Transcript:
7:00 p.m..Maxi Falieres - Live Skies Above Argentina
hmm
7:15 p.m..Sybella Burlingame – The Launch of Saturn I
[Music]
7:30 p.m..Ten Minute Break
hmm
7:40 p.m..Adrian Bradley - Night Scapes
all right
7:55 p.m..Molly Wakeling - AstronoMolly's Universe
isabella do you know what you're going to be for halloween um i'm still kind of deciding
8:10 p.m..Jerry Hubbell MSRO
still deciding you've got options that's great
i was asking my students and most of my students were kind of just staring at me as if you know
8:30 p.m..César Brollo - Live from Buenes Aires
they're too old to celebrate halloween and so i kind of teased them about it they said no no we'll be doing something we're just you know we're not going out
or anything like that i said but you have to give out treats like you got to be at home and see all the little ones in their costumes
8:45 p.m..Douglas Struble – Latest Images
and i was mentioning to them that years ago my house used to be known for giving out little toys along with candies
because i always used to buy halloween themed toys you know yo-yos and pull back planes and all sorts of things and
then somebody else in the neighborhood loved the idea and started getting better toys and drawing more decorations
9:00 p.m..Shelley Bonus & Steve Paskay - Zero Gravity
outside and so our attendance kind of dropped down i still have the toys but
we're supposed to do not as many kids come by anymore you're supposed to start handing out 20 bills you know so
9:15 p.m..Ten Minute Break
yeah well i got 475 kids last halloween so wow wow
covered here that's nuts that's fantastic they're
9:25 p.m..Carlos Hernandez
astronomers that do outreach during halloween you know but we're still yeah
yep so it's not that's probably not the right thing to do well if you put
your computer out beside your telescope you can and it's going to be a nice very low moon night so that'll be good uh but
9:40 p.m..Till ?
i i was i used to only give mars bars when i started teaching astronomy because i thought you know it's my end to just say
something right milky ways and mars bars well i think it was 2019 when i set the
record we've been over 400 for about 10 years wow we've got a very safe very safe
secluded neighborhood no through traffic and uh people
they flock to this area that's fantastic that's a story because i live in a city and we can't do that
you know that's that's a beautiful thing it's it's yeah yeah you should write about it that's really great
that many people the suburbs are lovely for that and getting to getting to see the kids creativity the ones who make
their own costumes especially or the ones who add like a little touch some are classic some are just classic
we have one of the gentlemen in our club trevor he runs this plateau astro where he does sidewalk astronomy in the middle
of the city and every year right around early september he goes out and he finds
these big cardboard boxes and depending on the size of box he dreams up his costume and he makes it from scratch
over the next month in his spare time so he's been a crayola box he's been a mailbox he's been a jet plane he's been
a transformer he just something different every year
it's a lot of fun to see and then he does little videos of him putting his costume together and then trying to go
out and walk around in this big box
scott what are you gonna be uh well being i'm scary enough as it is you
know i don't know i you know i have done all kinds of things um
uh i i think that uh um probably the most fun thing to be is um
you know i don't dress up like really kind of scary looking but uh something that you wouldn't expect you know so
right like long hair or something that you just wouldn't
you would have to look at me and go is that you scott scott dresses up as a high pressure
sodium light better than a high pressure salesman
right so the color orange would suit you
my brother dressed up as a bush a couple of years ago he would hide in the bushes and um
jump out when people walk by yeah yeah they're in san francisco on the wharf there used to be the bushman and he
would just sit there and wait for people to come by and scare the living daylights [Laughter]
oh that's so much fun it'd be cool if an astronomy club you know did halloween and they had to be
constellations or myths you know then you'd have a bit of we actually do a halloween yeah we we do a halloween
event for little kids and uh it's run by some of the students of mine and this year it's on zoom like it was last
year but uh normally it's in person and they do some activities we give out treats and then we show them the stars
we show them the planets wow that's cool
and i always dress as the astronomers biggest nightmare i wear an astrology cape and i carry a crystal ball
i thought you i thought you would uh the astro photographer's scariest thing is dress up like the full
moon okay everybody i just wanted to say that
wendy is here she's not on line with us but she is listening so wendy hi wendy hello wendy
here i hear your little voice back there
did everybody get something to eat or drink or you know stain you through this
were you sending us ubereats [Laughter] yeah i got some fedex packages coming
out to you guys yeah he's gonna call all the local i'll call the local pizzerias and send us all a pizza
oh yeah that's right isn't there like one eight eight eight number eight eight eight i ate a pizza or something like
that you know that would work that would work i ate a
pizza so scott are you doing a special global star party on uh sunday for all of us to
show off our costumes or are we supposed to have a costume on tuesday
i should have that would have been fun it's a global halloween party right
jovid could have broken out all of edgar allan poe's poems yes
i'll have to do that next year that would be fun i think so good idea so we got a lot of people already kind
of chiming in here senthil nagapan says hello and harold locke tarreck watching
from the uae norm hughes is watching we've got
rob and lisa fanning from new jersey uh chris watson
yeah david harold hey everyone yeah josh kovac thanks for watching
so yeah
okay somebody's got has got their computer on i can hear the audio feedback so
you want to uh silence that otherwise we'll get into a echo
you know loop
very cool those of you in the audience who are watching if you would so kindly share this and like it and subscribe to it
uh you know to help support these people who are doing educational outreach tonight so
but this is our 70th global star party and uh explore scientific is going to give away
a special door prize so if you have not tried to uh participate in the astronomical
league's door prizes you're gonna want to tonight okay so because we're gonna make it special
so chuck how hard did you make the questions then oh they're not too hard
maybe you should throw in something like unbelievably we're hard there's still time
[Laughter]
for the past 40 years astronomers have known that something about the cosmos doesn't add up
first in galaxy clusters and then within individual galaxies they found that visible matter
stars gas and dust cannot account for the motions they observe
no one knows what this missing mass now called dark matter actually is
but studies by nasa's wmap spacecraft of the cosmic microwave background the
oldest light in the universe show how much is out there dark matter outnumbers ordinary matter
by four to one the w map results also hint that dark matter likely takes the form of an as
yet undiscovered subatomic particle wimps represent one hypothesized class
of these particles they neither absorb nor emit light and don't interact strongly with other
particles but when they encounter each other they annihilate and make gamma rays
that's where nasa's fermi gamma-ray space telescope comes in two years of scanning the sky with
fermi's large area telescope have set the strongest limits yet for wimp dark matter
the best place to look for gamma rays from dark matter annihilation the most boring galaxies around called
dwarf spheroidals these faint tiny galaxies possess impressive amounts of dark matter but
they contain no gamma-ray emitting objects and little gas or star formation
in the currently accepted cosmology the first structures formed as the gravitation of dark matter corralled
normal matter simulations show that the largest structures formed in this way were comparable to the dwarf spheroidal
galaxies we see today it's thought that large galaxies like our own were built up from collisions
among these dwarfs using two years of data fermi scientists
explored ten dwarf galaxies for any sign of gamma rays from wimp annihilation
in this graph the dashed line marks the sweet spot where conventional expectations for wimp dark matter align
with what we know about our universe even when scientists combine all of the fermi data from all 10 of the dwarfs
they see no sign of gamma rays this limit shrinks the box where wimp-based dark matter may be found and for the
first time shows that the cosmology we know essentially eliminates some wimp types
the longer fermi operates the better its ability either to box in the nature of dark matter or to find actual evidence
of what it is and the discovery of new dwarf galaxies will make this search even more sensitive
[Music] although nondescript dwarf spheroidal galaxies may have been the first large
structures to form in the universe now they've taken center stage in the drama to solve astronomy's greatest
mysteries [Music]
[Applause]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explorer alliance and this is number 70
the 70th global star party we've been running this weekly since
about august 4th last year and it's been a real pleasure to bring you
all the programming that we have uh incredible speakers um that have
described everything from black holes to minerals to comets to you name it okay
live views from astronomers from all over the world and it's been exciting and a great way to
combine together astronomers from all over the world not only from the presenter side but from the audience
side too so it's just really been wonderful a pleasure and so we've got a great program for you
tonight including of course david levy will be on chuck allen from the astronomical league
will be joining us we have david eicher is supposed to be uh
coming on as well um in fact i'm not sure if he's on yet or not but uh
uh if not that that means he's got an internet problem or something but uh anyhow um uh we have uh uh kareem jaffer
and uh he's going to be introducing chris kerwin uh who does an outreach program called astronomy by the bay
uh we have maxi flares uh with live skies above argentina um cybele uh
a young astronomer uh young aspiring space explorer who'll be talking about the saturn
launch uh platform uh that uh from the 1960s that'll be very cool
adrian bella or cybella's cap will be giving me uh i am not sure
i'm not sure yeah maybe both uh we have adrian bradley who will be uh
sharing his nightscapes with us molly wakeling from astronomy's universe
jerry hubbell from the mark slade remote observatory uh cesar brola brolo live skies from buenos aires and uh douglas
strouball uh you know master of planetary uh nebula astrophotography
shelley bonus and steve pasquet uh will be sharing uh the zero gravity experience which is uh
totally cool from their recent trip and the and uh what's affectionately known as
the vomit comet uh and then carlos hernandez space artists will be with us tonight as well
so i'm going to turn this over to my dear friend david levy who uh always gives us um poetic uh
justice to the global star party david that's all yours thank you scott and it's really good to
be here tonight to talk about the interactive universe and i've tried very hard to find
something that would be appropriate for an interactive universe with me that interactive universe begins
with jupiter in 1960 on september the 1st
my uncle came by drove by and he said i'm giving
david an early bar mitzvah present and they gave me a box and we opened the box and inside was my
first telescope i needed echo because echo had was the satellite the
passive communication satellite that had just been launched and uh were all very excited about that
and i named it echo i thought i would keep the telescope very long and you're right i didn't i got it in my on
september the 1st 1960 and in
um 2010 about but maybe about
2015 or 16 about five years ago i donated echo to
the linda hall library of science where it still is to this day
when i first looked through that telescope at jupiter the first thing i saw through
a telescope i just fell in love i couldn't believe it galileo himself
could have felt no greater thrill than i that night when i saw the four galilean satellites
of jupiter and on that from that moment i decided that jupiter would be my favorite planet
and i think i made the right decision because jupiter actually and i had a
number of interesting experiences later on in life particularly the one that began on march
the 23rd 1993 when i took a couple of photographs
of the night sky that happened to include jupiter on the 25th caroline discovered a
comment on those photographs it was the most unusual comment she is she or any of the rest of us had ever
seen that comet eventually was named comet shoemaker levy 9.
