Global Star Party 47 Part 1

thanks Simon interesting well you're always useful so
come on come on anyways okay okay take care all right Simon bye-bye
bye-bye you saw we have a big Aurora forecast
coming up the next two nights soon
yeah the the shame of it though is uh you'll have to work around the moon so it might have to be uh right after
Sunset you know right right at uh Twilight as the Moon is rising
um the Aurora may be visible from the site that I would go to try and catch it so
I I may go for that it might be a a moonrise Aurora shot if I can somehow
pull that off that'd be amazing that would be amazing it would be a stitched together photo because of where the moon
would Rise um the Aurora would be to the North and the moon would rise
South by I think it rises more Southeast um if it Rose Northeast it would be even
I might be able to get it in all one shot with my 14 millimeter but uh I know where I would go to try and get all of
it and um yeah if I do pull it off there may be a lighthouse in the middle of all of it so
uh we will we will see if uh if I'm able to
pull that off that would be nice but uh it will come at the expense of work but
that hasn't stopped me before
you got a little tickle at the back of your throat right a little bit of a headache uh it's gonna be tough to be at work tomorrow early
yeah I may call in from I may call in on site yeah I'm not feeling very well
um I am vaccinated but I'm not so sure I want to take a chance
um broadcast your excuses are coming through yeah good point I need to work
on my excuses make them better more believable there's a good excuse that I came up with on May the 5th 1961. I was
in seventh grade having breakfast and it was the David Allen Shepard was scheduled to be
launched into space and I'm uh eating breakfast and I go at him
and Mom says good evening if you have a little cough and I said I am just a
small cough I mean she looked at me and she said maybe you want to stay home
and I went I am I him and she said maybe maybe and I said maybe if I stay home
for like a couple of hours then I'll my cough will be gone and then I can go to school and she says a great idea
I wonder what television programs would be on this morning around that time let's go after breakfast we ran up to
her bedroom turned on the TV we watched the launch of Alan Shepard
and it was just great and then I went to school
my girlfriend gone completely so Adrian I hope that happens to you too
that so my problem though is I work from home
and it will be a little harder to explain why I'm not online but
I might be able to just listen into the meetings and that may be enough so
if uh unless it's unless the Aurora hits later
in the week um I'll have to I'll have to watch the forecasts so they're saying the better
night is tomorrow night oh well tonight's kp5 tomorrow night's kp6 are
you in a five or six region I think you're in 106 right or I would probably
be in six if it so I can go to the thumb of Michigan um
and I can see far enough North last time I think it was a six or a seven
on the uh Solstice and I saw it cleanly and I you know I have I have some images
of that uh where I saw it really clear now it I had to image it in order to see the
colors it you could see something moving in the distance on the horizon you could
see you could faintly see those Light Pillars the light towers um
you could tell something was moving and you could tell it was sort of greenish as soon as I put the camera to it all of
the colors of the Aurora showed up and that was an unmodified camera as well so
they were they were pretty brilliant um let me see what I have space weather
on my uh phone I just have to find because I've moved it around
and we have an aurora we have an aurora Chaser who is
um you know has produced some nice photographs as well and she uses uh
you know these numbers yeah the so there is a interplanetary magnetic field
setting or bz and when it's to the South
um then along with the uh KP levels and other other things
happening it means that the Aurora the further south the more visible
the Aurora becomes in you know the in the latitude that I that I can get to
um I'm a three hour drive from the uh area in the thumb that I would go
to and uh yeah tomorrow is so full Moon is
tonight or yeah full moon happens tonight at the moment of lunar eclipse
that's full full moon so it's going to be a later Rising
Wayne and give us but it's still going to appear full to you know to the eye but it's going to be a rising waning
gibbous so it'll be rising later at night so there's an I think there's gonna be an opportunity there
so I may I may go for that we will know tonight the exact moment yes
yep which means it's gonna yeah so it's yeah by the time it comes
around that you know that next night it's uh it's already a waning
it's already uh waning gibbous which means uh there'll be a limb of the Moon
that's going to be all cratered up which is I like those waning or what you know
waxing give us 98 moons because you see that you see
most of the disc and then you get texture in one of those Corners where it's not quite cut you know there's a
shadow the the Terminator Shadow is still moving to cover it and so you get
detail in that little section of the Moon and um once it's really full you know
you you get the biggest brightest disc that you have and then the process starts all over again
goes back to the waning and then it then it rises later and later
um that's when the night that's when all the dark sky night photographer folks are like okay now now that the moon's
out of the way and they start taking data um till moon rise and then it you know
the cycle repeats itself we go back to New Moon and this new moon
is an annular solar eclipse in Canada right is this this is the the annular
Eclipse yeah and you learn well it's June 10th in the morning we'll see it uh
from just north of Thunder Bay Ontario and then it curves up through Northern
Quebec into green London over to Russia yeah I've been see it's it's becoming
time to where I've been a little too slow to get my uh modified driver's license because
I envisioned driving up to Sea to at least to that part of Ontario
to see if I could capture some of it um I may not be able to come out with
just a normal United States driver's license so I there may yet be some time for me
this week to try and get a modified license so that I can or if unless there's really no place
that I can drive to to see it um I've heard that I'd have to get there by
plane well if you go across to Sault Ste Marie you can drive up to uh Thunder Bay and
then go north from there there's a few areas if you reach out to the Thunder Bay uh rasc Center
just to let you know kind of uh the areas around but there's no in person right now because of covet is the thing
yeah and if Ontario is still on lockdown then you're then you're out of luck oh
that's right yeah it's because we're still on lockdown and travel restrictions and stuff right now
yeah so I can't just come I can't just come rolling in from the US vaccinations
we've spent so much time with this open border along here that we're all used to
I mean I grew up in the states then came up here to Canada and we used to come up twice a year every year to see family
and it was just a given that that order is always easy to pass through it's just
it's we're two of the same two sides the same coin hello Chuck how are you David
bedroom hello Chuck who am I missing here I'm
gonna have a good full screen Jared here
this clock is winding down a little pretty fast hi Chuck how are you tonight yeah good
I had my I was on mute I said hello a couple times and realized yeah I was just hey Adrian what is this modified
driver's license you're talking about so it's a driver's license I think you can get that it's it's basically
a little less than a passport like you can get a passport and then go you know to other countries of course there's
travel restrictions that I forgot to think about but I think a modified driver's license
enables you to it's kind of like a passport for getting into Canada I see
yeah so I don't know if that modified driver's license would get you into Peru
or Chile or no no no no of course not yeah it's the fast pass through the
Border that's all it is it's a long drive to Purdue or to Peru anyway yeah Argentina no I can't go but um yeah so
that it's I think it's just uh if you're not gonna travel but to Canada and at
this point I'd have to do the slickest talking ever to say but I really need
this because I have to present images to a global Star Party
of the annular Eclipse um you might have to talk my head off to
get get over there I I'd bet I think I saw Kareem the other day that
I uh I flew into Canada in 1995 as a judge for the international science and
engineering fair in Hamilton and I did not know the rules had changed and I just left my passport at home and
uh so I kind of ended up on the group W bench there for a while after I arrived but the the fear was not the Canadians
the fear was getting back into the United States so I had the same experience Chuck yeah I I flew to Canada
okay uh because I'd always heard oh you can just get back and forth with your
driver's license yeah right that used to be the case of the case yeah yeah I I
remember that there I go and like flying is different because when you get back home ever you know so flying they don't
know where you came from you know you might have just touched down in Pittsburgh and then Flo you know flew
into Toronto or something but um the British are finding this right now
with brexit and uh trying to go to European countries just before covet hit and even now after it's uh
it's a new experience for them so Kareem what are the rules for coming
to Canada is the Border totally closed or so at the moment the border is closed
to Leisure it's still open to business travel and essential uh travel back and
forth as needed but it's Case by case but from what I'm hearing there should
be an opening or relaxing of the restrictions very soon now that both sides are reaching about 50 to 60
percent vaccinated it looks like everything's gonna start to relax a little bit by the end of the
summer but it's by the end of the summer it's yeah you'll know that by the eclipse you know all that makes a lot of
sense and then we have on the southern border here in the U.S open immigration of people unvaccinated unchecked they're
just pouring into the country go figure go figure that's right that's really
well and that's that's where the vaccination numbers now if you know the
vaccination does its uh task it helps so at least you're not
catching but I still don't know about the spread of covid we're vaccinated
it's not going to affect us in a way where we get deadly ill
but are we spreading it to others and you know we do have folks in the country
that just for one reason or another do not want to vaccinate
so it's uh it is it's pretty weird situation the whole thing is very
strange to me yeah and and the ID thing is really strange too I see I I
understand I I got caught in Canadian immigration once um in Ottawa a few years ago trying
to get to see Doug George I made the mistake of saying I was on business whoops I ended up being pulled into a
room and I had to call him and have him send an email to the immigration officer
and all this stuff and I had a passport it wasn't a matter of just trying to get in with a driver's
license here in the U.S you can vote with no ID at all that's so crazy
that is that's very true even in Mexico anybody who voted votes needs a Mexican
voter ID and they have your picture on it and that's been that way for 30 years probably
not in the U.S in our state that you do need uh at least some kind of ID
you can vote in Arizona with a utility bill yeah that's bad
you need Wendy says you need two two utility bills two years there you go
okay well you can the the heat you know the electricity and cable which I think
most would have uh yeah and that's so that would explain
the concerns um raised I think that the voting
concerns and of course we're we're scientists
um political but that is interesting to know yeah sorry I even brought it up but oh
you're no fraud we we have to deal with politics too we're scientists I live in
Arizona so combination of fruit power and finesse
would have to slow it down maintain perfect balance gentle ball
[Music] surveys reported in excellent condition
all signals look good I have a picture of John hubbult next to my next to my
desk nice 200 feet [Music]
100 feet
I love these little videos
foreign if surveyor had done only this made a perfect soft landing on the first shot
after traveling over 240 000 miles against overwhelming odds it would have
been a tremendous achievement would have built a bridge in this cool drone shot made in 1966
and feed the conspiracy people it's all done in the studio
that particular [Music] it went on
that's not able as a Triumph of technique yet now
routine in a way as surveyors camera obeyed every command fulfilled every
request it sent back Man's first close look at the mountains the rocks and Craters of the Moon
it identified such landmarks in the range of mountains known to be part of a flam Siege crater
the excellent resolution of nearby rocks and surface indentations caused by surveyor's foot pads is helping
scientists determine detailed surface physical properties [Music]
it's important how do we know these vids are real
because they come from a credible Source we have been given the scientific knowledge
the technical ability and the materials to pursue the exploration of the universe
to ignore these great resources would be a Corruption of a god-given ability
ten nine ignition sequence stars six
five four three two one
zero all engine running thank you
I'm just awesome yeah
on my bucket list to go to a launch like that here that if it's the last thing I
hear it's really close
well I'll try not to get yeah cause I'll get vaporized as well so yeah I'll try
not I'll try to live through it
yeah I'll let the two cameras and shots like this
[Music]
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we have a very exciting night tonight this is the 47th Global star party so
thank you for all of you that have already signed on and are chatting with us from around the world
tonight is a great program uh that starts off of course with David
Levy we have um um others on as well of course as always
Chuck Allen from the astronomical League will be up uh and then we are looking at
uh astrophotographer Molly Wakeling uh Kareem Jaffer from the royal Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada Montreal Center uh Jerry Hubble from the msro and
explore scientific Christopher go is supposed to be on tonight from the Philippines we have Bob Denny
technologist uh uh you know uh founder of uh and developer of the ascom
platform and alpaca Caesar barolo from Argentina Maxi filari's uh who created a
sensation on our show with cell phone astrophotography with uh with the lens
removed Adrian Bradley will be on with us as well we have an after party going on and this is only part one of a
two-part series because at 4 a.m Central which is oh 300 uh excuse me not oh 300
it is oh 900 universal time uh we will start preparing for 4 30 broadcast
um for live uh you know live broadcast of the total lunar eclipse if we can get
some clear skies somewhere around the world so um it's uh you know I'm I'm excited to
have a two-part series like this and uh uh it I think it'll be real interesting if we're able to capture live views of
this uh Super Moon total eclipse um uh you know the only eclipse in 2021
a lunar eclipse anyways uh David Levy is uh uh is is coming on
uh of course next but I as always I like to say a few words about uh David he is
he is a you know one of my very very best friends um and uh he's been a guide and a mentor
and an inspiration to me uh and that's something that sustained me for now
decades that I've been in in this industry and have known David um you know when I remember when I first
was able to meet David I just thought it was like gosh almost miraculous you could meet someone that has discovered
something you know and and at that time when I first met David it was at the
Riverside telescope makers conference I'm not sure David might remember it but I certainly remember it you know uh he
was there he was walking across the grounds and I'd realized that he had just recently discovered a comet at that
time I'll have to pin down which one it was but um but he has uh he has contributed so much
to our amateur community and to the professional community and the To The
World At Large and inspiring them to look up and uh you know through his books and videos
uh his interviews and now uh on the 47th Global star party so David I'm going to
turn it over to you why thank you Scott that was really a very emotional and very touching
introduction thank you very much and I can just say right back at you because I
consider you a mentor and a very very close friend anyway a few minutes ago I was about to
say tonight is the night of a total lunar eclipse but now I'm gonna say
Eclipse fish I mean of all of the NASA videos Scotty that
you have played on all of the global star parties up till now
the one I just saw the one we all just saw is Far and Away my favorite
and seeing the picture did you watch the picture of the Saturn V going up in slow
motion yeah with the sound and everything yeah the memories are brought it back
and you know I love it when people especially Kareem couldn't vouch for this in Montreal we're talking about
well we're going to do this we're going to do that which is all well and good but these videos that we saw and the one
you played tonight shows what Humanity has already done
when we set our hearts and Minds to it we can do pretty much anything
I have one thing to add at about the beginning of that video it showed the group at JPL
watching the landing of surveyor I didn't know I didn't notice but I'd
like to look at that video again a lot more slowly sometime in the future because one of the people in that room
was Gene Shoemaker and he had told Carolyn he said it's not
going to work this is remember Ranger they had to launch five or six of them before we finally got Ranger 7 to work
we're gonna have to go through a few of these it's not gonna work and I'll be back in a couple of days
and the rocket took off everything was fine the translator
trajectory was good it uh going into lunar uh approached the moon and started
to decelerate that was good and uh then when the video picks up
everybody's just sitting there at the edge of their seats and they're watching it come down and it
makes this gentle soft Landing and everybody's looking at each other and they're saying it actually landed is
it will surprise bunch of people you ever saw what do we do now my goodness
anyway I really enjoyed that and Scotty thanks so much for entertaining us with
that wonderful bit of uh of what has happened in our past
by Shadow Earth from Pole to Central sea is the first line of a poem by Thomas
Hardy it's called at a lunar eclipse and it was
[Music] it was he wrote it in 1903 and I think
it was about an eclipse he had seen a few months earlier in London
and the you know we a lot of us are familiar with the writings of Thomas Hardy
you know one of his most famous bones lines on the loss of the Titanic is one of my favorite was written just a few
months after that and uh but but where Thomas Hardy really
shown was with his novels I read tests of the derbyvilles in high school and
the movie The Novel was so depressing to me that it actually and so deep and so
powerful and yet so wonderful that it set off one of the many depressions I
had in those years but actually my favorite
party novel is two on a tower it's about a variable star Observer now remember at
aads only and they've been anyway enjoying this somebody was talking about
two on a tower and he was sort of summarizing the story and then at about you know when this
time ran out he was nearing the end of the story and the person moderating that session
tried to cut him off and say your time is up and we almost mugged him you said
you cannot stop now and he said he sits down he said okay you're right now to explain it to me
because we have to hear the end of this but anyway this is the poem that he wrote about a lunar eclipse and what I
really love about it is talks about the moon and about the earth and the lovely wonderful shadow of the Earth
compared to the kind of Earth we all live on and I think this is so appropriate to the Earth we live on
right now and here it is thy Shadow Earth from Pole to Central
sea now steals upon the moon's Meek shine in even monochrome and curving
line of imperturbable serenity how long shall I link such Suncast
symmetry with the torn troubled form I know as thine that profile Placid is a brow Divine
with consonants of loyal and misery and can immense mortality but so so small a
shave and Heaven's High humans team the hemmed within the Cults yon art and wise
is such the Stellar gauge of Ripley show Nation at Warwick Nation brings the team
Heroes and women fairer than the skies thank you Scotty and back to you
well thank you David uh beautiful poetry as always and uh you
know I'm glad you were inspired by those videos I I was looking I was looking for
a nice series of videos that I thought was inspiring about that about the moon and you know what we're doing as humans
uh you know we're getting ready to go back and um you know you can count on uh
that just like Global star party it's going to be an international effort and
uh you know I really do believe we're going to have uh people living 24 7 on the moon much like they do right now in
the International Space Station and much like the ISS it will be people from all
over the world and people from all kinds of backgrounds so I think it's going to be really cool and uh you know I think
that uh you know I I hope to be you know living to experience it and see it come
to fruition because it it really will Mark a huge milestone in humanity and uh
May teach us some important lessons back here on Earth our next speaker uh is uh we're doing a
little bit of change up here we used to uh have our door price uh section uh with the
astronomical League kind of be just before first break this time what we're going to do
is uh we're bringing them on up front here um because uh you know who doesn't love
door prizes and who doesn't love the astronomical League furthermore who doesn't love Chuck Allen and his uh you
know the contributions he's given to all of us here on global star party so it's been really cool
Chuck um I I met I met Chuck uh I think it was
early 2000s might have been late 90s and he was um he was president of the
astronomical League at the time Chuck and uh pinpoint it better than I can but
uh you know I met him and Bob gent and they were so excited about launching something called the national young
astronomers award and um uh you know I was happy to be involved in it meet
