter williamson
pete uh he's gonna be talk he's a freelance astronomer in the uk he's on bbc uh radio talking about astronomy on
a regular basis i think i've heard him once or twice uh he's listening to bbc a lot
uh and he's in that big advocate for promoting the arts uh and to promote science and uh he's got an astronomical
music festival held yearly in in wales i've been to wales very nice
um and you've got an astro radio um on an astronomical music radio station
reaching about 20 250 000 listeners around the world very impressive and pete you're here to talk to us today
about remote telescopes for outreach and processing nasa probe information is
that correct yeah what i'm going to talk about is what why i do what i do and how i got about how i came about doing what
i do um effectively i started doing astronomy in 1966 if you can believe that
it's a long time ago and couldn't afford a telescope uh back in the day so what i
had to do was make my own so i ground my own mirrors grab my own six inch mirrors um i built the tube
and uh then decided to do astrophotography with it and if anybody remembers i think we were talking about in the chat earlier
which was hybrid film that she used to keep in the fridge and then used to sit outside with the old telescope and i
couldn't even afford motor drives so i used to have the scope sit in there and we used to have clear nights in those
days in the uk we don't get them anymore and they used to sit there for about three hours tweaking the little knobs to
keep the star on the rectangle and then you send the film to get it
processed and it was all streaked um so it started all over again but i started out doing that and then um
i think libby touched on it and other people saying you know people especially my day when i was at school people
thought astronomy was a nerdy subject and you got ridiculed at school for it and so i decided at that point to carry
on doing astronomy but quietly and i became a professional musician
and then went on to uh to um have a career let's just see if i can
share my screen is that shared okay yes yep so i went on to uh become a
professional magician but there's the picture of the telescope that i uh i built back in 1966
and i had hair then and everything it was it was amazing um but i went on to be a professional
musician for 46 years i was a bass player in varying rock bands uh playing
across uh the uk and ireland um but i had an accident about 10 years
ago and had to make my profession my hobby and my hobby my profession
and when i came this started to do that i started to look at astronomy and i thought how can we get more people
interested in astronomy if we do family events half of the families don't turn up because either the wife does is not
into astronomy or the husband's not into astronomy or the kids are not into astronomy so i
decided to create a thing called solar sphere astronomical music festival and the idea of this was that we give
something for everybody to do at the festival it's only a small festival but we give something for everybody in the
family to do so if the husband wants to go and watch music he can or if his wife wants to go and look at jewelry on
stalls or go to the music she can and we have astronomical talks we've had one of the guys who helped set it up was
john zarnecki who was involved with the hoygins probe he helped me set up solar sphere and also some professional
musicians as well and those are a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what solar sphere was about
we've got the talks area at the top there and we hold it on a farm so it's got a
rustic feel to it and the cows and everything are still in the fields and the sheep and we also have live music as
well but one of the other things that we're involved with is sun space art and i've been uh involved with this from
time to time and this is a festival and also a project where
uh different different members of sun spaceof go around the uk and they go into the classroom and they
teach kids to do poetry to do painting all based around space and
and the idea is that you may have some that haven't got a scientific any scientific knowledge but they still
enjoy everything to do with space everything to do with astronomy um and those that
have got a scientific bias will then we channel them towards the science and
that's run by professor helen mason from cambridge university and she's a
brilliant advocate of space art but the side of it i do mostly uh with
the schools is um the forks telescope network is an educational project and i
think enrique's involved with lco to a certain extent
um and forex telescope the two two telescopes sit on the lco network
they're two two meter telescopes one in hawaii and one in siding spring in australia
and we give forks are based in cardiff university in the uk and we give access
to kids across the uk and into canada and into other parts of the world as well access
to these telescopes for free so they can either do scientific projects or just use them for imaging now me
i've i'm not a mathematician everybody's been going on about not being mathematicians i'm as far from a mathematician as you could possibly get
so i approached this from a particularly arty point of view so i teach the kids how to image using these telescopes
these are the two two meter telescopes that are involved and they're quite uh sophisticated telescopes but they are
operated from the classroom and um if you ever want to join the forks network and i'll leave my uh email
address up at the end of it and you can um contact me if you wish to join forks
network and i can get you onto that or you can go directly to lco and i would
imagine you can sign up from there as well but through the forks network we've got our own resources and we've got our
own uh people and our own staff working on the project those are the two lads from canada that
were involved through the forks network last year and they were doing astrometry on the uh asteroid apophis
and they've got a website if you go to the website it tells you all about the project they were involved with so it's
worth going there but what we'll have a look at now are some of the images that some of the kids uh or children in the classrooms
that i go in to teach some of the images that they've done with some of the with
the forks telescope and here we have some of the images that the kids have actually done we've got the pillars of
creation there uh we've got ngc 403 the antennae galaxies
um and we've got the crab nebula there and the ring nebula all these are done with the two
meter telescopes now these are just not accessible via kids any any people that
are doing outreach what forks have got me doing is going around the uk particularly and going to societies and
saying to astronomical societies if you go into schools for us and teach
astronomy we'll give you access to these telescopes and paul rocha cardiff
he's a big got a big push going on to do this so even yourselves out in canada or
wherever you are in the world you've got you can get access to these telescopes if you're doing outreach
and you're doing it for educational purposes um there we have the fireworks galaxy um
and uh in ngc 7331 you can see the supernova that was in the fireworks galaxy a few years ago
and we got uh the pegasus galaxy um for those that are into stargate atlantis
that's the galaxy where stargaze atlantis is i just thought i'd put that in there um
and uh we've also got uh m51 the um the work the whirlpool galaxy and now that's
that particular image i did a project over in ireland and it went out on rtu
television over in ireland where i stood alongside the burr telescope if you've heard of the bird telescope that's the
telescope where lord ross first discovered the spiral structural in galaxies and the
project was for me to stand alongside the bird telescope using my ipad taking
image of m51 using the telescope in hawaii and it was kind of like stepping back in time
to be able to do that and also um ngc uh messier 89 now these
all these images are taken by between 10 year olds and 16 year olds
they're all taken by this age group and i've helped them process them
so you know if you're going into schools or if you're doing outreach and you get access to these telescopes you can help
the kids do this the big advantage of these telescopes as well is that a lot
of the lco telescopes are in the southern hemisphere therefore when you go into the classroom in the day
specifically us in the uk when we go into the classroom in the day it's night in australia so they're accessing the
telescope from the classroom in the day at night if you get my drift
and of course we got ngc 891
and a group of galaxies there um as i say these these are really
these are just taken by children they're not these aren't you know professional hubble images or anything these are
taken by children sitting in a classroom somewhere in the world how much integration time it speeds
up um on average there's no more than 20 minutes because
you're using a two meter telescope um you're only using 20 minutes and i mean
the one the one i did of the ring nebula was about five minutes i think something like that so you haven't got much integration time
at all and of course the the benefit of this is because all the data is educational data
it's access across the network so anybody that's signed in can access the data so you might take a few frames
yourself but you can then download other data that other people have done and add it into your data
so it doesn't mean that the kids have got to uh sit there and take all the all the images themselves
and then you've got a black hole candidate where you can just see the uh ejector there um and uh that's a deep
field view of uh of um abel four two six and that was simply a five minute uh
exposure of m17 the amiga nebula so you can see what you can do with
these telescopes in a very short period of time and uh
that's my favorite thor's helmet 15 minutes of data
to to to achieve that and again that was done by uh that one
was put together by a 12 year old so you can see what can be possibly done
but you can also get the schools to work with other establishments and i got one school to work with dr megan argo at
jodrell bank uh using the the level uh dish at jodrell bank and i was image i
got the schools to image the supernova in the fireworks galaxy why megan was working at the bow shock using the jojo
bank dish so you can actually work with other establishments and you can work with radio astronomy sectors
and you can combine your data and see what you can come with the mega did a paper uh on that supernova at the time
and you know we we we set up little projects and it can they can be simple little projects with the schools
identify how many galaxies are in the frame you can start really simply then you can work your way up use photometry
software to work out magnitudes calculate the magnitude identify blue and redshift
and you can work on other projects as well we get kids to look at variable nebulas
to work out which bit of the nebula is missing and they could be simple little projects
that that youngsters can do or they can be complicated projects as i say we want
to try and include everybody we don't want to just go you're the brightest you're going to be doing this we want to
include everybody and give everybody a chance at doing something we look at um looking for exoplanets uh
we've got kids looking for exoplanets across the uk at the moment and that's a nice a nice thing for them to do um
working out the light curves on stars to see if there's any exoplanets crossing the path of that
star and of course another um project is the nsa the national schools
observatory now they run a two meter telescope as well and they're based they're based that the the organization
is based in liverpool that's why it's called the liverpool telescope but the telescope is actually in la palma
and it's the the control center is at john moores in liverpool but you can do so many projects with these now you can
sign up with these you can you don't have to be in the uk to sign up with these and there's so many resources
available on there that you can get kids to to cal you know counting craters on the moon
searching for pluto deaths of stars and i said this was was great to keep the kids occupied under
lockdown counting the stars in the milky way that really does keep them occupied and quiet for a little while anyway um
so there's so so many projects but this if you look at this one you can just see the little dot moving there can you
yeah moving backwards and forwards that's pluto moving backwards and
forwards against the night sky and i got two seven year olds to do that for me using
the two meter telescope they took two images of pluto on two different knights and then they combined them to show the
movement of pluto across the night sky now i hadn't even seen pluto up to that
point i'll tell you a little story there i interviewed alan stern who sent new horizons to pluto because i'm still an
advocate pluto's a planet nobody's going to argue with me are they um but i i i
had alan stern on astro radio a few weeks ago and i said to him is pluto a planet
because i think it is and he said of course it's a planet he said i sent you horizons to it it's a planet and i said
what's your definition of a planet alan and he said if you went there in the starship enterprise and you looked out
the window what would you see i said a planet he goes that's my definition so if alan stern can say it's
a planet because the starship enterprise says it's a planet then it's a planet but also with the liverpool telescope
particularly you can do lunar uh imaging and there's a picture taken with the two meter telescope from the palmer
something like about .01 of a second exposure um and i found out as well that
you could do some great imaging with the nso telescope as well the national schools observatory that was taken by a
12 year old and processed by a 12 year old and that's 25 minutes uh integration
but also the two meters on the forks network and the two meter on the nso network the data is a you're able to
combine the data it's identical field so you can combine data from one
telescope network and another telescope network and that's an image uh that we put together of ngc 7331 and and that's
a massive long exposure of 20 minutes um of ngc 7331
but we come on to space probe data and i know karim's particularly interested in this side of it and we will get together
and we will talk about this at some point um i'll have to do a workshop for you at some point
um but everybody heard it you're committed now i'm committed
i'll do it i'll do it i'll do it i'll do it you've got me i mean if i can be sitting with you at 402 a.m in the
morning in the uk i'm sure i could do a workshop for you um so
space probe data now is available there are many space probes out there there's new horizons um and then there's the
there's the the judo probe that's actually in orbit around jupiter at the moment as we speak uh orbiting pole to
pole uh we've got the cassini that's now crashed into saturn but it it all its
data is available now you can download all this data for free and process it using free software and i've written
many guides in different astronomy magazines but as i say if you want me to come back at some point and do uh
workshops on this that's not a problem i can do that um but this data if you go go to uh the
g if you just do a search on junocam you can download the juno data for free you
just go to the site you click on the picture that you want then you can process it now the processing all you
need to process this is a free piece of graphical software because they come down in jpeg or png format so it's no no
problem you can load it in any graphical software and you can then process it yourself and what nasa are
encouraging you to do and then encouraging the kids to do is to download this data put their own slant
on it and re-upload it onto the site and then you know it's available for everybody to
see but this is the sort of thing you can do with the adjuno data and i mean
for me at my age now approaching 65 in a few weeks just telling you just so you you can send the
cards um if you if you
if you um if you think about it when i was a kid to actually do stuff like this would
have been harry potter stuff it would have been magic to be able to access data from a space probe going round a
planet i mean how exciting is that it is absolutely unbelievable and you can
process it literally minutes after it comes back to you the red spot on jupiter who thought
you'd ever be able to process a picture of the red spot yourself looking like that and then of course you've got the
poll of jupiter something we never see and of course
one thing you can do is process the juno data of the earth because when juno left earth
it also took photographs of the earth how many astronomers thought they'd ever be processing pictures of the earth
right it's there for you to do and it doesn't cost you anything it's free it's free to everybody
and of course you've got the cassini data every single bit of the cassini data is available for you to download
and process the moons the rings saturn's globe itself even
right up to the point that it crashed into the surface of uh saturn you can download that data and make your own
images but also up there is the parker solar probe now i found something fascinating about this
is the fact that people were downloading it and processing pictures of the sun and i thought what if you take the
pictures of the sun out of the image and i've been teaching kids in the classroom
to do this and see what they can identify and what they can find and this is what we can find take the image out
the sun and what do you see you see the milky way and you see the planets
by taking the solar park of data out of the image so
it's uh you know and kids have been i've got one classroom where they've actually found the earth in a picture
so it's fantastic that we can do this in the classroom and like i said there is no cost to this it's there it's
there it's public access data you can go and get it anytime and of course we all
know what's in the news now perseverance and ingenuity and of course they're supplying all the
raw data as perseverance takes the data they're putting it onto the site for you
to download the raw data and process straight away and you can see what the raw data looks like on that picture it
doesn't look particularly great it's uh distorted and it's not quite the right color it's a bit greeny yellowy
but you get that data and play about with it yourself and this is what you can achieve
you can br you can bring out the necessary detail in the images and you
can see the data there and you can see there and look at little ingenuity sitting there all on its own lonely on
the surface but you can process these yourself you can go and do this now the data's there don't just sit there
after this is finished get out and do it and i want to see the results because if there's no results
i'm not going to be very happy um and there look at those rocks on mars this is real stuff this is mars for
god's sake it's mars it's real you know you're looking through the lens at mars i i find this
surreal because where i live there's a 13th century castle in our village and i'm doing this and then i'm walking
around the 13th century castle five minutes later thinking i've just been on the surface of mars it's surreal and i
get so excited about it i think you might be able to tell but i get really really excited
by the fact that we can do this now we can actually do this and look at that it's mars it's not a
desert it's not arizona that's mars and then the creme de la creme is curiosity and
the other rovers are also supplying all their data and who'd have thought you'd ever been
able to take the photograph of clouds on mars but there you go that's mars
it's not it's not earth those are clouds on mars and if you download enough of them you
can put an animation together and watch them drifting across it's unbelievable
but also um we've got in orbit we've got the hubble space telescope it's taking
pictures what do they do with all the raw data well they've put it there for you to access and download yourself
and here's the weird thing is it's nearly got the same field of view as the forks two meter telescope and you can
combine the data which i have been doing combining the data and i actually did one image which i haven't got it on here
but it shows the expansion in the crab nebula over 15 years and you can see the
expansion so these are things you can do now with the kids in the classroom
uh or or to any other outreach event so i advise you to go out and have a go
um that's the one of the crab nebula that i uh processed from hubble data uh
from 15 years ago so all that data again is free to access you just log on to the site and it's
free to access and as i say at the end which is i'm almost there um is i'll put
i'll just leave my email address up and if you contact me or contact kareem we can uh we'll sort something out for you
but where does outreach lead you it can lead you to places you never
thought you'd be and i started doing this as i say 10 years ago doing this outreach and i
never thought it would lead me places i i it did but it led me to doing a
10-minute presentation on apollo sitting on the queen's throne
in the mansion house in london to 400 lords and ladies
and this is where outreach can reach you i i'm not a scientist i've never been a scientist i'd mathematics
it's a mental block but i've got a passion to go out there and do it and this is where the passion
can lead you it can lead you anywhere so get out there as i say and do outreach that's
what it's all about thank you wow stunning pete wow just don't really
know how to what the word is that's so amazing i'm just comparing you know when i was in public
school in grade five or six astronomy introduction was you get those little stoke fire styrofoam balls and you put a
ring around one yeah and you've got these little uh pipe cleaners to hold them up from the ceiling and that was it
well i mean when we started uh when we did
solo sphere we were surprised at the uptake because obviously families could come and then we have mute we and we
were running so nothing overlaps so there's a group on a talk uh we have a dark sky feel because it's in in the
welsh countryside so we have a dark sky field and all that and it runs it runs um
except for all the families but we thought we'd launch astro radio on top of it and i thought
is it going to work a radio station i've now got 12 presenters worldwide and we're hitting 250 000 listeners a show
um we have um alan's alan stern on mike massimino's been on mike was great
he was telling me all about the big bang theory i didn't want to know about his fixing the hobble i wanted to know what it was like on the big bang theory um
so so yeah and what we do when other people like this event particularly um i
i mean i haven't done it tonight because of uh other other commitments but we can
actually broadcast these events on the radio as well you know that's not a problem at all um if you've ever got an
event you want broadcast on the radio and do it also if anybody's listening that wants to come on as a guest on
astro radio we do everything called reach out touch space 8 p.m in the uk mondays and thursdays you can come on as
a guest and we call it ask the astronomer and we also do one called planet island discs where you can come
on and pick your favorite 10 songs as well so thank you anyway well thanks thanks very much pete we've