i think we all know what happened that that comment it collided with jupiter and it's the first time when we
remember history of humanity that humans are able to witness a collision between two major bodies in
the solar system little comet and jupiter i was giving you i was on the lecture
circuit for quite a while in 1995
i gave a lecture at the million dollar round table and i was talking about the impacts and
i was talking about sl9 i was talking about my personal history with jupiter
and i told them the story about how my father was looking at the evening's kind and
saying daddy come look at the evening sky with me and he and mum came out and
boy did the three of us have a time that night discovering jupiter together as a group
it was fun while i was telling this story in the audience ken miedema
a blind pianist was writing some notes and at the end of the presentation he
came up and he played this song that tries to connect
my original sighting of jupiter in 1993 with the impact of sl9 and i'm
going to be sharing my screen to show this to you and the last time i tried sharing my
screen the computer fell apart and i had to throw it out the window very hard which
fixed it so let's see if that works if it's fixed too good
and uh here we go share and uh
it goes along with how we used to hit the television set to make it work well is the sound uh
is the sound gonna be on yeah if you just check share sound
before you share that okay so let's unshare let's unshare uh
how do i answer here i'll unshare you it'll make it easy
okay and uh
okay i think i can do this yeah share the screen
but check the little box before you commit it's checked okay you're good
and let's see if this is going to be fun for us
[Music]
[Music]
and we'll follow the course of the great sailing ship
to the ship sailing
daddy come look sky at the end
of tomorrow's dawn it's four billion years old
it's a mighty ship and it goes
[Music]
for the wonders yet to and come follow the course of that great
sailing ship until the ship comes
[Music] you thank you and back to you
great thank you all right so here let me
there we go and there we are and uh so that's great
um we uh always start off every global star party
uh with uh david's poetry his readings his thoughts uh
you know for me it really sets the whole uh the whole feel and the the you know the
um uh you know brings up the spirit of of exploring the
night sky and you know searching for you know your own origin that you might
find in exploring the stars right from your own backyard so um
up next is um we'll go to the astronomical league
and to chuck allen and we will start our door prizes but
the special prize that we're going to give away tonight from explore scientific
uh will be a 300 gift certificate and so you're going to want to participate in
that if you've never participated in the in the giveaway don't think you can't win
because you just might okay so um but uh chuck will describe uh how to do that
and uh and we'll go from there okay thank you scott i'm gonna go ahead and share a screen
let's see here
we want to make sure that everybody out there is safe and
that includes one of the most important senses that we astronomers have and that is our sight
and so we like to give this series of warnings to people who may be beginning
in astronomy or not familiar with solar observing uh never observe the sun
without professionally made solar filters that include energy rejection filters securely mounted at the front
end with the telescope not over the eyepiece never leave a telescope or binoculars
unattended in daytime where especially young children might try to access the sun with them
if you're using eclipse glasses make sure they're certified is safe and
come from a reputable source and the astronomical elite can help you with that and never use eclipse glasses with
binoculars or a telescope they're intended for looking directly up in the sky just with the eclipse glasses
and you follow these rules and you can observe the sun safely
especially with people in local astronomy clubs who know how to do it
these are our answers from october 19th one question is what happened to the international space station on july 29
2021 after a russian module docked and the module naca unexpectedly began
firing its rocket thrusters and as a result the iss lost orientation for
three quarters of an hour nasa's
insight lander measured the diameter of mars as molten core we asked what the diameter of that was
and it's 1137 miles or 1830 kilometers
closest to the right number gets the answer right and the witch head nebula was the answer
to uh this the question was in what constellation will you find this nebula
it is the witch head nebula in the constellation arrhythmis okay so we'll move on to the correct
answers from october 19th these names will be added to the door prize list and they are andrew corkel
dennis walsh rich eubank keith letourneau israel monterosso and cameron gillis
congratulations to you and here are the questions for tonight
october 26th please note that your answers should be sent to secretary at astroleap.org
email them to secretary at astroleague.org
question one the snake eyes are found in what constellations it's
scorpius serpens hydra or ursa major
number two which of these famous stars is by far
the largest it's pictured here is it the sun sirius
antares or arcturus
and finally this question is not multiple choice just give the answer for almost 50 years
this dwarf planet in the asteroid belt was regarded as a primary planet what's its name
and that will do it for tonight scott thank you let me let me add one little ad here for
our astronomical league live 11 program which will be held on monday november 15
2021. the reason we're doing it on a monday is because on that date the
astronomical league will be precisely 75 years old that will be our anniversary meeting our keynote speaker that night
will be alan dyer for those of you who heard his aurora program on virtual convention
in august uh you know that it's gonna be a great program it's how to photograph uh his program this time will be how to
photograph the november 19th lunar eclipse so we'll hope you'll join us for that and scott i'll turn it back to you
yeah thanks thanks very much that's great i have to say allen's presentation during the astronomical league virtual
convention on aurora and oh my god i was just blown away by those images in the
videos that he showed yeah uh you know they always give uh he
always gives a great presentation uh you know and alan dyer's been a mainstay
of astronomy for many decades uh so it's really it's always a pleasure to see him
present live you know so it's great um up next is uh
the editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine david eicher david has participated in many global
star parties already uh it's always a pleasure to have him on uh
he has he's taken us to the furthest deaths of the universe and uh to explain galaxies uh he has um uh uh
also brought us back to earth with his his amazing uh mineral and gem collection and his kind
of tied you know like like maybe like string theory somehow he has tied it all
together and uh uh you know and shown us you know all the different
facets of our beautiful universe all together so david i'm going to turn it over to you man
thank you scott thanks for having me again tonight uh and i'd like to share uh if i can
share my screen here a little bit about another mineral tonight
and uh that is can can let me see if i can start the slideshow here can you see the screen
good that's a good thing um and tonight i'm going to talk about a
different mineral that we have not yet talked about and it is called wolfenite this however
i'm using as a sort of an opener all the time as a tanzanite crystal um it's a
form of the mineral zoocite and of course many minerals are used as
gems um i thought i'd talk a little bit because of the theme tonight with a couple of
quotations david always shares fantastic quotations and and meaningful
shakespeare and and others with us i thought i'd i'd talk a little bit about order in the universe tonight and
mention a couple of heroes of of mine i believe in a divinely ordered universe
said thomas jefferson uh the statesman and president third president isaac newton one of our heroes
of the one of the founders of modern science said truth is ever to be found in the simplicity and not in the
multiplicity and confusion of things and there is of course great order in
the universe as we know through science in the last uh century or a little bit more through
astrophysics the universe is ordered though not by supernatural design we know now of course but by the principles
of physics minerals help to demonstrate that and i think there's a little bit of fun in
sharing these with an astronomy crowd because they're really planetary science and they're the way the universe makes
planets with ordered substances they're not an accident we don't need
any magic as richard dawkins likes to say to make science we have atoms that are assembled in
precise ways because of their nature and their electrochemical attractions the
inherent properties of those atoms and where they are and the temperatures and pressures that help to bring them
together and and build a planet so that's one thing that we are now in
the last few generations able to understand is that there is a real story of the
universe and it's not magic tonight i thought i'd talk a little bit
about wolfinite which is a favorite mineral of mine it's a lead mineral
lead minerals tend to be really brightly colored and so they're favorites with collectors
this is a great favorite of american mineral collectors especially because there are some great wolfinite mines
in the southwest particularly in arizona but also in lots of great localities in
mexico the type locality was originally in austria it's uh it forms tabular thin crystals
it's a secondary mineral this is a mineral in in hydrothermal lead zones uh
where lead ores re-oxidize and form these tabular crystals and it can be over a
great range of color orange yellow yellow honey yellow reddish orange gray brown olive green
sometimes even black it was named in 1845 in honor of franz xavier von wolfen
an austrian botanist mineralogist and alpinist and it forms a series with another very
similar mineral called stolzite uh and uh let me just see is this this
is not a new message that no okay i wondered if scott was urgently um requesting me for something
um sorry scott uh so this is a popular one and i thought i'd just share a few
examples of this one now that are very uh ordinary examples of what this thing
looks like okay now i won't first i'll show this forgive me
um here's the crystal structure of wolfenite and what this is is lead molybdate
lead molybdate uh consisting of lead and molybdenum along with a little bit of oxygen
and so you can see in this three-dimensional crystal structure diagram of wolfenite we have the gray
represents lead here the blue molybdenum and the red oxygen
and there we go okay it wants me to click on it tonight so now i'll just show you a few examples uh that are
things that i have in my collection that i've mostly found at the tucson gem show if you want to become a
rock and mineral and meteorite collector the best place to go in the world pretty much is the tucson gem show every
february there's also a major gem gem and mineral show in munich each year
this is a very uh famous locality it's called the red cloud mine
where this comes from this very bright intensely hot fire orange crystals of
wolfenite uh that's in la paz county arizona and this uh accompanied by some
quartz and some fluorite here on this specimen these are all pretty much hand sized specimens that fit into your hand
this is a sort of a novel find of wolfenite that was located in china a number of years
ago and gives you these sort of very hot orange
coloration of the wolfenite crystals and you can see there's still finely bladed tabular crystals here the
so-called what mineralogist called a crystal habit here's a very famous locality as well
for wolfenite this is accompanied the yellowish wolfinite with uh oranges mimity which is a similar
lead mineral this is from the famous san francisco mine which is in sonora
mexico that's a very famous mine for these lead minerals as well
this is an example of wolfenite uh from mexico as well and you can see it has
this sort of butterscotch color and thicker tabular crystal so you can see there's a little bit of variety
of how the same mineral forms often in different colors and in different
uh crystal habits and and structures depending on how long the
crystallization goes on and what kinds of fluids are there to make these
minerals this is another mexican example a very
bright tabular uh orange wolfinite from the eruption
mine in chihuahua mexico very famous locality as well
this is wolfonite the yellow uh glassy sort of transparent crystals along with
calcite this pinkish calcite this is an arizona a specimen from near gleason
arizona this is an interesting and relatively
recent find of this intensely orange bright orange wolfinite from iran
um from the esvahan province of iran that is uh just a about a decade old or
so this find of wolfenite of course we're finding more and more minerals and
other interesting things as time goes on because they're often found more or less accidentally when they're pushed up in
mountainous areas often this is from uh the type locality of
wolfenite i mentioned austria and and where von wolfen was from this is from
bob blyberg uh austria and and was close to the original locality where wolfonite was
first discovered this kind of honey yellow wolfenite crystals it looks like
and exactly and and this from the same area a little bit different uh
looking uh color and crystallization but also from the same area of austria there from
the stephanie mine this is again a mexican specimen that
that has these long uh sort of tubular crystals of wolfenite as well as
here greenish mimatite this other similar lead mineral from another
mexican location this is from the famous glove mine in
arizona and you can see these butterscotch uh colored wolfinite crystals and there's a little tiny
speckling of black uh lead mineral called decloazite here those little
balls on the crystals as well that you can see