instruments had decided to support it they sent me to um uh be the you know
kind of a front man for it uh on meadside anyways and it was just a huge
honor for me to see these young people who were brilliant uh uh winning
um you know the national young astronomers award and being recognized for that achievement uh it's now been
I think has it been two decades Chuck uh the first award was 1993. 93 okay
it's been over two decades time goes by fast
um but uh uh you know what's interesting is is uh how the lives of uh these young
people were influenced by their involvement in science and by the recognition by the astronomical league
and so um to have played a small part of that you know because we you know we just
agreed to support the uh the award and to offer a prize you know and a
telescope but uh the vulnerability of it was that it was recognized by the
largest Federation of astronomy clubs in the world which is the astronomical League itself
and um so I think that that's that's huge and uh so that you know the league
and the vision of uh Chuck Allen and uh Bob Janet at the time you know is is you
know has affected so many people and uh uh that are making big contributions
today so you know that's that's my that's my Chuck Allen story for the
moment there's others uh but it's all it's all about the inspiration of this man and um so you know I'm glad that
you're joining us once again on global star party and uh we'll let you go ahead
and take over the uh door prize questions and answers sure first of all
uh Scott the reason this program has succeeded for nearly 30 years is because of you uh your early sponsorship and
continued sponsorship when we needed a sponsor later on uh were really critical factors uh in this award a lot of our
the kids who have applied for this award also enter the international science and
engineering fair and submit to the Intel science Talent search as well and some
have won isaf Top Awards so we get really fantastic submissions and they're
they're impressive as heck to see um so thank you for everything you've done to support the program and we'll be
announcing our winners for this year in about 30 days so the packages have gone
out to our professional astronomers let me share a screen here if I may
um as let's see here yeah okay
just one second okay I'm showing this picture because of
your intro tape Scott um many people don't realize that we not
only launched surveyor in the mid-1960s but we also went and visited it yet on
the Apollo 12 mission Apollo 12 landed a 600 feet from surveyor 3 which landed on
the moon one year after surveyor one and so we just walked over and took the
camera back and took some parts off of it to study any micro meteoroid dust
that may have settled on the uh on the vehicle itself so it was really an
amazing bit of closure there from 1967 to 1969 two years later visiting
the vehicle that we landed there the vehicle itself was testing the Surface by the way for stability for the landing
of the limb so the surveyor of spacecraft basically told us many things
about the surface in terms of its temperature its radar reflectivity and also again it's stability for purposes
of Landing a lamb and it was very helpful in that regard I want to put in a plug for our virtual
convention this year we're holding hopefully our a
unique virtual convention for the astronomical league and hopefully it'll be the last virtual one we'd like to get
back to live conventions in Albuquerque next year we've delayed that convention for two years
uh Jocelyn Bell Bernal Dr Burnell Bell Bernal is joining us from Oxford
University uh she is of course the discoverer of pulsars we have an amazing amazing
series of speakers we have Dr Richard Gott from Princeton Dr Caitlin Ahrens Dr
David Levy who's joining us tonight my good friend here um we have all of our uh 2020 and 2021
League Awards Youth Awards included we have a slew presentation a vla tour
we'll have our library telescope program discussed and also the drawings for the
11 Library telescopes that we give out each year we have actually now over four
thousand dollars in door prizes each one contributed by a club in the
astronomical league and they're still coming in so this should be exciting you do not have to be a league member to
attend this convention and be eligible for door process you just have to register in the registration again if I
can go back is right up there alconvirtual.org it's
www.alconvirtual.org if you forget that just go to the astronomical League website there's a banner and a link
right on the first page and we hope to see you there it's August 19th through 21st sessions at 3 P.M and 8 P.M each
evening Eastern Time uh I'll put up our solar warning for
those of you who are new to astronomy and uh may be tempted to do something uh
by way of solar observing there are lots of dangers there uh I've talked to many
people uh professional ophthalmologists about the reaction time of the human brain to seeing something that's too
bright and the fact is that the human brain cannot react faster than your retina can
be totally destroyed by sunlight seen through a telescope so you can't rely on
just yanking your head away it's too late then so you must learn to be safe
in absolute terms when observing the Sun never observe the sun without professionally made solar filters that
have energy rejection filters mounted at the front end of the telescope not at the eyepiece end never use solar filters
or welders glasses that attach only to the eyepiece they used to make those back in the 60s and I thought they were
crazy because of the heat that would build up inside the eyepiece and inside the telescope never leave a telescope or
binoculars unattended in daytime especially of small children are around because they will try to require the sun
with it I've seen it happen never use non-certified eclipse glasses or viewing
cards unless they comply with ISO 12 312-2 International safety standards and
beware that just because it has that ISO certification on them they could be counterfeit knockoffs so find a
reputable source for the eclipse glasses that you purchase we ordered them to
sell through the league but we have them tested after they arrive so we want to make sure that they're reliable and
there are sources that we can provide you never use eclipse glasses reviewing
cards to observe the sun while using binoculars or a telescope they are solely for use in looking up at the sun
naked eye and local astronomy clubs can help you
with this so here are the answers from GSP 45 or door press questions or basic
questions for General audiences and here are the answers from uh about 10 days
ago the Greek mathematician astronomer and librarian eratosthenes is famous for
measuring what distance to within 10 accuracy the answer is the Earth's circumference or diameter
number two which of these is the famous Crab Nebula it's Messier one seen in
image a the upper left Supernova remnant and what French comet
hunter became famous not for his 13 Comet discoveries but for making a list of objects that might be mistaken for
comets that of course is Charles Messier created a catalog of 103 bright nebulae
galaxies and clusters that's now been expanded to 110. the correct answers from 10 days ago
were given by these eight individuals I won't read them off I'll just let you
read them here and their names were put into the pool for our May door prizes which are drawn at the last GSP of each
month so the winners for this month that were drawn were these three individuals
Christopher Larson Jim Hendrickson and Mark Helton congratulations
okay here are the questions for tonight these answers by the way will go into the June door prize pool
number one what is the name of the tallest mountain on Mars
and number two what is the name of this constellation sometimes known as the northern cross
note that your answer should be emailed to secretary at astraleague.org not chat
here on the GSP but emailed to secretary at astraleague.org
and the third and final question for tonight in 1949 this 200-inch telescope became the largest telescope in the
world a title it held for 27 years where is it located
okay I'd like to mention that the astronomical League live event 7 will be held here on with Scott Roberts
wonderful help on his platform on June 11th of 2021 at 7 pm Eastern Time 6 p.m
Central this program will feature Haley wall a PhD candidate at West Virginia
University she'll be speaking on pulsars so we hope you'll join us for that as well okay
that we'll do it for tonight Scott and again thank you so much for for hosting us again great thank you so much thank
you okay thank you Chuck um uh I I understand Molly wakelings in the
house and so uh Molly you're up next um I met Molly
um uh the Advanced Imaging conference uh for the first time and I saw I saw Molly
um um she she had just come from I think it was the cannon booth and she had this
I've told this story before but she had this beautiful print she was holding in front of herself of uh Rochas and and it
was beautiful you know the uh showing all the colors of that nebula region and
everything and she's talked about the image before but uh it's just kind of stuck in my mind and she was just she
had this big beaming smile and stuff and and I just thought it was wonderful I
was able to talk to her for a little while and uh you know since that time uh Molly has contributed so much to uh
Global star party she's been on many of our programs uh she not only shows up on
our programs but she's also on uh she has her own astronomally
um uh website and uh she is on I guess
many other um streaming programs about astrophotography
she's an expert on image processing she lives in um you know kind of a Suburban
environment maybe an urban environment actually I should say because she's in the Bay Area lots of light pollution but
she gets lots of work done and um you know it's always a pleasure to have Molly on
um you know not only to share what she knows but her passion for the night sky
and science so Molly I'll turn it over to you hi I'm glad to be back and uh the the
picture that Scott's talking about is uh this one here I love that image I love
it yeah when you see the real print it's just like wow you know so yeah
yeah very cool yeah it's it's my favorite one of my favorites I think pretty much almost my top favorite of
all the ones I've done so um kind of a combination of Scots and my
idea is um I'm going to start at these Global star parties doing like um like sort of
a mini series highlighting astronomical objects uh and also and like information
about them scientific information what they are what you're looking at stuff like that so I think part of the
observing experience is not only seeing the cool stuff uh and knowing that you
saw something that was far away and was amazing but also knowing something about it and having some idea of what you're
looking at so uh we're calling it astronomy's universe and I'm gonna do the first one night on the rosette
nebula so share my screen here
all right um yeah so uh this is uh the image on the right here is is one of my is my
most recent image of the rosette nebula uh done with my Takahashi and my zwo 294
camera I'm really in love with this with this target some of my favorites
all right um yeah there we go okay so what is the rosette nebula it is
in the type of nebula that it is an emission nebula or it was also referred to as an H2 region in the center of the
rosette nebula and one of the the kind of the primary NGC number associated with the rosette
nebula which doesn't really have its own NGC number but there's uh Agency number
for the open cluster in the center there's indices numbers for some of the brighter regions of nebulosity so it's
got about I think five or six different NGC numbers affiliated with it but
ngc2244 is that open cluster in the center and as is the case with I think pretty
much all emission nebuli H2 regions is it is a stellar Nursery new stars are
born here from the old Stellar material that is the gas that you're seeing
so where is the rosette nebulae it's in the constellation monoceros and if you
if you're to look top down from like down onto the Milky Way here's a map of
the kind of our corner of the Milky Way and these labels are hard to read so I I
circled them here uh Earth and the solar system is approximately here and then the rosette nebula is back here
on the Perseus arm so uh just uh one arm behind us over on
the Milky Way looking outwards from the core which is why we see it in the winter time and not in the summer time
when we're looking towards the core up in the night sky it's just just left
of Orion at least for us Northern Hemisphere folks I guess it would be on the right for you southern hemisphere folks
um but uh to the to the east of Orion and so uh this map here we have the uh
Orion's belts and then over to the left is the red patch of the rosette nebula
so some some fast facts about the rosette nebula missions in the constellation monoceros which is uh not
a really easily recognizable constellation and it's uh that that's uh was that Greek for a unicorn it's the
constitution of the unicorn um it's kind of one of the dimmer constellations it's really dwarfed by Orion it's about 5 200 light years away
and has a diameter of 130 light years so it's enormous it's huge and the apparent
magnitude value that I found for it is 9.0 but I'm not sure if that's for the nebula or if that's for the open cluster
um all the open cluster is kind of bright so it might be for the for the nebula um but yeah magnitude with nebula is
kind of hard to tell because uh as sort of the integrated value and this is rather large on the sky so can't
necessarily compare it with like a magnitude 9 star for example and it's the official state astronomical
object of Oklahoma as of 2019. that is awesome that a state would have
an official astronomical object you know I think I think that's great I think
it's its shape because it looks kind of like that sooner o on the on the helmet if you think about it
okay yeah and plus with the red color yeah that yeah that might make that
might be it yeah I would believe that believe that so what causes the red glow
in emission and H2 nebulae so a little bit of science here uh the picture over
on the right is the uh kind of a rough map of the electron shell structure of
the hydrogen atom so now the hydrogen atom it only actually any any given
hydrogen atom only has one electron floating around it but that electron can have a various quantized different
energies that it can absorb and we classify these uh into steps of n equals
one n equals two n equals three so you can see on that on that chart there and there are several series of of
energy decays of that of that electron so it can be in a higher energy but as
as with everything in the universe it desires to be a lower energy so it will eventually
shed some energy in order to drop to its ground state its lowest energy State and
it does that by emitting light and so there's the two series of that shown
here are the lineman series and the Balmer Series where the in the lineman series it drops from whichever one of
those shells back down to the ground state shell the N equals one shell and
the Balmer series is where it drops from any of the higher shells down to the N equals to Shell and that's that's the
light that we see visually most uh most often with hydrogen that n equals 3 to n
equals 2 transition right here is is that hydrogen Alpha light that
that characteristic bright red that is seen in in so many nebula across the sky
that you can't really see with your eye because our eyes are not very sensitive to Red in general and at night we are
looking through its whole scope and it's very dark you're looking at a very dim thing the uh the rods in our eyes that
are sensitive to light are not sensitive to Colors so the red is hard to see you're probably more likely see oxygen
that's in there and reflection nebulas and they're kind of on blue the one you might have heard of is the
is the H beta line which is this 486 nanometer line dropping from n equals
four to n equals two and uh 486 centimeters is um is blue it's firmly
within the the blue part of the spectrum then there's some there's some higher energy drops as well uh in a um
uh even Bluer blue and kind of starting to border into the ultraviolet here for
this transition so looking over on the left this is what the spectrum of
hydrogen looks like in visible light so visible light that light that our eyes are sensitive to spans from 400
nanometers of wavelength to about 700 nanometers ish
and so here's uh that it's called H Delta H Gamma or sorry H Delta H gamma H
beta and H Alpha over here uh in that in that deep red
so there's some signs for you a little bit of quantum mechanics you have been science this evening yes
so it also hydrogen gas also glows on other wavelengths as well as other gases
that are present in the nebula if ever if you've ever imaged it in the Hubble palette in narrow band
um do you do you know that there's oxygen and sulfur in there as well as in addition to other gases and those also
glow on characteristic colors oftentimes outside of the visual spectrum and hydrogen also has several emission lines
that are outside the visible spectrum as well and uh and then of course the stars
are glowing in their black body Spectra all across all across wavelengths so uh the left
image here is a radio image of kind of the whole area it's got the Horsehead
nebula the Orion Nebula Barnard's Loop you can cut it's kind of kind of a familiar shape to people who look at the
screen a lot and the rosette nebula that there's a lot of hydrogen around here
and a lot of this is is probably hydrogen gas emitting on radio wavelengths
and then uh further up the electromagnetic spectrum is infrared so this is a spitzer image not a lot of the
whole nebula because it's got a pretty small field of view like most space telescopes but um kind of zooming in
toward the core here's one of the little fingers that uh you might recognize in a
uh as come one of the fingers that you could see kind of getting into the core if you look at a wider Field image of it
but they've got three different infrared wavelengths here up from what was it
like tens of microns to a couple hundred microns color coded into these different colors so you can see
different gases flowing at different infrared wavelengths other wavelengths include ultraviolet
so you can't you can't really see the rosette shape anymore in Ultra ballast can I add a different profile to it
and then a lot of X-ray and gamma ray surveys uh tend to not be very high
resolution unless they're really focusing in on on one area and I guess the rosette nebula is not particularly
interesting in the X-ray in gamma ray although I was seeing that there was some papers on x-ray emission from the
stars the hot young stars that are in there um but this is the best uh like a survey
images I could find in the Aladdin software so yeah I don't can't really see much
but that's been an image in these wavelengths before as well all right so let's dive into some of the
features of the rosette nebula so first here we have this Central
cavity so the the star cluster ngc2244 are a lot of these Bright Stars here
uh with the exception of I think this one which is actually a foreground star but the rest of them belong to the open
cluster and these are hot very hot young O type stars that are just blasting out
Stellar Wind and that Stellar Wind has carved a cavity inside of the rosette
nebula that's kind of that that hole that you're seeing there that makes the the sooner oh
um so uh now the the some of the stars in that cluster are 400 000 times
brighter than the sun like if if we were if we were near to it uh and 50 or 60 times more massive than
the Sun so there's some truly awesome stars in there and the age of that cluster is on average less than five
million years which is pretty young in the star's lifetime compared to our sun
which is 5 billion years old so a thousand times older
um so yeah these these hot young stars that are blasting out all kinds of radiation and carving the cavity in the
center there and then if we zoom in on one of my
favorite sections that uh there are these little dust Lanes here with some
really cool intricate detail that you can get if you have a good Optics and
maybe do some deconvolution and yeah so this is dark molecular dust
that is absorbing at least visible light as it goes through and infrared light is
usually able to see through or you know kind of kind of make its way through these dust clouds because they they tend
to be a little on the cooler side um yeah so this is this is molecular dust and also in here you can see these
little globules that are kind of separated from these fingers of dust and
those are called Bach globules I'm going to give you some perspective on on how I mean these structures they look small
but they're actually enormous like this finger for example is on the order of 10 light years long
just just that that finger there and so like if our solar system was in there it would be less than like a hundredth I
think of the the size of of that and uh and then that's the whole solar system from like and like work cloud or Cloud
so it's it's just a massive massive massive structure
so zooming back out I wanted to show off another one of my images of course
um so I I yeah I live I live in the East Bay which I live just north of Berkeley
so kind of in the uh Suburban Urban transition region I read it at about
bortal seven because I can see a lot more stars than I would expect from being somewhere this bright so but yeah
it's it's uh it's still a challenging area to image from this is with my zwo 294 color camera on my one of my more
recent acquisitions uh rookie9 135 millimeter F2 lens that I usually run at
F 2.8 this is with the CLS tcd light pollution filter so it's uh this is a
wide band image of the rosette nebula and you can kind of see some nebulosity
up around it as well because this whole this whole monastero's Orion region is just lousy with hydrogen gas it's
everywhere just everywhere because it's in the plane of the Milky Way so there's
there's lots of material there and uh this is about eight and a half hours of Total exposure time a whole
bunch of three minute exposures on my iotron 740 Mount which I just got uh
right in last year uh so if you want to observe the rosette
nebula here's some observing notes for you visual observing um you can you can see it different
parts of really any magnification you could zoom in on that open cluster
that's in the middle you could look at some of the more detailed regions around
the cavity and some of those dark nebula if you're in a dark place and you could
probably you could pull out more of the blue glow that's there with a nebula or potentially an O3 filter
I haven't actually seen the rosette nebula myself it's I'm not usually out
at a star party in the winter time with somebody who has a nice telescope to to look through I don't really actually