all got our homework assignments i i hope everyone understands that great thanks and we have one more speaker
distinguished speaker uh before the break and that is dr enrique gomez uh from western carolina
university in north carolina united states and uh he's gonna be talking to us about the appalachian or should i
don't know if i'm appalachian or appalachian uh star song project kids making music with starlight
fascinating hi enrique hey how you doing i am doing a quick uh
check to make sure that i can share my sound and i can also optimize it
um optimize video clip okay so hopefully this will work you let me know if it's
not getting okay so buenos noches uh good evening everyone happy astronomy day and thank you so much for that kind
of invitation we're seeing your presenter uh image instead of is that right oh that is very interesting so
let's see if i can figure it out um is the exact same issue that i had earlier so let me just um
on the presenter screen then there's a little button on the top uh where you can switch to screen uh
slideshow and on the bottom ah there we go on the bottom too yeah
let's see uh see if i can actually figure this out if you could just give me a moment um if someone could help me out
so if i could do you're good um just go down to go into the actual
client the powerpoint client yeah okay there we go very bottom you'll see that
it looks like there it is that's the one okay and those are used full screen
still the presenter but there should be one at the top yeah somewhere see it there should be a
little button that says uh slideshow active yes okay i think i know
what to do i think i know what to do let me just try it one more time and see if i can figure this one out so i'm going
to share my screen and i'm going to do how about this uh can you see it oh yes that's nice no
okay all right so that's that's where we're at okay thank you so much and thank you for working with me so the
appalachian star song project i am in north carolina and this is solar appalachia so this is
basically the idea behind this um i started when i was essentially 13 after reading
um david david levy's observing variable stars and uh going
with just a pair of binoculars going out there with my finder skype from the american association of variable skype
servers and uh be brave enough to actually submit my observations and i was hooked right that gave me my
identity as an observer gave me the confidence that i could do science and that i could actually develop an
intimacy with the sky the fact that you can actually see things change with time
uh gives you a sense that this is a dynamic interesting universe but then the question for me now that i'm a
professional astronomer trying to do outreach is that how do i scale this up so that more and more kids can actually
do this in the classroom can i bring this in the classroom of course the challenge is is that well classrooms
take place in the daytime and you actually have to be patient have to go over many nights
sometimes the nights are cloudy so what do you do how can you bring this into the classroom so following that
excellent presentation by pete i um you can see now that the frontier in
science education on outreach uh is now um very strongly led by what's going on
with robotic telescopes so i applied to and got some time uh using the last observatory as part of their sky
partners who have a location dedicated entirely for education entirely for
education so we have partners for instance in nigeria in colombia really all over the world they're doing
they have some 23 telescopes i believe uh that they are used and we have a
space location for that so this is an example of what one of their sites look like we're talking about point four
diameter telescopes uh robotic telescopes uh the kids of course don't have to go there but they can send in
requests and of course you have schedulers so that they can send jobs uh
to particular sites or anything in the network anything with a clear sky we have you you can go do have projects
in that northern and southern hemisphere so we have this you can look at say cerro tololo for
instance you know if it's cloudy in laniakea hawaii have it done in serotololo this is an example of the
espic 0.4 meter telescopes uh that we we use uh for kids so
many of the projects that pete just mentioned are things that i have already done in the classrooms right so one of
the things i wanted to do is see if we can take a short period variable right and have a week of time with students
and essentially organize a campaign to kind of actually observe this now the kids themselves didn't take this picture
this hubble space tells good picture but uh see if they can actually generate likers out of this right so this is a
typical light curve showing how the brightness of a of a star looks like and this is an example of the prototypical rr library
and the shape the shape tells you information about what's going on deep inside this constant but not only that
you the shape identifies it a particular type of star so that when you see that shape you know what the absolute
magnitude is if it's an absolute magnitude it's a standard candle so in the history of astronomy standard
candles are essential so uh there's another aspect of this and uh p kind of touching this
and that is the artistic aspect of this so we talk about stem let's bring an a in there for ours and
you get steam so multiple representations of targeting various senses enhance learning and engage
higher level of cognition the idea here is that we ask students to represent the same
phenomenon in as many different ways as possible and add an artistic band that
that enhances retention and also engages different part of the brain so they're deep thinking about their experience in
that phenomenon at a deeper level so uh this also involves sonification so
simplification is a way of representing uh information in the form of sounds as opposed to say something visual
astronomy is very visual but there is a movement out there to make astronomy accessible to the visual impaired so
there's a great talk by one that yes merced a blind astronomer uh that does gamma-ray
astronomy by just looking at sounds right and turns out though that when you engage other senses normally you're
engaging people with a visually impaired you're also engaging a water audience as well so this is an example of what my college
students have been able to do right so do a period fold off and are a liary star in a global art cluster ngc 3201
this is student data and this is student work or if we're doing a folding but this is what i've chosen to do i've
chosen i've asked students to actually represent the shape of this light curve with musical notes so the higher the
pitch the brighter the star and you don't do every single data point you just do enough so you represent the
shape so here is i'm hoping that you'll be able to hear it and you have to let me know whether you can actually hear
this or not i'm hoping you can [Music]
yes we can hear it awesome [Music]
nice well it is kind of boring though because a single musical line so this is one of the things i ask people to do
right uh turns out that you can actually ask ai machines to kind of harmonize it in a particular style so taking
advantage of the work of the google magenta team that have loaded 306 black coral pieces so that when you feed it a
musical line it will harmonize it in the style of box so it sounds like this
well this is what we have um and if you wanted to contrast what that sounds say with
another uh type of variable star that's using astronomy a standard candle here
you have a delta cephe you know delta set frequencies
so then you begin to talk about uh the personality of stars it begins to show up right the fact that you can actually
tell the difference between one type of variable star and another sometimes by just looking and and and
listening to the key of the harmonization i think that's potentially kind of interesting
so this essentially the project that i have students do so i have reached out about 608 students between the fifth and
ninth grade i asked students to form small teams to adopt a star and
organize a campaign they have to choose a star they have to choose a location that's in the sky so that the moon is on
the way or is not too close to the sun or whether it's a northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere optimize it so
you get the most telescopes you can actually get you ask students to send the commands and you coach them on
how to send the commands very much like pete does in the schedule selects where to do this
and i also ask the students to their photometry so it turns out that middle grade students can do aperture
photometry you can give them this image and they can extract uh the
the magnitude as it appears to us it's something they're able to do sometimes they're cranky especially if you do a
class over zoom during covets and it's at 7 30 in the morning sometimes they don't appreciate that but here's the
other part of this and the part of the engagement is asking them to represent the white curve with musical notes and
to harmonize the musical voices so this is an example of what happens when you give a 12th grader say um m5
12-yard m5 and try to kind of like fit the image and of course m5 doesn't look like this it's actually have much more
red but i thought that they could be creative and have something that looks like right off harry potter cover but anyway this is
more like the scientific image that you use and you use for instance salsa j or
astro imagej uh to the photometry this is an example of student work and this is what it looks like this is
what it looks like to do astronomy in the classroom and this is an example of students
actually looking a way of how to create a musical piece based upon the right curve so they
select essentially places to have a note trace it out and this is student writing and i ask them to give their star's name
if you would
and uh here you have a different star you have essex violence so another short period variable star and students
this is what again [Music]
now the next thing is that i'm in southern appalachia so i ask a friend of mine who is um
uh um who plays the appalachian lab dulcimer to actually take some of the student work and see what it sounds like
in the lab dulcimer now the idea behind this is that you know in southern appalachia uh the music here sometimes
has a negative connotation as being the music of people who are not have a
lot of background and what i wanted to do is mess with people's expectations a little bit to take a simple musical
style from region and actually represent a very complex sophisticated idea having to do with stars on this by having it
represent the light curve in the lab dulcinea so here we go
[Music]
so [Music]
okay and it goes uh for a while and i even had a student uh do a musical composition uh based upon the like curve
of another short period variable yc capricornis on the french corn so here
she is in my classroom doing the french food
[Music]
uh [Music]
good okay well um turns out that this is the project over there and this if you're an educator you can do this too
you know for instance um we had one example of one network earlier but you for instance could submit for
observatory time uh with the las cumbres observatory uh to use um structural
education programs using robotic telescopes applications are due this coming june 13th sorry for a petition
there's a link over there and i thank you so much for your kind attention
great thanks very much enrique awesome really awesome again another amazing perspective we got
lots of good comments lots of feedback and i think you can make a business selling these lab dulcimers i think
you've got some requests for them on the chat oh cool that's actually a great code thank you there you go side business for
you cool really amazing though to um to
listen to the harmonies and uh uh just the melody of of the music of of
the heavens so you know really incredible stuff so uh and i think a lot of us made the
connection that uh this is something that could really help the site challenged um
uh people that are out there to understand you know to get some sort of understanding of of uh
of the universe that they might not otherwise get so yeah that's cool all right all right
well we're gonna take uh it's up to you scott now i guess it's time for a break yeah i think it's good to take a little
ten minute break and um we'll be back uh we have a lot more to go so observing stay tuned for part c
the imaging stories imaging stories starting gonna be good yeah we'll start at about uh 11 35
right i also want to mention that the um that the um after party waiting room has
opened up at 10 o'clock and will remain open until about uh
10 45 now that's central time okay so if you're interested go to the waiting room we'll get you
all checked out and get you the link to the broadcast which uh you know of course the after party happens after the
presentation so but you're welcome to
log in and hang out until such time that we run through the presentations that we
have so thanks very much and we'll be back in 10. okay perfect
hate to break it to everybody but uh i'm getting cloud central hello
uh so it's cloudy there simon yeah well there's gaps um
yeah based upon where its trajectory will be we might see it because i can see arcturus i can see planes whizzing
by every now and then there's one right now actually um so yeah i'm just going to keep on
going because you never know yeah yeah i mean it's 45 minutes away
just let me know like 5-10 minutes ahead of time if you think it's worth a try and we'll fit it in
i think we'll be into the after party by then no we still have six presenters oh well
i'm gonna try and run mine really fast i think i'm second
on the the astrophoto presenting i'll uh i'll try and quicken it up um
no worries i mean honestly we we expected to be able to go long and we expected that uh
we'd have different parts where there would be lots of comments and lots of questions or lots to talk about and it
would go a little long it's the stories are too amazing to stop which isn't i
i understand that completely it's and we've heard we've had a lot of uh
really good content tonight and it's been it's you know this is the
thing that i love about international astronomy day is uh whenever i've been able to be part of something for this
day it enhances in scale very quickly because there's so much everybody wants to be
able to do and deliver because you have an audience that wants to hear it
a receptive audience is something that really enhances the effectiveness of the outreach that we do
so know this is what it's about um i started with i'm in a couple of
astronomy clubs um in my state of michigan in the united states and you know it started out with us
sharing views on a telescope or views with a screen if we were imaging something
and um you know the pandemic has challenged us to find different ways to
share the night sky and i think this is one really good way that we've uh we've come up with
where we're sharing experiences we're sharing past star parties things that from
professional on down to amateurs that just love being underneath the stars i mean we've uh
we've covered it all oh absolutely and i mean the amount of effort scott puts into these but the impact i mean he told
like you know he was telling us we've already had a we've reached almost 2 000 people 2 000 screens who knows how many
people that ends up being right and this is one of the neat things we do sometimes the zoom um events not by
webinar style but by meeting style and you'll have a screen turn on for somebody to ask a question and it turned
out there's an entire household there watching and listening and coming up with questions together and that's when
you really know that like you're you're making an impact because they then have somebody to discuss it with
afterwards yeah that's it's really good um
the interesting thing is going to be how we incorporate this once we are able to get back
behind the eyepiece and you know there are places that are loosening restrictions now based on
vaccination so i i am curious i'm i'm actually president of an organization astronomy
at the beach which we do in michigan and um i've been just looking at how
this star party is run how some of the other you know the
reports of the other star parties and how how it's being done
to try and get a good idea of how we want to do ours we're going to be
faced with the possibility of being able to do something outdoors he's doing restrictions now based on back
reason how how it's being done i have to put you in touch with
astronomy by the bay this is a friend of mine chris kerwin in new brunswick here in canada
and he sets up his telescope by the bay near his home other people come out and set up telescopes they share the view
but he live streams while he's sharing the view in person so he has a facebook
audience he has a youtube audience and he has his direct audience and then he does these weekly sunday night astronomy
shows where whatever questions are piled up over the week they choose a topic according to them and they focus their
show on that and it's it's a core group of three or four astronomers and astrophotographers
and then they bring in guests and they bring in you know local people who were just enjoying coming out with them they
do and explore the moon contest a photograph the moon contest and he really just engages people
both in person and online simultaneously that's for yeah i wouldn't mind having
contact at all we've got a couple of folks who have set up their personal observatories
so we tend to lean on them to do the live work when it's late at night and you know
they'll they'll open up a webex or you know their their screen
and um they'll you know they'll come along i'm actually hoping to get
one of them on this on the global star party he was interested in coming out a
gentleman dr brian adam who has done some really good outreach work using his
remote setup in arizona he's with us in michigan where the cloud is the state bird but the um
his setup is in arizona so it's you know it's clear 300 and something days of the
year and he'll he'll up he'll work his from michigan he'll run his observatory
and show the images that it's doing similar to uh simon what you're doing you know you you're except i think
you're directly outside where you are uh running your uh running your rig
well it's not much of a rig it this is literally just um
a camera lens attached to the camera not a dslr camera or anything like that it's actually a a asi
2600 but it's just got a camera lens attached to it and it's just sitting on a mount
that's not turned on because well would i try i intend to show and i don't know if this is even going
to work too well you know here's a dslr or canon and i intend on showing it's
hard to see because i got my picture in the background i may turn my picture off um
but uh the types of images that you can get as long as you know where to point
and what you're looking at you can still get some uh you get some data
i mean the sensors are actually similar uh you've got like an aps-c sensor in
that uh one-shot color and um you get it depending on the time of
integration the lens you're using the darkness of your sky that's uh
wonderful images i mean the shapes that are in the night sky don't change much it's a matter of getting
them nicole drawing the images and she what she draws
can look they can match what we take pictures of what she draws and it's it's the same
it's then it's becomes an artistic and artistic interpretation of what we're looking at
sometimes sometimes when i'm dry i'm not exactly sure which messy object i'm drawing so
i'll go back and look at photos to double check that i've i've drawn the right right thing yeah because sometimes like
in sagittarius there's so many things close together yeah it's hard to realize so i double check with the photos what
i've drawn yes that's uh yeah i was looking up one of the images
that i'll try and show i took uh this big old lens
i think i'm gonna turn off my uh this image that's behind me is an image a composite i did of a lake in a galaxy
and i've got something like or the milky way standing straight up in the fall and all that'll be a part of
as i'll run through those and you have to look for the virtual screen and turn it off
um i'll just go none right here you can see my junkie uh
back but yeah this thing aimed it right at the milky way
at 100 millimeters and using this thing which is a modified camera
i've got an 85 on it now um using a modified camera
and you could count you can see easily four messier objects in that same field
and dust clouds and lanes you'll you'll see it's not the most beautiful of images but
the data that's there is what you know what kind of blows your mind it's like you're seeing
that much data in one image and that's where it all starts the data is there
then representing that image you know the the better your optics the better your
images look and you know then the whole processing part of it which
you know we know that that can i've got some i've got some pr interestingly
processed images that started going the wrong way really bad and i decided to show them
because it's uh it tells you how crazy you can get
if you hit the wrong sliders you do too much of one thing or another so it's
you know and i'll try and keep it brief when it's my turn so don't worry i don't worry
okay everyone we're back from our 10-minute break and um there's been some lively conversation
already been going on in the background as you could hear um we
we've had also just great interaction with the audience i really love that um
and uh so we are i guess at the uh the astrophotography section is that
correct guys exactly we're ready for our imaging stories beautiful okay all right
well um uh where do we start so our first imaging story is actually
going to be one of our longtime members mark ricard and he's going to chat with us a little bit about his journey into
astrophotography now mark started imaging in 2007 and purchased a new
mount for his uh c8 and according to him and these are his words he's been spending too much money
too much of his money on gear ever since he's going to talk to us a little bit about how he's gone through his journey
and what what his progression has been as an astrophotographer this is going to kind
of give a little bit of insight into when people really become passionate about this field and really start to
explore how to do the processing and what exactly they're getting for the photons coming into their camera
amazing detail can come from that so mark we are all yours all right thanks for the intro print let me uh
share my screen here
okay i don't need that don't need that
let me put that up
what's that look like looks fantastic yeah yeah okay great yep we see it
all right thanks well look i back in 91 my wife showed me a flyer it was about an open house the
montreal center was having and she suggested we go and check it out
i just picked up a new c8 and i soon realized that the universe is a big place and deep sky objects i was looking
for were pretty small i guess my wife figured out i could use a hand
so i started going to some of their outings and i met guys like frank bill and mark who told me how to use this new
scope of mine and before long i was working on my messier certificate and then i was
observing ngc objects and yeah i was drawing them nicole believe it or not i was doing that back