and as a final here's going back to the eruption mine in chihuahua mexico and this is on a sort of an ugly
gray a plate of barite which is another dense heavy
mineral and you can see these really blocky bright orange fat crystals if you will of wolfenite as
well so that shows you it has a kind of a great range of forms uh even though it's the same mineral
so there's another one it's a favorite it shows the us how the universe likes to make planets
and there we go again it shows you also that lead can be beautiful they're very
popular with collectors so scott back to you from the uh momentary
division of planetary science thank you so much
yeah i mean you know if if you don't have a uh you know
people have asked me you know do you have to have what kind of gear do you have to have to explore the universe really you just have to use your senses
and uh and just to be aware because the the universe starts literally right in front of you so
um and it's within you too so that's that is uh part of part of the interactivity of of people
and the universe but it does and as we've as we've talked about before scott you know temperatures
and pressures and other things change vary all over the map of course but with
all the exoplanets that we're discovering now throughout the near space of our galaxy and no doubtless
they exist everywhere in all the galaxies of course these give us a sort of a glimpse of
what minerals would look like on other planets as well because we know through spectroscopy that chemistry is uniform
through the universe so holding this stuff in your hand not quite literally like a meteorite
that can be older than earth or from the outer solar system but it can give us a glimpse of what other planets are like
as well not just our own earth which is kind of cool that is very cool that's very cool
i'm curious david uh when you look at some of these mineral samples that you show us the crystallization is just
gorgeous the different shapes and the the way in which some of these crystals grow and interlace and you know you get
the toffee looking ones you get the disc shape what do you think when you look at some of the artists rendering of some of
these exoplanets and you know especially the tourism thing that nasa put together for the exoplanet tourist bureau how do
you do you feel like it captures a lot of that possibility absolutely yeah and of course you know
we all know that planets are uh just as common as giordano bruno
believed they were and boy look what happened to him you know centuries ago now now we know of course that the
planets are ubiquitous as of course of course everywhere uh it certainly looks like it's trending
that way um and so you know i you know it does give us this incredible sense of
variety that that you know if there are uh a trillion or more planets just in
our galaxy and there are 100 billion galaxies we know of 5 000 kinds of different kinds of minerals
just on our planet earth uh the the you know the variety of what chemistry can do in the uh you know i'm
not trying to sound like the sun of a chemist here forgive me but i was
but the variety of what chemistry can do in the universe and some of the exotic and amazing
uh worlds that no doubt are out there would boggle the mind even of the
scriptwriters of the first season of star trek
yeah that's that's a that's a valid point i mean i i was just you know i was talking to my students
last week about the europa clipper program and the whole plan and how dangerous it's going to be to try to
land where the ice forms inside and they were asking you know does ice really form like that out in the solar system
and and i was explaining to them the dynamics of jupiter heating part of it and the tug on the broken ice as it's
reforming and it's great to be able to show them examples on earth geology that leads
them to see that this is what happens like you do get these incredible formations and now we're seeing these
rocks from perseverance and from curiosity before on mars and we're seeing the shapes and the geologies
match what we see in dry beds here do you do you find that
are are you excited for the sample return from uh from bennu and the the sample for a return from mars down the
road or do you feel like the sampling process is going to destroy some of this crystallization
i don't think so i am very excited and of course crystals can form on very small scales dimensionally too so so i
think we'll be fine looking at at crystal habits and and what you know
let's hope we have you know a lucky sample coming back to us uh uh that's that's as as rich and exotic as it could
be um from these bodies but i think benny was gonna be very interesting for us of course the first comet sample return
um mission we we found the simplest amino acid in glycine in 2000 exactly
you know there's a you know what what might we find from bennu and and from mars ultimately and other bodies as well
and and you know the whole history i think it's just carrying on the heritage of us awakening truly as sober
scientists you know we've gone from this history of of you know human culture of
believing that we're the most special thing there is out there and i don't think it it brings us down to learn that
we're not really that special in in a special place we may be very special in
that that self-replicating living beings are special
but we're not in any special play the universe is full of special interesting places and we're going to see more and
more of that and even thinking about ice you mentioned cream which by the way look it
up is technically a mineral
right right in your freezer i'm so glad you started sharing
mineralogy this is fantastic well thank you i i didn't know if straight you know astronomers need something to do during
the day you know other than that so you know i found a lot of mineralogists love to
observe at our star parties out west at night and maybe some astronomers think that
planetary science and mineralogy is pretty cool during the day too it's very cool it was very cool
wonderful david thank you so much for for these i i think it's a very eye-opening and the and the samples you
have are just outstanding they're beautiful you know so
you know and just one more quick thing scott i don't want to go on too long but if people are interested in this stuff
you know it used to be as i've said back in the day before there were as many lawyers in the united states as there
are now you used to be able to go out and collect things in the actual areas
yourself and risk falling down a mine shaft you know you can't really do that anymore so now you can go to these
mineral shows as i mentioned and you collect things through buying them from dealers mostly
but you can get a very nice beautiful little examples of some of these crystals for very small amounts of money
so so i'm going to encourage anyone who's interested in this stuff look online shoot me a note at the
magazine go to the tucson show you'll be amazed at the kinds of things that you can
have and collect and look at and examine yourself right and david before we transition uh maybe
you could tell us a little bit about what's going on at astronomy magazine oh gosh
there's a lot going on [Laughter] um probably the the biggest thing we're
uh doing a lot with the magazine we have some big surprises we've been working on that are going to be special issues and
products that are coming in the next few months that i will tell you more about uh soon
we have a new website that is just about to be rolled out that is going to bring us right up to the present era on
the web and going to be fantastically more complex and deep in terms of content uh and we're doing lots and lots
of things with partners with the starmis festival next year uh with scott roberts
and explore scientific and with others with some joint ventures that that
people will hear about over the next year as well so it's we're busier than we've ever been the magazine's as large
as it's ever been we have a huge uh digital and social media following now so uh you know
strike us down for saying this the the pandemic was terrible disaster in so
many ways but it turned a lot of people on to astronomy and i think they're really busy with observing the sky again
yeah i would i would agree with that i think that people uh focused on
many things that were important to them number one family but also uh you know
looking up and exploring from as i said from your own backyard is very important and so
um i think that it strikes you know being outdoors and learning about your environment that uh
goes of course way beyond your fence line so uh is is really uh
something a lot of people discovered uh during this this very tough two years that we've
been enduring this so but there's always a silver lining
thanks thanks again david that's awesome well up next is uh kareem professor
kareem jaffer uh he is uh uh hosting um
chris kerwin and chris kerwin is someone that has been deeply involved in astronomy outreach uh
with his astronomy by the bay program i think that's the topic tonight and so
karim i'm going to turn it over to you thanks scott and honestly i've been trying to figure out the best way to to
introduce chris because i met chris a couple of years ago pre-coveted times he
was receiving an award from the rasc for his work in outreach and the award is actually called the killak award it's an
inuit term for dome of the sky and the award is given for exceptional work in
communicating astronomy to the public educating astronomy in the public or
exceptional outreach work and his came for exceptional outreach work and when i started chatting with him one of the big
things that i found is he went from being known as that guy on the beach with the telescope to being astronomy by
the bay and he developed this entire outreach program that
affects not just people in person at the beach where pre-kova times he was hitting three four thousand people
coming to him at the beach on nights and seeing what he can show them through the telescope
to having a facebook live following and starting a sunday night astronomy show before covet hit so he was
forming an online presence with his outreach activities before all of us ended up going that direction for
whatever reason we started going that way when the pandemic came and we found that we had to transition to virtual
chris was already online yesterday night or sunday night he celebrated the
hundredth episode of the sunday night astronomy show wow okay they've been going for a hundred episodes they've
been covering every topic under and what i really love about chris's outreach is
he encourages people to look up no matter what they have in front of them no matter what the conditions if they
can't get a view he shares his view with them on facebook and so i wanted to bring chris on because he epitomizes
what a lot of us try to do with our outreach and adrian and i were chatting about this whole idea of at the beach or
in the parking lot and just bringing astronomy to people and when scott chose that kip thorne quote for today it just
hit what chris and i have chatted about this idea that a lot of times people were turned off the curiosity was closed
off for whatever reason and these moments at the telescope or
chatting with them or with chris going into the classroom and talking to their kids and they come home excited about
astronomy it can reignite a passion and i think that's what we've all been seeing over these last couple of years
with covent so i'm happy to introduce you to chris and chris do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and
i know you've got a few slides to share and go chat a little bit absolutely thank you so much kareem for that uh
wonderful uh uh introduction and uh thank you scott for the invitation yeah thank you thank you
it's awesome awesome to be here um yeah you can see the awesome lineup of telescopes behind him
look there's always room for one more right right um no i can uh
i can introduce myself as as yeah i mean i've been in the hobby now for i guess 15 years um as an amateur astronomer and
i'm only an amateur tonight that's great because that's where i just want to be because i like to uh be comfortable
around people who are in the same level of experience as i am and my
my goal really is to reach as many people as possible and to bring in as many people into the hobby as i can i
try to be the the open door so i'm the welcome mat you know and come on in and uh once you get inside then you can go
after photography or go uh searching for comets or whatever you like to do you know
get you in the door is what i'm trying to do so i introduce a lot of new people to the hobby
and they range from uh you know young children to uh older children i'll say
in their 70s and 80s and still you know still enjoying it but these co times have certainly opened it up a lot i
think a lot of people are looking up a lot more now than they ever did and a lot of people are spending more time at home too they're looking for
hobbies so i get a lot of requests for people asking about what type of telescope i should buy or
what can i see with binoculars that type of thing so it's a lot of beginner kind of things but the following has grown up to about 12
000 followers now off the facebook page and about almost 2 000 on youtube and another thousand on instagram so it's
been growing just a little bit at a time but but nicely yeah it adds up that's
right it does and it's and it's so wonderful to be able to see so many people interested in that in that uh
that's this hobby it's just it's fantastic so one of the great things is you're so receptive to the audience and you one of
the things that i wanted to point out is chris actually gets the audience to send him pictures that they snap of whatever
topic they're talking about or just pictures that they snap of the moon and he gets them to ask him questions and
then they address them during the show and it really is this sort of a fostered environment where you can comfortably
express your your curiosity and that's that's where like that that whole welcome mat analogy is perfect
right the interaction is very important to me like uh i don't i i remember being a young boy and
you know wishing i had the opportunity to take a look through a telescope and i never had that opportunity right so um