have a visual observing telescope um but uh yeah so one of these days I'm
gonna have to do that photographically you probably want to you want to use a wide field of view if
you want to get the whole thing so it's going to be a refractor a short focal length Newtonian or a camera lens I all
do pretty nicely with it what's the size what's the size of the rosette and it's hot in degrees it's about a degree by a
degree uh yeah like kind of like four or four full moons Square wow
huge yeah it's it's large on the sky um so yeah see you can get it with with
telescopes uh and as well as camera lenses but I wouldn't go too long with focal line or you could you could zoom
in on on just the core the the that Central cavity or some of the Dust Lanes
or some other detail on there he's in a longer focal length scope and it's
really it's uh it's a nice Target because it's it's really excellent in with a hydrogen Alpha filter or one of
those multi-band pass uh filters narrowband filters for color cameras but it also is nice and RGB the
image here in the background actually captured with a DSLR an unmodified DSLR
back in in 2017 inside my first two years of doing astrophotography
so it's uh it can be done with a wide variety of cameras and telescopes and
it's just a really really cool object I've been back to it about oh yeah five times now and I'll certainly be Imaging
it again in the future so with that as anybody here or on YouTube have any questions
hmm I'm just um I have I have observed the uh this
nebula visually and it is spectacular because you have to like scan across you
know to see to see the whole thing unless you're like in some sort of Richfield telescope but it's really
diffuse you know so uh um you know I'm I'm uh I'm interested to
get back out under Dark Skies again and and use uh some filters that I didn't
have when I observed it years ago you know so but uh I think people love your program
uh they're very excited that you're going to have a series on global star party and uh you did a wonderful job you
know I love it when you when you drop in science like that so it's very cool thanks I love the overview of the bomber
series that was fantastic it was nice it was succinct it was great yeah
yeah and I'll be uh I'll be back on at um I guess uh about 6 a.m central time
so 4 a.m Pacific Time ish to uh with the bags under my eyes and probably a house
coat to to broadcast part of the total lunar
eclipse happening early in the morning uh that I'll be Imaging so um it also it'll be I'll be doing it with my DSLR
and using backyard Nikon so kind of a chance to see what backyard Nikon looks like for anybody who does DSLR Imaging
highly recommend that sounded like you have clear skies I will like yeah
astrospheric is showing a great forecast actually for the whole night
um let's even get this pulled up here we are all gonna live vicariously through you
uh yeah the green screen filter is catching some of lighter blue though yeah look at that top row is the cloud
cover and yeah it's looking great for promising and not even really too hazy or anything so very cool yeah I compare
that to you can come watch mine yeah compare that to Michigan
um the the visual thing is messing it up but it's the exact opposite of yours
it's all white so even if we wanted to see the partial because I think that's
all we would see is partial here in Michigan we're not going to see anything but the uh Michigan nebula that that's
what we're going to observe in nebula that's right all night long and I will be getting uh we are getting all of
totality here in California and uh all of all of the parcel phase and then the
the sun will be coming up during the penumbral phrase which is boring anyway so we'll have all the good stuff
all right good for you we'll we'll get you back in 2024 when we get the we get
totality closer to our area of course we could also we hope not to have you know
the Michigan Avenue to block that too don't jinx it no I'm I'm uh I'm gonna go
down to Texas wherever I'm at I'm gonna drive down to Texas I'm on the fence I know that I'm close
to the totality an hour away but so many people including folks from my own
astronomy club in Michigan are also planning to go to Texas yeah and I'm not
so sure I don't want to join them it's a better you know especially if the forecast looks better
I may be hopping in the truck and joining you all because yeah I'd rather see it than not even though I've seen it
in 2017 I don't see it again yeah my kids will probably come with me again in 2017 I couldn't I was in Ohio and I
could have just driven to Kentucky or Tennessee but uh it's it's too cloudy
over there most of the time so I drove to Wyoming which was really worth it although Kentucky and Tennessee both had
clear skies yeah I was I I was in Tennessee and that we had one Cloud Bank
it moved on out of the way and it was dead clear when White House Tennessee an
hour now that was an hour from Nashville in Nashville that cloud Bank covered the
eclipse during totality it was dead clear an hour south where I was or North
wherever where I was so we were we were pretty fortunate to see the entire eclipse
hey Molly I wanted to thank you for your presentation I thought it was excellent yeah invigorating and very interesting
and also Chuck I really enjoyed your presentation as well and thank you yeah
and Molly I have to say the same thing the science part of that as well as the
art part somehow you mix science and art in a way that is just awesome thank you
yeah spot on it's great that's great okay well Molly thanks again uh it's I
think we're all energized here um our next speaker is uh Kareem Jaffer
Kareem is um uh one of the uh I I may be messing this up Kareem but uh you are uh well it
says right here you are the Montreal Center of public events coordinator for the resc
um and uh you know you were on uh hosted one of the global star parties for us and you did an excellent job beautiful
uh series of speakers and um you know so I'm so happy that you've joined us again
to share in this 47th Global Star Party
and um I will uh I will turn this over to you I I hope to uh I know that uh you
were in the audience when I was at the resc uh uh event giving a short presentation in person uh but um and I
think that we I believe that we actually met uh kind of face to face for a moment there but uh Karine thanks thanks again
for coming on and I'm looking forward to this presentation well my pleasure Scott
thanks for having me part of the GSP panel I'm loving this this is we had a lot of fun a couple of weeks ago well a
week and a half ago on uh May 15th for international astronomy day and yeah Adrian and you stayed up with us till
the early hours of the morning a good eight hour marathon uh GSP that was a blast and I was chatting with Scott
about some of the ideas of things to add in to the GSP and we decided that uh
since we've been starting our Montreal events with some something different than a straightforward land and Sky
acknowledgment that I bring forward a few of the ancient and Indigenous stories and bring them into contact with
whatever's happening in the night sky at that time so tonight I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing at the rasc and the rec Montreal
Center and I'm going to share with you a few of the stories of the eclipse that you may or may not be aware of something
a little bit further away from the traditional what we hear about from the Egyptians and the Greek we're going to
go into a few other cultures and a few other stories and I even have a nice surprise for you at the end Scott's
going to play a video uh in about 10 minutes with an authentic First Nations
indigenous voice telling us some of the stories of the eclipses from some of the
Canadian First Nations so I hope uh I hope we'll have a blast with that but I
wanted to start off with something that was left over from International astronomy day and Adrian's here and he'll remember we were having this
discussion about pursuing astronomy in a family and the need to have kind of a
supportive family supportive wife supportive husband a supportive group that wants to do the astronomy with you
so I wanted to just take a moment and thank acknowledge my wife because today
is our 19th anniversary I want to do a happy anniversary and
what you could see there in the little slide that I made for her and with my kids is the person who I purported to be
at the start in the corner there with you know nice clean shaven you know thin and all properly made up and now the
hairy beast that I've become in the other corner with Cove at times but uh it's been a blast and my wife and I
actually met over discussions about astronomy and her time in Hawaii getting to be part of the uh the Canadian encirc
women and science program and getting to be at the telescopes there and my jaw dropping in envy and jealousy and never
having gotten to actually be at a telescope or own a telescope at that moment in time and from there to now
where my kids come with us and we do Outreach together and we've gotten a chance to meet Chris Hadfield we've
gotten to do the Apollo 11 50th together at the yogican Museum in Toronto and
it's just been amazing to have a partner with me through this Journey
and this journey that we're doing at the Rask and the Rask Montreal Center is full of amazing programs so at the
international astronomy day I mentioned this new program that we were launching which is called Creation Station and
it's basically calling out to kids ages 5 to 12 and giving them a space to just run away with their imagination about
astronomy and space and we've started to receive the first few submissions and my
jaws are dropping again because seeing the stories these kids want to tell and
the imagination that they're putting into their comics and their short stories and there's one kid who
submitted a short story where he had so much to say he just kept going and going no punctuation just thought after
thought after thought and I was left breathless just reading all of this and it's fantastic the other things that
we're doing with the rasc is we're just finishing up our moon at Moon series which is our Thursdays at noon on
YouTube if you look for the RAS Canada YouTube channel our last four classes
are coming up starting this Thursday at noon but they're all cashed so if you want to explore the moon if you want to
learn what targets you can look for during different days of the moon cycle this is a great chance to really get out
your binocular get out your small telescope and really learn about the moon and then we're working really hard to
prepare for our general assembly which is coming up June 25th to 28th and I was talking to Chuck about uh the virtual
astronomy assemblies and trying to do them with the large groups and it's a lot of fun and I'm happy to say my
daughter is actually giving one of the workshops for the Youth on June 25th she's 13 and she's giving a workshop on
drawing alien life forms and learning about extremophiles and so like I said it's kind of fun to be doing this as a
family at the rasc we have our public events and our members events in our Montreal
Center and our next public event everybody is welcome to attend it's actually going to be a fantastic
educational opportunity to learn about the fusing of Art and astrobiology and
the specific research project is by bertina Fourier who is the art director for the Artisan residence program at
seti she's also an educational researcher here in Montreal and her research is into encouraging girls into
stem so we're doing this as kind of a meeting format rather than a webinar format so that we can hear from Bettina
her project goals and the the things that she's doing in fusing art and
astrobiology and then just open it up to a discussion amongst all the participants so you're welcome to attend
and the link to register is there and you can always find our information on our website and then our Center itself does
clubhouses twice a week and this was the thing that Scott and I were chatting about at the start where he couldn't believe that all through covid we have
continued to meet twice a week despite lockdown despite curfew despite
not being able to get out and actually do astronomy ourselves sometimes we don't run out of things to talk about because there's so much happening in
space and in astronomy so the next couple of clubhouses we have an intro to the June night sky we have whirlpools in
the sky on June 2nd by Peter Williamson of the UK who some of you got to see during GSP 45 and he's going to talk
about the Leviathan telescope in Burke castle in Ireland and then on June 9th to preface the annular solar eclipse
that we're going to talk about in a few minutes we're going to be showing a viewing of a documentary made by a
couple of our members for chasing totality in 2017.
and the information is there to join our Center if you're interested but what I really want to talk to you about tonight is indigenous astronomy and ancient
astronomy and how we see the things in our night sky and tonight's full moon is
not just a Blood Moon because it's a lunar eclipse it's a full moon in springtime and the last full moon of the
spring and this full Moon by the cree of North America is referred to as the Frog Moon because if you go out at night
you'll hear that the frogs are becoming active in ponds and swamps and you can hear their calls straight through the
night but other tribes call it by the planting Moon because this is when fields are
plowed and sewn because they're now wet enough they have enough moisture that they can really allow for the fall crops
to be able to nourish themselves through the summer and grow and in European culture it's called the corn planting
Moon partly for that same reason or the full flowering Moon because again we have tons of amazing flowers out in our
Gardens these days if you've managed to get a little bit of brain a little bit of sun and a little bit of clouds
there's also a really high KP warning coming up because of the geomagnetic activity of the sun over the last few
days and so tonight and tomorrow night we're actually expecting a geomagnetic storm and so I wanted to mention with
the Aurora our local planetarium has this fantastic show about the Aurora and the way it's
seen by the Inuit and up north and it's referred to as walwate or
wawasu and it's the dancing spirits of the ancestors and the idea is that your
ancestors are celebrating life and not dancing is the dancing lights that you
see in the night sky and so it's really an occasion for celebration and that's a stark contrast with the way
eclipses were seen by both the First Nations as well as by a lot of the ancient cultures because while the
Aurora are seen as celebrating life lunar eclipses are often seen as evil moments
solar eclipses it's a mixed bag sometimes they're seen as evil Omens or sometimes such as in Chinese culture
they're actually seen as portions for uh strong leadership or a strong
um transition into a new era of of
governance or in that case it was actually of tribal leadership so when we're talking about eclipses
one of the areas that I'm really drawn to is the Dresden Codex for the Mayans but I'm actually going to talk about
that in a few minutes first I'm going to start with the Babylonians because when we look at the cycle
of eclipses the Sarah cycle it's first credited to the Babylonian astronomers is having identified the roughly
6585 days between the sun earth Moon geometry repeating itself almost
identically every 6585 days and
it's important to recognize that this doesn't mean that the solar eclipse will happen at the exact same location during
the next zero cycle because of the slight difference between the synodic
month of the moon and the actual orbital path of the Earth around the Sun it
turns out that the almost identical locations for solar eclipses repeat every three serocycles so you're looking
at over 18 000 days before the same location has the same type of solar eclipse now the
Babylonians were not a traveling group so how did they actually identify this type of a cycle when it wouldn't have
occurred in the same location every 6585 days and that's because the solar eclipse is
linked directly to the lunar eclipse they happen two weeks apart almost always because when the geometry lines
up not only will the earth find that the moon's Shadow falls on some area of the
Earth but the Earth Shadow will cover the moon or part of the moon during the full moon
phase just like the solar eclipses will happen during the new moon phase so what
the Babylonians did is they used the observations of the lunar eclipses to
predict the solar eclipses by seeing that the geometry had to follow the same cycle even though they didn't have a
model of the universe exactly to say how the Earth Moon Sun were aligned with the
other planets like Venus that they would spend time watching in the night sky now this is where we really see kind of
the rich power of astronomy or as it was called at that time astrology because if you could predict solar eclipses you
could really have a power over the populace yeah and in China they really
were trying to use that and if the astrologers were slightly off it made
the king look very bad and so there's the tale of ho and he who were two Chinese astrologers who were actually
beheaded because they got the day of the solar eclipse Wrong by three years so the poem that I found was actually
this one that's written in it's translated from Chinese and it's uh dating back almost uh well almost 4 000
years now here lie the bodies of ho and he whose Faith though sad is risable
being slain because they could not spy the Eclipse which was invisible now the Chinese viewed the eclipse of
the Sun as the sun being eaten and then it took the leader at the time to ask
for the sun to be released and so the Chinese term for eclipse is actually the
same as the term for it to eat because they really did see it as being gobbled up and so did most of the indigenous and
ancient astronomy at the time and that includes the Mayans and so the Mayans saw it as a giant snake which actually
represents a lot of their solar astronomy as eating the Sun and then letting it go but the neat thing about
the Mayan astronomy is not only did they identify the eclipses very well almost
in the same cycle that the Babylonians did and it was used to predict an
eclipse in the late 20th century but they also always show the lunar eclipse
and the solar eclipse side by side in the Dresden coding so they saw and they
knew that both of these phenomena happen together so when we're looking at our lunar
eclipse tonight it means two weeks from now we have a solar eclipse and the annular solar
eclipse will be visible through a large swath of Canada either full annular or
partial annular solar eclipse and even in some parts of the northern U.S
our rasc Facebook page has some videos talking about the eclipse path and how to safely view the eclipse and I'll
remind people what Chuck said earlier sunglasses are not enough you have to make sure you have proper solar viewing
equipment if you want to look at the Sun but our friends have discovered the universe have actually put together an
eclipse challenge to safely view the lunar the solar eclipse by using a
projection method and so there's a short video invitation you can always visit their website discovertheuniverse.ca and
they've worked in conjunction with the Dunlop Institute and the cfht in Hawaii
to get one of our resident indigenous astrophysicists who's working down there
at the cfht they're put together a small story or a small video about a couple of
the indigenous stories of the eclipse I'm going to pass it over to Scott to share those stories with you now okay
all right so let me share my screen here and um
let's see that should do it and here we go
[Music]
there's a very special event coming up on June 10th a solar eclipse I am super
excited even though I won't be able to see you from here in Hawaii many people in Canada you my family my
friends will be able to see either a total or partial eclipse of the Sun and this is super rare
all right hi my name is Laurie Wilson I am a
member of the Piqua family Lewis nation in Quebec and an astronomer working in Hawaii at the Canada France Hawaii
telescope that's so many communities around the
world are sharing tales about these phenomenons and today I want to share with you two stories that are from Canada uh that I adapted especially for
this occasion the first one comes from the Inwood series
in a time when darkness covered the Earth Melina and her brother and then again lived in a village
using the darkness to hide someone was disturbing Melania one night with the hope of finding out
who it was Melina spread 30 black boots all over the Mysteries using a lamp she
looked at everyone's face to find out that her brother was a doctor very mad she'd grab the brown from the
fire and started chasing him and again ran into the sky in Melina flew after him he then transformed into
the moon and nailing it out with the fiery brand into the sun during the pursuit Sparks got spread
around from the brand and became the Stars they have now chased each other in the
sky for immemorial time and again often forgets to eat and so he gets thinner infinner as they
still fly every month the moons disappear for a few days while I didn't get it
then the chase is continues this eternal cycle make the sun alternate in the sky
with the Moon when there's a solar eclipse and again as cut up with Melina and nalina is
known to be the goodest of the sun while and then again the god of the moon for the inward people
now the second story comes from multiple communities in Canada from the east coast and central Canada including the
Inu the Ojibwe the cree and others and it goes out in the old days people were
not the cheats and did not hunt animals animals were the chief and tons of people
they killed everyone except one girl and her little brother the boy learned to hunt Snowbird and
squirrels with a bow and arrow he became such a good hunter that he started catching bigger prey and one day he felt
like something was following him his sister helped him fashion a snare and he said it alone it melted fat in
the snow it was the sun's back as the sun rose he got cut into the snare and
darkness followed the animals were afraid but Amazed by the boy he sent the biggest and most
fearsome animal to try to free the Sun
the caribou and the Moose went first but it was too hot the hunting birds flew but the fire burned their feathers
it was a tiny Mouse who in those days was as big as a mountain that chewed
through the snare freeing the Sun but meanwhile the incense heat shrunk him down to his present size
[Music]
and he's known as the man on the moon this story is actually tightly related
to annular eclipses during which you still see a line of light around the
Moon that's there and the second fish is catching it so we can now predict when solar eclipse
happens so be prepared and have your solar filters and oh don't forget to put your alarm