then and i bought this scope with the intention of getting into astrophotography but
i was having way too much fun observing to stick a camera in front of it unfortunately a few years later i
found myself alone with two young kids and heading out to a dark sky site to observe took a lot of planning
so my scope spent more and more time in the basement and less time under the stars
that was until one night my friend lewis came over with his telescope a meat dsi camera and his laptop
pointed to sagittarius and in five minutes showed me an image of a lagoon nebula
i couldn't take my eyes away from the screen you can capture images like this from my polluted to my backyard
he said well it's darker than mine okay well that was it i was hooked i
purchased a new mount a t-ring for my 40d and i started imaging
here's one of my first images my images look like this one
dark very dark and i was having a lot of problems with tracking
i got a guide scope and another camera to auto guide but i wasn't having much fun here
it took me a while but i realized that my c8 with its 2000 millimeter focal length was more than my mount could have
what i needed was a new telescope more specifically a four inch short
focal length refractor and short time later a ccd camera as well
i started imaging open clusters like ngc 457 the owl and cassiopeia
and at the m46 and puppis and i learned that i could preserve the star color if i stacked a lot of short
exposures together instead of taking a few long ones okay this rig works with clusters
what about galaxies so i pointed to m81 m82 and i was all
take this image but it took over 23 hours spread over two months
it gets pretty cloudy up here in the winter i was happy with the image but i
couldn't help but notice just how small the galaxies were in fact everything that image up to now was small
i want the image something that would be big it would fill the entire field so i pointed my scope towards cygnus
and used my hydrogen alpha filter to capture this image of the butterfly nebula
now i had an image of fill the field and that captured all kinds of detail in the dust clouds as well as the starlight
reflected off of seder at the top of the screen i start to wonder
what else lay beyond the edges of this field so i stuck 135 millimeter lens in front
of my camera and with the help of sequence generator pro started imaging cygnus and hydrogen
alpha now all i had to do was assemble this huge 20 panel mosaic
i tried with pix inside at first but i was having to deal with a lot of stitching artifacts
so my friend sarah wisely suggested i give astropixel processor a try
boy what a difference in less than half the time my image was done
well now i knew my rig could go big and deep but my edges my images were black and
white what if i had a little rgb
okay that's better but now everything's red i thought well what if i had some o3
better but at this point i was adding hydrogen alpha and oxygen 3 to my rgb image
i was seeing other imagers were shooting in pure narrowband so i pointed my scope to the soul nebula
and image it through all three of my narrow band filters and put together this image
wow i the first time i looked at this image i realized i was capturing details from
my little four inch that were beyond any visual scope that i could afford
probably even more than a two meter from my backyard
for my next image i want to image a nebula and cepheus but i couldn't make up my mind which one
so i decided to image these three here fortunately the sulfur 2 and oxygen 3
images were pretty faint and it took me a long time to capture enough data to finish this image in fact
uh i ended up putting something like 118 hours worth of subs into this image
for the next one i chose something simpler i figured maybe a summer favorite like the veil
nebula here i used pixinsight to create the rgb channels
i mapped hydrogen alpha to red and different percentages of sulfur 2
and 03 to green and blue most of the image i'd seen of the veil
were red and blue that's kind of what it looks like i guess through
a telescope but with narrowband you can pretty well do what you want you decide how you want
to map the colors so along the way i picked up a few tips
and here are some that i'd like to share with you guys choose objects that fill a large portion
of the field of view or choose a bunch of smaller objects and
compose a shot with that start with brighter objects like the
messies if you're new to imaging especially if you're using a color camera under white polluted skies
and experiment with shorter exposures to avoid washed out stars especially if you're imaging clusters
try imaging with narrowband filters now not everyone has a mono camera but
something something you should consider you know down the road if you're gonna
you know you want to persist in imaging and finally be patient enjoy the journey
i mean uh like karim mentioned i started this and well with this new mountain 2007 it's
2021 been a member of the center for 30 years i think a lot of people are pretty
impatient when they start imaging they try to get it all done and they figure well i see this guy i can do this
you know take your time you're gonna make a few mistakes but that's how you learn
thanks clear skies that was incredible mark the images that
you are able to obtain are just breathtaking uh there was a question
raised asking about the color palette that you use whether you create your own based on feel or whether
you use something like the hubble palette or something like uh i think in our previous talk with deborah she
had talked about using a modified palette that she thought was closer to true colors
the um let me just go back this one was a palette i made up in fact
when i first started shooting narrowband that was the hardest thing about it
you know i mean you shoot regular images and i wouldn't say it's a cookie cutter
approach but you have an idea what the image looks like and that's what you try to do
here you play around with different percentages and you try this and you try that and
then you process it a bit further you go oh no that's no good okay i'll start again
and i'll try mapping this to this and this that so it's it's a bit unnerving at first uh
doing this narrowband stuff and the people that are good at it i admire because it it takes an eye and uh
man it takes skill there's there's no two ways about it but
you know it also just takes a lot of practice and a lot of this imaging it's a lot of what it is
it just takes you know a lot of practice yeah i bought some nice gear along the
way i won't deny it but i didn't start with this stuff you know i started with very modest
equipment and when i saw that you know i was really passionate about it while i
started investing into better equipment down the road but um anyways
i hope that answers that question yeah no it does and that's that's fantastic and if anybody has a chance to come visit us
at the montreal center especially on our library nights you'll see mark as well as a couple of the other astrophotographers that we have lined up
later they are always ready with advice as well as with seeking advice and that's
one of the neat things that we have going on in the center is even those that have been imaging for a long time
we'll ask others how they got certain effects in their pictures and we we tend to learn from each other and so whether
it's using pix insight or astropixel processor or free software like and auto stacker
we tend to just play around and that's the nice thing about digital files is you can play away
for a little while yeah all right so our next speaker is a
astrophotographer and an educator and uh as we chatted about during the break he's also the
lead for astronomy at the beach and uh is going to be working on figuring out outreach post covid over the next coming
months or weeks depending on how things open up but uh we're glad to welcome
adrian bradley one of the uh one of the regulars here at the global star party adrian
thank you kareem um so as i've been talking the whole time um
you know it's it's been an honor to be a part of the star party and just share what i've been learning
like mark just said it's my journey has been a little it's been a
journey it's been about discovering trying things figuring things out
um i'm all about uh compact so everything i image with i
jump in my truck and here's what i'm using um
that's uh this is a non-modified but it will probably be modified soon because i have
another i have a sony that's a canon it's a full frame and this thing's still fresh with
the uh intervalometer on it it's my uh modified a fully modified uh
aps-c camera the old old canon t2i um i'll share my screen and and i'll
just share briefly the um images i've been able to take i'll drive
to a dark sky park and i will go so you know first that i have a location you go to dark sky parks
and go after the types of images that um
you know that interest me um this is and i've shown this at um
during star priorities before this is the darkest sky that i've been to as of yet a portal 2 sky the upper peninsula
of michigan and this is the using a non-modified camera this is the
wide field view of the milky way that i was able to get about a minute exposure
my processing has been um i've been working on my processing
ever since this is maybe year was it year five of
doing it and just learning and enjoying it along the way this is ann arbor
michigan where the college town is you can hardly see the milky way but it's there
so that gives you i use these images as a talk on light pollution there's
antares um you can barely you can see the effect
of what happens to your night sky it gets washed out with the light so that's why light pollution is such a big
thing now along my journey your night sky it gets washed out um
yeah i was hearing some my own feedback you get lucky with some of your images and you catch a meteor streaking right
through um that can be fun another meteor
this dark sky park is about a portal four but with processing i was able to get some more milky way detail
a little cleaner sky and this was when i over you over process
you messed it up a little bit and i have a little bit of detail this is the cygnus region
but i completely blew this out that happens you might blow some things
out so um milky way imaging is something i've
taken up why you know taking the cameras out with the lenses a tracker on a tripod a very
compact setup so then i'm able to point it at the night sky
and grab some images here's the familiar milky way core now
this is of course the northern hemisphere this is the northern part of the uh milky way core that we're able to see
and it's what's most commonly framed against some sort of foreground it's the familiar the crazy horse nebula
here but there are other parts of the milky way that you can shoot the cygnus region especially especially busy region
and this is just pointing the camera up overhead i always look for the coat hanger whenever i image those um and this is
the cassiopeia andromeda heart the uh
part the part that sits near the andromeda galaxy and it's
it's more northerly um you look really close sometimes it's
that's on a screen but it can be really interesting what those dots represent
and you look at all you've got a lot of objects here um some that i haven't looked up
there's m33 right there a little blue image right there and of course it's m31
um you see a lot of other you know this appears to be a star
cluster here so there's a lot of detail in these images
um let's see if i can go back and
move forward so i'll do the fourth part and this was an image david liked i may
have overdone it again this was like a two minute exposure on the side of a road where there were a lot of trees but
that fourth part of the milky way is near orion this is you know the northernmost part of the arm
um there's a rosette and then there's other you know the
you've got the um barnard's loop the one thing i did not do a good job of and i have to keep
working on is getting the witch head in the shot um that was done using
um a non-modified camera in a portal 3 zone with a long exposure the hydrogen
alpha will come through but it will it will take a longer exposure to get it
so um so those are different parts of the milky way so of
course i go you know i try to go to different parts in order to
do the imaging of the milky way and i'll you know i'll first let's let's let's
look at some fails you can get crazy with
over processing and you end up with these weird colors um it makes for an interesting
nightmarish looking uh abstract thing some of the data is there but you over blow it it's like you're not
sure what you've got you can do too much processing and
really screw up the noise reduction and and in combination you end up well
there's a north american nebula right there you'll recognize some of the here's the um the region mark just showed over
seder um you know this the butterfly nebula is in
here somewhere still looks like a mess at least to me to others it may you know it may look
nice but then the colors are all different that's supposed to be a giant lake that's supposed to be lake huron so these things happen
there's um there's a cloud coming in this is the more familiar
bulge area and still kind of a mess shooting with an aps-c camera that's fully modified
um it teaches me to be a little more careful this is so it's a little bit cleaner i think this is the state of the
image before i really went to town and tried to do something with it um
so you can it you could look at these as fails or teaching you that okay
overdoing it may not be the right thing to do
an interesting milky way processing something interesting about
it is you have the look at it at night but then if you stay out long enough you
start getting this color when daybreak is happening and you get to a point where you can still see the milky way at a dark site
but it's beginning to fade this is actually the moon over here um i would take this picture and about five
minutes later the milky way would be gone the twilight of the sun
would overshadow it this is at uh upper peninsula to quantum falls i tried
to beat the the daybreak the twilight and i didn't when i finally got around to taking an
image this was all that was left of the milky way um scorpius is over here
and this was this was the basically the last image as the uh star started to fade away
the twilight started to take over and clouds started to take over simon i know you're dealing with clouds you come out
here to a beautiful area and clouds can come and get you there too so
you know sometimes if you're just out all night you know you're chasing the um
you're you're chasing the sun you're you're chasing clouds so
sometimes you do get lucky and i'll just rifle through some of these images that's an earlier
image and then here's a this is one of my favorite places image of bortle three zone point oh bark
lighthouse park in the thumb of michigan there's vestiges of the winter milky way
if you're in a dark enough site you'll get some of the winter milky way there's a winter milky way with aurora
and of course the lake looks a lot smoother these were shot with the uh full-frame camera handles noise a little
bit better there's a look um over lake huron
full-frame camera the rising of the milky way against the
those of you in canada i'm waving to you from here because this is canada and these are some
windmill farms this is the michigan side of the thumb and across lake huron
is the country of canada so whenever i'm out here just imagine me
waving hello to you all here we go again um
and i don't know if you can see this part because i've got this box right here um
you know i'll do that that might make it easier to see the
images over a portal 4 zone um probably a better
processing job and this was when i realized you know i'm
getting h alpha when i image with my camera but then i run into these noise
issues this image looks very dramatic
it started out a lot more tame than that there's uh once again
winter milky way and a peaceful scene i do love shooting over water
that is one of my favorite things to do and um and then sometimes
there's other things to shoot at besides the milky way and we'll rifle through these if you happen to be in the cold you can get
these light pillars um you can get real aurora
that's the same location where i shot um over lake huron
well there this was uh march 20th and there was a uh a geomet there was a geomagnetic event i
happened to be there at three in the morning and started imaging and saw some aurora there
this was during the conjunction with an image you could you could get saturn and jupiter you basically they're
blobs of light that are close to each other and as you can see i do have an artsy
side there's this keyholes that you're looking at simon that that's that's what you'd look at when you look up this was
this is the big dipper part of it's been swallowed um
and sometimes your images are a marriage of earth and clouds and what
little bit of starlight or it's like this there's you're not going to see a thing
this was in the winter of course because the lake was you know half frozen half not
yeah good luck imaging when you have that sometimes you get a little bit of magic
to take place the clouds park the moon shows up and you wind up with this interesting
image so you never give up even if you can't you know you get an image like this use the moonlight to your advantage
and you can use daytime settings if you're a photographer out there start imaging with moot with a full moon
and get an idea of what kind of shots you can get using light shadows and
you know you can you can create some works of art and then you and then when it gets dark you graduate to the milky
way here's a distant storm this should look familiar because i had an image earlier
where i had the milky way going across on this night there would be no such
milky way because there were too many clouds and
this magical image is because of clouds it produces the effect where the larger
stars bloat and you get this interesting you can get a filter to get this effect when there's
no clouds but for constellation work or night starry
sky scenes use these high clouds to your advantage and you get some really good images out
of them and of course the moon when it's at crescent just like it is now this is i think this could have been
tonight if it were clear i would have gone to this park and shot a scene similar to this
um i actually shot that with an old canon 30d so
so the these images are examples of things you can get as a single shot um
sharples 2 and the 37 cluster obviously i need to listen to mark and take
shorter exposures so that my stars aren't so bloated so you could see
you know this 37 a lot better um above beetlejuice and orion when you're in
astronomy and you do astrophotography you can shoot at different
objects that you know are there you don't have to stick with like the same objects that a lot of folks will shoot
at now the north american and the pelican nebula and then this
region with the butterfly over seder obviously a lot more work to do but
was just interested to see if i can get it so now so now my processing will have to
improve this region right here where i'm pointing at that's the wild duck
m11 it looks like a small little area
um but it's uh it's just sitting right there you know in the sea it lets you
know how big space really is there's our mineral moon
taken with a uh camera i think i handheld that shot um
using using a camera and a lens that could go to 600 millimeter
and held it steady and fired and then played with saturation to get
the um the mineral moon that we call it the colors corresponding to
ferrous oxide or titanium oxide for blue
and then essentially rust for the red areas with a 300 millimeter lens
on a full-frame camera you have just enough room to capture the flame
the horse head the running man and the orion nebula in the same field of view now processing
could be a bit better um you think this is again this is a single shot this is kind of a test shot to see
what my tracking was looking like and with some crazy processing
the my main goal was am i getting these objects here that i want to see are they showing up
so obviously there would be more to do to make that look a little better you can even get galaxies with a
a camera and a 300 millimeter telescope or 300 millimeter lens m98 right here and then all of these
galaxies that are part of the virgo cluster super cluster i'm
pointing past leo between leo and virgo and i didn't quite line up
m98 in the center because i wanted i think him 100 up here um but
there's a little galaxy here and this is a dark sky park that's portal three and
these dashes and lines are all galaxies so with with uh not so sophisticated equipment
you can still get shapes you can still get galaxies you can still get
these deep space objects in wider fields of view and you may and you'll see better
looking images but just having your own images does something for you this was a
tracking wasn't good but this is a double cluster here you know the cosmos is yours there's n52
i didn't get a good bubble nebula but where i'm circling right here is nova
cast 2021 earlier on now it's a lot brighter
um but this was where i'm circling is where the nova is
and um so that was an earlier image of it here's uh i added the effect the
crosshair effect with uh the beehive m44 thought it made it look like a nice
image um i forget the i think that was a a minute exposure
and then this van gogh painting um you've got m8
m20 so the lagoon the trifid m21 and
m23 i believe all in a single frame
yeah i call it the van gogh painting that's pointing right at near the core of the milky way and all
of those images show up here's a closer up of the orion nebula on a single frame
and processed um you know you
can deal with me getting started the pleiades and mars when they were close
um these images you're taking a camera and you're pointing it and
you're using a tracker telescopes of course more aperture the more detail you'll get but if you're
just looking to get something and enjoy your time in the night sky you
have the capability of doing that so it's you start with what you've got
and then you keep going from there and of course you know the sun
these are the last couple of images sunset this is your artistic side so if you're coming from the photography world
and you want to get into astrophotography
there are certain rules that you follow you're following the typical rules of photography when you're shooting
sunrises you can shoot right at the sun you'll get these bursts um just be careful not to do it for an
extended period of time and burn out your sensor you know use your art photographer this
is a photographer shot with the depth of field and this is this is an iphone if i'm not
mistaken i pulled out my iphone and shot this um sun had risen
and so i said why not and i just didn't take that shot so you
so bottom line is when you're out imaging um
you can frame shots and you're using both photography you're
using astrophotography tools and tricks to get these shots that
you want that you want to get and one thing that i mentioned
and they ask okay you know how do what were your settings it kind of blows their mind when i tell
them iso 6400 is what i use and a lot of photographers coming over into
the astro world are hesitant to go that high with their iso and then they're like but my images are dark and i tell
them when you're in a dark when you're at a dark site you can raise your izone if you're using
a full-frame camera you'll be surprised at how well how much better it handles the noise