and i know that every child has a question about astronomy they you know they've they've had in their mind that one question about who can i ask that
one question about and you know their parents relay those questions on to me and uh and in the classrooms you know
the environments are perfect because you've got a captive audience you just love to share that you know that and you
can see the ones in the classroom who are just intent on you know you're going to be an astronaut because you can just
point at them and see that's the person that's going to be the one right so uh i love you know my favorite things when i
look around the classroom is to say uh you know i may be looking at the first person to walk on mars and they all
their eyes just you know alter it up so yeah so that's there's a couple of comments here harold
locke says uh chris kerwin you make my sunday nights and your papa broadcast give me an
astronomy fix when my skies are gray awesome yeah kim hey is watching and she
says she's watched uh uh or he's watched um the live astronomy by the bay programs
and they're a great live event thank you very much thank you very very kind
um okay i could i could share some slides yeah so my first time using zoom so here we
go [Music] yeah their sunday night astronomy showed
they started with skype and then they moved over to google meet and they've been setting it up that way so they can share directly onto youtube it's just
been it's been comfortable along the way so we've been using it but uh yeah okay so i want to share the screen that
we're sitting on i guess okay there we go okay and uh i just want to
try to open up the slideshow from the beginning so hopefully this shows it we see it perfect okay great
so that that's me at my at my uh my favorite location i'll say uh locally um
i'm in i'm in from st john and brunswick uh just along the bay of fundy here just
in the maritime provinces in canada atlantic canada it's my city of about 75 000 people
um and it does allow us uh you know beautiful views of the bay uh there's lots of uh seascapes around to take
photos of and and to be close by i am a member of the st john astronomy club which is our local club of about 30
members uh they're very very active group i'm also a member of the royal astronomical study of canada the new
brunswick chapter which is also hey put the plugin
so from uh this is the spot that i normally would set up at this is um what's we call it
saints recipe so this is right at the at the opening of the at the bay of fundy uh along the saint john area
uh and uh it's at the entrance to the irving nature park and the urban nature park is the first urban dark sky park in
canada um so um within the city limits so that's actually comet uh neo ice right
there i grabbed that photo with the uh with my camera but it's not not a bad not a bad sky for
a city uh and what happened actually the uh the local energy company uh st john
energy uh went through an led lighting retrofit now they didn't select exactly the right color but what it did do is
that it lowered the lighting level so much in the city that now when you fly over the city it looks pretty pretty
dark so it looks very rural so it has actually allowed me to get much better views of the milky way when i'm sitting
at the beach this is my view to the to my left and this will be my view to the right with sunset
so and there's the horizon that i see southern so this is nova scotia off in this distance and um this is a couple of islands
instead of here but this is my view of the milky way since they changed the lighting levels in the city to these led lights so it really has
improved so i set up there and i offer fuse to the public as much as possible
this was the harvest moon just recently and you know i get you know nice views of
crescent moons and there's the park actually so i usually set up right down here in this part of the beach it's a very a very accessible beach and it's
very active uh the park actually closes uh in the winter time uh around 8 pm
uh and it's usually a pretty icy spot in the winter time too so they just keep it closed but i set up down here
so i get a lot of the public and a lot of travelers and a lot of tourists come through and and stop by so it's a great spot to be
for for offering that because a lot of nice sunrises and uh but here's us uh basically at the
beach so um these are just a couple of people that had to drop it by that night but i'll
get people that and i just love this this is what i like because people sit and they stare and they're and you can
see their their wonder right so um that's what means the most to me i started out just setting up uh offering
the sun because i didn't know what else to do i was mostly an introvert
and the anxiety level was quite high to be able to come in front of people but the passion kind of took over and i said well you know i'll give it a try so i'd
set up and let people have a look at the sun and eventually i started to to feel a little bit more comfortable and and some
of my astronomy buddies would join me and he set up at the beach uh mike powell who's another local rasca
member was my wingmen most of the time so he would set up and uh eventually i'd end up doing some live feeds and he
would talk to the public there with me so so i was there quite often and uh what
happened was i i didn't uh i didn't have any way to tell people when i'd be back um
for a living i do air conditioning i'm an air conditioning technician so i would be called out a lot through the
summertime especially and so i couldn't say exactly when i'd be back uh back at the beach and uh maritime weather if you
haven't been here it's never never very predictable so i could never say i'll be there tuesday
night or friday night of next week so i had this i had i asked my wife i said you know which how can i tell people
that you know i'll be back in the spot how can i let people know so she said well i want to set up a facebook page and and she actually named the page
astronomy by the bay so um so uh anyway uh that's that's how that was born and
i ended up uh offering people the name and and told them that so that's where i'd be uh so these are some of the public that
would drop by every single day you know every time i was there we had a crowd like this just a lot of happy faces
everybody loves to look up in the sky right so and it was such a great spot to be able to to show people the night sky people
would stop by and i tried to teach them a little bit what i could uh we even had some local astronomers that dropped by that was having some trouble with the
telescope so i'd say instead of coming to your place or in you know backyard setting up why don't you bring your uh
telescope to my backyard and set it right beside me for the evening and we could learn the sky together so we did a
lot of that with a lot of uh people who were getting interested in the hobby so that that really helped out a lot
of course you don't always get clear nights so on the cloudy nights i started putting up you know little posts about
what was coming up in the sky what to watch for that kind of thing on my page and then the pages started growing from the feed too from the local
saint john astronomy club which we started to run some workshops and stuff during the the evenings that
that weren't the very clearest um these two guys the guys are on the sunday night astronomy show with me
so that's us just putting on some free introductory workshops about astronomy
and i get a little bit over anxious here [Laughter] i talk with my hands so somebody tied my
hands i think i'd be lost so i try to describe things in a particular way
anyway uh this is our local club again just doing you know as much outreach as we possibly can we did an awful lot of
it in the last a few years before covered anyway um some photos of that even in the
wintertime for for sure because there's nothing wrong with wintertime observing that was
the local club was so so nice to me though but this was the award that uh karim was talking about and uh
i let them know that uh jenna jenna hines from uh rask uh national uh was
gonna come down and interview me at the beach so she said i said well that's great so we set that up and i went back
to the local club and i said you know do you think it'd be possible that maybe i could get a few people
to maybe take an interest to maybe come out at the beach and you know we could show jenna what it's like here in the maritimes kind of thing so
i i showed up that night by myself and then i turned around and then people just started arriving and
then more of them got there and then we ended up with a full beach of telescopes was first i was just you
know it was in my happy place i couldn't believe it just everybody come out and it was so great and there was a whole pile of visitors there as well so we
just had a big star party right there at the beach just an on a moment's notice kind of thing so it turned out to this
kind of a thing so that's how great the local club is and and the local uh the rask members of new
brunswick too they're they're very supportive on on all the initiatives that we do these are some photos from our star parties
probably the thing i missed the most though is this um i love getting in front of classrooms this this is the moments that you get a
chance to to to mold those little minds you know i say get them thinking about space and every
one of them has a question i and i never get enough time in the classroom 45 minutes or an hour it's never enough
time because they all have their hands up and you want to answer every single question if you can but
we get around the classrooms as you know as much as possible it's usually kindergarten to grade five groups some
junior high even some boy scouts and girl guide groups you know when we have the opportunity
certainly most of this was pre-covered we're starting just barely getting back into the school system now again
but i'm really looking forward to that happening once again and i mean
this is how much they i i appreciated this because they do this kind of stuff so they they knew i was coming so they they they made a bunch of planets and
put them down the hall that's wonderful and they're even artwork here and uh and i get these
these are these are precious to me i've gotten these uh in the past i've never got you know they sit in a special
spot for me here at home um so uh wonderful yeah that's wonderful if they take the time to do that i every
once in a while too one of the parents will work with tim hortons and send me a little present on a coffee cup
wow that's at the drive-thru so somebody knows that i work or i do this kind of stuff on the side i guess and even when
i go camping my wife says you know can you just put it away for a while but they had this up in the camp store so
no i go to where the dark skies are when i when i go camping as well but um every
once in a while too we get a chance to you know this this little telescope was i picked it up off of
kgg for i don't know 20 bucks or something like that we got it and i gave it to mike and mike fixed it up a bit
and we greased it and everything and we ended up you know giving it away to somebody so you know what you think is
garbage or might not be something very valuable to someone else it's their first scope right and it can get them it
can get them started in the hobby so whenever we have the opportunity to pick up something local that's that somebody's going to give away or they
want to donate it to us we'll repair it and send it back out you know in the field again and get some use out of it so a scope sitting in the closet does no
use probably my biggest outreach event that i've um i've been very humbled by
was this one here um back in june of this year when we did the the partial solar eclipse uh that
took place here in st john it was about 72 percent uh limited in all the local uh um
morning radio stations and and the afternoon ones are very supportive of my efforts they get me on whenever there's something happening so they had me on
and they kind of publicized that quite a bit so it was really nice and i would i did happen to be so i'm sitting here
with my cell phone on on top of the my telescope and this little 72 millimeter refractor telescope
and there's i had one or 1500 people live on wow
at the same time and they were coming from everywhere i i couldn't i couldn't read the comments fast enough they were just scrolling by
and i'm just it's just little me with a cell phone sitting on the so you don't need a pile of gear that you can do this
so easily right um and i ended up with 30 000 views uh on facebook and 12 000
on youtube when that when it ended so wow they were nice they were awesome outreach numbers
to be able to contribute back to rask again so yeah uh there again this is pre-covered and this is a postcode right for in the
time that we're in now so classroom talks versus uh what i do now is a bit of online stuff so i still get that
opportunity to at least teach online so i'll teach right here from where i am and that's that's the one thing that
i've learned for kobe though our students can be anywhere in the world you know they can be on the other
side of canada and i can teach them from here so just a matter of lining up at the time so that's that's another good
part of it i guess we've done a lot of online workshops too uh ran those as well to try to get people interested in
the hobby to try to fill in some of the void other things we've tried are there's a ca telescope with a with my
cell phone mounted to it running over to a volt monitor so it's just a 12 volt
television and it's running off my battery pack down below so i could have people over here social distancing from
the telescope they could see the same thing as i was seeing but they were just a little bit farther away
which was great for codewood too because you can't have too many people close to your eyepiece um still more setups of the same thing
of just classroom talks i've been trying to get people involved in this type of thing so the interaction kind of comes
from something like this so i run a shoot the moon contest every few months so in other words i just get somebody to go outside with their cheapest cell
phone camera whatever they have and take a photo of the moon i don't care about the quality it's just a matter that you took a picture and you submitted it all