clock super early on June 10th and catch the solar eclipse foreign
[Music] so thank you to Lori thank you to the
Discover the universe at Dunlop Institute and thank you everyone I hope you enjoyed these uh brief glimpses into
the ancient and Indigenous stories of the eclipses I think it was wonderful it was
wonderful our uh Karine thank you so much I I'm uh that brings a whole new
dimension to Global star party you know uh these stories and the lore and uh
um you know of course it's all uh intertwined with the development of all
of humanity and and uh and where we are today you know so
um I think it's uh I think it's important to understand the these um
these ancient uh uh stories and and uh with the with the indigenous of the
world so I've always found it fascinating as I've traveled to try to dig in and find out more about uh how
they viewed our universe you know um our next speaker is uh Jerry Hubble
uh Jerry and I met initially at the Northeast astronomy Forum uh I guess
it's been now over 10 years uh 2010 I believe right yeah yeah and so it
was great I was really impressed with Jerry and his knowledge of astronomy and um hearing about his background
and it was not too long after there after I had Char you know challenged him
to create what is now called the pmc-8 uh go-to system
uh which is now being used uh around the world and um uh is supported by
something called the open go to community so we have we have amateur astronomers truly driving the technology
and the direction of what go to technology is I I did you know having
come from another company that always wanted to kind of dictate what
um uh you know robotic amateur astronomy was all about I wanted the community to
kind of lead the way and eventually you know take over the uh the interface of
of how that works and so we have seen several uh important steps in that
direction and it it seems as time goes on that whole uh uh Community
contribution is getting stronger and stronger so um you know because I believe that uh go
to robotic astronomy is is um you know part and parcel with what
amateur astronomy is today and and that should be driven by the community and not by any one company first for example
so I'll get off myself about that but no that's cool quite well and and um yeah
uh so it's it's been an honor to work with Jerry he's a devoted amateur astronomer he's done tons of Outreach
he's been on a lot of these programs uh he started uh these live broadcasts with
me and he's still doing them now in a show called The Open go to community live so
thank you thank you Scott I appreciate it and we're lucky tonight to also have a I consider him a Pioneer in robotic
technology and it's Bob Denney that's right who's started the s-com uh project
uh for for telescope control so and I take full advantage of that system that
he developed for everybody uh with the pmca so it's great
so tonight I'm going to be talking not about the technology so much although I will be mentioning some new technology
that uh but I'm going to be talking about the work that I've done observing exoplanets transits
and I gave this talk actually um a couple times I'm going to be giving
us a short version of The Talk that I gave at the neef and at the uh I
think this is this is one I actually gave last year at the AAS
um and it's based on a paper that uh We've we've uh wrote at the Mark Slater
remote Observatory where I do this this work and the mark Slater remote Observatory was founded about five years
ago this is the paper and uh
and what I'm going to be talking about is a specific technique that that was developed
at uh University in Pennsylvania and other places
that I found their paper and then and adapted their technique to small
telescope systems using the same equipment so I'll be talking about this specific
method that they developed and I've been able to adapt I think successfully to
small telescopes um I'm gonna share another screen here
so I can find the right presentation let me go back to my
I don't know if you guys have seen my desktop before but I got hundreds of icons along the roof top and bottom I I
have a tendency to uh to keep a lot of stuff open is really to
make it handy for me sometimes it's hard to see where it's at sometimes but uh here's the presentation
uh can you see that yes
all right so I'm going to be talking about the high Precision photometry used to um to do measurements for exoplanet
transits and and really and these are these are transits that are
very small changes in the in the light uh in terms of the uh brightness
of the star so in the transit I'll get into this but a Transit basically is like a Venus Transit
that we see from Earth where the where Venus crosses the face of the sun that's basically the same geometry that's going
on here um just a little bit about myself I'm a
retired energy nuclear instrumentation domain energy nuclear Transportation controls engineer and I'm the vice
president of engineering for explore scientific as Scott said I'm also the vice president of msro science which
runs the observatory and owns The Observatory and finally I wrote These two books that
you may have may not seen but they're available on Amazon and on Springer
books um so this this is the paper that we wrote
that was uh published by the society for astronomical Sciences in June 2019
and here's the link for it uh and so if you go to Archive you'll find
it there I've got a slide at the end that has some information for everybody also
but basically this is what the mark Slade remote Observatory station one
looks like inside this film and the directors Dr Milan lasuda
on the right there and I'm on the left as the assistant director of The Observatory
our main instrument is this 165 fbl 53 Apple that uh that's explore scientific
Flagship I call it the flagship telescope because it's our larger largest refractor that we have available
it's an excellent telescope and then we also have a secondary
telescope on the system that's an FC an es102 uh
so to get into the main meat of this talk
um there's two different there's two different ways to to measure the brightness of the star that we use in
this method one is and they both basically spread the light out of the star
and the reason we want to spread the light out is to to make as many pixels
as we can to gather the data without overexposing uh each any of the pixels we want to be
able to gather the light over as many sensors as we can so that we have a high number of photons that we collect the
higher number of the higher number of photons you collect the lower the shot noise is what it is and shot noise is
basically a random error that's that you get whenever
um you measure radiation it's just the randomness it's a it's a it's a statistical number
and so in order to minimize that which which if you've got a focus star you've
got like the light of a star over like maybe five or ten pixels you're going to have a lot of noise in
that signal compared to when you spread the light out and that's really the the goal is to is to minimize that type of
noise in the in the measurement now there's other types of noise that we also that are still remaining but this
this is the first cut at getting the noise level down so that because the brightness changes we're talking about
are less than one about one percent or less changes in the brightness uh so that's what we're going after
so on the left there this shows you what a diffuse damage looks like compared to a defocused image they're very similar
except we use a special instrument called a diffuser to obtain the diffused
image and it creates a profile or point spread function that's different than a normal star
um so this is kind of the difference so in
a defocused or a normal star image you've got a point spread function that looks like a gaussian shape like they're on the right
okay but on the diffuse image the profile looks like a it's called a top hat
profile where you have steep sides and you have a flat top
so basically you get all the light within this area gathered and you never
overexpose because it's spread out further so you can take a long exposure on even
a brighter star and you will not overexpose the the data and that's an important thing too because you want to
be able to count the photons accurately so you don't want to overexpose the image so this diffuser creates this profile of
the star where a defocused normal star image looks like the gaussian shape on
the right and the device we use is called the
engineer diffuser and it's created by a company called RPC photonics that's
based in New York and you can see here on this uh this
picture on the left where I'm holding it it looks like a frosted glasscon and you can see it on
the right hand side too right there it kind of looks like a frosted glass but it's actually kind of like a
um like these little tiny dimples on a plate um that that spread the light out in a
certain pattern and come together and again this is what so this is what a
star image looks like you can see there's different angles so when you get a different angle
diffuser it spreads the light out at different sizes and there's a calculation involved in how big it would
be on your plate on your uh on your CCD chip or your CMOS chip and
um so this is what the star image looks like when you expose it you can see it's kind of like a cool Starburst image it's
kind of neat looking at it um with the diffuser it's different than what it looks like with the the focus
star one of the main things I don't know if I talk about this on the next slide one of
the main things that this diffuser does also is it takes the light
from the star and and basically mitigates or settles out
all the scintillation in the Stars so the star could be moving around as it comes in you know like you
normally see when the seeing is noisy and you see if you took a video of The Starlights or if you look at it with
your eyeball you can see it twinkling that's seeing you can see it moving around on the chip also but the way the
diffuser is designed it spreads the light out into this pattern but it also averages out all the seeing so the
scintillation basically disappears uh it's a steady it's a steady glow a
steady profile which is so the scintillation is another source of the noise that you mitigate or
you reduce significantly with using the diffuser so those two things together
help you to measure the brightness of the star very uh precisely
and look for these small little dips which is a Transit so that's basically
how the instrument works now
we started doing exoplanet like curve measurements uh back in 2018
and we started out this was before I discovered the diffuser instrument uh
this was this this is our first exoplanet light curve that we measured uh part Bart Bullard Dr Bart Bullard is
a member of the msro team him and I both worked on this this measurement
are these measurements and you can see we detected the dip of hat P30 wasp 51 Bravo
uh that exoplanet had been discovered
um probably quite a few years previous to this and we were just doing a follow-up observation and and learning our
techniques on how to measure the transits now one of the things you do you model
you model the light curve you fit it to a model and then you can determine some parameters such as the size of the
planet the uh and the uh basically the the uh what's it called
the uh I can't remember the term now it's the uh let me let me move forward
here the uh orbital inclination I'm sorry the orbital inclination
of the star so you can see it's inclined on this model on the right hand side
uh this shows you uh the catalog model on the on the left
here that I'm circling and then this is our measurement and you can see it's pretty close the
inclination measurement was very very uh precise and accurate somewhat accurate and the size of the planet that we
measured was also pretty close uh so we were very pleased with this measurement uh even though you can see
the scatter and the measurement was quite a bit we were able to model it fairly well
now we we also later on when I discovered
the uh diffuser and put that to work you can see the you can see the
difference in the measurement with the diffuser with the high precise Precision that's available you can see the noise
in this previous measurement which is the defocus method and these were made with the same
telescope and the same camera you can see the scatter in the defocus
method and then when we go to the diffuser method you can see how tight the data is
okay to the to the uh to the model and uh so the depth measurement
um is the noise source for the shot noise or the poisson noise
is down to one Milli mag or one one thousandth of a magnitude noise
which is very very tight and the total Precision of the of the model the measurement with the
scintillation and the shot noise was 2.7 millimag and and this uh
this is a 12.9 magnitude star uh no I'm sorry
the depth that we measured was 12 point uh 12.9 millimag
um that's the depth so we were able to do a Precision measurement of the depth because we were able to reduce the noise
down to uh that 2.7 millimag value so that allows us to do a better model
of the system and the results of that are here
on these are the catalog values for these different parameters and this is our measured value so the size of the
planet that we measured on that hat p16b was 1.19 times the size of Jupiter the
catalog value is 1.29 size so it was pretty close the orbital inclination was very close
it was within the error bounds of the catalog value is 86.3 compared to 86.6
our Transit depth was was uh pretty good as you can see there 10.76 versus 11.47
and our midpoint time so the midpoint time value is is very important to
determine the orbital period of the planet and and
to be able to predict the next time it transits so it's if you can repeat that
measurement and and uh very closely then you get a good you get a good model also
and then the transit links our length the the time of being between
Ingress and egress was two hours and four minutes and 28 seconds in the catalog time
now the catalog value is two hours and seven minutes so that's very close um
uh so those are the results that we got with the diffuser
now we've also formed a team at the markslade remote Observatory called the
msro exopop team which is the exoplanet follow-up program
for the msro and uh since since August well back in August
in 2019 we we did a bunch of training sessions to get our observers up to
speed on the methodology that you have to use to do um
to do this work and then in November of 2019 we successfully observed and
verified this toi uh as a member of the test uh follow-up
team um SG-1 group it's an sg1 group is a
seeing limited team so basically from the ground if you can you minimize your error terms uh in
terms of the statistical shot noise and other terms in your instruments then all
you're left with is a scintillation limit basically for your measurement and that's why it's called the seeing
limited group because that's if you've got instruments that are that good then you're basically limited by the scene on
the ground and at that point you can do some good work um
that's that's about all I had to cover I want to just go a quick quick overview of what we do at the MSR in terms of
exoplanets uh I'll leave this screen up for a little bit see these are the links that you can
go to um to see more about what we do at the Mark Slater remote Observatory
and uh and then msro science so that's there any questions on the audience
I don't see any questions here I mean people are commenting on on that uh you
know you know people are saying it's not art it's science you know uh here right uh
there's uh you know there is the the you know the art of the skill of of
conducting uh you know or collecting data and presenting science and um and
and you guys do it really really well and you know I'm excited that um you
know we've we that explore scientific played a small role in that um in helping to get it off the ground
so I I think it's great what you guys have done at msro um I think you make it exciting for a
lot of amateur astronomers who want to actually learn the you know scientific
method and um how many people you had to go through your program so far well
we've got we've got three two I think Byron's got three active students from
around the world we've had several people from around the world use our systems remotely it's a completely
robotic telescope system yeah uh and it it's pretty reliable now it first took
the first few months of course after we built it get it up to speed and get it commissioned and reliable but it's been
a good five years now since we've been using it and we've changed the instruments out a few times we've had some failures that we've had to recover
from in terms of the mount systems early on but uh right now we've got the
explore scientific equipment in station one we've got other equipment and two other stations that we have
uh available to train on and to use for science Myron's been doing a lot of good
work with the spectroscopy with two or three students and then a couple other
people also um around the world so we've probably gone
through we've had local students three local students probably a total of 10 to 15 people
have been using the system over the last uh four or five years that are outside the
msro team we've got we've got five people that are active at msro that are on the
on the team on the msrs science work for us so uh but overall it's been good
um we we have been able to observe in 2017 we were able to observe pretty much on
every clear night and we had a lot of clear nights in 2017 compared to what we've had over the last couple years we
observed over 200 nights uh now we also observe when it's not perfectly clear we
observe when it's partly cloudy to do because it's available to do work and it's a manual the other thing it's
not a fully automated system like what Bob Denny creates it's a uh it's a teaching system so it's
a Hands-On laboratory basically for people to learn how to observe uh the sky with uh with these telescope systems
and remotely remotely do it so we teach people how to use the system all about
the equipment and we hold sessions as often as we can uh observing sessions and teaching
sessions at night and during the day there's a nice comment here this is an
that's a new school process I had considered an old school using electron devices and photo multipliers to measure
the subtle variations well done Jerry that was for Martin eastburn oh yes thank you yeah and so
uh you know I I really admire what you guys are doing and um you know and to
get involved uh Jerry uh how do they join the msro what's what's uh yeah so
let me let me real quick uh bring up the website
and I'll share it here real quick foreign
I have to say using this diffuser method is really interesting because the scatter and the uncertainty in your data
otherwise is really it's it's what my students are finding when they're doing the transit with our rasp robotic
telescope oh yeah scatter and so I definitely want to follow up with you on this diffuser method because
it sounds like it would really just it would Plateau out a lot of the shot noise and I like it absolutely and it
and it mitigates some of the uh scintillation too I if you yeah if you
find my paper uh on archive then uh and I'll put the link in the in the uh
you had an article published it was in astronomy magazine is that correct right yeah last year astronomy magazine also
published an article I wrote um that I probably have in my library I just have to be pretty cool yeah I was
in was it in June I think it was a June issue in 2020 um so this is the and you notice what
object I have here this is a picture I took I'm not a deep Sky photographer nice
image it's Oklahoma's favorite deep Sky object that's right so your official
deep Sky object that's right so as always rosette that's right so uh if you go to
msroscience.org you'll find uh what we do here and uh the contact information
so we do Outreach training and research um and uh
this is what the observatory looks like and you notice there's a there's a bunch
of trees next to it which is to the north it's kind of a pain our sky is not the best in terms of coverage when we
get by pretty well we do a lot of work we have two other stations that I don't
I don't have a picture of right here but uh uh this is Dr wasuda Myron a good friend
of mine we've known each other for quite a few years and then uh we've got
Shannon Morgan who's a member of our team um she's been trained a professional
trained astronomer Lauren Lennon is also a professionally trained astronomer we're really lucky where we're at
located in Northern Virginia that we've got access to this caliber of people that want to join us Dr uh Dr Barton
Bullard was a retired physicist and worked for the Navy at the dog run
Naval service weapons laboratory he's an optical physicist and um and then Linda Millard's his wife
and then we got Dr Glenn feiny who's the president of the Rappahannock astronomy club
and then Matt Scott you know Matt uh Scott [Music]
he's our he's uh our mechanical engineer that does a lot of work for us also yeah
excellent and uh so yeah an excellent team yes yeah we do
free Jerry um or rather
photometry images that happens to be defocused from my focuser wasn't working as well yeah right for my photometry uh
that I do for aavso and I have trouble registering those
frames because they're defocused the registration algorithm in pics insight for example yeah like that so what do
you use to register those frames well so it's yeah depending on how diffuse the star is a plate solve doesn't work you
also diffuse I call it diffusing out the Stars so you minimize the number you start to minimize the number of stars
that are available so you have to strike a balance basically that's that's a big that's a big thing that you have to think about using the diffuser also and
so you take longer exposures like like you know you never want to overexpose the data so you have to balance that and
depending on the size of your star you know and what comparison Stars you have and all that uh your exposure time but in terms of
registering it yeah I would I would try to just work with the program or
whatever you're using and and make it as small as you can to get away or make it as large as you can and get away with
plate solving if you want to do it registration can I stick something in here sure if you guys can send me some
um excuse me data I might be able to adapt pinpoint to be
able to deal with those uh diffuse star
profiles as opposed to using a psf fit or whatever right there's five different
excuse me five different object detection and centroiding algorithms inside pinpoint
and they're all hands off they just run over the image and do it but you have to select whichever one it is okay and if I
could get some of those images I might be able to adjust it so that it would
work with that also and I'm as you'll see after the break I'm just getting ready to release a V7 of pinpoint and