of turning your iso up it's the better your signal and your exposure
the better an image and the less noise you get in your image so don't be afraid to raise the iso it's with night sky
shooting that i do go fully manual and just trying a bunch of different things
if you shoot for longer than 20 seconds with most wide-angle lenses like this
one a tracker helps you to follow the stars for a little bit longer
or you piggyback on top of a telescope um again my i guess my level of astrophotography is
it's out of an appreciation for what i'm seeing with my eyes and um as i progress with it it's just a
matter of getting better at the post-processing figuring out what it is i want to share
with you whoever i'm sharing the image with here's what i want you to see in the
image i mean it's like this big image i maybe
you know i may be looking for a particular detail or sometimes i'll have it as a backdrop and i'll try and
make a pretty picture out of it so just depending on what scenery that i'm with
especially if i'm over water so so that's it for my presentation um i'll
be willing to take any questions answer them the best i can
thank you so much adrian and you've actually inspired a lot of conversation in the youtube chat people are chatting about uh their own
experiences trying to capture the milky way uh the fails that they've had in the past with
processing and i have to say that you know some of your fails might actually be amazing book covers for some
fantastic short stories so i i thought when you pointed out your location i
know exactly what you're talking about because the some of the best skies i've ever seen are just across the water in
manitoulin island and up uh just just near sudbury on the way to lake superior
and the skies are just amazing so i have a feeling that uh during the after party we're gonna have a lot of
discussion about milky way photography and other objects of choice but for now i'm actually gonna gonna
move on to our next speaker because we have a speaker with us that has braved the time till past midnight he's a new
father and so uh sleep is is normally uh
a treasured yeah it's measured in the treatment for the week
but i have to say when i'm up at night working and marking for my students the person who keeps me
company is qua because he's always on his balcony imaging and sending me these awesome images going look what i've got
why aren't you outside looking i'm prepping i'm marking i'm busy and so
i live vicariously through quoi so he's given a fantastic intro so i have to
give this with diapers and daycare a more important part of the budget than astronomy gear
new father qua talks about his recent experiences doing astrophotography under the only skies available to him under
curfew the heavily light polluted ones in the plateau so with no further ado
hua take us on your journey thank you very much karim
and i am going to share my screen now
starting my broadcast in three two one
you can't set up expectations like that you have to wait until there you go
might nope it's starting to come up yeah it looks like a slow connection but
there you go it's eventually yeah we're eventually gonna yeah it's it's loading
all right so i i'm going to [Music]
well there seems to be a connection issue turn off
so if it doesn't come up in the next minute what i'm going to do is i'll turn off my
so in the meantime you want to you want to tell us a little bit about your c your location
i think we're still having issues there i will mention to the audience while we're waiting that uh simon tang was
actually out waiting for clear skies to be able to show us the starling train in california
unfortunately he's been stuck with clouds and neighbors throwing karaoke parties and
so uh he's unable to share with us that always happens literally as you see on my screen right
now is all i've got this is a tiny little gap um there's still about 20 more links to go past but i cannot see
them all right i am back hello hey okay we hear you much clearer
excellent excellent so i think what happened is that because this connection is not fantastic when i have my camera
on that really throttles things so here we go once again
there we go do we see do we see me we see your screen we see your screen
booting up that's that's all i do there it goes there it goes excellent that's that's the most
important thing who needs to look at my mug anyways so thank you very much for your patience
i'm going to keep this as brief as i can so my presentation is entitled deep sky
from downtown or how i learned to stop worrying and love portal 9 skies or at least you know try to tolerate them as
best i can because they're all i've got right now uh so for those of us who are on this this call who aren't uh living
in montreal uh provincially we've been under curfew since
january um of some sort where if you're december if
you're if you're outside after dark so right now it's 9 30 but for a while it
was 8 pm if you're outside after 8 pm you you you get ticketed 1500 bucks or
whatever um but that that's also irrelevant because you know us as a new parent uh bringing up
you know someone like a baby who was an infant uh during when when lockdown
started happening um you know no car living downtown uh
getting out to dark skies is is a very very precious uh sort of commodity so
you know i have a rooftop balcony here uh so in in my plateau um
apartment and and so i wanted to see what i can do with it
so first off i live in the plateau neighborhood of montreal basically downtown it's home to
leonard cohen or home of leonard cohen the arcade fire trepper from plateau astro and both of
the major montreal bagel houses uh bortle uh scale uh it's over 9000 i
think and uh the limiting magnitude here feels something like three point something somewhere under
four uh because in the wintertime uh with the reflection from the snow uh
up towards the sky when you look up um it's it's actually kind of frightening to admit that i can only see
uh six out of the seven big dipper stars uh at a glance because if you look away
and you see a a a building light or a street light or if a neighbor turns on
their bedroom light there goes you know there goes your night vision major constellations are missing stars
for example uh the keystone in hercules is actually harder to pick out than i'd
like to admit um from from my neighborhood uh but that's what i got and that's uh that's what i'm gonna work
with so i'm gonna call this slide uh excuses excuses excuses um
and the results i get are pretty grungy uh and they're never gonna make astronomy photo
of the day or you know rival images from from other astrophotographers you're going to see tonight who have you know
nicer skies or more sophisticated equipment i also like a challenge so you
know my gear is is admittedly a little cobbled together you'll see that in a
bit uh there may be some jb weld and sticky attack uh involved in in the
making of some of these images so if you want to talk about how how light polluted
my part of the city is um it's basically as bad as you're going to get in canada
i think um you know i i was poking around on lightpollution.info and and it's similar to what you might
see you know in in your bigger cities in uh over the biggest cities really in the us
and so this is a single 40 second exposure at iso 1600 um using you know a
mirrorless olympus pen f camera mounted to a very small apo refractor uh
telescope uh at f 4.5 or so it's unguided on uh a star adventure mini and
if you look really closely um in the muck that is the gray you know washed out uh frame you'll see little bright
dots and if you look even closer uh you'll see that there are um
there might be little fuzzy things uh on it uh and and uh this is this is the
virgo cluster for reals and with the magic of tracking and stacking
as we want to you know bring up the signal and wipe out the noise uh like
when peter gabriel would say um you get something like this so this is 158 uh by 40 seconds or just
two and a half hours of of integration time uh with 40 and and
35 second exposures done over a a span of four nights um and you know there are
more galaxies in here than you can shake a stick at um and and it's just kind of amazing to me
because i i haven't seen these galaxies myself through an eyepiece because i haven't had
the chance to yet um i haven't had the fortune to get out to a dark sky site this time of year and and look at you
know what's out there so in a way i'm just adding you know stuff
like messier 60 90 89 and the mercarians
chain uh to my list so i call it my astro pokedex um some of you get that reference
um so with bad skies and and short refractor telescopes and a star tracker
uh my exposure needs to be really short um so anything over a minute and you run
into the limitations of the star tracker as well as well the skies themselves
and with uh because um your normal star hopping stars like your
normal star hopping marker stars aren't really visible uh in the city sky i have to take
advantage of the fact that that in you know boosted live view i could see down to about magnitude eight uh and then you
know carefully pre-plan my star hops and in stellarium and here's a warning picture
uh sorry a warning slide for for what comes next this is uh the gear um so i started out with
uh the picture on the left that's a a star tracker sorry i know it's a it's a
barn door tracker that i made myself uh about 10 years ago uh two pieces of pine
um and it's carrying you know my mirrorless camera with a telephoto lens on it
um you'll see that there's also a tick wheel uh on it that's got you know like minute markings uh or second markings uh
you know and and my way to get um you know good tracking with just a single
arm barn door was to do very very careful polar alignment and use a
a metronome at 60 beats a minute ticking out five four time and and just uh
moving along with that um that was well and good and then
i realized with longer telephoto lenses things were getting heavy and and that's really an unbalanced rig uh it's fine
for normal lenses it's fine for wide angle lenses but you know once once i got to a longer focal length um it was
really difficult to balance and frame so i moved on and and um on the right
you'll see an abomination which is a a motorized equatorial mount riding a
motorized equatorial mount um carrying a 1970s refractor uh
with a field platinum i stole from another telescope and and
you know a a red dot finder that i glued onto a hot shoe cover for for for
guiding um and and this this works about as well as you might uh imagine um i'm
getting about uh you know 30 40 second uh unguided trains um and and you know
it's it's what i had on hand and uh the unfortunately uh sorry scott roberts
your your uh eq man your eq down there is serving as
a very glorified latitude wedge for the uh adventure mini because it's in there somewhere i don't
care yeah yeah um and and the the the the mess of wires there's also
uh it's a it's a hacked celestron uh motor drive um that i use actually the
the nano eq mount there uh i got with with the with a four inch uh
your fl 102 um long focus aftermat and with uh with the motor drive the the
the mount is fine for for you know uh for longer focus telescopes you know to
track planets for video uh i find that fantastic but you know i just needed a little bit more precision to do you know
whatever deep sky i can you know stuck at home here um and again this is the same rig but
using uh the the ascar short focus um refractor in fact it's it's out there
right now uh adding more data to the to the virgo cluster
uh so this is the this is a photo of messier 97 and messier
108 the owl and the surfboard uh just under six hours i guess um
and and what i found really fascinating and kind of awe inspiring to
myself you know this is you know it's a grungy photo like if you look really closely there's there's a lot of noise
um you know that was a lot of light pollution to try to beat back but you know i look in there and it's like oh my
god that's that's the central star in m97 that that's the white drawer that's
right there i i got it and and it's just one of those moments you look at your your results afterwards and it's like
wow i got that um and this is a very popular target as well over six nights um
and just under nine hours um from from a balcony that can only see
about a third of the sky back then uh messier 81 and 82 and
this image also took six nights to do um but was more of a challenge because in my old
apartment um i only got about a half hour or so of time before
they kind of went behind you know my my neighbor's uh building
um so this is the the jellyfish nebula lower left and and messier uh 35 uh with
its little companion cluster um in the upper right now what's
what's really special to me about this is the first night i i tried to line up this target
and shoot it uh montreal went into the first night of it's 8pm uh curfew and
and hovering in the region of gemini that night was a police helicopter which unfortunately does not appear in any of
my photos kicking myself still um so i guess that's it for me um
takeaways are that you know this isn't for everyone like it's it's fun for me because you know
being a new parent you have the this weird paradox of having you know too
little time but also you know an abundance of time um if you don't sleep
and and if you have you know your your star tracker out on your balcony shooting um while you're making dinner
or while you're you're reading stories like you just let it go and trust that you know a good number of your your subs
are going to be uh are are going to be good like keepers um
and and it's also really kind of humbling and and fascinating to me that even them
in the most light polluted skies you know our favorite targets are are still there i mean behind the clouds behind the veil
you know it it's it's it's still there um and it'll be lovely again you know to to
get out to uh an observing site and i say this to all my friends at the ras montreal center you know i miss you
all and uh can't wait whenever we can we can do this again in person uh it'll be lovely
thank you very much thank you thank you so much clara that was fantastic inspiring it was
definitely to be able to uh you know you shouldn't let
you know light pollution or [Music] you know tree obstructions or anything
stop you from doing astronomy i have had many friends that had only
a balcony to set up their telescope on or even one guy who was in um i believe
he was in singapore he had no balcony he just had a window
now this is singapore okay just out of window i am spoiled he is shooting
outside his window and the window the window's only like this big
okay so he had his mount drift aligned or puller lined in a precision way in his bedroom turned out
the lights and he would shoot this much that much okay over and over and over again and just
got amazing stuff and just mind-blowing stuff you know and uh so
uh you know it it it is making use of what you have and um
you know and and use that window you know and and go after it because you i
mean uh you know you'll be amazed at what you
can get um and i've just seen it done again and again so the the tools available to
amateur astronomers with with the cameras with the filters um you know and
uh and all the rest of the the the stuff that you can piece together to make that you know to build your puzzle uh and and
to make it work for you is is right there and it never was before this oh my i think my important tool is
a truck with gas in it and a supportive wife that says if you want to drive
listen to these portal three zones you just make sure you come home safe
with some images so yeah it doesn't matter whether you have supportive parents or a supportive
community or supportive friends having also supportive spouses is very very
important you know yes and uh you know there's a lot of things that people could be doing but
i believe that uh i've said it many times i believe that astronomy is good for you it's healthy
for you it improves your health your state of mind you know it calms
your heart down it lowers your blood pressure okay these things are important for all of us
you know and this is uh one of the reasons why we do astronomy outreach um
we just we just innately know it's good for us you know so um
yeah it's more than just a fun pastime is what i'm trying to say absolutely and actually
two years ago when when we did international astronomy day in person last time qua's wife was one of the
animators at one of the kids booths making comets for kids to take home with them out of clay and pipe cleaners and
it was just a blast and so we definitely uh we've definitely benefited from having fun and gone love
is part of our center and uh it was it was a fantastic talk i mean in the chat everybody's talking about how
inspired they are and how much it encourages them to keep trying to image no matter what their situation might be
so thank you so much paul now our next speakers i
actually i know them really well they had they lived down the road for me gerald and dominique mckenzie uh they have actually
gotten attached to photography lately and since retirement they've really kind of dove right in they bought uh tell
view 85 the go-to mount in 2016. but they live in the city area like like
i do in suburbs but still on the island of montreal surrounded by light their backyard is trees on all sides
city lights glaring in from the corner and they make do as best as they can but
then they also have really become adept at processing and it's picking out their targets really
well dominique is a retired high school science teacher in adult education gerald is a retired information systems
auditor and so for today's presentation dominique set everything up and gerald's going to deliver it and they're going to
talk to us about the latest project which is the messier hunt and they've been so kind to share a lot
of their image files with my students when they're learning when they're practicing processing and the amount of detail that they're
able to get is again inspiring so gerald we're all yours
thanks sir it's really kind okay so
this should be the right one to share
and slideshow
hydro okay so
uh we're just gonna let the slideshow roll and and just talk about our uh
journey into astrophotography uh first a little background like kareem
said dominic has been dominic's been interested in astronomy uh for quite a long time since a kid
and me i'm a computer geek i was in computers
my whole career back from the early 70s so where dominic approaches astronomy
from the science side i approach it from the technical side and i'm majorly color
color challenged so anything that's post-processing unless i want it to come out like
adrian's there i'll leave it to dominic uh so uh like uh
like like kareem said in uh in 2016 dominic found a used teleview 85 and we
thought this would be a nice-sized telescope to start more active observing
we bought an ioptron 725 mount to go with it it's something light and we
thought we could easily take it on vacation or bring it to the cottage
but then in 2018 we naively thought that we might like to get into extra
photography and we didn't have a dslr so we bought a
as well asi-224 it's a relatively inexpensive color
camera and a good beginner's choice our first target was the moon it had to
be mosaic because it it didn't fit in our field of view but it went nice so
and then in that june we went camping at a relatively dark site in ontario
and all that although the nights are short in june we saw a lot of double stars and deep space objects and then we
decided to try some deep space photography and that's when it all began
uh for newbies astrophotography is strewn with a lot of
moments where you say ah that's what they mean yeah it's a lot of those
came along because we didn't take a course in this we just bumbled along
and you have to learn the vocabulary and until you learn a vocabulary you don't know what people are trying to tell you
so we thought we'd start by
photographing the mesquites these are the most prominent dsos and they represent most of the visible deep
sky phenomena you know clusters globular clusters nebulae planetary nebulae
galaxies we didn't want to have the best photographs we wanted something between
eaa it's electronically enhanced astronomy and astrophotography
something to bring out the details that you can't see with visual astronomy
especially in our zone our portal zone our first problem came when we decided
to remove the diagonal and put the camera directly on the telescope why couldn't we focus
what's wrong with this thing what is back focus anyway well turned out we needed a flattener
reducer back focus extensions uh to bring the focal plane of the telescope
in line with the plane of our camera uh so
now uh the 224 like i said is a very forgiving camera
yeah high gain low gain short exposure long exposure we almost always got
results we weren't very discerning
then we got dust bunnies and gray patches on our images and after
consulting a club friend uh he's gonna talk later there ben shu we learned about calibration frames
darks flats dark flats biases by now the limitations of the 224 were
especially regarding field of view or becoming apparent and we wanted more
so in early 2019 we bought a nasi 183
camera this was a whole new experience as forgiving as the 224 was the 183 is
very exacting at first we were very discouraged and now we really had to learn about gain
exposure offset white balance guiding especially guiding
the small pixels of the 183 meant that guiding must be exceptionally good
up until now we'd only been tracking so we decided to get a guide scope and put
our old 224 to work as a guiding camera but then we started having these
really bad guiding sessions and i couldn't figure out what was happening and it turned out that
although the the program is called phd you know push here dummy
i hadn't calibrated properly and the ra and the deck parameters were reversed
i guess push your dummy with anyway
then uh and when we were aligning our mount we were using the three-star procedure to
came with the mount uh it's very laborious and unforgiving in our limited
horizon like like corrine said we're just surrounded by trees when a star was out of view
we had to restart the process so a friend suggested we try plate solving
now this shortened our alignment procedure by at least 10 minutes per session this was great
for quite a while we've been fretting about deformed stars on the edges of our shots meticulous focusing didn't get rid
of them then we happened on an article about back focus determined that our camera was set about
a millimeter too far from the flattener so that seems to help now
and then we changed our 183 camera for an asi 183
pro and we started attempting longer exposures now we realize the major advantage of a
cooled camera you don't have to interrupt your session to get dark calibration frames at the same
temperature as the lights now we can build libraries of darks another big
time saver uh ironically uh we're starting to realize that this camera is really not
well suited to long exposures in poor scene although i really love the resolution
the full well is is rather shallow so pixels saturate very quickly in the bright skies these are all things we
learned the pixel size is so small it's
in a in a mortal six seven conditions like ours it's not very optimum optimum
so anyway now our our messier project is continuing but our extremely limited
horizons are making opportunities rarer so maybe uh
maybe we could have taken a course and learned all this but uh what's the point in that