all entries are treated the same and then i usually give away some prizes at the end of it so uh it generates uh
quite a bit of interest so it's a lot of fun to do that um these are some of the photos you know that people will will submit you know
i love that and this one here with the kids sitting so i'll get a lot of this and it's very
very nice to get this interaction i'd love this and you know what it's doing is it's helping to fill the void between
now and the time that we get into personal outreach again um so some of them were actually coming to my telescope and taking photos of them
and they said well you know maybe i could start doing some of that so i started offering uh live feed so here's
me at the beach that i set up normally with my cell phone um talking to people online and it went over well
in i'm a very uh i was a very much an introvert and with a lot of anxiety
doing this but i would just kind of think that there's only one person on the other side of this so i'd say okay that's i can handle that
so so i just let people talk away and i you know i'd be talking about the moon but just general points about the moon
people ask questions and back and forth but so i just started doing it more and more um
and every opportunity i had even when it was cold didn't matter too much telescope cools down a lot faster and
there were some windy nights down there for sure um this is a capture of uh of uh neil weiss that i had i had
offered that through my that's through my cell phone on the live it's a great shot thank you yeah so those they they
help to fill this void and they help to bring but it also helps to bring people in like there are a lot of people in
seniors homes that that have viewed this now as well i can't get they can't get out to the telescope to see me so there
are those who can't can't actually physically meet me at the beach that i'm hoping i'm reaching as well so that that
really helps um and again we've uh to try to help fill the boy two two years ago we said well
we'd like to try something different and paul owen actually who's another rask member that is on the show with me he
suggested this this uh this idea of a sunday night program you know once a week why don't we try something and i
said well do you call he said well we'll call it the sunday night astronomy show okay that sounds great so um we ended up that i'm i'm the host
of the show and paul and mike come on the show and mike is the equipment manager so
anything that is broken uh he can fix it doesn't matter what it is like he's the macgyver of astronomy and paul is the
astrophotographer astronomy so we get the two of those guys together and the knowledge that they have in just their heads you know they don't need to write
anything down we just talk but it's more like a kitchen party kind of thing for astronomy so we'll get on there and
we'll tell a lot of jokes amongst ourselves and this is the attitude that we have most of the time we're not you
know we know we're not professionals we're just enjoying the moment and we invited a lot of people in so they can
feel invited to come in and join us and tell us whatever uh it's all interactive so they have questions on the feed we
answer their questions along the way so it's been a great experience for us that way um and yeah we reached our 100th
show the other night we brought all the guests back on that we're on throughout the last year room was actually on the show with us i still appreciate that for
him coming on and joining us been a great supporter of us every once in a while we get a chance to get out to
someone's place and do a little bit of outreach uh just amongst ourselves but it doesn't happen very often yet but
it's coming you know let me get around you know we goof around a little bit that's me with the moon and uh trying to pretend on the statue of liberty but
that's with with the gang so but i mean these are the moments that mean the most to me it's it's this it's
this type of thing uh teaching someone new you know i i truly believe that we have
a responsibility to teach the next generation to share our knowledge with next generation we we have that
responsibility we need to do that and that's why i try to get so involved in
in bringing up the next generation in and how we want them to to see things so
so that's my story here here i'm going to share your website okay
great awesome thank you okay and i wanted to add something
when i first when you first started talking and when i saw you on the agenda for tonight
i just assumed that astronomy by the bay was san francisco living in the united states as i do that's what i just
assumed and i was going to say something about john dobson who really started that then when you came on and you
talked about a very different bay uh it really sent me into orbit
um i have a personal familiarity with the bay of fundy being a graduate of acadia
oh hospital uh i spent a lot of time out there but my best visit
happened to be with roy bishop i was there in 1995 the year after our prominent packs
and uh we were there at mid-incoming tide as the water was flowing out of the bay of
fundy into the minus basin and the roar of the tidal rip was so loud
that it really was was really dominating everything and roy said that's the sound of the
moon the moon is drawing that's the wound causes all that and you're hearing the moon roar
and i just wanted to thank you for this presentation oh my my pleasure i i could add a funny story to that uh
i was i was out i was sent an email by somebody on my page and they said so where are you setting up tonight i said
well i'm setting up at the beach okay so what time we expect to be there i still about 7 30. so but 8 o'clock i got an
email back saying again saying i i don't see you you're not here i said well yeah i'm i'm at the beach but i told her what
beat she said you're by the bay right i said yeah she says by in melbourne right
i know so it was uh somebody over there calls himself
astronomy by the bay as well i guess so she thought it was in australia but i know i'm on the other side of the world but thank you
oh that's fantastic but you know it really it really is what john dobson said you know it's not about how big
your telescope is or how expensive it is it's how um how many people less fortunate than you had a chance to look through it that's what that's what it's
all about it's very true once you look through that telescope you are as fortunate as you and uh it is so
important to do that and also so much fun to do that yes it is it's all it's
it's amazing it's the it's the gratitude the gratification you feel back again you just want to keep going with it
right so right yeah and you touched on something i thought was very important that there are people who cannot get out
okay who cannot get out there uh they're you know they're they're taking care of
their parents or they are um you know in all kinds of different circumstances where they would never
get a chance to experience the amazing uh uh
you know the views uh you know you're doing electronically you're you're you're
doing it um you know through your scope your the passion that you're giving uh
through your talks you know the workshops that you're doing you know it's it every piece of this is just so
interesting to people um and uh you know i often wondered uh
you know when i would just go to a star party i would hear from people saying gosh i would love to do that but you
know uh you know i i my my physical condition doesn't allow it
you know and uh through this through this you can you know so i i
hope that you keep it up and uh when you return back to the physical uh
uh outreach activities again that you that you don't let that
always be there thank you so much yeah thanks god thank you thank you so much comments online here in the chat so
you know you've got a great fan base it's awesome thank you very much appreciate it thank you for the invitation thank you
thank you anything more you'd like to add kareem before we transition to uh
to um maxi in in argentina uh if you're free sunday nights visit the sunday night
astronomy show on youtube on the astronomy by the bay channel and uh follow him on facebook and you can get
his live feeds whenever he does them and i'll tell you our clouds and persistent nebula here in
montreal means i live vicariously to all my friends so chris gives me he gives me
that little bit of a view of the moon and saturn and jupiter when i need it so i definitely encourage everyone to take
a few minutes on facebook and find astronomy by the bay wonderful wonderful great thank you so
much thank you thanks everyone okay so uh let's let's transition down
to uh argentina to maxi follaries uh maxie
uh just recently was one of the co-hosts for the um you know for the global star
party and uh so maxie i'm going to turn it over to you you always enthrall us with your astrophotography
goodnight everyone how are you like you are seeing me here do you hear me right now yes yes
excellent uh right now i'm in my backyard
there's a very good weather tonight it's very at most the 20
to celsius degrees is it's warm warm yes
so well i i just grab all my equipment i
have some issues with the internet with the notebook i prepare everything and then
reset you know but i think it's going okay
let me share my screen hey right now i'm with my notebook
okay do you do you see it yes excellent the live view through your telescope i suppose
exactly yeah right now i pointing to a
some global clusters in the scorpio constellation
and i'm doing live views from five seconds only
i don't know if you see all these kind of stars yes
and well i want to do some little serve from [Music]
this place uh because there's too many global clusters
some kind maybe tiny or some others are
a little more more brighten for example this i right
now i'm on ngc 6259
and now i'm going to uh ngc 6231
okay now with the with the guiding scope
you're starting to see the stars and then there is the this open cluster
and let's see but let's wait for another picture
and there it goes this is an er
a really bright in a in global if not a open cluster source
there are in this case in detail of the scorpio
constellation scorpion and [Music] for example
well of course the queen of this constellation is m7
and if you want i am i'm going to point it but you can see
this kind of stars you can watch it through a
a very regular telescope a single telescope without too many
you you don't have to be a professional to watch this place because it is very very bright
so let's see if you want well m7 i think you you know how it is but
maybe some people of the audience doesn't know let me
do you hear the scope rotating yes yes
i thought that was a problem but i everyone told me that it's okay that's
the motors goes okay so here's m7 is a very
huge open cluster stars and right now
this is the place you can see there's behind
this is not nice is stars there are behind it
let me see but right now it's really blow i think it's uh well
33 degrees from a little but it's pointing to a very pollution area
and let's take a 10 seconds picture
but there are too many stars
here here's a 100 uh
because this place is practically practically in the the core or near of the girl of the
milky way of our galaxy i think this place are a
dust and gas very darkness but
if you take pictures for more seconds you start to see
those those shapes for example this in this place it's more you can see all these stars and then there's nothing
and and well uh so
i sorry i didn't tell you no dark dark nebulosity or dust in the
exactly and well i hear of course you know mh
from the uh i you i able uh
available to see this
sorry this screen is uh
i don't want to see this let's go rotate
i think the go 2 is going okay right now even the
the issue of problem the computer well here in the live view we can see some stars but here we
started to see some nebulosity and let's wait for the picture
and there it goes i started to stabilize it nice for a
live view that's great well this is only 10 second exposure
and [Music] but you have the color you can see color in the nebula already yeah yes it's a
light pink or maybe blue in this place and
but here in the core of the nebula you start to see this clouds
really really dark but that contrasts with the with the brightness and
nebulosity and also you see this place is like a like an arm
of the nebula it's very it has a very good shape
uh let's stop and do some 30 seconds position maybe we have some
color but the sky from this very pollution
but to do some live view and and show everyone
uh the skies is a very good uh
place to watch and also you this this kind of nebulosity of this nebula also
you you have you can see it with a like i said before with a a
telescope more a more normal you don't have to have a very good scope
yeah well this is a 30 seconds posture oh wow
and then there's another place to see it's very pink
of the nebula on the new velocity the color but here it has some background more
darkness and this place has something clouds
that it has a very good shape and one
let's go more to the south if you want
let's see uh what we are here in scorpio where we
have the constellation of peacock or pavo that has this very good global cluster
this ngc 6752 let's see if we can rotate
telescope rotate and here's the hyperspace point
speed traveling i like calling it the hyperspace button
feels like you're in a movie let's close this
so we can see more well here's the this lower cluster here from my guys go and
well let's stop this and do some 10 seconds picture
it's very nice beautiful wait for it because it has
this star trails i think right you know there you go oh there you go yes and
pops that's great so that's impover we don't get to see that up here
no this this constellation is a circumpolar i think
and it's able to see from maybe for brazil and
i think from colombia but more more up it's kind of
difficult that's uh that my favorite globular 47 tukane uh yes
watch let's let's see that is also on the list yeah
if there was an if our earth was surrounded by stars like if we were in a globular cluster
and all the stars with the same brightness as our sun that would create a nice sky about 20 times
brighter than the earth's night sky at full moon
we never knew the how is the night yes that's right imagine how the lights