I'd love to put that in there I have it awesome I knew nothing about this until tonight oh well great so I've used
penpoint for a long time we've talked we've known each other for a while Bob and you know I've used pinpoint from the
beginning so so that's great
yeah I'll look at it but um let's hook up afterwards I'll give you a drop where
you can put like 10 images or 20 images or something and that's what I would use to put a set of test images and
um try and adapt to it okay Molly do you have some diffused images you want to send out I I mean not
diffuse but the defocused I've got some defocused images too that I have a bunch of defocused images and they all have
the as you said the psf uh shape to the stars and pinpoint already has a psf
adaptive centroider so it's no problem for defocused images okay the fuse ones
that you showed and those were Maxim DL graphs that I could immediately
recognize they're totally different than what I've seen so I'm most interested in
getting that data before I release 10.7 to try to do something about that it
might actually because I was thinking too you know when you get when you start to like if you defocus a lot then you
can see the the donut shape when you're using a reflection right right and even if you're not even if you're just a
little bit defocused that shape is probably there I haven't I haven't looked at uh the psfs myself but that
that shape is probably there too so it might help also folks uh like being
having being able to handle kind of more that flat top type data or where it dips a little might help right right so that
was one thing that was one thing I was we worked with uh Dennis Conti was part of this paper and part of this study
that we did uh he's a vso uh chief for exoplanet observing and uh but we
noticed a difference I mean they believe it or not the uh uh Smith cassegrine type or or a
reflector type telescope where the central obstruction is really not as good uh to do the measurement as it is
with a refractor of course because you've got you don't have that defect in the image yeah and that defect you know
you can work around it at some level but again it's not quite as precise as what you get with a refractor that's why I
use a refractor to do these this work uh and that's precise in my paper that's
that's discussed in the paper also sorry our science people they try to stay away from Schmidt Cass
with that donut shape if they defocus because it's really difficult to get
precise observations or you know measurements of the centroid with that really tough
so I'm going to post this link right now on archive to the chat so everybody will
have it um to the paper
and uh and yeah I welcome any questions just anybody want has any questions at all
email me at jrh at explore scientific.com
and I can I guess I can put that on my in the chat also and then you or you can send it out to anybody Scott yeah
excellent okay well um I think we're about ready for a 10 minute break uh so
now it's time to get up and uh stretch your legs maybe grab a sandwich a hot
coffee or something like that we've got a uh we've got a long night ahead of us
um you know maybe some of this will take a short nap and wait back up uh in in
advance of this uh uh total lunar eclipse that's coming up but um will you
sleep tonight Molly are you just gonna I yeah I'm I'm gonna I'm setting up the rig to run uh semi-autonomously uh but I
am gonna get up a little before four to make sure that it's still pointing at the Moon because my star Adventure
doesn't track the greatest um and also to come on and live stream
for a little bit so yeah very cool memorandum my time uh-ish
we will come on earlier uh we're gonna start broadcasting about uh 4 30 a.m
Central uh which would be much earlier for you um uh but uh we may have people that can
log in and start to show different parts of the eclipse as it goes along
otherwise maybe I can do some Shadow tricks or something like that until we get to Molly but uh anyways it'll be a
lot of fun and uh I look forward to it so okay so let's make sure I do this
correctly we are uh going to our first
intermission so thanks uh for all these great presentations so far and we will
be right back in about 10. so so Molly do you have any guiding on
your star Adventurer or you just let it go so um it it'll it'll guide in my
attention but I can't ever really get the polar alignment to be really good I
think my polar scope um isn't quite calibrated so I've tried it with sharp with sharp
caps polar alignment as well and still haven't gotten the satisfactory results so even though it guides an RA it drifts
enough in deck that um it it's it's it's how it gives me a little bit longer exposures when I do
deep sky but I'm not going to bother guiding for the eclipse yeah so it's a star Adventure I mean
I've I've taken mine out the little you know the little star Adventure I've done the best I can I have the older model so
I manually polar align by looking through and um there are nights where
because I'm doing wide angle you know nightscapes astrophotography there nights that I can tell that I got it
spot on a little you know better than others because I can take longer exposures and the Stars stay round and
and then if I see that I put on a bigger lens and I go shoot for something you
know try to do a little Camera DSLR deep space uh so it's uh yeah it's Hit or Miss if I if
I'm getting star Trails after 30 seconds and then I start stomping up and down and
going what am I doing wrong try again that's when the clouds usually cover the
North Star and you know then things get thrown into the lake and it's not as
good at night but
here in the South it's very difficult yeah turn right at turn right at Crux
right uh it's near near but we we have the um
four stars very tiny and very uh the magnitude is very few so yeah
yeah you don't have to with light
pollution in the city it's very difficult you have to go to the to the
farm and when you are in the farm or outside the town there's a lot of stars then you can find
it and also there's three stars that matches the the asterisk
like the octans is asterisk so when you put it together uh you you say okay I'm
I'm aligned but I'm close yes you try
your first you try your first image and it's Trails after 15 seconds exactly you
have to do it what is it wrong yeah I anybody
tell us about that everyone says find the octans asterisk the four stars and
that's it em obviously the the the final
polar has to be very aligned but
it's very difficult I remember with my brother when I I bought the the star
Adventurer a few years ago we're so excited to prepare it to unbox
it everything and when we want to find the the
asterisk in my city the live pollution of the very light pollution is in the
South so [Music] I was with the my binoculars and the
Lesser point to find it and tell my brother hey bro there is it find it
yes I think we've had on on here before
um uh he he's in uh he's in Chile and I stayed at his uh his Observatory Hotel
thing that he's got down there in outside San Pedro de Atacama and I had I
had to enlist his help to align my star Adventurer uh he was really good at it though he took a green laser pointer
kind of held it on the top and got it roughly pointed and then just kind of he could do it in like in like 30 seconds
like he was so experienced at it I don't know how he did it
yeah so so obviously I need to find gonna need to find someplace dark because if I get frustrated it's going
to be back to 20 seconds wide angle yeah regular there's an easy trick to do
give up yeah can you guys hear me yeah hey Simon there's another there's an
easier trick to do polar alignment regardless if you can see the north star or not and it's by looking at your
geographical location so a lot of the a lot of people don't realize this but your lat long tells you
where to actually move and how much to tilt the star Adventurer by so if I'm
here in California uh Los Angeles specifically my latitude is 34 degrees so if the star Adventurer is at 34
degrees it is actually looking right at Polaris and then I use a compass and I
point everything so it faces true north not magnetic north and if I look through my polar scope I'll find that I'm
actually very very incredibly close to it so if I actually had a digital um measurement of some description you
can actually get it dead on without seeing Polaris ever that's how I usually you know I'll do
that before it gets dark and then fine tune it once it gets dark and it will get you pretty close but even when I
have Polaris uh somewhere inside of the one degree ring that's in the polar scope even if it's if it's not dead on
I'm still pretty limited to about 30 or 60 second exposures at 135 millimeters
right it looks close but not cool so that can be attributed to
um if you're I don't want to get too technical for people this is the perfect place to get technical Simon go for it
well the people who are listening might not understand this but if you're if your actual Imaging camera is not
orthogonal with your polar Scope when you're doing the alignment to begin with uh for Polar alignment this is
specifically what you'll find here is let's just say this is all facing Polaris and the camera is ever so
slightly skewed off in the wrong direction uh-huh and then what happens here is you don't know if this is
orthogonal as it moves around even though I see what you're saying pointing any way you want but what happens here
is during my alignment procedure I need to know that my camera is facing with
the mount orthogonal with the or parallel for like a better description with the polar scope and if it's not
then I know I'm going to have a real bad time and I usually check this by just simply rotating the camera or the mount
round and rounds and what I'm doing is I'm looking to see if any of the Stars decide to make a weird elongated shape
if it's a good Circle and again I use sharp cap and you can actually put the circle to go up there watch one of the
Stars to make sure it makes a complete Revolution and lands back where it was because if it doesn't and it's kind of does this weird elongated shape you know
you've got a problem yeah that's that's more or less how sharp caps built-in polar alignment kind of works when you
have it up right and then you have it at 90 degrees and then it calculates how far you need to move it and that's I
I've gotten I get great results for that on my telescope mounts for some reason I
still can't get it to quite go for my star Adventure but I did recently I got a new base for mine because
um the equatorial base that I had before was kind of wobbly in altitude yeah
so now I have a more firm one it didn't perform much better the last time I took
it out but I'm hopeful that all right I'm hopeful it'll work in the future I've had some I've had some Immaculate
um alignments where um I just found that everything stayed in
place for a minute 30. I've gotten as much as two minutes of exposure but I
was shooting anywhere yeah like 85 millimeter 100 millimeter and I've
gotten up to two minutes with like very minimal to no star uh Star Trek Adrian
the the last December I could took um sorry
in almost five minutes with a a 55
millimeters lens in my Nikon
with the star Adventurer uh the the lens was very short so the declination
doesn't pull me and and the AR goes fine in in the yeah
I have an 8518 that I tried out that night and that it
this is a big old lady five for the Sony that I didn't use it won't show I have
an 8518 cannon that's smaller than this and I hooked it up and uh hooked it up
to the 6D and said I seem to be I just seem to have pretty good polar alignment so let's shoot the North American nebula
why not and let's see what I can get and so I took some I took some frames that
uh a minute 30 each frame stars were staying round but I then learned that
the exposures were perhaps a little too long because they were bloated so so I
still have some more experimentations but uh yeah it's fun playing with the star Adventure
yes yes yeah I'm sending it to you about 12 of you if I that I did with the large
magazine cloud I think the best thing here is is the
learn drift alignment I hate to say that but yeah I have done that yes
alignment or or shoot pictures like I have in my background where your polar
alignment doesn't quite happen you've got a wide angle lens yeah and it
doesn't have to quite be on you at least get a minute and your stars stay round
because they're all small as soon as you dig in and you want to do rofi Yuki up
there then you you your polar alignment has to be more spot on well this image
back here um I was in a dark place and I was using the Sony uh mirrorless camera
that was really sensitive this is this is a half hour's worth of 30 second exposures
um so fast lens sensitive camera and Dark Skies you can compensate for bad
tracking yeah what do you remember the portal rating you were at because this is Desert uh we were near San pediatica so
it was really like portal one and a half or so but it was quite dark yeah this was portal two and a half I would say
behind me and so it was an unmodified camera and you're seeing some of the lines heading to oh you know Row for
Yuki this region over there you're seeing a little bit of that that was unmodified and so I kind of plan on I
want to head back there and see if I can you know get in there a little more when it gets dark in this area and of course
I'm also heading to Okie Tech so that's gonna be that's gonna be fun I I hope to
get out of there with some really nice images I wish I could go it's during classes
but I potentially potentially next year although I can really only support
either doing Texas Star Party or Okie text and I usually pick Texas Star Party
well Wolfie I I saw some images from Texas Star Party and I said I may go to
that next year myself someone came back they came back with Omega Centauri and a
few other things you could see from South and I said you know until I can uh meet up with
Cesar and Maxie um that may be my best bet then when international travel opens up I gotta
come down and struggle Simon I'm gonna give you a call because I'm gonna struggle with polar alignment in the
South yeah what am I doing
with you you know these methods but in this in this scope
I don't have well I have a polar scope
finder because you don't need that I I don't need the stigma dentist is a
fantasy it's something like like uh yes you know never say oh yes we have we
have um Polar Polar Star which one Sigma
plant is if you if you say Sigma is that maybe Sigma is not in any and any
consolation it's a bright it's a bright stars and imagine that I've done this is
a second solution that anybody knows and the worst thing is that Sigma okay you
you you you give me a constellation that you never see and you tell me that the
star is not Alpha it's Sigma Sigma this is this is our our tools in the
South come out all I can say is drift alignment sorry
that's why I'm giving you a cause
and the the the drifting polar and Eggman goes very fine with those but I
do pH pH to guiding and that's very
gorgeous yes that's exactly something to look forward to
all right well I'm gonna actually take the evening so I can get my gear set up and yeah
you go to bed early I guess that picture that I sent you was the the last December of the yeah let me let me share
my screen yeah so everybody else can see what we're looking at here good night Molly
there you go Maxie you can talk a little bit about it and then we will we will uh
next so now particularly this picture I remember in
those days I was previously to do a trip to the a solar
eclipse in the south of my country and I have some a promise in my family with my
mom she was a very with some issues with an operation and in a hospital in that
time and I had to clean my mind I had to go out of town I tell my my girlfriend
Connie I need to go out sorry and I travel and I Christopher oh can
you hear me and Scott I'm hearing I'm hearing myself
yes Christopher goes trying to call in here I'll call him privately okay okay stop
five minutes
blow my mind hey Scott can you meet me hey Scott can you send me your microphone for a second
um yes
no no I think what are you hearing
you and somebody else you and somebody else it's Stadium announcement
Stadium announcement now about batting for the New York Yankees number two
number two Eric Echo number two Tengo Tango
are we still hearing these are we still hearing this yeah we are yeah we are
something changed ourselves
foreign
okay now somebody say something I think it's good I think it's good
physically on the thing there's the button that says [Music] um
okay so I should not hear myself now which I don't yep it was your Zoom meet Scott I think
with someone coming in yeah the stadium Echo is gone and Jeter
is out so yep I guess we'll continue now we can now we can go
foreign
's going on it's called I think you're the pro no he Scott just muted himself so we can
continue yeah how are you
I guess uh since we can't hear Scott Bob Denny
I still hear it I still hear an echo all right I muted I don't think I'm the
cause no it it's go ahead Jerry I think we can
real quick I know you can hear me Scott um do you have TeamViewer I can log in and reroute the audio so it fixes it
while these guys do their thing but we'll stay muted
chat all right Gary you can talk
can you hear me okay
I've known Bob for at least 10 years I think uh I met him at neef the first
time I think and and uh I learned about Bob when I got involved with the ascom system early on about 10 years ago
and uh or 12 years ago actually and uh uh he's a great guy I enjoyed talking to
him about a lot of different things uh and we've had some good discussions at the niece I think Bob over the years and
uh and you've been recently been evangelizing the alpaca cross-platform
system for ascom is that right yep that's been my thing for two years
but I don't take credit for the technology I'm just a flag waiver no but you're also a uh an excellent resource
and go-to guy on how this stuff works I do know that
so don't don't sell yourself short in that realm because everybody needs to when they get into it I wrote uh driver
for the pmca system and it's a lot of work to get it correct and and there's not a
lot of good examples in terms of they show you what you need to do but not how you need to do it uh to get it to work
with your Mountain that's one of the things I found early on when I was developing the mount s-com driver it's
gotten better there's a lot of other examples out there now to go by but uh I started this my development
about five years ago I think it was on the pmca system well there were templates there have
been templates for almost 10 years in C sharp um but that just shows you what you need
to do but not how and the only way you know how is how you know how your
equipment works and that's the whole point of a driver is it isolates the applications out there like SGP and my
software and Maxim and whatever else from the Gory details of how your ex
your system whatever it is a focuser a telescope controller works so it is true
I'm going to share a screen just for a a brief moment it forces you because it
actually forces you to understand your system a lot better when you're trying to tell tell the ascom driver how you
want something to be done yes it does and there's a almost said something bad
there's a boatload of information out here that for developers and for
application developers about the general principles what do you need to know what to do how you manage errors and retries
you know if somebody beats the heck out of your system by asking your mount for the ra 500 times a second you need to
isolate the the innards of it from that and all sorts of stuff so there's
resources there but um you know you have to uh know that's
there and use it so
um thank you Jerry I appreciate the intro I'm not going to take too much time
tonight one thing I want to announce is that
one of the projects of the ascom and alpaca group has been to build a set of
reference simulators that are cross-platform that'll run on Linux Mac and windows and they speak alpaca and
every single one of the devices that's defined in ascom all of them are
simulated as a reference implementation those simulators are will behave according to
the spec and Daniel from op Tech has implemented those and they're going to
be out there shortly where there's a few of us who are testing them right now they look really good they all pass the
conform and they will run on any platform which is totally cool yeah and
because they speak alpaca any app on Windows can use them because of the
middleware that translates the old uh calm as com into alpaca and that's
already out there that's done it's been out there for almost two years so any
application can check themselves against those simulators and eventually the what they call the Omni simulator that will
become the standard instead of the ones that are there now so we're making a lot of progress in
that department and it's uh it's good news um the other thing I wanted to talk about is one of my own projects uh Which
Scott said it's okay to talk about and that is a new version of pinpoint and what one of the well there's a 64-bit
engine but I should probably explain what pinpoint does first and that is it's an it's a library or an engine that
you can can include in an application or you can script it from any one of 20 languages on Windows it is a Windows
resident engine but it does astrometry similar to all
the other you've seen a lot of astrometric plate solvers pop up in the last five years the difference is
pinpoint when it solves gives you a very accurate centroid and RN deck of every
single image in the whole field no matter what the the um
a profile well not only the profile but any sort of optical Distortion that's
present various telescopes have uh you know sine X over X or all different
kinds of distortion in their image so if you just try to scale across the image
from RN deck to to X and Y or vice versa you'll get errors because it's not exact
it's not just a flat transform so it measures that Optical Distortion all
automatically and you just call it and it does all this stuff comes back to you Dr Donald brunes used uh the centroiding
in pinpoint to measure the stars for his Recreation of the Eddington experiment
in 2018 with the solar eclipse and it was pinpoint and astrometrica both
giving effectively perfect centroids of the stars and under tough conditions and
he used that to get a very very excellent
um measurement of the warping of the Stars due to gravity it's it's quite an
interesting thing I'm not going to bore you with more of it but that was part of
what pinpoint does so it does a lot of different things and I'm not gonna can you uh do you provide data or or
a graph that shows the field curvature as part of that no it has built in a set
of of coefficients for a two-dimensional polynomial my Distortion correction
automatic Distortion correction predates the Sip that came out in 2006.