that's about it i think it was definitely more fun not taking a course and just learning it as
you go they're great images though i i'm i'm i think they're good
yeah well it's a good thing we've got a few people out there to help us in the club there
we're always asking mark and ben and you know
what to do and i'm asking you guys
passing it down [Music] well this well i really
yeah i know i'm gonna be heading out but what i really like is your i think the most important thing you did
was set out a mission you basically said we want to gather
a little bit beyond what the human eye can see to make a pod we're not out to make the best image
that uh you know ever and i think that was a really good goal because
then you look at your own image and say okay i'm seeing things here that i would not
normally see if i were just look at it visually and to me that's more than enough
there are a lot of great astrophotographers that have really got down as soon as they get their data
their process i guess it takes what days weeks they'll tweak it until it's perfect
and i know it all takes time but enjoying the hobby means enjoying the process that we pick
and uh it's not frustrating when your goal is just a good picture of messier 33
that has you know features and i'm you know with the some of the milky way shots that i take i'm
perfectly happy if i can see certain messier objects pretty clearly within that milky way
shot so i think a goal statement is very important and it leads you down
we each have our own journeys in astrophotography or you know visual
whatever however we're approaching it and we follow those journeys um chasing
others work can get so frustrating that you then you'd want to give it up with quoi if he's chasing
certain other work at a bull with bortle nine and ten skies that's frustrating enough to want to
throw your equipment out of the window and take up another hobby you know so
so yeah i think it's very important it's one of my favorites there
that and uh yeah and this this hubble effect because this was three strats mosaic
wow yeah those are those are beautiful images yes you know it's
you can't when you can't mistake the object for what it is i think that's when you've done a pretty
good job if it's a blob then well then there's just a little bit more
work to do but um there when you look closely you can see the dust lanes in the spiral arms you can even see some of
the structure in the dust lanes on the left side and it's just gorgeous the amount of detail
yeah none of our shots took more than one night yeah
so it's it's not that we don't appreciate those really nice shots of marks and quads
oh we um so in our play and i'll i'll say this real quick we have a gentleman
who's been in the global star party before douglas drewble um
we have a unit of integration named after him 30 hours is a struggle
and so so if you integrate for 30 hours you've integrated a strooble's worth that's
just one strobel i generally integrate for a minute and a half because i can track for a minute
and a half so i'm getting my own um image
you know it's called the bradley the shortest amount of integration possible so you've got like so you've got like a
micro strew bowl or yeah you need you need a big lens to see you
need a macro lens to see my uh imaging start time uh does anybody reach the uh hecto
screwball or the uh kilo stream i think i'm close that that's one of my
goals is to get a great well that was the uh orion nebula image that you saw
the running man was a 90-second image at a dark sky and it like the detail
that showed up was um i was very happy with that it was this combination of equipment you can't
see the camera because of my virtual screen again and that same tracker you've got qua
and uh 90 seconds and boom i was happy now more frames
more you know i get more data but that was a good start it was a good enough image for me to say well at least
i got something because i was clouded out before that darker skies quas dealing with a bit
more of the light pollution that he has to deal with yeah that was portal 3 that took that shot
you know that's what three multiple multiply by three again and
you've got portal three terry the one gerald and dominique have uh you know around bortles six and then quas what
was it nine thousand over it's over here it was over nine thousand i got that that uh dragon you got the reference yes
yep i know that reference vegeta but um i ain't that so the story goes you image
based on where you are and you use whatever techniques based on where you are and you can get
fabulous images um and that i think that would be the message going forward as i leave tonight
um you know equipment helps but
you know passion for imaging and using your current situation to get those
images is you know what gets you your results and then you keep going um but equipment
does help it does have to say we have a 16-inch explorer scientific at our at our dark sky site and i cannot wait to
use it again i cannot wait to get out there and use that light bucket and really just see some nice
nice dark even just visual i'm not even talking about imaging yeah we're talking about getting there and using the light
bucket and enjoying seeing some seo objects yeah i i hear you there well we
had that presentation earlier um the children are using two meter
telescopes 20 images of integration looks better than like two or three
strubles worth at a but but as much as you gain from the exposure
from that type of outreach which is a ton you lose that one element that scott mentioned earlier that that moment under
the stars where really kind of you take a breath you relax yeah you feel the
immensity of things but you also kind of feel a place in that and yeah
that's part of what we want to get across with these imaging stories and i think gerald and dominique really kind
of encompassed that because no matter no matter what target they're on no matter how much they're working with
their computer and stuff at some point they just stop and they're just enjoying being there yeah i would wonderful to see
yeah um one of the things that we that we miss from not not being together and not
having uh these club nights is is little things like watching jerry and dominic work together
as as a team as a duo it's it's it's beautiful yeah i would wish for everybody i did
see a portal 2 sky and the milky way rise out of that i would wish for everybody
to see it with their own eyes and i wish i had shown i have an image of what it looks like naked eye there
when you see color in the milky way that's when you know you know your skies
are and you you see how enormous the milky way really is when
you're in a bordeal two sky um i know the one image i had was like this full-on
big detailed view the milky way but the real impressive thing about a portal
2 sky is seeing the milky way naked eye and uh it's my hopes to uh see a border one sky
here in the fall heading to okee tech so the images from there um
they probably pale in comparison to what i'm gonna remember seeing with my own eyes so it's it does sit with the gravity of it does
sit with you thanks adrian and uh i do want to just get to our last couple of presenters and
then in the after party we can chat more um our next presenter is our
ariac montreal center long time director and treasurer ben chu tang
and ben is an avid astrophotographer and today he's going to talk to us a little bit about road trip astrophotography
which is actually kind of a cool story you can tell us about actually trying to take equipment with you
so bench you were all yours yep thank you kareem um
do you guys see my screen yeah oh good great
all right hello everyone uh so yeah um i think we talked a lot about city
imaging and uh yeah i i decided to talk about uh some
dark sides imaging so my topic tonight is a road trip astrophotography
deeping to the west of the united states so why road trips
as a hobbyist in astrophotography i just want dark dark dark skies
and there's nothing else so we do have some challenges there as you
can imagine um like like number one we don't have enough time i have a job i have a family
so the maximum time i can have like in one period is like a week more or less
so the weather is often not very cooperating so the solution is you drive a lot
to chase the dark sky to chase the after the the clear skies and then planning that
when you drive a lot you know the planning is a problem because um you can have different
like very changeable weathers so the solution there is to check
multiple forecasts and very often at least twice a day
and then once you get that it will be hard because you you move
around right uh your plan changes every day or every twice a day so
when you get the spot you don't you don't just set up things besides the road you need to find the
right spot so at a time clear sky chart as you guys mentioned before it's really
a handy tool as well as google earth to help you find out about the surroundings
and then you get there set up everything you are in good mood and something
hiccups on your equipment because i normally i have my um
my um equatorial mount and then my telescope and then there's the filter wheels
there's cameras and then focuser there computer
then i hook up to a wi-fi and then i have my ipad i control everything from my ipad so there are so many things
there and yeah the the way to avoid all these hiccups is to have
lots of backups like backup computer cables power cables
everything so and then there's the wilderness right
you might have hails on the road you might have uh thunderstorms uh
just uh the weather forecast turned from clear skies to thunderstorms
and then you have all these animals like coyotes or insects like scorpions none
other scorpios in the sky but the real scorpions and which are
which are not really friendly so my solution is to get ready and do some
homeworks there and ask around like what what to expect when you are heading
to the dark so this is the clear sky chart this is my
best friend when i go to do my planning here you can see all the ping points
okay so this is the state of texas where i started so
on the this is a map and there every single pinpoint on the map is a
public or private observing site and that that's really beautiful and the
uh the color of these pink points tells you how good the sky is so if you look at the the
darks dark dots there on the west on the left side hand side of of this
map they are fabulous so and if you
hit on uh one of the uh the the dots or pinpoints there it
will show you the the weather forecast for next three nights
which is really handy um to to just navigate through to to see where to
where to drive for the next day or the next two days um yeah so that's that's my number one
tool so when you did the planning after you've done the planning
you need to pack up all right so some advices here uh first you need at least the suv
minivan will be great you need those spaces then you need water
food and fruits in the front you have to have to be able to access them when
you're driving and also the batteries are essential uh you better have
one uh one extra battery and you better uh be able to charge them on route meaning
you might travel from one side uh one observing site to another
driving six hours then you need to charge them on your car
you might need an inverter or if you don't have the ac plugs on the car
so also you need the the binocular for sure don't forget
that you need to need that to enjoy the night sky and also
those spare cables those are backups i put them in one bag so that they are
accessible and then the tables like portable tables and chairs they're also great
you don't want to put everything on the ground and also the chairs for sure so
with that i have two special recommendations if you ever want to go to a road trips
uh in the west right ready to use drink meal so that's
that could be my meal for a whole week no not a whole week but
i think it's one week one meal for the whole week right so uh in the west uh on uh like interstate uh 10 or even uh or
you go to new mexico it's not easy to find a restaurant definitely not easy so this will become
your best friend and it will save you and save you a tons of time which is very essential
on the road trip and then um when you go there it's as you can imagine it's pretty costly
both time and money so you do want to have some best optics all right
so there unfortunately there's no telescope for rent as far as i know so but the good news is
there's rent lengths for rent so lens rental is one of the my favorite websites for that
we rented a canon ef 400 millimeter two f 2.8 that's very fast
lens and it's very very expensive it's 12 000 us dollars if you want to
buy it but if you rent it for one week that's 350
which is more much more affordable i should say so think about that that's that's just
one more options there um yeah let's talk about my journey uh this is 2018 i believe in the summer and
then i started from houston that's like the right hand right right bottom corner
of this map uh so day one i tried well i started from my
friend uh chanwu's uh house and i drove i drove his car with all his equipment
and some of my equipment and yeah the plan is that i drove all the way
around to around el paso and he will join me there so day number one i
i stopped at the junction uh that's uh that's like 15 minutes
away from the south slano river state park which is a great place on the map
it's like uh bottles three two four on the edge of three to four but
in the side in the south it's really really dark it's like bottle two there so um that
night i had a great picture on the m16 uh with the chance
c8 telescope and then day number two i was i was happy
then and i made a very big mistake i checked the weather before i start a
start the second day the plan is to go to big bend we have the the cabins
booked in the national park so it was not easy to book but we had two
nights and the weather was really good um the weather forecast was really good
when i started so uh i i drove alone so it's a bit long drive so i didn't check
the weather i only checked it after dinner i checked in i had my dinner and i was like ah
i can i can start again uh with the gorgeous then then i say ah what's that
why it's overcast then i checked my weather forecast it flipped from two
clear nights into two nights of thunderstorms so
i have then i i have to like quickly check everything and make my plans i decided
not to not to stay there so i checked out after two hours like two hours of
checking i checked out and drove all the way the second night i basically i was on uh in a car driving
from big bend to ben horn under thunderstorms for sure so i stayed there in vancouver
so for the second night and then the third day i i went through um
el paso and pick up the the lens so the beauty of lens rental is that you
don't really need to have them sent to your home you can send it to anywhere like fedex
ship centers or any fedex office uh the the prefer more preferably uh you should
ship to somewhere uh close to an airport like this is the el paso uh international airport so that minimize
the traffic times the ground traffic times so i pick up the lens
and i drove again to the cosmic campground
which is a really a great place that's um it has
it has its name because it's uh like it's the international dark sky sanctuary uh inaugurated by ida of
course everyone knows idea so yeah this is uh this is a great place they even have
four concrete uh um paddle pads there uh
just for you to set up the telescope and yeah the sign reads the telescope loading unloading only so
that's really for astrophotographers or like amateur
astronomers so before i went there i was like do i need to reserve there's only like four
concrete paths and then i was the only person that night on the concrete pad um and then i
saw a guy there he told me i've been here like a dozen times at least and you are
the first person i ever saw come he came here with whiskey all right so
that's interesting but anyways it's a great place and there's no mosquitoes by the way in summer there
it's basically very dry as uh as you can see and uh yeah um
there's only a couple rabbits there during the night and uh yeah they are
very friendly so uh this is the m27 uh the dumbbell
nebula i sure i shot that night uh this is with c8 and this is with the
the 400 millimeter lens uh it's uh it's actually uh yeah it's a
it's a hr for plus oh three that's a narrow band uh of the veil nebula
of course i i also did the andromeda galaxy uh
with this 400 it's it's really a fast very fast and the the
image quality is is also great so yeah they uh day four i was joined by chen uh
he he uh we we met in a silver city that's like a little bit below uh cosmic
campground and because of the weather we have to drive all the way north to
charcoal that's that's a historical national historical site
within the navajo region so that there we we didn't really have a
campground or anything uh so we just uh arrived early and uh uh look around
finally we find a um kind of crossroad with a big uh vacate
vacant ground there and it's kind of high and it's very very remote so we're not
really worried about the traffic so this is yeah they have gorgeous dark
skies there and uh yeah this is m8 laguna below with trivia nebula uh in
one frame um yeah this this one with f 2.8
lens it only take like 30 minutes of exposure
yeah this is my friend chen and me this is um
we we reached there in monument valley and we decided to
turn around this is the furthest point we go and this coincides with mr forrest
gumps so yeah we took this picture
uh yeah we head back uh because it's it's definitely we are going to north we are
going to north and the day is at the night is very very short there you can you can really feel like even that's
that's like three four degrees uh north but it's
it's you can you can tell the difference so yeah and then uh night uh
the sixth and seventh night we went back to cosmic campground uh the weather went there
went uh really well there and yeah this is uh the m20 with the c8
that we shot beautiful and uh yeah uh m16 the the uh
m17 uh the amiga nebula and then i went uh pretty ambitious i
i took this big mosaic uh frame of of the um
row of nicos uh and also that's uh yeah uh
uh that right beside the antares right the the color palette
uh this is a yeah six frame mosaic and it took basically two nights there
so thanks uh so after that we we take another
night uh break and uh day nine uh the ninth night we went back to uh
mount davis state park that's right besides the the mcdonald observatory
and then uh the tenth night we uh went back to south llano river
and then uh the weather turned out good in the north so we the 11th night we went to photographing
that's the last night of of astrophotography for us for this journey
so yeah this is a picture of uh mcdonald's observatory the the visitor
center so my friend the chen is uh just walking beside
the the size of the the cake two uh main scopes that the tiles that uh
made for the like size of k2 there so yeah that's how big it is
well yeah and yeah this is a
ptolemy cluster m7 in the south so we we really took
advantage of being in the south and uh this is the ngc 6334
the cat's pawn nebula yeah this is the last night we returned
the 400 millimeter lens so i used the chance uh 70 millimeter uh lens and to
take this three frame mosaic of the galaxy yeah from antares to uh lagoon nebula
all right so uh here's some lessons i learned so number one is that you have to drive
safe rest every two hours because you basically uh um
night overnight observing is very uh exhausting uh you need to rest a bit more while driving so number
two is that you need to have some exit plans uh you go to some observation sites uh it's all exciting but
you better have some place to rest after observation and it's it will be great if it's within 15
minutes of drive yeah 15 minutes after that you will be ready ready
really really tired so yeah also check your subs as soon as possible
don't wait till you get home because something might go wrong and you don't see it on
your camera or on the ipad better just enlarge them and see it on the screen on
the laptop screen and then there's wildfires watch out
the the don't don't just check the weather also check the air quality or the wildfires because that might ruin
your night skies download maps be prepared for any for
the internet black house because we are always going to dark sides which means remote areas signals might not be good
and then drives warm even in the summer you have to dress warm if you go to a high altitude
and yeah i'll finish up with three of my favorite images also taken in texas but
that's another uh that's another trip i i went there again 2019
with my epsilon 180 so these are the best shots
from the third journey so this is uh uh this is m45
and this is iris nebula ngc 7023
wow yeah and this is m33 the triangulum
galaxy so yeah this this this is really the power of dark skies
all right so last but not least i want to extend my special thanks to uh
mr chen wu my my best friend we've been known
each other for 20 years by the way he's probably also uh watching this uh this
great program so yeah he will thank special thanks to his all his
hospitalities and his family and yeah i'm really lucky to have a friend there in houston so that i can um
hop on these great journeys all right that's it from me uh thank you very much
if you have any questions please that was incredible then uh
just thank you the planning you put into it and the amount that you get out of one trip is
just wow it's kind of tricky because yeah the
plan you you don't make detailed plans you don't book the hotels anything
you just have some idea that i'm going to the west but you don't know where you
are going to end up with right i found your um uh you know the
idea of of uh packing food you know that that would give you a lot of nutrition
uh along the way is uh important um you know staying hydrated you know
getting your vitamins your proteins and all the rest of that because you know the physical exertion of going out uh to
these uh dark and remote areas is uh is challenging you know and so you have
to approach it that way i'm i'm uh uh you know and i'm pleased to say see that
you uh talked about the safety aspect i have seen people
uh you know i spent i have spent a lot of time out in these areas and
i have seen people come to star parties completely ill-prepared for both the night time the temperature
changes not bringing water um some people go to
uh remote areas and drink too much alcohol uh this kind of thing
i have seen people where their car was was uh the you know uh batteries were dead and uh
you know they had to be basically saved you know so
so it's good also to have have re uh you know cables to charge somebody else's battery
uh and be prepared you know with maybe um uh you know first aid kit
those kinds of things you know to to be out in these regions so yeah but yeah
you'll be treated to skies and environments that are surreal
you know yeah yeah so it's it's a it's a very good journey it's like um
enlightening journey that we we always when we live in the city we always complain about light pollution
and everything uh then we go to remote sites and uh suddenly we feel that oh
really we are we were actually blessed with all the civilization and everything
you know and so many things can go wrong in remote areas just
lasting signal [Music] can can be like internet signal it can
be a big deal like there so yeah that's why they end up dark skies