it would okay let's go to the other place of the
mediano meridian and let's see you can see the scope is pointing here
and now maybe the go-to will be not very
very accurate yeah exactly but
we might be surprised see what happens
okay there it goes warp speed here
but it's not in the center but let's point it
let's point it more to the to the center
here so let's stop this actually are you indoors right now
no i'm i'm outside you're outside okay yes it's very right now is that's why
it's warm like a thin a wind
wow look at that which globular is that
this is 47 to kind of oh it is so that's the globular that
dr alan sandedge thought he found the blue straggler in
and it's very interesting uh because i think they've been finding others
over time and that has great significance what is the foreground what is the background what's
old what's new and how do we date them what do you see you're shaking your head david you you're
familiar with that dr sanders's discovery of that and what
they're doing can you oh yeah and this is the this is the
second brightest globular in the sky by the way too
fascinating yeah the blue stragglers and globular clusters for for a while they remember going back
to the time of sandage and others people briefly thought that they were measuring that glob stars and globular
clusters were older than the universe yes which was a bit of a conundrum yeah you know so that always worked out
but i'm sorry no i just said that that that uh that
line of thought always kind of disturbed me you know how could the popular star clusters be older than the universe you
know they can't be of course and and now we know that you know stars in globular
almost all globular clusters that we know about are 10 or 11 billion years old but they predate the assembly of
galactic disks which is pretty astonishing in itself um you know because the milky way's disk
for example is only about 8 billion years old but it's a fascinating question this
business of stellar evolution in globulars and still a lot of people you know kyle cudworth and a few others are
still working on this stuff so it's it's a pretty interesting uh
question that we don't know everything about and from what i from what i remember you guys i think we don't want
to get carried away with what would it be like to be inside a globular cluster
[Music] you would have a night sky
of several hundred first magnitude stars
so it wouldn't be like you're in perpetual sunshine you know because the distances even in globular clusters are
appreciable but can you imagine going out and trying if you're a galaxy person you're not trying to observe galaxies
and you have 1500 first magnitude stars in every sky
that would be a bit of a challenge you know maybe you know pollution
we always or sometimes yells to the moon
the moonlight uh and also the the city lights
but well we have some kind to do to go to place every darkness and
and try to do some pictures without like pollution i can't even imagine if we would be
there i will be really frustrated you know
hey maxi speaking of great astronomers of the past who we had acquaintances
with david knows this better than anyone i think our old friend bart i i admire you i i
envy you being where you are maxie remember bart bach used to say all the
good stuff's in the sun you know and that's not that much of an exaggeration you know
well we have of course the great magazine but right now it's really low
i think my house is now
i can go there too but yes we have
a re really a really good place to to watch there are too many global clusters
like this not like in this size of course
that's great did we get some freeze frame here [Music]
it happens let's see if he comes back i'd like to tell you that this was thrilling because as much as i've
studied that i've never seen it like this remotely or only in in
pictures so that's right yeah it's live it's cool live
that's right i've promised them that i come to see it
with my own two eyes one of these days i'm still trying to figure out how i'm gonna make that trip work but
that's uh it's on the list two things passport and a plane ticket
and you're there yeah so yeah yeah my wife and her concerns i just got
my booster shot today my wife does have her concerns about kovid so i have to convince her that i
won't come back with anything bad and then some money for the food
or just roughing camp all night that's kind of what i did at okitex which is
kind of the subject of my presentation later and um just rough it and still enjoy the night
sky there yeah they'll i'm sure they'll be you'll find them to be very hospitable i'm sure
caesar will make you a pizza so i'm looking forward to it i gotta
i gotta start uh on the uh politicking at home and make that happen
yeah yeah we can see you maxie yeah there's max i'm back sorry
my connection goes out i think i'm connected with the
uh maybe uh
maxie why don't we have you come back uh later in the program and uh we'll we'll
transition over to cybella and uh have her give her presentation
uh and then we'll take a tim and a break but uh you know we've got uh we've got more time here on the global star party
so okay okay
so i'm sabella um let me share my screen
my presentation is about all the saturn rockets
um not too much detail but still a lot of detail uh
obviously winner von braun's creation and there were 32 saturn rockets in all
so i i need to minimize it there we go so um renner von braun is the designer of
all apollo rockets although he had help from other designers runner von braun came up with he came up with the main
concept thanks to him we can now travel to the moon and beyond werner von braun quotes research is what
i'm doing when i don't know what i'm doing kind of confusing but in a way it's
fun saturn rockets were used in support of
the apollo lunar missions the launch of skyla of the skylab space station taking
astronauts to skylab and the launch of american of the american half of the apollo soyuz test project the only
saturn one that's still available for public viewing is that the saturn one is a saturn one at the u.s space and
rocket center in huntsville alabama on may 2nd 1945 as the defeat of the nazi
germany approached as the defeat of nazi germany approached von braun decided to change sides
together with some scientists from his team he met the us forces in tyrol i think i'm pronouncing that right when
explaining why he defected to his former enemy he said my
country lost two world wars this time i want to be on the side of the winners although some flights experiments
experienced significant problems no saturn rocket failed catastrophically in flight thankfully
okay so our first rocket is the saturn one this is the picture of it at space camp
um the u.s space rocket center uh right there the saturn one was the second smallest
of its three family family members being 180 feet tall 55 meters it has three
stages like the saturn v rocket along with the saturn 1b like the 75 rocket along with the saturn
1b it was used to launch people in into space and orbit the earth this amazing
creation has eight eight has eight h1 engines having about 1
500 million pounds of thrust 10 of these were launched the first one being on
october 27 1961 our second one is the smallest of the
three saturn rockets um being
uh 141 feet tall that is three point thirty forty three point two meters it
has a diameter of 21 feet 6.61 meters this rocket is very similar
to the saturn i think some of this is being blocked no we can see
we can see it there we go she can't see oh i see this rocket is very similar to the
saturn one as it's the only destin as its only destination was entering earth's orbit this was the spacecraft
that sent three missions to the skylab space station in 1973. this is what the
last this was the last saturn vehicle to bring amanda into space with its last
launch being in 1975 nine of these were launched the first time being on
february 26 1966 okay and here's a saturn v very famous
almost everyone has heard of this one before probably because it's the tallest of them all and sent a total of 26
astronauts into space total 12 of them landing on the moon this giant has five f1 engines on its
first stage alone and 160 million pounds of horsepower
the saturn v is 363 feet tall 111 meters and weighs 2.6 million pounds 2.8
kilograms that's 39 times heavier than a space shuttle and by the way that's the space
shuttle without um uh the engines like the boosters and stuff this rocket
was by far the most expensive being 1.23 billion dollars today for each rocket 12
of these were launched the first launch being in on may 25th 1966.
and that is all okay good now cybella i know that you've been to uh space camp and you saw these
rockets up close how did that make you feel to see these incredible
i thought it was actually really cool because i didn't know that um the first of all there was only one saturn
one left in the world and i didn't know the one that i saw was
actually a real rocket so i thought that was really cool when i just found that out
oh very cool very cool now i know too that you're really really interested in uh space exploration do you see yourself
as being someone that might travel to a space station or to try to
travel into space yeah i hope so uh there's a lot of risks risks to it
but um space travel is getting safer every day um now um that
um i think um i forget his name but the main character
of the first uh captain kirk the actor who played captain kirk is actually going william
shatner yes yes i think he already did actually yeah he did and
yeah i think it's really cool that we're um now having other ordinary not ordinary people but
people sent into space that aren't considered astronauts right right yeah uh there is uh there's a show a
movie a documentary that you should watch it's out on amazon and it's out on
netflix right now and it's called the wonderful and it's stories from the international
space station and they interview uh these astronauts uh and many of them
recall the moments when they were just kids okay and and deciding at a very early age
that they were going to be they were going to become astronauts and so it's just story after story like that i found
it very inspiring and so when i see someone like you sabella uh so interested and
you know brave enough to come on to programs like this and to give your presentations uh you know i really feel
that probably in the next few years i'm going to see you working at nasa so i i you know
i wish you the best so thanks so much i would like to add something to that squad sure i think that um
i think sabella's presentation really got to me to have someone as
young as you are be interested in history of any sort of history is to me
god-given it is wonderful it is beyond anything i can imagine
because you know gibbons said that those who do not learn from history
those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them but um
i remember when i was growing up and uh i was following the uh
the uh the bringing out of the saturn market and uh back in the early 60s it was a
wonderful time to to be living through and the fact that you're interested in that as a
historian sabella is wonderful
president kennedy i know he's very famous for the line that when he was giving alan shepard the medal of freedom
after his first flight into space and uh he's about to give him the uh
medal and he drops it and he leans down picks it up pins it on
shepard and he says this medal is from the ground up i think that he did that on purpose i
like to think that he it was so good and such a good line i think you did it on purpose
but when he was giving the press conference about the saturn one that he was very proud of
he said and i remember he said this rocket
will be the largest payroll payload of anything that has been launched into space ever
and he thinks for a second he said and it will be the [Laughter]
largest i i just think that this presentation shows what you're capable of
and i would like in the future to be to see you orbiting the earth
at some point in the thank future beautiful job sabella
thank you that's great okay so i think it's time i think it's time
for us to um go to a uh 10 minute break and uh we'll
come back with uh with more of the 70th global star party um
so just give us a few minutes uh go stretch your legs get a sandwich get a cup of coffee we'll be right back
this is really really
it's good to see you david normally i jump on and you've already
gone off to observe
nice hey maxie
i i gotta say that everything i think now it's okay
that's good yes i don't know if scott's going to bring you back on or if i'm going to
show you maybe show some nice tips here
king study is planning to put maxi back on after the break okay
sorry what you're gonna be back on after the break
i'm looking for a few nightscapes that i haven't shown yet
um i think there are a couple of here
and let me go to lightroom classic
somewhere in here i have
more nightscapes
i gary alvin thank you really appreciate
that
norm hughes all of us are inspired
by david levy i think uh david you you may be single handily responsible
for not only discovering comets but discovering amateur astronomers that in turn
love the uh love the night sky so much that we come on every tuesday to share what we've
learned and and we grow in this field um
it's uh i i credit this for lowering my blood pressure why not thanks adrian i i
to hear a compliment like that from you makes my day it is so wonderful
and uh the fact that you have gone and done what you've done with your astrophotography your pictures
have heart and soul in them and that's what i love about them interesting you would say that a really
emotional impact that is um [Music] i took a picture of the heart and soul
while at oaky tech so i plan on showing it um
but uh yeah i i do appreciate that because there are so many of us now the hobby has grown to
the point and it's something that i'll be uh saying thank you kareem and i appreciate it fan base is here but
um the hobby has it's starting to get away a little bit from the visual sides of
things when you would have a big telescope and you would look through something look through the
telescope at something in the night sky and you would study it you would draw it you would see its intricacies