um I didn't know anything about it I they hadn't done that yet but I did it in 2002 because I was dealing with a
centurion telescope that was a corrected Newtonian and it had extreme
sine X over X Distortion and I had a customer with six of them who was
running this thing all over the sky discovering asteroids he eventually became the first amateur to be
designated by the MPC as a survey but in order for him to turn in accurate enough
uh measurements astrometric measurements it had to figure this all out and take
it out of the equation and submit accurate positions all the way across the field
so um that was a guy named Quang Yoo Jung and he named an asteroid after me anyway
um which is cool down on the twenty thousands um two three two five seven or something
like that I don't even know anyway asteroid Denny we got two asteroids with us tonight we got Scott Roberts and Bob
Denny anyway the point being it does a lot of
work to get science quality astrometry hands off you just
call it and it comes back and you can pick your way through all the objects in
collect in a collection and get really accurate RN deck of everything and no it
doesn't have beautiful pictures of the it's not like CCD what's that thing that
measures the beautiful you know it creates beautiful pictures yeah nah it doesn't do that it just does what you
need to do to get the astrometry and that's it okay no UI none of that and
you can embed it in any in any application and call it with simple calls and it's really pretty simple
so okay cool um so what I did with pinpoint seven is I added well I made a 64-bit
and that was requested by a government employee in Canada who is
using it with Matlab 64-bit and since Matlab can call com objects he
was using that to measure the positions of objects in the sky I think it was space surveillance as they call it and
um so he wanted that and then SGP the guys at main sequence were coming out
with a 64-bit version of SGP so I needed to make a 64-bit version of the engine
which I did and it was interesting because there are two really really big
libraries that are included in that one is see fits IO which is a recognized
industry well you know science standard fits IO library and I needed to convert
that to 64 a bit and then La pack which was converted years ago to CLA pack is a
linear algebra package and it's huge and there's a the the regression test scheme
runs for a and a half in order to make sure that it's right but I use CLA pack to do the Distortion
correction using singular value decomposition which is a matrix algebra scheme for taking measurements and then
fitting it across the field and creating the the coefficients for a two-dimensional polynomial I know I'm
probably getting too technical for the audience but you ask the question I'm the only one I'm probably the only one
that likes this stuff because anyway I use a math net to mathnet library to do the uh the point being it does it and it
does it and I don't try to talk to people and tell them how it works internally because it's not that interesting but
um I'm glad you you're interested in it but the point is it does that so that's one thing the 64-bit engine the other is
one of my customers for uh let me get this right now I'll
have to pop this up here now share screen
where is my I thought I would be able to share only
the browser but unfortunately it looks like I'm sharing the whole damn screen
can you see this unfortunate well you know what I'll just expand this thing to the whole thing I
don't know why it didn't it wasn't able to pick this browser out of the other stuff but this is the Atlas all Sky
reference catalog and you've heard people say oh you need to use the Gaia catalog dr2 right well this is Gaia on
steroids it not only has the Gaia information on it but it also has we've
I don't know if you can read this but it has a pass all sorts of other information in here a
pass by the way is the aavso all Sky photometry survey catalog
they measured millions of stars for
photometry Way Beyond and you know about that also and that was done with our
scheduler over a period of many of several years like six years both in the Southern and the Northern Hemisphere
Arnie Hendon LED that project but and then um Dave Smith made the the system
that gathered the data for that but apas was done and it could not have been done
according to Arne and you can ask him without our scheduler it was it it ran all night every night that it could and
you know acquired millions of images on two telescopes to do that so Atlas is a
really cool reference catalog for plate solving you'll see this is going to be in use with other people too it's big
each magnitude band from zero to sixteen sixteen Seventeen Seventeen to eighteen
eighteen nineteen nineteen to twenty one each one of those bands has 64 800 files
one per square degree of the sky and so it takes a bunch of time to get
those files down and get them decompressed and so forth but once I could have it What's the magnitude limit
on it on that Atlas is it 22 22 really that's amazing it goes almost well I
think 21 and a half 22. it goes way down and it is a super high quality catalog
and I have to um thank one of our customers Eric doce
who pointed me to this catalog and I started looking at and I go 64 800 files
no way but you know what Windows just doesn't even break a sweat you just take
some time to put them in there but once they're in there it it works great and
so now it's capable of using that as the reference star catalog and so you can
start working really deep and I have customers now who are working down in the mag 19 1819 area and so this is just
perfect and uh that's nice when you're doing with a smaller field of view with these longer focal length telescopes
also well but you have to take long long exposures to Get Enough stars down that
deep narrow field work with science is tough no matter what and the more money
you spend the more data you get per unit time so the bigger the aperture you know what I mean but anyway you're right it
has its advantages I'll stop sharing that oh you know what there was something else I wanted to show you I'm sorry on this this thing there is one
other Tab and that's the archive the ads reference for this
and if you're interested if you look at the help for pinpoint you'll get all the
pointers to all this stuff too and by the way here's the uh the pointer to
Jerry's thing which I just thought was fascinating
and uh I put that in the chat the public chat also so I'm really interested in
this thank you I want to get um the V7 pinpoint which is almost it's
in field test now but I want to put a bunch of these images through that to
solve and see how it works I'm really interested in doing that sure did did I
do this right oh there we go that's it yeah now we're seeing right and so I may
not have shared it before but here's the ads
on the atlas catalog and uh there's the original thing that I posted so I'm
sorry I didn't go the whole nine yards on that so that's what I've been up to and on
alpaca it's charging ahead um Simon he's not here right now or his
picture isn't here right now but Simon helped tremendously last year by putting
me on a live stream and allowing me to give a uh detailed
briefing on this which is on the ascom site
which I will now share so if you go to the ascom dot
standards.org website which is very simply that
right at the top there's this video and you can see that and and I've got it
expanded because I don't know how to share a window with zoom instead of an entire screen
so that's this here uh-huh I don't know why it started in
the middle but anyway you probably can't even hear this
can you hear that probably not anyway okay
yeah we're not here yeah okay that's enough anyway it's there and uh or send the the
URL yeah I'll put that um on the uh chat
um in just a sec that's right at the very front of the
ascom website which it's probably worth um seeing that I'm gonna put this on the
chat right here one two three Click Boom as
com-standards.org that's the public chat
it should have come through by now I can't seem to shrink that's good there
we go okay anyway thanks to Scott um I guess that's my thing Simon
yeah he he really helped last summer with that and uh so thanks to him my thing is just
to make the the ecosystem you know how we have the Google ecosystem and the Apple ecosystem and
blah blah blah well the astronomy ecosystem has there are
two of them there's the Linux Indie and the ascom formerly Windows as common now
everything has com ecosystem alpaca is is a
version of ascom we'll put it that way anyway we're trying to make it Universal so that if you have a piece of equipment
and you write a driver with alpaca anything can talk to it
and there's that's the whole point and and a piece of equipment can have its own Wi-Fi and its own little
microprocessor and speak alpaca and everything on Windows Linux
or Mac can talk to it and that's our goal no libraries no C C library C plus
plus none of that stuff it's all over the internet network connections so that's our deal
anyway thank you for the opportunity to speak I know it's been highly technical uh um Jerry let's get together and Scott
thank you very much as I say as you said at the beginning I'm a technologist not an astronomer so this makes my segment a
bit different and I hope I didn't put too many people asleep no Bob I think what you've done is
you've especially with if nothing else anyone gets out of it is your technology
is what makes the things we like to do possible and things like plate solving
for what we're looking at in the sky if we want to image something or we want to Polar align that's where your technology
makes it easier how do I do it I look at the I look for the North Pole and hope
I'm right how do I do it if I use your technology press a button and it finds
it so that's where the connection is and I you know maybe I don't understand all
the nuts and bolts but I understand that is very important so it gets people up to speed very quickly and we've had
people customers that have had their stuff they started out brand new and started into astrophotography
immediately and after three or four months they've got great images it's pretty amazing when yeah when they
dig into the technology and learn it what's possible after just a few short months
it took me two or three years yeah Scott opened the door years ago I
had written the original plate solving engine back in 2000 and in 2001
I was in the Mead tent at rtmc with a me
LX 208 Edge bouncing around taking pictures
five or six pictures coming back taking another five or six pictures of the same field 15 minutes later and then 15
minutes later bringing them in and blinking them and seeing the asteroids moving and being able to measure those
asteroids and send the report to the MPC so that was my original reason for
getting into this and Scott open the door for me and once again Scott thank you very much
you know I gotta say this um in regards to alpaca for the people who are watching at home it's not specifically
your jobs but the more you guys can put in the effort to tell these companies
that you want to use oh sort of what's that noise
is that me muted can you hear me no I don't know what it was it sounded
like crickets oh that was weird but you can hear me now right yes yes yes all
right so I'm sorry I've got to start that again then just in case because we're having audio issues um
for the guys at home who are watching this we kind of need you guys to actually go
out and speak to the manufacturers and say hey we want our Packer drivers we are doing our part to the best of what
we can to try and get as many of these people on board but the more of you that are asking for it the bit the better
this gets and the more likely alpaca is going to be around as far as we're
concerned it's not something that's just going to shop and go away it's going to be around it's going to stick around and whether you like it or not we're all
going to be using it there are more benefits with alpaca than there are negatives to be totally honest and quite
honestly especially for Education um the way that it controls telescopes
and allows so many people to see what's happening as opposed to everybody huddle
around the screen Simon doesn't doesn't it make sense also to talk to the client application developers to say I want I
want the alpaca on this out that's where it starts for the user right yeah I mean
as long as they can just keep harping at anybody and everybody to start using our pack and I'm not saying this just to get
you guys to you know convince you guys to use it it's I've seen it in action when we did this demo obviously with uh
doing the video with Bob and the guys over at optek there was more to it than I saw and we had this private one-on-one
with Daniel who you know has been doing a lot of the programming and he showed
me all these little things that you guys never got to see because they're not completed yet they're probably now but
they are they're they're um the Omni simulator is one of Danny Daniel's things and it's out now for
testing amongst the group and so he's just a genius and he is Jeff at op Tech
I thank him I call him every few months and say Jeff thank you very much for funding not only what Daniel does for
you but for what he does for the community but I mean what so this is what the one of the things I'm trying to explain to
people about the alpaca though is the example we use with the focuser you can
have especially with the pandemic you you we can all be on Zoom but we can all have this web browser over up to an um
to a certain extent and control this um focuser
through a VPN private Network or something like that because obviously this doesn't work it's not it's not an
Internet Protocol it doesn't work over the internet but if we create a VPN we can all log into it
and one person can control the telescope and everybody else sees the telescope
moving in real time as well as the statistics so you don't get two people who try to control the telescope you can
have one person who does one setting and then the next person can come along in the same application make a change and
it happens for everybody and I think that's where the unique side of all of this comes from and how you
guys at home want to utilize this and tie this into your system and your setup
is entirely down to you but from an educational standpoint to me it's going to be a game changer as far as I'm
concerned well and the key is individual equipment makers
want to create their own little world and have everybody tie into them and
then the next guy comes along well you need to speak Polish to me and you need to speak Chinese to me and you need to
speak espanol to me well no the whole point is
your value is not that you are preventing your competitors from being
in the field your value is being better than your competitors and being in the same field and
operating on the same level playing field with regards to talking to the instruments is where it's at that's what
makes it go and that's what standard protocols do
between the programs and the devices and that's what alpaca is for and that's
what ascom has been for and that's why I'm here that's my big and I carry that
flag all the time and it's cross-platform more importantly now yep that's the big change in the
last two years is that it's moved out of instead of having it hooked in with the
windows scheme where different programs can talk to each other in in any of 20
languages on Windows a program and a driver can talk to each other and the
program can be in one language the driver can be in another and they can be one of 20 languages so you have a lot of
flexibility there but outside of windows like Darren from Australia said what
three years ago why can't I install it on my Mac well the now instead of it
being using the com system or the local procedure call on Windows it's been
moved over to network connections which can occur on the same machine or across
machines and the implementation is still language independent because every
language on every platform knows how to speak rest and that's what it's based on
so it basically really moves it out away from being specific so people like SGP
CCD autopilot and um
uh Patrick chevali wrote cart to CL on on and hits a cross-platform thing and
he jumped on this bandwagon right away and any version of CDC can talk to any
alpaca um based right device and because
there's middleware on Windows which is there
somebody who has a plane wave you know L 500 Mount which has pwi4 as
their control system on Windows it doesn't run on any other platform a plane wave machine on a Windows box
it's a fabulous control system it's a fabulous mount it has a com as com input
but with the little thing that Peter Simpson wrote now anyone on any alpaca
device anywhere Raspberry Pi Linux Mac it doesn't matter can also talk to that
plane wave and run it and that's today that's not a dream it's right there right now so that's that's where it's at
and I'm I know I've probably gotten I I need to get off my soapbox but anyway
thanks for the time and Simon thank you for helping last year that was great no problem no that's
very interesting I in the chat we were talking about building it in in DSLR cameras
um Canon is already Canon already has a camera that they designate for astronomy
so something like uh having askom the alpaca software built in with the
mirrorless camera I mean I could you know if I can just slap my camera up there and let it polar align tell me
where I need to move it in order to be perfectly polar aligned um that would be wonderful
um camera cameras are a real tough issue it is probably you know if you think
about all the other devices we use for astronomy those things are fairly straightforward
focusers domes filter Wheels mounts even
but cameras are tough and there's a big technology shift going
on from CCD to CMOS the characteristics of the sensors are different there's a
lot of low level raw and raw functionality that's being pushed out to
the applications that probably should be contained within
the camera and I again Scott shut me up if you think I'm going on too damn long
but for example and this is only an example a CMOS camera is better off
taking short images because of the way the sensor works so if you want what amounts to a 20 minute
collection of photons on an object you may have to take
20 one minute objects or 50 or 60 half 30 second exposures well how the hell do
you take an 8K by 8K sensor and put 50 of those across the wire into this into
the computer and then stack them that's outrageous so
you know there there's a problem with that sharp cap is more of a video type
of thing it takes in you know high speed short images and then stacks on the
computer and you get to watch the thing form and be wonderful but there are applications where you just want to take
an IT you want to tell the camera give me 20 minute exposure and give it back to me
and in order to do that what we did in in the standards was to add a
sub-exposure interval that you can tell it okay I want 30 second exposures but I
want 20 minutes worth of these and it's up to the camera to combine them inside the camera and return a single image
with Nvidia processors which are dirt cheap these camera makers are eventually going to start making their cameras
really smart but it's not there yet it's all it's all in transition right now with uh with the
technology and I expect to see these cameras be way smarter in not that long and we don't want to change things in
such a way that we hamstring people by making forcing them to go the old way
instead of allowing them to go the new way if you know what I mean so yeah
overdone it yeah it also comes down to motive of the camera makers as well I
think they're and anyone can correct me if I'm wrong but I think camera makers
are seeing that the dslrs are being used at night whereas I think
initially you you've developed the DSLR you didn't take this camera and make it
so that it could shoot Stars the intent was to shoot landscapes in the daytime and the sun was the basis of light and
that's how the thing was developed but now you know astrophotography we're proving that you can take this camera
and shoot this back here on my screen and shoot your Aurora and and it can do
a good job capturing photons at night but then you've got the thermal noise and the other
um things that are going on so there's dedicated Astro cameras to deal with
that and you know and so on and so on so so yeah that it's one thing to have the
technology to do it it's another thing to make your camera makers understand
that that technology will sell and that's you know the business part of it is is very be pretty important you have
a really good really good point now I I'm sorry Jerry but I want to answer him the the very last thing
that was discussed in 2009 amongst a set of
camera makers at the AIC conference in San Jose before
the ascom camera standard which is a again a universal standard was agreed
upon and released was the representation of the Bayer Matrix that's used by one
shot color cameras and having a universal way of
representing that Bayer Matrix because the different camera manufacturers had different ways and they all agreed that
from the program the application standpoint we see Bayer matrices the
this way and if your camera makes one differently you have to switch it around that was the very last thing that was
discussed and agreed upon and compromised on before the ascom camera
standard was released in early 2010 so for dslrs it's been out there I'm really
my big probably boring lecture a minute ago had to do with the new CMOS cameras
which are monochrome with filters and that's a whole different you know ball
of wax yeah but you're right Adrian that that is the camera makers they all have
huge markets I mean I deal with this every day there's one camera maker that
is their their astronomy segment is this big and their microscopy segment is the
other ninety percent of their pie chart and so trying to get their attention for the customer to fix something is almost
impossible and so you have to look around who's focused on astronomy who's
delivering good equipment but more importantly who's responding to the
astronomical customers needs on a timely basis and fixing bugs and making things
work right and I'm not going to say who's who but that's the key and that goes back to
what Simon I can see him laughing and yeah you're absolutely right boy is that
ever right putting pressure on the vendors to deliver what you paid them for is my number one whoa I talk to
people all the time well you know my moon went this way and it didn't do that and it didn't report an error well you
know what you paid him money why don't you get on their case and tell them to make it do what they sold you
it would do well they never answer the phone or you know whatever so anyway
that Simon's right make them make them behave
right I'm sorry I know I probably went way over this Scott's going to call me tomorrow and go you know what you need
to tone it down Bob I know he's gonna scare me okay
no Echo no Echo okay great okay I'm done
man Bob let them have it okay sorry um Jerry I cut you off five minutes ago so
I'm sorry all right I was just going to say one thing with the camera manufacturers we're we're kind of in a golden age of cameras and I think it's
going to change to the bad here before too long where they're building cameras that are useful for the mass consumers
that are also happen to be useful for astronomy but that's not going to last I don't think that's going to last I
think they're going to move on to some other technology that's not going to be good for astronomy at all and that's my that's my fear
well that spells opportunity for a small company who wants to get into this market and focus
on it and as long as we still have free enterprise that's good you know the
interesting thing here is there are companies and I I will not name them because I'd rather you guys discover
them in your own time but they have cameras dedicated or in fact sorry their
company is dedicated to nothing but astrophotography and I'm going to tell
you now it is not the big two that you think it is so be be prepared when this it's not new
okay the cameras themselves and the technology has been around for a very long time the company on the other hand
is starting to show up on people's radar they are focused on nothing but
astronomy they know it's a small Market but they don't care because they're all astronomers
I know good homework for I know at least one of those that Simon's talking about