is because they're away from all of that right and that's what gives us that that moment of
what adrienne was talking about right those the portal 201 skies where you actually get to see the color in the
milky way with your naked eye you can't do that with the city over the over the hill
there is something called a spot satellite communication device if you
tend to go out to regions like this and you get beyond signal these things commit
communicate with gps and you can still do texting and that kind of thing and so
people that uh nomads that travel all the time you know that are on the roads they use these
things and uh they are they're relatively inexpensive you know you can get one for
between 150 and 250 dollars something like that but it could save your life
you know that's a great idea yep so we've got one more prepared
presentation and then we've got two people lined up for the after party so our prepared presentation to finish off
our amazing international astronomy day that we've had so far is from one of our expats who's left us
for seattle he got tired of the canadians and he went just south of the border but he's still a further north
latitude than we are in montreal and that's cameron gillis and so he's going to be joining us to talk about his sky
survey adventures he's going to talk a little bit about visual and smartphone astronomy
and evolving into uh astro imaging and automation to enhance a little bit of
the community's enjoyment of what he does so cameron take it away all right thanks a lot karim okay is everyone ready for the
late late it's gonna be uh yeah so i'll try to be um
at a reasonable pace because i have a lot of stuff that i'd like to cover but i don't want to um i know it's like
quarter after one on the east coast there and uh so and i'll uh but let me share my screen
a shout out here uh cameron has a new program on our
network called camistron camstronomy and uh he you know he goes he takes a deep
dive into his journey and shares that with the audience we've already had our first program
that's fantastic thanks a lot scott awesome so uh actually i just uh realized so
first of all let me just have a disclaimer here that um you know i i am really impressed
what you're gonna see is somebody who is just has been a visual and observer for most of my life
and i'm just starting now to get into astrophotography but i'm very much inspired from
everything i've seen from all the previous speakers uh to the point where
now with the technology that we have today available at our fingertips i am on a journey to
basically walk the path of moving from pure observational
to enhanced uh astrophotography and imaging so that everyone can uh
can can see the stepping stones because in the past when i was an observer back in you know last century
the uh the thing was uh you know you had i heard about you know hyper sense that i film and uh iso 3200 and 6400 iso uh you
know film and and uh and and a lot of the equipment that you'd need
and it was very expensive to get in but now with smartphones and you know wi-fi and
all these great things tablets available to us my gosh
you can put together a pretty good kit and i uh what i'll be talking about is that and then some of my primitive
pictures uh that i have so far but uh again inspired to get better so
let's let's dive in uh first of all a little bit about me uh my background and my journey
and uh you know as a fellow canadian i think some of you might recognize uh
uh uh it was omconn um telescopes back in the in the 80s in the west coast
and i started my very first telescope was a four-inch newtonian reflector
and that was a wonderful my first experience was saturn at four
o'clock in the morning in vancouver and uh that image just got me hooked i
was 14 years old and that was a beautiful thing that telescope cost me 200 canadian back in the day
and then and then of course after that i went through many journeys i won't go through all the details but basically i
got into aperture fever i ended up uh in the states and um now in seattle
uh i got myself an 18 inch obsession so i started looking at 15
magnitude galaxy clusters and stuff and the like and so very much again focus on visual pure visual observing
then i started my foray into kind of the when you know telescopes started to get automated i
said well this is kind of cool you know the technology is getting good enough that you know it's it's within reach of
uh you know amateur astronomers at a reasonable budget um so i got myself a
celestron neck star six inch enjoyed that but then you'll notice uh what has
shifted is i actually went from small to large and i'm back down to small and
i've got myself a mac 102 explorer scientific 80 millimeter
refractor and uh and what i learned again through my observational
experience again the best telescope is the one you use and uh and uh you know you kind of go
through this cycle where you get all this stuff and then and then you say you know what i just want to have something that i can just grab and go and make it
really efficient that combined with the technology like you said wi-fi go to and all that uh
that i get myself a celestron ca and uh that has been a wonderful thing
during uh kovid having these guys to be able to look at a lot of uh scopes and
then i started coupling my my smartphone to take astro images so here we are
today uh where i actually have on order um to upgrade my gear into uh more like a
high-end uh astro imaging i got myself uh getting myself an fcd-100 e80 for
really nice quality wide field views uh and then and of course uh one of the
things i've learned with an alt azimuth of course we all know this is uh the best part of the sky which is zenith is
directly overhead you lose a big chunk of the sky that you can't really do much with with an altas and at go-to
so i could get a wedge and all that but no no i decided i want to go for an equatorial so i'm going for the the xos2
and then i'm going to piggyback my uh ed80 on top on top of my hd8 and then
image with my smartphone on one telescope and then an asteroid imager on the other so i can have two different uh
images uh simultaneously i'll get into that so anyway that's kind of a background and so my this is you know
for anyone who's starting out i you know as a starter kit if you want to get in and have a lot a
lot of fun you already have a smartphone uh it doesn't matter what kind as long as you get into some sort of pro mode
that's kind of your your uh your starting point i get yourself a good adapter i got myself a
celebrant there's lots of good ones out there um but basically make sure you can couple that to your eyepiece get
yourself a nice wide field eyepiece um i got uh this one here from explorer
scientific and then this mac 102 i must say uh mac and max top the biggest
thing that they have going for them they're really good quality optics at a reasonable
budget price and you'll get excellent images with this guy the only thing is it has long focal length it's very light
very good and it's very affordable uh so anyone who you know but you do need to be
experienced because you know great you can look at planets and that that's good but if you want to look at uh galaxies and deep sky objects
which are still quite nice and especially astro imaging with uh with this uh four inches is plenty uh but
that long focal length is uh uh means that you kind of have to know what you're doing so that's why you want the
wide field uh and that's beautiful i love the the ed8 is a perfect uh scope
for anyone and then i got myself a little uh alt azimuth so if i travel
i have a little go-to system couple batteries and then when i finally do get to the
south uh southern hemisphere which i haven't yet um i'll be able to uh
easily find objects uh with with that system anyhow so that's that's the starter kit so to speak then i get into
intermediate where i get into wi-fi and uh and a larger aperture there's a
reason why this the eight inch is the most popular telescope in the world and it's a beautiful thing i have to say
it's a it's a perfect size you you're big enough that you can get down to 14th magnitude
uh you can you can see like i have portal 6 to portal 8 skies so i can get down to
you know 13th magnitude galaxies almost depending on the surface brightness
and and uh so it's it's a it's a really good rig that you see lots of objects and then this go-to uh system uh what i
do is i tether a laptop sorry not a laptop a tablet with sky safari on it and i'll tell you what it
what a wonderful coupling you put a sky safari in this i have my old sky atlas 2000 which is a beautiful
atlas i love it with a color prints and all that but instead of going back and forth between the eyepiece and before i
was on a ladder on my 18 inch dub and then going to between that with a red light flashlight and looking at the the
galaxy and my eyes are getting worse uh what i what i like about the tablet is you can zoom in you can do the visual
plate solve right there at the eyepiece and it makes you can really
uh concentrate on observing which which is a fantastic complement being again a visual observer myself but moving into
astro photography the other advantage of course is you can couple it with uh ask
for imaging gear and use it to control and do um uh sequences of images
but anyhow then i got of course i got the two inch diagonal i got that before with my six engine i got
the wide field uh 40 millimeter 68 degree eyepiece beautiful eyepiece
um and then um and i always have had a bunch of nigglers and i have to say the neglect 13 millimeter is a beauty um
that's a nice and small it couples nicely with the smartphone as well you can get around it really nice
it has a great field of view and it's it's the optimum power for galaxies
uh it gives me about 156 power in a native focal length
um and with a and a half a degree so it's it's kind of the sweet spot um
and then uh then this is all the stuff i'm kind of my my toys that i'm going to the next
level intro what i call intro advanced now that i've kind of got my visual stuff and the smartphone stuff i
realized one thing about smartphone photography is you can't set up an image sequence and uh very easily and and set
up if i want to do a batch of images and i want to do you know a whole bunch of sequences and i want to program it and i
want to have a very easy tightly coupled configured i don't want my smartphone to kind of wiggle around and all that kind of stuff
it's still good smartphone's great but it's just enough to get me inspired to do this which is
basically equatorial you've got to have it so you can so you can look at zenith which is the best part the other thing
is visually i always avoided equatorial because when you when you move that thing around the the diagonal goes in
weird angles and then you're way down your way up especially with a refractor so but with imaging
beautiful you just couple it in and then it doesn't matter where it's going and it's also since you don't have a diagonal the
balance is maintained it doesn't shift balance because your eyepiece is not offset so you basically once i once i
couple this all together uh this will be a great combination then of course i i dove in i didn't get the
cool camera i know cool cameras are awesome low noise and a lot of stuff but i think it was mentioned earlier
and i'm not really going myself in my journey i'm not going for the supreme
pictures that i've been seeing it's beautiful i i admire eventually i will get to that but
i am looking at more survey orientated uh equipment so that i can do repeated
image views i can go constellation by constellation a whole bunch of deep sky objects use it
as basically a visual augmentation mechanism so that i can
observe both visually and also create a database of a a record a database of all the um
sorry just my earpiece a record database of all my uh images that i've been taking and i can
log them uh because one of the things you know as you start taking a lot of images and that you want
to have kind of an organized way of of doing all that well anyhow this this gear helps me do that anyhow just to
finish it up um you know i i have these are the the rings to put
my ed80 on my c8 uh the other thing is a filter drawer with an extra filter uh
drawer slider so that i can put two different filters i'm going to have i have a uhc
which is relatively broadband right it has uh the oxygen and the h beta h alpha
but the problem uh you know it and so it's going to little more light in but i i wanted to
try out broadband because i'm going to have a colored camera so i can take dave the channels and then i also have a
matched um two inch an ir cut filter which gives me the the full
spectrum and the reason why i why i did that uh is i have two is because one of the
things i learned is that your uh focal distance changes when you put a a piece of glass
because of the uh in between your uh your objective and the uh and the imager
because you're going on an angle and then it changes or it would be focal uh distance so by putting uh by switching
between these two filters i can easily get my luminance if you will and then my
my my rgb filtered kind of uhd obviously these are just introductory filters i will get
more advanced later on but for now i think this will serve my purpose as a start
um so now uh getting into what i'm doing for the survey
uh what i've done in the last year with those of that equipment that i've showed you c8 and the mac 102
i've actually observed uh over 2878 objects i've done the tally
i have done 2878 observations using sky safari
recording logs across all the constellations constellation by constellation down to magnitude 13 with
open clusters galaxies and nebulae and and the purpose of that
is again i want to be able to have a database that people can use and i want to share
this so that people can all they are observer budding astronomers that are starting
out at all different levels can can say okay well if i have a four inch uh and i'm in portal six skies i
can you know based on this surface brightness uh you know i can see a magnitude 10
galaxy let's say that has you know a certain size because you know a
magnitude 10 galaxy is not a magnitude 10 galaxy as we all know and just for use that don't know surface
brightness is everything right you see some of the larger magnitude gamma sun galaxies say hey i'm going to see a magnitude 10 galaxy no problem right but
then it's it's way too uh low surface brightness to beat the light pollution so you don't have a chance and
that's the biggest thing i think as a barrier for a lot of people starting out is
they try to look at fainter objects or things that look might appear great and then they get frustrated right uh they
say oh man because i i remember when i was going through my thing i have my skyless 282 000 and you have all the red
galaxies everywhere and yes i'm going to look at all those galaxies and then you see some are like oh this is nice and
you're very satisfied and other ones like this is impossible like you don't so you don't have an idea and then even
then when you go a little deeper and then you have the magnitudes you say oh this magnitude 12 should be able to
be detectable in my 8 inch but then you find out it's impossible because the surface brightness is just not there and
then i want to augment that with imaging back that up so that i can kind of have a database
that that people can refer to and say yeah you know this is what it looks like we
already have the the dss sky survey we which is really good but the problem
with that is it's overexposed and or underexposed you don't have a really good session so i'm looking at
a reasonable quality but high quantity and it's going to take a long time but i'm going to go through
this journey and i want to share and publish all these and so let me just um
quickly uh jump over to uh uh sky safari what i've found i uh
since the last time scott i'm happy to share with everyone and i'll share this again on next program next week is uh if
if anyone wants to run an android app uh on on their pc uh the bluestacks uh
is a great application so i actually have sky safari running native on my pc
in an android emulator so i don't need to cast my uh my my tablet anymore and
uh and the nice part is it works just like sky safari on your tablet except now you have mouse control and i can
point to stuff and so this will be really nice to be able to use sky safari and show people uh you know what's going
on so for example let me just show you my observing lists
i have a whole bunch and what i've done i go through the my all my i have constellation by constellation
uh the number of objects down to 13th magnitude that i've observed and if i go to um
best and brightest and i highlight that let's just make them highlighted
uh hello sorry it's just a little bit delayed now
okay let's try that again oh it's already there okay good so you can see uh all the objects that i've uh
i've categorized as best and brightest and so that's with my eight inch so what i'm going to do and we're going to go
back and re-survey these both visually with a smaller telescope and also with
with an imager and say okay well if i can see it at an eight inch reasonably well as a distinct object in my light
polluted skies uh what is my chances of seeing it with a four inch and then eighty millimeter etc etc so uh that's
that's basically uh what i'm working on it's um uh so in this journey uh what i've done
from an imaging perspective so let's let me go back now to uh presentation
so what i've done is uh i've started to uh you know do a starting foray into
imaging with my smartphone and here's what i did with my mac 102 for example uh at the beginning of the year
i took a number of pictures of uh various clusters galaxies nebulae and
even the moon of course love the moon because when it's a beautiful crisp night in the winter it's like you'll take anything you can get
and then and then it's like if the moon's out it's like who cares i'm gonna i really love
beef sky objects but you know what the moon is beautiful it's it's fantastic and i've actually really enjoyed that
and now they're with my uh anyhow so basically um yeah let me go to and then i have also
done some with my c8 and these are the objects that i'm going to kind of summarize
and let's go through some of the pictures and again just a warning that this is
not going to be anything like what you saw earlier but it's it's part of the journey and this
is meant to kind of give people a stepping stone so that they can feel that hey
they can do this with their equipment at a moderate budget and then get to that that awesome level eventually
so clusters you know this is just with my mac 102 i got my large uh i was very happy i got my uh 26 millimeter 2 62
degree eyepiece i was able to fit the whole pleiades in there which is a which is a feat with a mac mac 102 with a high
long focal length and uh but uh the moon was out so it got between the smartphone and the eyepiece
and so you can see a number of uh uh artifacts here but i got it so you
know it's uh it was uh that was my first thing then i also took a picture of my um
of the double cluster you can see vignetting you can see this is the i put a piece of black tape to try to cover
that infrared sensor but it still gets in there that was another reason why i'm inspired by uh
you know getting an asteroid imager so there's no stray light that gets in there but and causing problems with the
optics so um but anyhow the point is you can still see
and it's it's very nice to be able to to image that moving on to uh or this is just with my eight inch
yeah this is a really bad picture but uh you know m13 um and uh
if i go to galaxies so with that mach 102 see uh m81 amy m82
yeah you know not bad you know you you got you can see a little bit of structure in ma2 very very bright a
galaxy by the way it looks fantastic in an eight inch um but but i was really pleased to be able to see this with my
mac 102 and take a picture of it with only 15 second exposure iso 1600 so um
that's that was kind of nice so again a good starter object for anyone who wants to take a picture of a smartphone go go
for it and you can get both in the same field of view um and then uh i moved on to my c8 and i
started to experiment with different uh iso settings um and uh you know it's blown out i
haven't done none of these images are processed in any way obviously uh i'm getting getting into that as well
i'm gonna be probably using uh for for doing some basic editing um there's
regis backs and deep skies guys there's a number of different tools out there i'm not going to be probably into
stacking so much i think i would like to just do some simple
you know since i'm going to be doing a lot of images i'm probably going to do some simple algorithms scripts i'm gonna be setting
up in to basically auto stretch and auto darken and all kind of stuff so that i can get a nice reasonable quality
picture very easily with a one button press and and get the image that i want but
this is all part of my learning experience with the smartphone to learn about uh you know different uh
resolutions and stuff but not bad you can see the needle galaxy you can see both sides
and again visually it looks great but this is the interesting part what what i've noticed
uh with all these is what this smartphone allows you to do uh is it in in um
is instead of using averted vision like you'd have to use visually as we all know averted vision doesn't give you
the resolution as direct vision so what happens is by using a smartphone you can get the same
or better view that you see visually as an augmentation with direct vision you can
look directly at these pictures and you can see very clearly the balls you can see the dust laying and everything and
yeah it's not going to be it's not a professional image but compared to visually it's a wonderful complement and it's
very easy to do and you can even do it uh in front of the telescope and
eyepiece you don't have to go through all this stuff of putting in a slide show you can you can actually look at it real time
and you don't even need dark adapted eyes and it's a it's a wonderful uh little tool to augment so um
then this is just a another galaxy picture where you know um i i like this little
trio of galaxies in in leo and you can see pretty reasonable you can see the difference so these are
obviously quite a bit variety these are magnitude 10 galaxies and and here's the magnitude 12 galaxy down here and you
can see that it's pretty pretty faint but it shows up and that's pretty much what you see
uh through the eyepiece um here uh as a canadian
i have to put in the hockey stick galaxy um so so i put that in it doesn't look
any very good but i can't wait until i can image it properly with uh with an imager but the point is you i don't know
if you can see it but there's a tiny little bend here you can actually just pick it out um but already better than what you can
see visually if you look at this visually you barely you get a hint and you get you can see it but when you look at
direct vision you can actually see with the with the smartphone um m106 i love where m106 what what a
gorgeous galaxy i especially like this is with a mac 102 okay
uh you can actually pick out a little bit of the dust lane in the central uh core
and you can see this fire alarm structure so so not bad you know with the 30 second iso 1600
with a mac 102 with a four inch uh with a smartphone and then this is with my eight inch uh no processing again but it
will be a lot better but again you can very clearly see actually multiple dust lanes uh and there's the spiral arm