there's uh there's a bit of a temptation to shoot straight to astrophotography
because the pictures are pretty and you know the things are in the night sky
um i think there's room for both expressions of
enjoying things in space there's a feeling of getting the light of the galaxy hitting your
eyes directly as opposed to your camera sensor and on the other hand you know those of us that
want to show that earth is a part of space the definition of astronomy
um is basically things off of earth and i'm seeking to change that it
we are part of what's out there in space these are these stars are our neighbors this this
is all it's all a part of you know we're all a part of the universe in here together so
we don't have to overlook the beauty that's on earth and focus just directly on space so
that's part of what motivates me to take the not only the night pictures i'll do some classic astrophotography
but i like incorporating elements of earth and the photography that i do
and it's uh that's something that i continue to work on
and now if i could find i have a few other photos somewhere that
i haven't even haven't really released yet and i would like to find them
we'd like to see them there
i think this will be this is one of them
all right these are
it would be nice if i if i had the opportunity to take
a shot on top of the volcano that we visited beautiful volcano in the um
yeah beautiful we had a beautiful volcano in uh the capuchin volcano
confucian volcano and it was a uh really beautiful sight at night it would just be gl it was it's
in a mortal one zone as well i just know it would glimmer with stars
josh kovac is um referring to an image that he took on uh
he's supposed to bin so i'm just going to go ahead and post the link to that if you guys want to go
check that out uh it's 760 masinga and perseus
kareem says but not from inside the volcano that is correct we were standing on the uh
rim of the crater we we scaled the outside you know the wall of the crater but we did not go in
the volcano and on that note i'm going to have to say good night because it's observing time and
observing time that's right the nice guy is calling and i'm going to have to go and i will see you at the next global
star party thank you david thank you thank you david thank you um
scott if you i wanted to show david this picture of the uh
of a valley covered with trees um
go ahead really quickly screen one um share
here's an image now normally this would just be sort of a
you'd think this would just be a simple starry image i haven't cleaned it up or anything but i took a lot of images like these
with the dark clouds because of how bright the milky way is here and
when you can see it and you can see this nebula naked eye when you're looking up
this is example of the type of image that i like to shoot um
you know mixing that whole idea of mixing the night sky with
things on earth and you could go you could imagine being on a different planet that has trees like this and
seeing this exact same scene so i i find that very interesting of
course you'd have to be at a similar location away from the core of the milky way to get something like
that but um those are those are the type of pictures that i love taking
you know they are beautiful and even though even though you don't
see much of the milky way you still see enough to get a hint that it's out there
so uh great well adrian why don't you um
why don't you go ahead and uh you're our next speaker so how about okay go ahead and get started
all right well we will start with um
sharing the screen again go to screen one so hello everyone
we're back from break and i am going to share
now title of my um title of this is nightscapes it's what i
love to do you just heard me talking about it you're seeing a bit of other photography
here so sometimes we dabble into wide angle astrophotography
so they aren't the prettiest pictures you've seen but
um when dave david told me you know i try and put my heart and soul
into the images he's um he isn't wrong
and sometimes i put the heart and the soul into the image to the point where it's it really
is in the image there's the heart and there's the soul and there's a double cluster right so uh
not only will i try and image it but then then i come back and i go
and get images of the night sky that
speak to me in some sort of ways there will be symbolism i know that we have we may have uh many on the uh star party
and we have some in our groups that um that just so happen to be atheist the
one thing about those of us that may believe in god those of us that don't
um astronomy is a place where we come together in spite of those
differences so for some you see an interesting and milky way photo that
only took me eight seconds to take because of how dark it was in the settings that i used
you see this milky way photo and you see this cross superimposed on it
for and it's really close to the the lagoon and the trifid
and it's it's in the same field of view so for for many there's a there's an additional
symbolism there um in addition to just the night sky the thing i will say uh and many of your
photographs evoke this is the sacredness that feeling of sacredness okay i don't
care what kind what your beliefs are okay when you're
out under a night sky like this and you look up and and you see with your own eyes the
milky way you know and many are shocked like you evoke what you see with the naked eye
yes this feeling of sacredness
hits you like a ton of bricks it really does and so uh you know i'm i'm uh
i i've felt it experienced it many times i have yet to meet anybody that really
doesn't feel that you know when once they slow down you know and they you know the all the
noise in their head kind of goes you know quiet and then they look up and uh
so yeah even if you don't have a modified camera which i use to take a lot of
those pictures you can still take photos like this and
even the sky may be hazy but that actually works in your advantage because
your long exposure will brighten your the brighter stars and give you this look if you manage to
get them sharp you still have a pretty good photo here
yeah this one was probably the sharpest photo one of the sharpest photos that i
took um dark skies aren't necessarily a must i
will prove that by showing an older image
um here you have one of the lakes near my hometown the way that this was
processed the milky way does not shine as bright and there's the notice the color
on the um clouds from the light coming up from nearby town
all of this light is here but you still have a beautiful and peaceful image
you can still expose for all the stars now when you go
you go somewhere that's darker you know that you're exposing for a lot more stars
this is this place is slightly darker and
this is a this is an image that i took in the uh thumb of michigan um well it's a
beautiful image there's the milky way being exposed you see a lot of these stars you can still see the trail the
milky way but it does take some imaging to bring out some of the
detail that's here and that's why we've blown the light out of this uh when the lighthouse shines
it uh blows it gets blown out when you do a long exposure
however go to some place dark
and these are this is a mosaic of 25 25 seconds worth of images there's four
of them here stack or basically put in a uh vertical panorama
and you get things you just you that may surprise you like the squid and the uh
well i don't see the squid here but i think this is a this is where the squid is it's it's
some nebulosity here you can definitely see the cat's paw and this is i'm i'm at 41 north i don't
see the cat's paw when i do a milky way image i also don't tend to be able to
image for 25 or 30 seconds and get all of this data
in the milky way like those those uh shows travel to the center of the milky
way i mean this is what this looks like except it gets to a point where where the image you know the
sharper an image the more of that you can do
and there's still some symbolism here with the cross nearby
um so again the goal is to
not just you we have pretty pictures that focus on the um
you know they focus on the milky way and they focus on these nebula nebulae by themselves
um my goal is always to mix them with earth and present a complete
universe whenever i share images so when you you know like scott has been saying when you look up
this is basically as we see things 50 millimeters is how we
is close to how we see things when we're looking straight ahead and so shooting in 50 millimeters gives
you the impression that you're there looking at the you're looking at the south east this is
be the south west in my yeah southwest you're you're headed
you're south and you're heading southwest um kenton oklahoma you're at the okitec
star party in the northeast corner and you're looking back on the milky way this is exactly what
you see minus a little bit of the detail you don't see the aberration over here
you see round stars you may not see as much detail but you see this dust lane
you see this region you see all of this with your naked eyes because
the night sky is so dark there and
what i'll do is i'll close on that note scott so we can move on um but
you know that why i do night photography you know those are the reasons because
it's uh yeah it is i know a wonderful feeling yeah i know that this is uh
this is special for you and uh we really appreciate you bringing that uh you know the hard work that you do to
try to capture that uh kind of those views and that kind of feeling and to share that with us so it's very
special it is very much yeah thank you scott for giving me a platform to be able to work
with it it it actually pushes me to look for uh look for new material every tuesday when
i can make it so um it helps keep me going so i really appreciate that
and i will have to my star adventure is missing a couple of screws so
i may have to catch up with you offline to talk about if explorer scientific has
trackers for cameras what do you do we sure do i will talk to you offline about
possibly looking at them because my tracker is now wounded so i'm gonna need a new one
okay and i'll uh we'll talk offline prices and all that stuff sure i would love to i would love
to give one of those things a run and continue this so uh with that i'll go on mute um thank
you again scott i really appreciate it thank you very much thank you all that are watching
that um enjoy the photos and um i'll keep them coming right thank you very much adrian
maxie we're going to bring you back on uh um are you uh
yes i i think i'm here okay great well uh i was
pointing to the southwest right now let me share my screen
okay right now i'm the alpha sculpture this star and
there it is right now it's very very writing
so what i want to show is some galaxies they are in this a particularly
[Music] in constellation of sculptor
constellation and well nearby from the star
to the east we have the ngc
253 this is the sculpture galaxy this is the most famous uh
let's see if we can go to this place
well there is started to this kind of shape very blurry and
there's very sensory so let's
it's right there the sculpture galaxy but this is only two seconds of exposure
so let's bring some time
this is a very good galaxy that you can see also with binoculars
here in argentina we have we have it really above of our
heads if we see this this is how i see from here my skies
you can see here the south and the north and here's the east so
to this place from people is if watching from here is where i am where i'm right now is buenos
aires i'm sorry i'm in chile but to the east is buenos aires so it's really
above of our heads so well
let's this is a a picture of sculpture galaxy i think we have
do you do you see it yeah there it is
excellent i have well i i'm not guiding right now it sounds 30 seconds
and it's really up and we have maybe some little star trails in every picture
but uh of course with binoculars that is
impossible to see the the the core of the galaxy but as i was able to find out at okitex
i saw sculptor before it went below the horizon in binoculars
you you see the the shape and i saw the shape and nothing else exactly
but you know what's happening and it's something i normally don't see
at home so that and the accidental imaging of the cat's paw
um were two really wonderful takeaways of the many wonderful takeaways of oaky
text the poor imaging of orion was also a take away
i got to stop shooting so high and high so it was terrible right orion is
coming up oh you guys are just you're starting to get him he's coming in feet first
yeah exactly and here's the sword and what
so that means though you have you have uh canis major should be
practically watching with your eyes at the summer sky here in the south you
able to see um the star canopus that's this is star
yeah yeah and and if you
uh put an imaginary line to the east you will see
a series and they are always particularly together to watch it well
that's is the summer skies here uh right now canopus is a come
rising up to the from the southwest and [Music]
of course we have here really really to the south and the canada
nebula that's for now it's impossible to watch maybe to 5 00 a.m
we will have really up but right now it's kind
it's kind of difficult to see it uh well
we he we are here in sculpture and let's see if we can go to
uh ngc 55 this is the the the what the cost
i don't know how to say in english let me go look it up real quick um
let's see ngc 55
come on phone um
oh my apps not giving me a common name for it it's just saying it's a
a john bard spiral galaxy
part of the spectre group exactly um
i think it's right there but let's wait for the well it's
right there but let's wait for the picture oh the whale galaxy the white
guy yeah the way galaxy but also we call it um
the the women that use the jewel around their neck how he calls
um like a a brooch necklace um but a really with diamonds or
something like that uh yeah if it's around her neck it would be a necklace yeah exactly
i used to know how to say that in spanish and i have forgotten
well there it is and like i said it's not centered they go to is i think
right there let's go with that
[Music]
is what's spelina yeah shelley knows
the whale ah yeah
that's the name oh i never never heard i i know we call
the whale galaxy also but okay let's see
if in 30 seconds you can see molly there's a minus 10.