so and he's right and I will add one only one other thing watch for what
happens inside the camera with regards to processing the photons that come in in a
way that one science people can account for every Photon without any kind of
fiddling around or transforms they have to be able to go from photons in to
Signal that's important and for art astronomers they have to be able to get
data that they can use to make beautiful art those are the two requirements and
processing inside the camera is where it's going to happen and just think what
an Nvidia video processor inside a camera and they're Dirt Cheap think of
what that can do instead of the old days back when s big had a CCD chip that was
being clocked off the chip and read into the computer over a USB line with no
buffer that was the worst of all worlds right there you had to stop the CP you
it was horrible otherwise you'd get horizontal banding remember that
what the hell and that's still there there's people with those cameras still there so it lasts forever all we can do
is pray that these people don't set another 10 years worth of pain into their cameras that's what I that's my
thing like I said there is a company that is their primary focus is these problems again I'm not going to say who
it is I want you guys to discover it in your own time because they're not fully realized yet
well that's good homework for me if I get into a pinch I'll beg for some help
but no that's something that I think I'd love to look up and in the meantime I'm
firing away the interesting story about the 60 and then we can move on um is the fact that it was made to shoot
portraits or whatever but Canon found that a lot of astrophotographers would
go to it just the way it was built it handled those photons at the night sky a
lot better there was less noise coming in and the images you ended up with were
a little cleaner before you started the post process something about this camera not the Mark II but the original that's
now about 10 or something years old and there are a lot of astrophotographers
well now including myself that are using this camera I have a newer mirrorless
and I still don't seem to get the quality of image that this produces and
not with this lens a different lens but it's the the quality it's the the image
itself just it comes out cleaner it's you know it's what's behind me and it's um it's just something interesting about
the camera itself and the technology that's in it that you know it just
happens to work and it's kind of an agreed upon camera until we go to a real Astro camera like you're talking about
Simon um and Bob they're they're they dedicated Astro camera takes care of the
flaws the thermal heating and everything that our dslrs go through
um when we're when we're trying to use it to do repeated Imaging for nightscapes it works just fine for
classic Astro um you get that thermal heat and you know your sensor you know it heats up so
you've got you know I guess you've got like the dark pixels or whatever you have to deal with and the cooled CMOS
sensors take care of that problem so I get that I have a yeah number a very
interesting discussion and I'll go ahead and mute so we can move on to program myself but it is definitely an
interesting go ahead want to say one thing I have a friend who's a former
Army aviator who went from enlisted to officer and took a Physics degree as his
college and now he retired years later he's got quite a military career but now he has a
backyard astronomy and he uses DSLR and I was at his house on Friday night and
his astral images are just stunning um so impressive so I get it I mean
there's people like yourself and other people who are just knocking him dead with that and I'm sorry if I made it
sound like you're at the low end of the spectrum you're not what he has done and I'm sure what you're doing is just
amazing so I'm sorry if I made it sound that's okay and I I've done it I haven't
done it for many years but there's a passion for it and it's just with each
image it gets easier and better and a lot of what I've done lately is just go to
where it's dark in Michigan we do have places that are darker and less signal
to noise coming from the sky really helps I mean it's and that's just one thing that um that I've noticed so it's
it's a Pursuit it's a passion it isn't necessarily to be better than Cesar who
I know is coming up next but it is but it is just real quick my luck my own
love of the night sky that drives me so are you gonna stick around for the after party Bob
um yeah I wasn't going to I have to get up really early tomorrow morning to go travel but yeah I'll stick around you stick around
for the after party let's carry my conversation so let's move on that's fine with me yeah I'll be around I'm
gonna duck out for a minute now but um then I'll be back
okay all right so um we had a great discussion it was it
was all good and healthy here but uh uh we do have um up next here is Cesar brolo Caesar is
uh at Optica siraco in Buenos Aires Argentina
um uh Cesar are you still on with us there we are great this is our
um uh it's he's been on many of our programs he has been one of our hosts
guest special guest host on the global star party and uh we always enjoy this
is ours adventures in uh you know rooftop Imaging from his uh from his
balcony and uh the uh the great work he's doing in
um you know renovating uh you know a uh historic Observatory complex in
Argentina so Cesar I'll turn it over to you hi hi it's God hi everyone uh yes we are
waiting the the lunar eclipse uh tonight or in in the
morning early in the morning and uh uh well uh I I found some all pictures
from them from the last lunar eclipse in
in 2018 2019 sorry the same year that we have
the the total solar eclipse in San Juan in Argentina especially and
uh uh well I I share some videos and pictures of of
the my life my latest uh
pictures of lunar eclipse I don't know if you can
see now here let me yeah
um okay well this is the the the today 2004 uh lunar eclipse in Argentina
I I make a uh the experiment to make the the
different uh different sequence of of the eclipse a hard part really
um was was my my first my first uh
experience uh in in the in solar
eclipses this one was the the latest Eclipse uh we we went we went to the
where to the in the River Plate Coast that is near from my to my home uh in
the Buenos Aires uh Rio de La Plata River that is uh uh 60 kilometers 60
kilometers wide it's like a sea but this is of course only fresh water no soil
water it's not the sea it's only a river
maybe one of the widest rival in the world
um we have an opposite to to next eclipse in few hours uh this one was in
the rising uh of the real reason and we prepare we made a small Safari where the
people go to fish in the in the you know in the in the
the coast of the river this was some pictures that night I don't have uh my
camera prepared and used only in a in a in the worst way the
my cell phone um and well what was more of uh that we
had fun with people that came to make a a smaller Safari
here we are we are all friends that that you know say okay I can go to the to the
to the coast to the uh how do you say in English uh when you
have this area well I don't know it's the cause it's an area where the people
go to to walk the right right biking and
the password yeah thank you thank you and uh we uh we
went to this place and we've uh people that normally we we meet uh in different
third parties and and uh of course eclipse or different things
and uh yeah well here is a small video
or this is yes
this is something social because it's
you know this is the place here we had an airport near to the place
because it's at only maybe three kilometers from my home Palermo in
Buenos Aires um of course that we have a very fun this is my Sonar
you can see the small one that is 90 millimeters refractor was great right I
I took all pictures that I took I took it with this telescope
and was a great telescope that we had from the from the eclipse in San Juan we
carry a lot of this for the people to use and take pictures with their their
cell phones and I had a very very great experience of filming and take pictures
with this telescope is this you know there are videos
I don't know if the people yeah well very noisy sorry and uh
we we had fun uh taking pictures this is uh another
another uh eclipse from 2015 2015
and he there here I used the uh
um another telescope or Microsoft I I don't remember exactly what that was
that from the rooftop in my in my home
and well this is the this is the from the from the clips of uh
of uh 2000 2015. and uh well I'm preparing
with this to to for tonight and I using actually using uh
[Music] not a telescope for tonight if not on the camera but it's okay
it's okay I need more with a 300 millimeters
and using in apsc sensor I have near to 4 400 400
millimeters and it's great for to have a not so uh for this kind of eclipse in
Argentina this time for for this lunar eclipse uh really is something that we
only we only we
could shoot could shoot sorry um the first time of the eclipse
um maybe uh we don't know how how
how many uh will can can see the
difference with the shadows and the colors because actually normally in in
this maybe in 10 different 10 degrees over the horizon when the when the the
shadow is starting to be more visible uh uh the moon uh is turning red and you
have maybe the the situations where
you know the things are mixed with the colors and maybe
we don't see really uh a gray effect of the clips we don't know
if it's something that maybe it will be great awesome or totally say okay it's the
same we can see nothing because it's it's only the first part uh
of of the eclipse well but I can go to sleep now and I return to to share the
live image at our local from our local time of 6 PM
or where is Central Time is for a I think
from the eclipse is is here this the UTC
is uh almost nine hours
yes six yeah six a.m 6 a.m yes we have five five hours to go to sleep yeah
when you actually when you do these um Outreach programs and show people what's happening and
something like the clips because I'll never forget the reaction from my neighbor who had come out of his house
and you know he was just doing whatever he was doing and he sees me with my telescope and you know because I got my
lasers and cameras and and then first thing he's like saying he's like what are you looking at and I was like I'm looking at the moon he's like so what
what's the big deal this is like why don't you actually look up and look at it oh yes and it's
what usually what is the reaction from people that you get because the Moon is such a mundane thing to everybody but
when they see it what is that reaction like to you it is so fun it's so fun because when you go to the public place
of course that the people that are in the videos that I show uh it's people
that is from they are all amateur astronomers maybe what they was only you
know seven or eight uh or eight people but they are amateur server but
the fishing the Fishers the Fishermans that that all times are in the in the side
work of of the place of the river uh there was really uh with a mix first of
all that they know something wrong with the moon and and they came
to us to ask what is you know what is wrong with the mom now because it's hard
move I have raw and red or and it's every every time is fine because you
have the it's fun because it's do you have the opportunity to explain and the
people say whoa and watching your telescope uh I think maybe it was
something like I love it yes this is the most Islamic hey dude
yes hey dude yeah yes all people all the time all the time in Argentina the
people you don't need invite to the people that came to to to
came to see to the telescope that all people is curious and social and you
know it's a it's an uh it's another immigrant a country and we are a mixer
all people don't have any any problem to say is it possible to to make something
and you make something different or curious uh you know maybe I am the same
when the people fish something big and I oh who is Euro how kind of fish is you
you fish you know it's the same when I I uh I use a tennis in public places it's
yeah you you you need to be prepared to to explain to the people's
yeah some some some type of Kings but I think that people is is smarter
than the media this is incredible but sometimes in the media you can listen
the more stupid things about eclipse moon and say okay this guy is really
talking about this in TV I can't believe when the people want the people normal
people that don't understand astronomy uh many times most of the time they explain
you they sorry they ask you about the questions in the in a in the right they make the
right uh questions this is incredible because maybe it's a
you know a fisherman they say okay what's wrong with the moon why and I
said okay ah you you can see for example in in a in a in moon eclipse this was
interesting because we have a the driver is like you see because we can see we
can see another another cause of the driver and is is
how you say the idea or C of uh see the
moon in Eclipse where do you have the the shadow of the heart
here and do you have your horizon that you're watching it's great because for
have an idea of okay you you see a flat Horizon but when you
see the project you you see the entire uh the entire Shadow cure and they say
oh okay it's not flat I don't know about I I never I never
um I never found people start talking with
me I was looking Maybe for in especially in Eclipse that say
okay this is impossible because they are flat now fortunately never I I couldn't
I don't have the the the idea of of
the opportunity to explain that but yes that the people have more
idea um is more Curious and it's it's really nice share image in your telescope or
explain something or think simply ask about this type of of events this is great
really and and I prepare uh to go and in four hours
more yeah six five hours more go to the rooftop but really I need to go to sleep
a little and return at tomorrow
it's okay for me it's okay for me but it's it's because
um tomorrow I I have I don't have uh are you having sorry with having uh
we'll be having a hard uh work day because we have
Monday and today we have today holidays is a patriotic day with this information
yesterday was a holiday and uh well okay
I have a very very related work for tomorrow it will be a nightmare okay
it's normal it's tomorrow is like like a Monday by the way
I just uh thank you it's a pleasure and I I we return
in a few in five hours with my my image
my my mom Eclipse image from the rooftop I
I I wanted to let you guys know that I just stepped away to take a um a call
from Christopher go in the Philippines and so he's got his rig set up and
everything and uh he's actually going to come on after he has lunch he's getting lunch right now so uh we'll continue on with
our program and uh uh we'll see some some live images coming from the
Philippines uh somewhere towards the end of this program uh and then if uh Skies hold up
I think Chris is going to try to get the eclipse live from the Philippines as well so
so that's all cool okay so uh up next is Maxie Maxie
um uh thanks again for coming on to Global star party and uh you know we we
love your images we love your uh your creativity and uh your Technique and um
so uh thanks we'll we'll uh we'll turn the uh the show over to you well thank
you Scott again for inviting me hey thank you see sir Adrian Simon I saw
your pictures in Instagram it was amazing with the sun it blows my mind
I started to follow you so okay
um well I I only want to show you what I
did in 2019 uh in that year we had two
uh lunar eclipses one was presented by Cesar in July I I remember it was 14 but
at the beginning of that year in the 21 of January
uh we have another one so I'm going to show you my screen to
that in July I couldn't take any pictures because when it start when the
eclipses started I was working so I only crossed the street see the sky and so
that orange maybe oh I wanna I I I
wanted to be in my home with my telescope my camera and everything but I
was working uh so tomorrow uh I will try to take pictures of a partial eclipse in
the rooftop of my house so then I'm going to work
so I will sleep very shortly oh my God okay
that's like a real astronomer so yeah yeah and also we are in maybe five or
six degrees Celsius so it's very cold cold
yes yeah well let me share my screen
okay everyone is seeing yes okay well this is was December my
butt beautiful image this is a little bit what I did
in that time in the 21 of January in 19
2019. here's our three Scopes this uh a very
Newtonian shorts and this was my first telescope with my brother
but here's the max YouTube and and 32 IPS and that's my cell phone
see and here's the moon some Stars yeah I think was very age
seconds of picture so uh
here's my brother Christian he's watching right now
he's my a sister-in-law peronica my nephew
uh no I think no you you see me yeah we see you sorry I'm
just hit continue and here's my dad my brother Christian my another brother Sebastian and me and
he watching the skies the same night and here's where they start beginning
here's uh doing in uh ocular projections
okay by the cell phone up of the eyepiece so this is where I started you
can see the shadow I think maybe this night it could be like this very
above the Earth the Horizon but
this is taking pictures on this is what you see uh
um through a telescope okay you see the shadow you see the moon and
that's it but when you start to take pictures with
some maybe two seconds of exposure you have to start to see the the color that
you're seeing without the telescope and here's a start that Shining
so this is basically I think was four seconds of exposures
there's some tiny stars behind the moon and that's blow my mind in that time
and you can see it's working and this is a
finally picture that I edited this one was all with cell phone
always whereas with the cell phone yes by ocular projection
so I don't think tonight is going to be this way because in totally was a
besides the The Horizon so
maybe it's going to be like this or maybe less but in a short exposure
maybe the bridge of the moon will
kill the the picture but the another one maybe has some color but we have some
Cloud Skies coming from the southwest
see here's Buenos Aires let me Zoom it
right here Cesar and I'm here I'm right here in this 60 Friday
so you can see the clouds are disappearing
and appearing and they are very thin clouds but
is the the the weather in here because it's
very wet in the Pampa it's very wet so
okay I'm still I'm starting to stop the the screen and to share it and
that's it I I only want to show you how I what I did with my cell phone
so everyone who can do uh you can still doing taking pictures
of almost eight seconds and that's it you don't need anymore so
thank you for inviting me thank you and well I think I'm going to sleep yeah
get some rest get some rest he have some coffee ready for when you first wake up and uh
yes I my my fiance is coming home maybe five o'clock oh maybe six he's a nurse
he's working right now so I'm talking right here in Miami because if she's here maybe not but
[Music] um she told me that maybe I can
fall out from the rooftop and
she will help me if I fall out nice she
would be she will be sleeping but uh okay so
I will leave you with Adrian I try to be
in the uh now start party but I my eyes are closing right now
okay so thank you everyone hey Maxie thank you
okay okay see you later all right everybody
well I'll be even quicker than that because I've only got four slides but um
okay yeah this is this is gonna we're gonna rifle through it right now I'll share
uh screen so those that are still hanging on you're seeing a couple pictures I took January 2019 unlike uh
this lunar eclipse it was cold it was out there I didn't have to cool my
camera because it was zero degrees uh Fahrenheit
um when we took these photos so let me move this over here
and I will play the slideshow so this is
with an old 30d I took this photo as the moon was being bitten in half the shadow
crept up this um this photo you have the Beehive cluster over here it was it
wasn't of course the best of photos but my thing was you can see stars during the total eclip or during the total
lunar eclipse here's an image you've got some Starlight are they the best images
no but they give you an idea of what you see when total totality happens at night
this image I like a lot just because I was able to image that many stars
there's a moon during totality you don't often think about when you see images of
the moon um we may not
um think about the fact that there's all these other stars now when it happened in 2019 uh
what was it uh 20 yeah 2017 I think or I I forget but it was um
it was directly overhead and this is just about South right here and um
you were able to see all the stars and image all of the stars as if you were shooting
a moonless night scene you just had this this darkened Moon which I actually
brought up the exposure a little bit oh that's cool and that's that's the moon
and these are all the stars um you know not shot with the equipment
that I have today um if the opportunity came back I would of course try and shoot this you know
with the equipment that I have now and get a you know get more Milky Way here if it were you know during the winter
um but that's that's the you know with lunar totality you have the sky back and
then as it goes away the Moonlight brightens back up and you
know your Sky gets washed out again with the uh Moon Adrian
stuck a picture this was not a stacked picture this was
a 10 second exposure um with a kit lens an F at F35
ISO 1600 on an old 30d aps-c camera
the picture the the lens now yeah the lens was a kit lens it is
like a a lens that comes with the camera when you buy it in stock
um and this was this was one of those where I didn't even use a tracker on it I
didn't have the tracker at the time I just I went with you know a 10 second exposure
and then you know I didn't get as much detail in the Stars here and but I my
whole point of this shot was stars um and just seeing you know the moons in
the sky but yet you can get all these stars and um this was this was in the backyard of
uh the house of a person sadly is no longer with us but um his skies were maybe
Bortles four to bortal five it was uh it was pretty decent we would go there and
Visually observe um in the back of his house and on this
night it was around it was near midnight when uh lunar totality occurred and we
took a few pictures we went in every few minutes because it was cold I mean zero
was it the Fahrenheit scale hit zero so it was definitely gold so
um so that's that's my uh lunar eclipse my best lunar eclipse story I've seen
the solar eclipse yeah I'm hoping to get some uh I'm hoping to get some better
images um you know as time goes and I'm
actually I'm actually debating whether I'm going to get up if our cloud cover I will briefly share one
more time and then Christopher go go because uh I'm gonna be in you all
can enjoy this site is showing that right around the time this whole thing starts
at my house I've got mid-level clouds and low-level clouds I don't know you know there aren't many
high level clouds but it's like this is you know go time is right here and then
you've got sunrise um it goes below the Horizon when it gets into here
um the moon's gone so it's not looking good which just
simply might mean I may be sleeping through it if there's a break in the clouds watch it live online watch it
live online yeah yeah that's all I end up doing I'll get up and just watch it live yeah everyone else that's right or
or I'll be I'll try to peek out the window see if it's clear you know but
other than that I try to to submit if I
can with my cell phone in the app so okay yeah yeah
I'll watch along so so yeah that's uh it's gonna be it's
gonna be fun it's a a sun rising lunar eclipse and I did see
one of those before um we saw one we had somebody uh Brian Adam who I'm trying to get you in touch
with Scott um that can that also does remote astrophotography so his rig was in
Mexico at the time of a a total lunar eclipse it was just like this one it
would only show up in the western part of the globe we were able to watch
it in the morning at his house um as he remotely projected it so it was
it was cool to see so that is cool yeah so it's similar basically similar to what's going to happen in another four
or five hours yeah right here so that's awesome yeah so awesome my presentation
and I'm sticking with it thanks Adrian thanks for coming on again um and we look forward to seeing you on