structure coming out here um but again i'm i'm sp i'm speaking as
a visual observer uh you know please forgive this crudeness this is not
again a professional uh this is my journey and i i i really hope
that everyone can can see that hey with with a little bit of equipment a little bit of
you know experience you can uh you can you can take these pictures yourself and you can make your overall
experience with on the astronomy journey that much better um
and uh continuing along m51 on again mac 102 uh trying different
exposures obviously you see uh uh you can just start the hint uh of the spiral arms which is not bad for for a
for a four inch you can just start to see and you can see uh the companion galaxy with its uh
stuff there and then zooming in i played around again with the different iso settings blowing it out
and you can see how grainy it gets with 30 iso 3200 i'm also using the digital zoom on the
on the phone as well so that because of the pixel scale and that it's it's not sampled properly
it's you know that's another reason why you want to eventually when you get past this stage you do want to get
an astro imager so that you can match the pixel scale and all that
to the appropriate uh resolution and and field of view that you're looking for
here is my c8 you can see the pixel scales a little better but but it's uh
you can see the spiral arms but uh it will get better and then my lightest picture on galaxies
uh the last one on galaxies is sobrero galaxy and you can see the nice dust
lane here and you on the c8 you can almost see
the visually you can almost see the bulge on the other side of the dust lane
but but obviously what the smartphone is makes it very clear and then
moving on to nebulae so crab nebula everyone knows how low
surface brightness this is uh it's quite a large um nebula with fairly low
surface brightness even though it's a bright magnitude so with the mach 102
i was able to uh just pick it out you can see it's just eeking out here
and so that that was that was a kind of challenge then i also took the dumbbell nebula
again some of these infrared um you know artifacts that are coming in
but but you can see some color in it you can even see a little bit of red on the outer rim so not not bad for the
30 second i had to go of course all the way out with 30 seconds and 3200 but you can get some structure you can
see the central star um and then eskimo slash clown face nebula
the uh with a mac 102 this is the original picture and then i zoomed in so you can start to see the inner ring in
the outer ring but not very not very good but then i moved on to my c8
and then i was able to get some much better pictures uh where you can see the outer ring and
the inner ring the triangular part of the inner ring and then the even some texture and
different varying colors of the um of the outer ring um this is the other
thing i want to i want to say about the smartphone photography and also being a
visual observers you start to really appreciate you really train your eye to see the
finer details it's really training your eye after you observe so many objects and you look at you get really good at
seeing things and you start to appreciate all the little details that you can get
every time you increase the technology and the capability so it just makes it that much rewarding you know uh so i'm
i'm very pleased with this image to be able to see that the different variances um and then if you look of course at the
hubble version of this uh you can actually see that this part is actually brighter um
and and this and it does have kind of a multi-shell triangular shape to it so it's it's kind of neat to see that even
with primitive equipment ghost of jupiter similarly uh zoom the heck out
of it not good quality but still you can see the oval shape and the brighter and
say on the outer and the outer ring and you can see the central star
here's the ngc 40. even some color in ngc 40 which is interesting it's it's
more of a pinkish color which is a neat and it has these two uh two arcs
and then the darker center and then the cat's eye nebula i love one of the things i really love to
always look at with my 18 inch job was it's casa eye nebula what a beautiful object a really nice pinpoint
central star and then a really nice structure in the ring but anyhow this is with again with the ca
um oops then i played around with uh stocking a little bit uh
you know and then i took i actually got the hubble's variable nebula this is a really awesome object this was a
pleasing object because i hadn't seen it for so long and uh it was really nice to be able to
see it was quite bright this time as we know it's a variable nebula and it can fade pretty faint but this one was very
bright this this year and you can see some texture uh i really like uh these
these underexposed uh pictures you can see the fan shape here the brightening and how it kind of arcs this way and of
course this uh is interesting how the stacking shows like multiple hidden nebulosity in the background too so but
i'll have to play with this some more that's another thing the whole image processing side of things even
with smartphone it gets uh but i my my point is i want to get good data
uh with minimum processing up front right garbage in garbage out so i'm gonna
that's why another reason why again smartphone excellent quick uh it gives you a good
visual observing but i'm gonna do both i'm gonna have my smartphone taped to my one telescope and i'm gonna use my astro
imager on the other and then get them all remote and and then be able to do both so we can we can compare both
um and then uh this is orion medley in my mac 102. when i took this picture this is
actually one of the first that really got me into smartphone i was like holy smokes you know
i can see pink i can see the the texture of orion nebula you can see the arcs here it was just it just blew me away
this was so you know sure there's lots of artifacts but i just filter all that out mentally and i just say you know
what this is beautiful in here i'm i'm really happy and so now i'm going to continue to do this so this
this is my first picture there and then i got my c8 and you can see it's a little bit better uh i did it was no moon getting in
between you can very clearly see the arcs and you can see this beautiful uh
nebula that sticks out in in the foreground a very good ng m43 right here and uh yeah and and of
course a nice texture just just really enjoyable then i played around with the mac 102
again so this is the very first picture i took with the mac 102 just for fun
no tracking two seconds and you can see blurry right so this is probably everyone's first
picture you know it's like it looks like this and then it's like okay well i'm going to turn on tracking
here's four seconds here's 10 seconds with 1600 and you can start to see more structure and this
again with the four inch then you start to see some pretty decent detail um then continuing that
it now i'm looking at the trapezium i got my start with four seconds eight seconds
and then uh and then i zoom in and then uh you can actually get uh start to get the trapezium and some
color and texture but really uh fuzzy and and i was using um what i was doing
here is uh zooming with my my phone itself that's the the advantage of
using a smartphone more than anything is you can there's a probably a way to optimize this pixel scale with the zoom and the
eyepiece and all that kind of stuff the focal length i haven't done that calculation but the point is i will
probably eventually do that calculation but i'm just playing around here zooming in
and uh it makes it really nice and fun oops and of course then i have my cn you can
see the quality is is that much better right i mean this is a 15 second i reduced the iso to 200 because i didn't
want to blow it out and uh and look at the beautiful you can see this it actually start uh
the i think it was mount wilson uh um right uh that one uh
uh scott there was that one uh live image of mount wilson where they were really zoomed in right um
and it was like incredible and it had this type of coloring you could really see you could really see the living and it
was like wow obviously this is not mel wilson but it just reminded me of that it was like wow you know it's kind of
nice to be able to zoom in and now obviously this is but it's uh it's it's it's really fun
again iso but nice texture inside the the deep heart of the wine nebula
um and then switching to uh the last part um yeah and then i you know moon was out
and uh boy mac is the mac 102 is is a stellar performer
with anything uh lunar or planetary so you can see i took these pictures um
120 250th of a second iso 100 picture taking uh the moon is very
difficult when you're not stacking or processing uh because of the seeing right the skiing conditions so i figured
i i got this um you know this uh one two fiftieth of a second seemed to be pretty optimum so i
got some pretty decent pictures serving the new the moon and and zooming into all the different
sections so so that was really fun uh but then uh more recently and uh scott remembers
this and i think adrian and some of them we had an awesome global store party 42
where i did some moon cruising with my c8 and uh i wanted to i'm not going to show
you this but if you go with that thing it's it's jerky video and everything but i had
great seeing and i was able to do a live video you remember scott right i mean uh
it was incr incredible i've never seen in all my time observing uh i've never
seen such good images of the moon um and and i here's what i'd like to share
with everyone and i want us to i think there's a way to to do this i believe
that we've discovered something where if you use your smartphone
and you cast that smartphone you use the video you don't take a video don't take a
video don't take a picture just cast that over youtube or over live stream over zoom
and and that image that video is actually
so good compared to anything you can process i believe uh just because
you're you're doing visual stacking and you're you're visually looking at a
video and and it it it compromises it basically makes just
incredible it's a wonderful experience i want to do this again scott we're going to do this again um and but i'll do i'll
do it with a better more stable mount of course but basically and i want to go to all
the uh the apollo landing sites and let's do a nice survey you know this would be really fun but i i really think
this is the way to go uh when it comes to lunar uh cruising it's it's really fun get a good high resolution telescope
like a ca high focal length use your camera your your smartphone to zoom right in
and and you can get beautiful without blowing out your your eyes right when you look at the moon with an eight inch oh my gosh or
you know when you try to go bigger sure you're gonna have awesome resolution but you have to use the lunar filter uh or
or your eyes are gonna get blown out right so if but if you do it this way with a smartphone
and uh you know and and then or cast it to a screen or something boy it'll be awesome it will
be like you're in an orbiter um anyhow so last thing last thing just
to uh wrap it up it's all about the journey so i wanted to share my little discovery or
self-discovery of the uh cassio and uh cassiopeia and anova um so what i did is when i heard
about it back in march um i i started looking at it and i looked at all the websites where how to
find it and i found out that there's a star sao20610
that's the star and what you do and i'll go i'll show you how how to do this but basically i i did a search on
that and uh used my sky safari i went to this location this is the sky
safari screenshot of what i got and then of course using my uh experience of you
know triangulation and star hop mini star hopping if you will i found this triangle here i found this
little asterism here and then i found okay this is where the sao206 is
this is the actual picture okay through my smartphone and this is exactly the same and i rotated the picture as you
can see to give it the same orientation as what i saw on my tablet and basically these are the stars
there's exactly the same same scale everything and there's sao20610
and then guess what there's no star in sky sky safari and guess what there's a new star that's it so i knew i had found
it and uh so this is how you can prove to yourself and and uh and for for future to do a very
easy self-discovery of any any new nova and help the community and have fun
you know so i want to show you how i did that so basically uh i go back to uh sky safari
i'm going to turn off the uh my observation list so i've produced a letter
turn that off hello
i guess it's just a little bit slow there we go
okay let's search for it i already had my search history there it is io20610 you search for that
it comes up and it's in cassiopeia you center on it
it moves over there and then i'm going to zoom in
and what i have in my field of view right now the small circle is my neglear uh my angular 13 millimeter with 156
power half a degree um and then the optically and then the other one is going to be in my new asi
294 um image scale for for uh with a with a f six three uh
focal reducer so it's a really nice match uh between uh to be able to do that if i keep on zooming in let's keep on going
here okay now here's the neat part
i'm going to lock on it and i'm going to change the time so i want to show you something i'm going to rotate rotate rotate
i'm going to enter time okay oh let's go right
like that okay there we go so let me zoom in now i want to show you
something oh where's the uh
there it is okay see this triangle stars that is
if i oh i have to go back here oh i have to go a little bit more
there we go that's this triangle of stars here see this asterism here
that's this asterism right here yeah so basically sao20610
is this one right here so this triangle this asterism and the nova is right here
so that's how you do it so you basically what you want to do whenever you're finding these things whether it's a
you know a quasar or nova look for the closest star
you know sky and telescope astronomy or whoever has that and they're going to give you a
star reference search for that and then look for the asterism and then
match it with an image plate saw a visual platform with your eyepiece and then you'll be
able to do exactly what i did here with um with your sky safari or whatever
tool you're using i again i use sky safari but whichever ones whether it's stellarium or whichever uh but
skysavaric has good magnitude and good plate solving capability and then uh and then uh use your smartphone couple it in
there take your picture and voila so that's that's my
that's my presentation that was amazing camera that was a
it's it's fantastic to see the journey that you're on and i can't wait to see where this journey takes you because
just the amount of the amount of images that you're capturing now just as you're trying to
parlay what you see visually into what you're trying to capture without actually processing it too much
or anything is really showing a lot of details so this is going to be great to watch over the next little while
i i didn't even know you could take decent pictures with a smartphone for now you convinced me to get sky safari
and to get a little adapter for my smartphone expensive it's really fun it's really
fun what you said earlier about the moon and one of the things we love doing when
we're out at sidewalk astronomy basically is i've got a small reflector where i can turn the
motor down to a very slow speed and so i go to the moon i put a fair amount of
magnification on it get it in focus then i hand the controller to the person from the public and just say
skim along the surface of the moon take a look at the details take a look at the craters and walk along the terminator
and it's like you said it feels like you're actually flying over like one of the apollo missions just
yes actually smart uh maxi flores was uh actually on our
program before and this guy's done he's watching right now but he's done incredible smartphone astrophotography
uh he oh yeah remember his uh smartphone lens he took the lens out of a
smartphone so it was just okay incredible stuff i mean it's just
uh you wouldn't believe it you know so well the best part is the outreach
capability right now now a lot of us do you know you might uh experiment with taking out uh the the lenses and making
a little astro cam or something so russell's getting ideas i can see it i
can see the wheels not that one not that one no not that handy
yeah we'll get we'll get carl to do it for us right sure yeah we'll happily do it so
thank you so much cameron and we've reached the end of our prepared presentations this was such a fantastic
international astronomy day we went seven hours of astronomy stories this was just
inspiring it was content filled it was a bunch of completely
different approaches that really all spoke to the same motivation the same passion that drives us to be here for
seven hours sharing this with each other with with everyone across the world and the one person that we didn't get a
chance to hear from who's still on with us is simon tang and we had a couple of people join us
from the after party but they weren't able to stay because we did go quite a bit over time
but on behalf of the rasc montreal center before i actually asked simon to give us a little bit of what he does
i just want to mention that we really we enjoy we appreciate the support from
scott from explorer alliance for explore scientific the astronomical league you know
we have had such a blast organizing this planning it and then having today's event russell and i when we started
talking about international astronomy day no way did we envision this much amazing fun it's gone way beyond way
beyond what we originally planned no way like not even close super impressive super motivating super inspirational wow
no words great yep thank you so much scott and having doug burger on at the start and david levy
yeah it's just it was wonderful it really really set the stage it was great to see doug so um uh
giving of uh you know all those wonderful stories of how it all started and everything and you know so i i wish
there was some way to tally up all the people that have been affected by
astronomy day and all the amazing outreach people but that must be all over the world you know i mean there's
just uh you never know that uh what will happen on that magic moment you know
that you've got a a a a a careful and sensitive
outreach enthusiast showing somebody saturn's rings for the very first time
and what's i mean the neurons that must be firing in their brains and and just the experience of it and stuff to for
these people to know that they are you know where
all their world isn't just their their their small world of problems and
and uh and stresses and tension and all the rest of the things that that we experience
you know as humans but to understand that you're connected to the whole universe you know and so
i love that when i see someone uh go past that tipping point and i go wow
okay the light is now switched on and uh you know it's a kind of enlightenment
you know so um you know and so it's um especially
when you get someone out to see something you know it can happen on a street corner it can happen at a dark place uh
uh that you know where you're seeing the milky way overhead like a a temple
you know um and these days it happens online and we should it's happening online exactly
yeah it's kind of sacred actually so it's amazing how accessible it's becoming now i mean i i love the fact
that uh you know libby emily and virginia cameron adrian
pierre carl we're going to hear from all of them and what we heard is going to be
accessible for kids to come back to for adults to come back to spend more time on and continue to be
inspired from the story that we heard today yeah true yep well i look forward to the next time you
guys uh feel geared up to uh being host again so you know i'm happy
to make that uh you know to avail our our resources for that i mean
it's uh it's amazing so and uh so was your support for this uh scott this has been uh wonderful well it's just amazing
to see the resc i mean uh the montreal chapter i know the rasc has
how many like 4 000 members 7 thousand members yeah yeah but you guys are a
powerhouse i mean you know we are we are quite gabby and keen yes we are
that's really good it's good i'm meeting you said twice a week twice a week yep
plus our public event club meeting that's right you know that's awesome you know i want to i want to say something uh you know
being a fellow canadian here uh you know the rasc
uh sorry are a rask i called it rasc yep yeah rask um that's how i actually uh started uh when
i was 14 years old my mom took me to the rsc rac
center in vancouver and uh and and and we went to the
planetarium um for for monthly meetings
and uh and i had the observer's handbook and all that stuff and and i had my little pencil marks to check off all the
different objects so i was kind of uh you know always been working on my list but i want to say we were at
the campbell river valley park that's where that was the uh the vancouver's um
delta it's in the dark uh sky set as part of the vancouver river delta or the
fraser river uh delta very nice dark sky and i never forget and i think it was
the uh the antenna galaxies i looked in a 17 and a half inch dobsonian uh
when i was 14 years old or 15 years old at that at that time and and that was it i said man
so that that this is what you know risa rac does right it it
it gives that that spark right and and really inspires uh everyone and it inspired me so i i
want to again i want to thank and give back to the rsc rasc
for everything i've done it's it's it changed my life thank you cameron i think i think a lot
of us feel that way and no matter what point in your life you find that passion
finding a group of people to share the passion with and who embrace your approach whatever your
approach is however different it is from theirs they still embrace it and they want to hear from you and you want to
hear from them that type of a camaraderie just it enhances
the learning but it also just enhances the experience it makes you feel like a part of something and that's one thing
that we really get from the rasc and if we weren't passionate we wouldn't be still up at 2am so we really like
this stuff losing my voice so uh from the rasc montreal center our
next event is saturday june 5th it's encouraging girls into stem field with
art and astrobiology in between now and then we have our clubhouses on wednesdays and saturdays and wednesday
we have russell presenting on backyard astrophotography nicole presenting the following wednesday on the june night
sky and scott did you want to plug the next uh gsp yeah the next gsp will be
tuesday night um and uh that will be our 46th global star party um
you know and it will be just one of the the regular ones if there's any such
thing as a regular global star party so but uh um yeah and um uh
we should be back on monday also with dr daniel barth who does how do you know
um you know he is the stem outreach uh educator for the state of arkansas out
of the university of uh of arkansas so um i really want to thank uh
the rasc montreal center you guys were awesome uh i wanted
if you're any of you that were presenters are still watching i want to thank you very much
simon do you want to close with anything no let's get this off the party started
oh i do have to point out simon as west coast guys
two hours trying to catch a glimpse of something to share with us for the end of the night yeah that that was that was
perseverance yeah now in all honesty um a lot of these things that i do like that really
push the envelope you know i will stay there for the last minute because some of the stuff that i've done
um i mean i've told like countless stories but i will share something real quick um
if we are all going to just turf out so i was going to show a handful of things but i'll just show one or two things real fast i'll just do a screen share
stuff so this stuff yeah it's all going to be solar stuff yeah uh okay so hopefully you guys can just
see the web browser and nothing else right right yeah okay
um this is me trying to do this because if you read the app it says clear skies no clouds
and uh yeah that's my shot so sure but that's not really what i wanted to show i really wanted to show my cat
again that's one thing evil kitty um okay so a lot of people know that i
do solar or i've spent a lot of time doing solar recently because i just don't stay up so
late at the moment because of uh work and things like that and one of the things that i've been
working on is solar animations so we can actually
the only thing here is though it doesn't take long for me to get bored of doing these kind of things because once i
figure it out i've got it all mentally put down and i have the technique so to speak so
this is something experimental that i just started to do um and it took a lot of time to figure it
out so first of all this is a this is actual footage from
the camera this is live and then we go through to the stacking process so that's what we essentially
get right so i thought what if i could get an animation of this so i could actually
see the convection cells moving so this is actually the result so ignore the wiggling but watch the convection cells
very very carefully oh man that's awesome nice that's incredible like so are you doing like a
sliding stacking approach
chocolate convecting or something yeah yeah yeah so the the actual technique being used
here is and this is still in the experimental phase is the first time i've done this so far i took 2500 frames
out of those 2500 frames i only keep 150 on average
and then i am taking images every 5 seconds apart
in order to capture the movement but i kind of feel like five seconds is probably too short of a time i don't
know yet because i'm just like i said i'm still experimenting so the next step for me to do now is to go up in aperture
size so i'm seriously debating do i do an eight-inch sct or just like just go
go crazy and just do a 12-inch dobsonian but there's no way to track the sun that's the problem yeah yeah
i want eight-inch is a good idea simon is like some of the sonic waves of
yeah because the sun rings like a bell oh yeah and so i i it would be interesting to see if there
was a correlation of that or if there's just some random uh movement going on but i i i think
it's probably probably like these sonic wave forms or something you know well um
clyde plymate who used to be the guy that was um
he well he retired now in case you didn't know i didn't yeah yep um now he was the guy that got me
thinking about this and he was using that telescope which at that time when he did this particular imaging was the
largest solar scope on the planet as far as i remember i think it got overtaken by somebody else now yeah
but he has this unreal solar animation of the convection cells boiling up and
out and that was basically that my inspiration behind all of this it's just yeah
needless to say i'm not going to have like what was that 2.2 meter scope hanging around in my backyard staring at
the sun because i'll probably set fire to something but did you know maybe 10 or 15 years
ago that's what it would have taken to get this kind of imaging what this particular one
i mean this is this is a bleeding edge it's stunning this is a bleeding edge so simon i mean
is there anyone else in the world doing this um i haven't come across them yet i've
seen i've seen a couple uh linked to the uh solar observatory that was built uh down
in hawaii they've got links to a couple of solar astrophotographers that are
doing uh video work so you might want to take a look at that because this is this is
actually better than some of them but on par with others it's amazing this is bleeding edge this is this is this is r
d stuff this is this is good yeah because i'm just looking at it and i'm thinking that you could actually determine
uh the the way in which the magnetic field line is going in and perturbing the
plasma you could even like determine velocities of these cells with the amount of detail
that you have here you could determine the the resonance energy back and forth
see the thing here is though because this was so experimental very few scientific measurements have actually
been made yet because speaking of science i do have a video that is
me being you know silly so i went up to big bear uh and shot the transit
and my friend um was also in elk grove and he shot the transit so we
get the sun from two different spots with transit occurring
so we actually calculated the speed of how fast the iss was traveling
at one point awesome that's amazing
you know this one is loaded with awesome stuff yeah um the funny thing shooting or something
you know it's amazing it's it's incredible to catch it like that oh yeah no it's it's it was a weird it was
something weird to do and and i think that's what i'm i'm getting into now because it's not that i've
you know become really good at doing imaging for like night sky and solar and this that and the other it's
everybody started to do the same thing and i'm looking at everybody and saying to
myself it's like okay this is what this guy is doing this is what that guy is doing does it board line art or does it
borderline science or is it this or is it that and the way i kind of feel now
is i want to bring the science back into astronomy and not just produce a bunch of pretty pictures
you know and some of the times where oh i've got to show you this because you guys probably
haven't seen this you all know who the cookie monster is right so if you follow everyone
[Laughter]
there's the mouth there's the hand there's the mouth there's the hand i've showed everybody this one before oh
you've ruined it no that's all i'm ever going to see can't unsee it now
that's the best now i need to add googly eyes to every photo of my orion nebula i know you're
gonna have to um but anyway so yeah that's these are some of the things i'm trying to push
into doing now is not necessarily the pretty pictures anymore um but more of
some of the weirder things some of the weird science so to speak it's just to get people more interested
and fired up to ask the questions because usually when you see a some really amazing image
there's no questions being asked they're not really going oh what's going on in here what's happening there why is it
this color so things like this become thought-provoking
something so simple it's a very very short animation but if i was to tell you that this happened in about two minutes
you could actually watch this in real time happening that's how fast it was i almost missed it
because the only time i've actually seen anything happen in real time on the sun
was actually in front of woodland hills cameron telescope during uh during one of the store events and we had a
we had a coronado 90 double stack out and i saw uh it looked like uh it looked
like white toothpaste being squirted out in two different directions it happened so fast
uh it was i was blown away i was absolutely blown away funny you should say that i think it was during one of
the star parties that we were doing and i had a similar thing and it's weird
because every time there are reports of solar flares or any type of flare activity i always have some crazy you
know malfunction with the computer and i got to try and find it because it's kind of buried because i post oh
there it is i posted the hope is as we're moving towards solar maximum we're going to get to see more and more of
this well that's just me just being stupid that's just a plane there it is so this was taken during um one of the
global star parties and if you look at it it's not smooth like
any of my other animations when this occurred of course my the hard drive decides to fail and
it's it just goes without fail and i would have caught the entire thing because i had the entire thing
originally and this was the only frames that i could recover um and this would have been the first
time i've ever actually caught a flare in action but it's just like what scott was saying it just looks like toothpaste
being squirted out and this yeah it just happens so fast yeah and so fast
and you don't realize what you're seeing until you just seen it and you think damn it i wasn't recording
but yeah so i mean um for those guys at home if you want to see more of this stuff uh you could just go
to my instagram it's just simon2940 and you can kind of go from there i mean
this is the kind of perseverance i have this is um venus occultation behind the moon the
sheer amount of clouds if you were there with me you couldn't see this that's how bad it was
but because it was um kind of like daytime i could really push
the the way that the exposure works and play around with the curves because the clouds were so high and so thin
that the camera could pick it up but visually we couldn't see it couldn't even see where the moon was
so this is why i will sit there till the very last minute to catch something on
the off chance that it might happen oh yeah so that's an incredible capture
wow showing up as eighty percent exactly
but yeah so i've got tons of uh pictures of like all different things i mean just an example i mean there are some of my
normal shots i guess i think everybody's seen quite a few of these different types of things there was something that i was going to
say when you guys were doing your presentations at some point and
a lot of people who get into astrophotography can find this quite um
disconcerting to a certain extent in other words it's really off-putting for a newcomer to try and get into doing
astrophotography and the mistake that i feel that they make is they see somebody else's pictures
and they try to compare theirs to someone else's yeah yeah and to me that is the biggest mistake
you can possibly make i would say to people go out and shoot don't care what anybody else does and
see what you get as a result and then you work on it but try not to
look at anybody else's pictures or follow anybody else's like you know tutorials or their version or their take
on something it's it's the idea here is is called a hobby for a reason
learn about it explore all these things and that's how you make all your discoveries
and and figure out all these cool things you know i didn't become that good in solar photography overnight it took me a
while to figure all of these things out but i refused to look at anybody else's methods i just did my own method until i
started to crack it stage by stage and over time i figured it all out you know
so sorry go ahead yes get get the equivalent what you're saying i you
know a kind of visual observer is like getting an 18-inch dab uh you know right
away uh you know it's bet it's better to
you know think of what you're trying to do you're trying to you're complete you're kind of uh improving your your
image yourself like what what can you see uh when you're getting into astrophotography i think be able to see
with your with your normal telescope um as an enhancement to say okay can i see
more detail with an image and then you and then that pushes you to get better and better and better
and then you're getting that enjoyment of gradually uh improving right if you it's great if you
can get the best image right away but part of the fun is the real fun is the journey is just making incremental
improvements right and really internalizing it seeing a little more detail uh instead of overwhelming
yourself with you know the the the hubble image right yeah it's nice they're nice but it's
nice to be able to kind of eke out a little bit more every time exactly exactly
i mean speak going back to um who was it that was doing the presentation about uh was it peter williamson
or perseverance yeah yeah for doing uh processing or just going through other
data that you can get and i was actually one of the first people to get a hold of this data
as it was coming through yes and um one of the guys who i have contact
with from jpl i sent this image back to him because i was actually more intrigued with what
was happening on this image nobody told me that these things that you see in the background
these weird-looking tendrils was the dust being kicked up by the two jets firing down but i had they didn't
realize this but their footage resolves far more than they realize so i when i went to process this and i sent this
back to mrs like you guys got way more detail than you think so i started going through a lot of all
of their raw data and processing it looking at things because one of the things that he's working on is moon
rigolif the effects it can have on space suits and so forth and so on
and i that's why i said to him this is like you need to send me whatever you've got on this raw data so i can look at it
process it and figure out what's going on did you see the uh the dust kicked up by
ingenuity that you can actually see it in the background of the propeller blades um i did but i haven't had a chance to
go through that so this is one of their videos that i did actually go i don't know if it's big
enough but let me see let me do this this is actually the video the only difference here is this is my processing
of it so let me just get past this so yeah if you watch their original footage then
compare it against my processing the clarity of what i get out of their
data is like groundbreaking compared to what it's leaps and bounds better i
showed their original video in class and this is so much better yeah it's that like i said they don't i don't
think they realize how clean their data really is well one of the issues was
with their raw data you can't really see why the the active
location is causing it to move from side to side because it looks like there's completely clean areas but when you look
at the process data you can see why it would actually start to move away from their original planned
dropping point yes and then i mean i mean i already identified this
section was if you look at the way that the dunes are forming
the only time i've ever seen that is on a dried riverbed and this is like this could this is
absolute evidence that is that used to have water in there so at some point
i mean i've shown this footage to thousands dozens of people and you know every now and then i get a handful of people saying oh yeah this is all fake
and you know they've never been to mars and they've never been to the moon and i just kind of cringe at them and say okay
if you say so can i use your images and videos in class next year you can indeed
um everything i do you do not need to ask for my permission to take anything just grab it and go i'm going to give
you credit this is amazing and the work that you've done here like the amount of detail that you've got on what the
thrusters are kicking up is like i have not seen this level um this looks like um
you know something done in hollywood you know it's just so
incredible it's surreal it's surreal yeah it's it's like it's so real that it's like can it be real right but
it it's it's amazing it's it's it's like you're there and it's like angles that we
you know it would only you would have to set it up you know in in a studio
uh but they were able to get all the cameras and everything in place uh knowing that you know they they could
do a shot like this so it's sad because people see this stuff
and say it's too realistic that it's fake and i can't stand that when they say
that it just drives me crazy yeah don't worry simon that's that they're lost they're you're missing a lot of advice i
i know um i know it's really their loss but i mean i had um i had an argument with a friend of mine and i've known him
since i was what 18 years old and he he didn't know that i was into
astronomy and then he certainly didn't realize that once i got into astronomy four years ago as in like imaging that
is um that i would get to where i am today but he still wants to argue with me that
we haven't been to the moon the uh pictures of whatever is fake uh none
of this the stuff is real and i and any minute now he was going to tell me that the earth was flat
yeah you know and i was like you know what you're one of those guys i want to take to the edge of the earth and just drop you off of it
i know it's frustrating but let's not let's not end on that note [Laughter]
this has been an amazing it was an amazing astronomy day you know
and we got to spend it with the founder of astronomy we got to spend it with amazing outreach people like yourselves
and um oh i got i've got a better one i loved it got a better way to end this actually
um so i did talk to ben in the chat privately yeah because i
really wanted to figure out if he was if there was any kind of like relation and the answer straight up is no
no but did you see in the chat ben might be my long-lost cousin yes i was going through that really no but i mean me and
ben we were sending uh messages because um it was our last names um and it was important for me to see
how his last name was written so he sent me how his one was written and how mine was written and i instantly
knew ah the pronunciation of your last name i know it says t-a-n-g which is tang because that's how we pronounce it
but his variation to me is slightly different if it was the english direct translation in cantonese it would be
tong so i was like as soon as i saw the character i was like no he's not related that's a shame it would have just been
so funny it would it would have especially because you didn't know each other and
so all of a sudden out of the blue would be fantastic but like i said you know i always call
scott roberts you know the father of astronomy he's our dad he's everybody's dad
oh come on don't don't eat him that much he doesn't he doesn't need to be aged that much i mean i'm already old enough
as it is i i am a i am a cheerleader for all the people who do outreach and the
organizations that are involved in it it has really just been an amazing
amazing ride you know so yeah and and i uh you know i think most of us
feel very privileged to be to have a little uh part in it and um
uh to be involved with it in any way that we can you know so
um i think that uh i used to tell people that astronomy outreach is a very selfish
thing and the reason why it's so selfish is because we get such a charge out of it when when we're doing it you know
it's like you know when things aren't right with me if i can go to a street corner and show
20 people 100 people you know the moon or saturn or something like that everything's right in the world man i
mean any whatever was bugging me is gone and and uh you know and i just feel like
okay this is this is why i do what i do you know so
but you know it's true actually every time we i used to do the outreaches and we would show people things you forget
about everything else everything else that's right i think matters any longer no
no if there was something nagging you you know and you you just come out you come out with uh
it's very stimulating it's very it's very much a high you know so
yeah so these live streams i mean in the last year what has happened with astronomy is is being truly a revolution
and uh really i would say even a renaissance uh you know i i feel we're
more connected together as a as uh humans and as as in our community as well
and and like you say there's such a wide variety of of seeing the universe the universe is so vast there's no single
human can comprehend or even describe it properly so we are playing our little roles and and having
our little enjoyment uh but it but it's such a wonderful thing that we can all come together and
and share in this together you know it's it's it's awesome what you've done uh scott and karim and and
everyone uh here uh this is awesome by enabling this and facilitating it uh it's not an easy
thing but it's i love it because it's real it's real stuff like we have our technical glitches you know we have our
different views but it's it's uh we all have a common uh love for astronomy so it's it's just
wonderful that's true and it's something that uh
goes beyond all borders and everything so it's it's just uh you know we get our own um overview
effect you know uh without being astronauts having to see the earth rise beyond the uh
the horizon of the moon you know uh it's it's something that uh
um it's something that i i still uh
try to describe i can't do it very well um but uh
uh you know the interconnection and the interdependence that that
that you start to sense and start to learn about firsthand without just like reading about in a book or having
somebody tell you about it but uh to really directly experience some of it
is really cool so well chad yep shall we shall we address for
tonight yeah it's i know it's very late there it's 1 36 here in springdale it's
uh 2 30 60 11 30 for me [Music]
yeah you go we'll just pass the higher up your your uh broadcasting there simon you got
all the equipment there so and you do a great job at it simon by the way you know uh oh yeah
he uh i still haven't quite figured out how he did it but we were broadcasting to our audience
he was broadcasting to a separate audience and he connected them both so we were
you know i was i'm i'm still trying to wrap my head around it so but um so simon and cameron i guess
we'll keep going and we'll join up with them when we wake up in the morning i'll get
um i'm thinking that the next goal uh the next uh astronomy day
event since it's an international one should be a coordinated uh effort
between people that do um uh these broadcasts and see if we can
get something that goes 24 hours around the world you know i think that would be very cool that would be amazing yeah
yeah yeah for 24. like the jupiter saturn conjunction oh man scott
that has twice the caffeine you know so starbucks is smelling it
and you know that time we'll get david levy he'll be on the entire 24 hours he'll just stay out
when we did the great conjunction yeah that that was major in the philippines and we went we went over and
that was uh five i think it was five different uh broadcasts uh that we did so
on that one one day so i think it's a great idea and i think you know we've got
thanks thanks to these global star parties we have the connection we have people from all over from every time zone that's
connected with us north and southern hemisphere so we're going to be able to actually share
experiences that others will never have seen before and so that's what's going to make it really special i think if
we're able to do that yeah looking forward to it guys thanks so
much good night everyone thanks everybody thank you thank you to everyone in the audience and
again to everyone at the rasc and all the presenters and uh um
you know we'll be back we'll be back on tuesday take care i'm wishing you clear skies yes may you all have clear skies
ahead good night
oh no it's the pirate ship explorer scientific again yes
[Music]
aaron cameron thanks for staying on the whole time that was fantastic oh no definitely
this is this is awesome i want to stick with my fellow canadians
[Music]
[Music]
oh