the next Global star party as well um so uh all the way from the Philippines
uh uh we have Christopher go uh on with us and uh
um I I trust you had a a good lunch and um what do you got in the scope Chris
um no I'm right now in my office so um okay right now because uh you know it's daytime here it's about oh that's okay I
just had my lunch and uh yeah unlike you guys um I don't have to wake up early totality is around 7 pm here so uh
unfortunately we won't be able to see the whole partial phase because it's well the the moon will be rising
partially eclipsed um usually I would image the eclipse using a DSLR and uh my Celestron C8 with
a reducer but uh for the past few days I've been trying to test a new camera
that I got from qhy it's a color cam uh it uses an IMX 485 chip and
um let me share my screen okay
okay so um here's an image of the Moon that I took using a 70 millimeter refractor
this one wow yeah nice so uh now if you want to say wow this is what I mean by
wow no way a 70 millimeter
this is a 70 millimeter uh uh refractor and uh this is a an 8
megapixel camera and I might be using this camera for the eclipse in it's a
BSI back illuminated chip so the problem with the dslrs or the DSLR that I have
is that it still has that IR blur or that each Alpha blocking filter and because you know when you have an
eclipse um uh you know the moon is red so this this camera will be far more sensitive
and uh if you can look at the resolution this camera I can get probably a higher resolution than just using a DSLR so um
I'm excited with this um this is an example of a you know an image of the eclipse using my C8
yeah so uh a beautiful copper color it's really
pretty it's blurry it's blurry
you can you not not as sharp as the so I'm excited with what I can get uh with the new
camera and the reason why I also wanted to to use this camera is because if I use a DSLR we're not going to get any
live view and I was just thinking of you Scott so uh okay uh with this camera not only
will I get a higher resolution but also a live view everybody can see what I'm capturing
remember when we were having the conjunction yes where you had the live view where we're gonna have we're gonna
do the same uh tonight so um while I'm Imaging I'll be capturing in between so
uh this is gonna be a short totality I mean this is the shortest I think I've ever
as far as I can remember this is the shortest totality I've ever experienced uh here it'll be around 18 minutes
more or less yeah so it's a it's it's a fairly short so um I plan to take an
image every minute so one thing you'll notice um tonight the the moon will not
be completely red so the the I think uh one of the edges I think the northern Edge
is gonna be bright even during totality right so uh it's gonna be like this one
uh this image here you can see the bright uh you know part of the uh moon
is bright in fact it'll be brighter than this one because this was a fairly deep Eclipse so uh we'll see tonight uh
you know I was I was you know I was so depressed the last couple of days because you have a huge Cloud uh cover
in our area uh there was a uh no this is supposed to be dry season but we had a
tropical system tropical depression a few days ago and uh would you believe um
we're at actually at the tail end of the cloud and uh right now it's sunny now so
it cleared around 10 10 a.m this morning and uh the wind from the Northeast everything east of us is clear so um I'm
confident that's why you know how depressed I I was uh when I kept messaging you Scott
right it's like bah humbug
well I think we're gonna have something tonight so oh that's great that's great well I'm glad lifting our fingers and uh
we're gonna have a very nice live view very high resolution even with a 70 millimeter refractor so uh it'll be
great okay well that's wonderful um okay well that that's great I uh for
those of you who don't know Christopher go he's world renowned for his uh planetary images
um he lives in the Philippines but he's traveled around the world to be it uh
astronomical conferences to give talks and lectures and to show his work and share his ideas
um and we've all been inspired by him uh and uh you know Christopher also put on
uh during that great conjunction uh you know just amazing um uh you know panel of people that uh
uh you know that showed the was it that time Chris when when you
hosted the global star party no it was different we had an Asian version of the globe that's right oh that's right that
we had an Asian version and yeah he had amazing people on he had a guy on that had his his Mount mounted in his
bedroom okay it's just aiming through a little window
okay and it's just like you know let's just move the telescope back and forth
to uh to get these amazing shots from Singapore incredible images incredible
images yeah now there's no excuse anymore I don't
want to hear it okay if this guy can do that you know I don't know how he polar
aligned in that little in this room and the the telescope is up against almost
up against the wall okay of his bedroom uh amazing you know so the just
undaunted amateur astronomers you know never tell an amateur astronomer he can't do something because they'll
figure it out you know so it was amazing anyhow I I look forward to doing that
again that was that was just such a fun time um anyway I can give some tips for those
who plan to image this one okay especially for the first timers uh be
mindful of the focus uh try to focus before totality and uh for those of you using the dslrs
what you should do is uh you know there's a live view on uh not just dslrs
right now I'm sorry we are using mirrorless right now right but uh for those of you uh who are
using cameras um try to get into live view and um what you do is there's a zoom feature
just zoom to the you know the deepest zoom and focus from there
uh and once you get the focus lock it um if you plan to image you need at
least you know uh at least 400 millimeter and above uh to get a you
know decent image of the Moon um uh but the focus is very important uh uh
during partial phase after you focus uh you know you can leave it for totality uh when you do totality as I think some
of you may have said um it's gonna be like a little deep Sky Imaging because the the moon's gonna dim
up uh it's not gonna be totally like moonless but uh you know it's it's it's
still going to be pretty dim uh you'll probably go to exposure times of about one to two seconds and uh in most cases
you'll be able to see stars so uh you know just be patient uh and also don't
forget for those of you using cameras capture in raw mode uh you know uh you get better uh image
quality that way hi Simon
hi buddy nice to see you again sorry I'm muted right this second because uh I actually have a gap in the
clouds but I I fall I know this could last long enough until um whatever o'clock
[Laughter] I'll be back you'll be back okay it's
called if you let me I want to thank you Christopher because uh when I started to
do planetary pictures I saw all the the YouTube tutorials and that's helped
me a lot to practice with wavelengths and race stacks and everything and also
with with your boss so it's a pleasure to be here with you
and talking to you right now yeah it's my pleasure also to be here thanks great to see you guys yeah by the
way Chris you have some um some questions uh one of them is from Harold Locke uh he was looking at that image of
the uh you know the I guess the black and white image that you had of the Moon there and he went to know is that qhy
image stacked or a single shot it is stuck it's about it's a 30 second capture
yep okay so it's about probably 1 000 images
oh wow okay all right and then we have Beatrice Heinz uh out of Belgium and
she's asking how do you like the Nick collection for editing is it worth the
buy uh actually um here's a secret um there's actually a free version just
Google uh just Google Google Nick uh there's a free version for that I
actually use Nick for sharpening in fact Nick was used to pre-sharpen this image
of the Moon you do I do use Nick it's a good
software um there is a free version uh just Google it but I'm the problem is it's
not gonna work with the latest version of Photoshop probably the older version but uh I would say it's a good it's a
good software for sharpening this is uh I see something this is
download the latest version of Nick collection by dxo is that it okay so uh
there's there's an older version because what happened was that Nick used to be Nick then Google bought it then it
Google gave it away for free for some time and uh for those of you who can download
the free version it's it's it's uh it was about a year then what happened was that Google sold it to dxo
uh just just uh just Google Nick collection free I think there there is
yeah there's something called lenscraft.co.uk it says how to download the Nick collection for free
[Music] okay yeah there's some uh
okay just actually downloaded uh is it possible to get free download yeah yes you just uh go through those links and
you should there is a free version but I said as I said it's not gonna work with the latest version of Photoshop
and you need Photoshop to run Nick so uh but if you have the latest version I
would say go ahead and buy it yeah 150 bucks yeah so it's not the cost
of an eyepiece uh just wait for uh July for uh they normally have a big sale
stop there you go there you go awesome
okay well that's wonderful uh Chris does anybody else have anything to uh add
before we take like um a few minute break here and then we'll come back with
the after party and finish up with any other comments before we uh try to get a
little shut eye before uh Eclipse time what
I'm just getting started my view of the moon so oh wow nice not that much special unfortunately
although this is actually if you're wondering why is it so small um I'm actually using my
gfx camera uh as soon as Chris stops his screen share wait a sec let me stop this okay
so yeah you can see the moon right there indeed
hey I see some uh chromatic aberration is that or
actually that red is telling me that my image is in Focus because I'm actually connected directly to my um oh FX Camera
so you can see me doing everything so if I do a playback
it shouldn't comes back quite twice as strong oh well
it just doesn't work at all one of the two and does that so you can see
I haven't actually tried this before doing it with this particular setup so it's still relatively new in that
fashion but I will get a regular astronomy camera back on there I just thought I'd take a couple of shots with my gfx
camera because I quickly ran outside because I noticed there's a great big band a cloud wafting up over there you
can see it but the Moon is low enough down this side for me to get it when it
gets all the way to the other side you'll actually see it theoretically in the background over there but my house
is in the way there is a tree and a mountain and I know so this area so well
that that tree sits the top of the tree sits at exactly 25 degrees
it's gonna screw me you have time
this tree is huge this damn tree is like 78 feet tall it's like
yeah I I have a nice view to show you guys
wow so this is the this is with a I think an astrophysics five insure Factor
uh the moon and uh you can see with background Stars
where's the Moon tonight located Scorpio oh this is gonna be nice so we
can see the Galaxy um I know somebody who's going to be doing a a somewhat long exposure so
it'll show up right next to a row of yukas because I believe um Antares is right next to it
is in in I think well here is the left of
the Arnold Scorpio no the the ride the ride sorry
yeah hold on a second I'm gonna fix what this weird problem is okay okay stop
sharing I have to go to bed
it's almost Maxi thank you thank you you have uh you've stayed the course that's
it's wonderful but get some rest and then uh we'll all try to come back um
so maybe I can do because I was uh because I will with
my cell phone I have the the two cameras maybe I can
change the camera so you can see in live view the the moon okay yes
I will start you know I'll start the uh the broadcast or the zoom uh login early
at about uh what did I say
it's 11 47 right now yeah okay and uh let's see so we have two hours
from difference yes it's zero five four seven so the
early logon will be 4 a.m my time okay so six wow a.m okay make sure you
wake up Scott I don't think I'm gonna go to sleep really I gotta sleep it's dangerous because then I don't wake up
so you know I remember when we had that one eat a
sandwich take a shower you know and then I'll be back so okay guys see you later all right
no thank you so much
great so uh do you guys want to take a little
break or do you want to uh continue on uh let's take a little break so I can get this guy up on there because okay my
other camera okay bio break for me but yeah all right so
here we go and then Simon what what camera are you using that's a huge one wait which one this one or the one that
I've got up there the other one that one it's the 2600 MC color wow well of course it's
the eclipse we want to see it in color but yeah I gotta get this sucker on
there first yeah my problem is that I don't have a big color cam I only have a uh uh yeah I
only have a monochrome yeah no this camera is so overkill for
this purpose but you know if it's worth overdoing let's just do it anyway
all right let's go for your buyer breaks I need to uh you know mess with stuff here okay bye
okay guys see you tonight I'm leaving also need to work okay
okay Scott bye
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thank you people
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well hello everybody we are back uh in what we call the after party and it
looks like it's just Bob Denny he's Simon tang and myself at this point uh
Chris Christopher goes left the room uh uh you know and um Adrian uh Bradley is
off to sleep and uh so it's up to us guys
hey Simon yeah you know what Scott we we need to let Scott go the two of us can
hook up later Simon's got here let's see what he's got
we got a few okay all right sorry I gotta reconnect the device because I don't know why it's decent I'm sorry I I
thought Simon though you know whatever we want to talk about we can do it later yeah we could always do another session
yeah I don't know why it's doing this what's going on whatever you're doing that's cool well there's always one way to skin a
cat as they say so if I do it this way screen share uh
uh my desktop gone oh screen here it is
there you go we have a moon right now uh this is right 2x Barlow and the 2600
yes it's a little Overexposed right this minute and that looks great in color
believe it or not oh yeah
but yeah uh I I completely forgot that this this camera with a 2X Barlow
runaway deck uh with a 2X Barlow the extension tubes that you need is quite
severe right
so yeah we have a moon um like I said there are clouds um it's kind of hard
for you to see is that what's going on right now is it kind of dimming down a bit yeah it'll it'll kind of blink
you'll see it dimmed down and at some point or right now there's no big clouds patching in the way but I'm not over the
far Horizon and I do see stuff happening over towards
um Los Angeles National Forest and the actual angelie's Crest mountains but they're
far enough away so I'm hoping that this is going to go on I think it will be like this I think it were five hours
it's gonna clear up for you I think so right yeah I think you had it brighter
before and if you brighten it up a little bit from at least our perspective it would look there that's good that
looks good yeah now we're getting there and something's flying in the front of
the camera don't know what that was uh no it's not aliens are you sure
can you prove they're not aliens that's what I want to know that it was not a UFO put it that way
UFOs jeez I'm sorry yeah yeah anymore Bob they're
uaps do you believe is another person I believe in them God there are people who
you know it's okay to believe in whatever you want to believe but
is it science you know no no not yet data versus interpretation right there
right but you know Scott um the chances are I
will probably get the pr number but I will not get the Umbra
well number is good enough for me yeah it's good enough for me I'll be we'll be
up we'll be streaming early enough to cover parts of that as well you know
it's part of the eclipse and so um and you got a live view right now so
you know we're good we're good it's all it's all the astronomy experience especially for an eclipse like this and
it's the only one this year so right we got to get it and it's a super
moon right well yeah that's probably why it's so damn big it usually doesn't fill the frame like this no I'm kidding
it's much closer right it is much closer well yeah much closer and full moon I
was gonna say what's the percentage of this moon it's like 12 larger than usual it's not a 14 I know that
mm-hmm I I've got to look that one up but as you can see this is not actually a completely full moon because if you look
at the top edges especially up here they are still in Shadow because of the way
the craters look there so this is not oh I can see that yeah that's interesting yeah
I bet you guys didn't notice that it's pretty cool Bob did I didn't you know I
thought it was just full you know so yeah it's not a true full moon it's like 99.8 and I think by the time we get to
the uh Eclipse it'll be a true full moon it'll be yeah it has to be right yeah Yeah well yeah you're right
that's right otherwise sorry yeah we're getting there we're getting
there this is the beginning of the eclipse you know it's really cool that you can see that mm-hmm
I don't know if uh people at home can see all of it but guess what we can also do yeah there you go zoom in just just
zoom in oh yeah on the edge check it out oh look at that oh there it is I love it
there's some Shadow yep you can see the mountain oh look at that crater right there you know I love that very very
edge yeah the seeing is a little bit questionable for obvious reasons that's
why I have clouds but you can make it out and yes uh Chris if Christopher go
was still here he'll mention that I've got chromatic aberration yeah you're right I do and he he would um show you something as
a result of a thousand frames oh yeah I mean I'm going to do a stack at some
point so you know I might just go ahead and do this but I don't know how long
Scott's going to stay up I know Bob you're going to probably scoot off but I'm gonna be like Scott if I go to sleep I will not wake up
right I have a early trip to leave on tomorrow so I'm gonna probably get some
rest Bob Simon that the the stuff that we were going to talk about in the after party I want to talk about but
um probably better to do that not tomorrow because I'll be gone but Friday maybe
Together Scott one day and as a as a star party sure
something that's probably more about the tech side of things and because I know
you do your other uh live streams that are probably more suited for something like this but I think having a
discussion and a debate because it can be a global star party we can have a uh we can have just a separate session
where it's a a technical session and it can be a one-off and if you guys want to do a series I can do a series it's it's
all I'm all good for it so you know well that would be true we've got uh for instance we've got uh uh
Caitlin Aaron she's doing a seven part series once a month and it's called seven months of science you know so it
could be 10 months of technology so you know that sounds ghastly
I'm not sure people will be like oh yeah right and thousand days of technology
[Laughter] so if I can keep broadcasting I'll just
keep going okay so yeah 24 hours of arguing about technology
and why it doesn't work right why are USB hub died that's a big one
that would be they'll be at ten thousand hours of us USB hub death yeah um okay
all right enough of that uh why are we still using oh God I must be punched
Rock right now so me too some um frames in and just keep
and then put up a very very very big screen and to stop the clouds from Rolling In so yeah
that looks great you're ready I could see like Moonlight coming through the
clouds here in Arkansas and it was so socked in earlier Heavy Rain you know during the day
so anyways I know the moon's out there somewhere so to all of you that were in the
audience today thank you so much I can see Beatrice is still checking things out Harold locks uh
Harold lock is um was with us we had uh uh Mike Wiesner
um uh uh Jeff wise um a bunch of people here
um that we're watching from around the world it was really great um had a very nice lineup of uh talks
and uh you know exciting astronomers to hang out with if you could be at any Star party and hang out with this group
of people uh yeah you would remember for the rest of your life you know so hopefully uh hopefully we've given you a
taste of what that's like and um uh you know and hopefully at one point we are
all together in real life somewhere yes um but if I get that put together Simon
you and I will have to team up and live broadcast it or something so that would be a lot of fun yeah definitely yeah
yeah and I do want to give a big shout out to you Simon I'm I'm able to talk
and close the show right now because of you so thank you very much trying to figure out what happened uh what did
happen was is that I got a Skype call from Christopher go and Skype decided to
take over my audio world which I had very carefully balanced before the show
so um uh so anyhow I guess we will close uh for now Bob
thank you so much you're most welcome you did not go on too long you know you were you were fabulous you know and uh
thank you for having me Hello thank you anytime anytime you got a permanent VIP
seat here so um and for all of you in the audience that have not been on global Star Party
definitely uh get in touch with us we'd love to have you on have you share your
passion and your your expertise or anything your journey uh even as a
beginner we'd love to have you on so um
we were all beginners you know uh and uh I wish I could go back through the whole
loop again you know it was it was fabulous you know yeah it still is but I I just wish I could could go back and
re-experience being a beginner you know your Saturn V thing opening
but I've got to tell you that was unbelievable yeah well thank you NASA
you know so well but you kind of put it together yeah I did I I yeah I I seek
that's true that's true I had to go out and find it so and it was fun it's great that you know
I I do think NASA on the NASA solar system Ambassador they give us such great resources I give the whole public
great resources for that but so does the European Space Agency Esa I mean they
they pump out the videos too and they make those available for all of us that like to do educational Outreach or you
know if you're a teacher or whatever if you're listening and you want to know how to get to those videos or whatever
uh get with me I you know I scour the web uh almost every day for videos like
that so and it was fun uh so we'll see you guys again
um the time that we will be yeah that's right in four hours we're going to be back on uh with the early log on at 4 30
a.m Central you know 5 30 Eastern 2 30 a.m uh
Pacific we will start the live stream again um and anyone that's got uh partial
views of the eclipse we'll we'll stream them going all the way up to the the crescendo of of totality and
um you know we had several people uh say that they would try to attempt you know
and Simon's one of these guys uh for sure um but uh we've got molly who's going to
be waking up Christopher go is uh is going to be there Caesar and Maxie they
they both might do it Jack Newton there's an outside chance that Jack might do it as well he is um uh he runs
in a an astronomy bed and breakfast in osoyu's Canada uh up there and uh just above Washington
State and so um we uh if he can get it if he can get
some uh some clear skies and a little bit of time away from his audience uh
that he's taken care of uh he'll try to live stream as well so we'll see what happens anyways thanks everyone for
watching so far I hope you liked it uh and uh Beatrice you're you're the last
one commenting here so thank you very much it's great to have you on and we'll see you okay
that's it good night everybody good night
I'm gonna blow out of this cup so I will see you in about four hours all right Simon take care okay Scott good night
I've got to get up early in the morning and bug out so all right take care be careful man bye thank you bye
thank you
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