it's starting to get cold here i'm running my cameras at minus 25 tonight
well i i have my camera 20 degrees celsius or 22
and then if stop it will be shocking to the sensor yeah
okay my camera is at about 70 degrees and is in park because it's sitting in a
bag somewhere i need to pull out i'm not i'm on the computer right now not shooting anything
right now well i'm start i'm not starting to shoot i don't know maybe i will leave the test
of taking pictures because i was talking to ngc 300 that we're going to
in a couple of seconds and that is more below right now from
this galaxy well for example first of all let me synchronize the object tesco synchronize
yes so it should be well
sometimes they have some issues but okay let's see if while this in a
particular galaxy would be more seen it would be not able to see like like this
from the whale and sculpture galaxy because it's a very difficult object to capture and
watch it obviously in pollution in the sky is more difficult
but let's get a try
so i think we are going in the place
stop and i like i like seeing um uh maxie yes
going through the southern hemisphere skies you know uh it's a it's a fleet it's a free
uh plane [Laughter] the dark ticket
in argentina you know it's awesome you know because it's like we're looking over the guy's shoulder you know
here we are we're looking at his computer yeah but then he says he's driving it
around you know so and he's showing us all the treasures the celestial treasures of this well
there will not be one single night to watch everything of
course if you have if you want to capture it now you have to stay
every season for example okay
okay we'll do it four years baby we have to be there
so if we all come down for one year i think we will think we'll we'll make it
no problem yeah we can i know they say male 1 tea yeah a giant house together
all we do is cook food images and when it rains
learn all the spanish right because when it rains there's spanish because it's spanish is so
different as you go to different parts in different dialects yeah yes different dialects different words the
same different things i'm gonna learn two words where do i eat
and where's the bowling alley
why the bowling alley adrian because that's the only other way i'm going to be
doing anything uh indoors okay i'll find where to hide next time
you got to come on with your bowling shirt on i've got a couple i will try that i want to get a couple bowling
shirts i just have to find them all all right dude [Laughter]
okay so there are and i'm gonna quickly say this storm bowling products has some
bowling balls that are named after things we may be interested in like there is a
proton physics out there there's an astrophysics out there the name of the bowling ball cool
and um there may even be a particle physics out there i have to look them up
but uh yeah they named bowling balls after scientific concepts
i don't own them for some strange reason i don't own those bowling balls you don't yeah it's probably why i'm not bowling
well i see that's right i gotta go get the astrophysics
i recently acquired my uh my brunswick from uh from my parents house
that i had in my childhood but i got i got an adult weight ball so i could use
it i think it's i think it's 12 pounds 12 pounds
i can't remember exactly but i have it i just need to get the thumb holes redrilled because my hands are a little bigger now yeah
yeah as soon as you do that we're coming down to dayton and we're going bowling all right all right so
we'll make sure the sky actually gets dark so that we can actually do something useful that's a cool galaxy
yeah there is look at that yeah look at that spiral isn't it no no that's got
and it's got like you can see the the spiral daggers it's like
[Laughter]
second place to eat and drink [Laughter] yeah if you're not a uh star trek fan
it's a tie fighter uh yes
aside from saturn this is one of the most sci-fi looking kind of objects in
the sky it really is you know you see that those well because it's faint you know it's like
really far away okay really far away let me see it's
in 1365 that's 1365 huh that's
this work oh yeah the great cards spiral galaxy 56
million light years away in the constellation foreign acts yeah four next so fornax and sculptor
have these incredible barred spirals i mean it's just you know i i wonder why in that part of
the sky they're like that you know but uh it's uh
it is amazing well this is a a one picture
a one minute picture only and then start to see the the
spiral arms and also it's like from there from here
you know and well also there are too many galaxies
so this thing is happening this galaxy has an enormous black hole at the center of that galaxy it's
spinning 84 as fast as einstein's general relativity
you know theory of relativity allows it to well well i mean it's going crazy fast
there's crazy stuff happening inside of this galaxy right here it's foreign
spornax uh ngc 1365
1365. well the iau needs to rename it after
you know either the tie fighter galaxy or the klingon galaxy they gotta rename it
we can if if uh it doesn't have a popular name and that could be whatever we want so we
just gotta like start it you do everybody picks it up and then everybody
starts calling it the the tie fighter galaxy
i love the star wars culture yeah it depends star wars or star trek
culture that's where the fight will be like which yeah which one gets the naming right yeah
it kind of like a here river place the soccer team it's kind of
like that but uh there will be always rivalry but
yeah well you know the angle that we're seeing it in it could be called the zorro galaxy it looks like a big yeah
exactly you know you know something that i
uh that i knew a couple days ago that the actor um
i think it was a williams his last name william shatner
no no no no no no no from the sorrow from zoro oh zorro the other shot
antonio
um
astronomer there are pictures of guy williams with telescopes and you know i was
nah you gotta be kidding me and also guy williams came to live here
in argentina and i think he passed away here in buenos aires
but it was a you know amazing to that
this actor that's love a astronomy
it was the dad of the robinson family and lost in space
ah yes yes that's cool i liked mr smith
actually i didn't like it oh the wikipedia article as an
eight-year-old mr smith really got on my nerves the wikipedia article doesn't mention
the astronomy oh that needs to be edited it needs to be edited one thing one thing that's very interesting and
everything it has at its center this super massive black hole and they are you know so so researchers
are thinking that the bigger and older that a black hole gets the faster it
spins so they may be able to measure the age of black holes by the rate of spin
i think this this a person a mario already what i have my issues on the internet
uh he that was a huge uh equation someone posted yeah i was gonna start
yeah we're like all of the fundamental forces and stuff i don't know where he posts pretty sure
i'd melt ah here it is yesterday i figured out that in every
er the the very efficient the actor guy williams
and sorrow or lost space of and bonanza and other series
he was in astronomy yeah very cool oh and the telescope's
even facing the right way look at that yeah it's nice that the eyepiece isn't at the bottom
he actually he actually knew how to use
yeah it's all correct it's that guy's a real amateur astronomer so
exactly he was he was in a matter uh so i was
really shocking you know he may even call that planet uranus
maybe and not uranus like everybody else does so it's pronounced uranus you know
[Laughter]
that we ditched that completely and call it uranus yeah herschel wanted to name it something
different anyway
[Music] i heard you say
is
it sounds italian though it really does
i have a new i have a proposal for the new name
because we want real science to go to it and they say when nasa says we're going to go send a
probe to uranus people chuckle too much and then real science and then it
doesn't get voted in is real science so there was an article talking about concerns
um about that but uh there is a tiny galaxy my parents would
have slapped me silly so there you go yes that's why we only have
one probe that's seen urados or whatever that's why i kept
astronomy to myself until i was about 30 years old so
mom there's uranus out in the sky okay what did you just tell me
all right go to your room all right moxie what do we got all right
well it was ngc 1360 but right now uh there are two galaxies
here okay yes there are uh there are i think now maxie these are
you're not like loading up images that you already took these are live right these are like
right now i stopped because i pointed to other places but uh they are single pictures that passing
by continuously i is that a supernova or is that just
another star uh here yeah i see that right below it right below the center of that galaxy
right there really that's kind of what supernovas look like you know
we just discovered a supernova on global star parties you know it won't be the first time that something was really
neat shown on like programming we did an exoplanet measurement one time live the first time
we tried it okay so yeah amazing yeah it was
which galaxy is this this is a ngc um
1360. it was right there because
and now i'm pointing to another place there are more galaxies near of the 1365
and it's called the robin's egg nebula i don't know why
no no no no that means i'll bet it's blue shaped like a robin's egg planetary
the romans [Music]
1360 is also 13 16 16 16. oh yeah
oh sorry if i normally no that's fine oh no it's no you're you were right we just heard you wrong
okay they're here here are more particular galaxies 60 million
60 million light years away you fly your what 5.9 trillion or 4.9 trillion miles away
it's insane yeah i run the car man
celestial speaking yes uh well there are some stars
but i wanna show the place where here are only two galaxies
but they're also
hero lock says so many jokes i have to control myself [Laughter]
there's a lot of jokes that we can't really speak of so all right yeah so there's a a bright
star so i'm looking at ngc 1316 and there is a bright star uh
um but i think it's a foreground star because it's got diffraction spikes in the hubble space telescope image yeah
oh faster [Laughter]
it's still something i can't see in my own sky so it's still amazing now shelley i know you're you're
watching here there are so many um uh you know both caesar that's down in argentina and
maxie and nico uh and some others that have been have chimed
in from argentina they all talk about the culture of amateur astronomy down there you know
and uh so many like like like up here you know you have a lot of
professional astronomers that are also amateur astronomers but i love the culture of
amateur astronomy in in argentina because of the the food the fun the
camaraderie you know the wine the wine the the parties
[Laughter] they put the party once again this is why
i want to go all right that's why your wife always draws
where are you going to be for the eclipse maxine uh well the solar eclipse yeah when i when
i did when in december the new oh yes i i no no i it's impossible to watch it from
here because i'm at 34
latitude and it will be practically an ontario fuel it's really
to the australian place and it will it will be i think when the sun
comes up yes it will it's impossible but in antarctica
i think the they will be able to see a partial for sure but
i don't remember that but it seems so how that is possible i
i don't know how i went the last december or another eclipse
but this will be very impossible yeah talking about eclipses
uh well the the next month will be how we will have a i think
a a partial lunar eclipse from here yeah it'll be we will also have lunar
it'll be almost total and i'll be out in california and i'm gonna bring my camera with me
[Laughter] yeah i'm gonna be freezing in michigan
i'll be trying to get some kind of shot of that myself um i guess it's supposed to be almost
total so the part of the moon that's covered is going to exhibit kind of that glow-ish
that auburn is glow but there'll still be a little bit of moon left so it'll be that'll be an
interesting picture yeah i think it'll look a lot like the last lunar eclipse that we had that was very deep and only
had um just a little bit of of the yeah
i brought it out processing i made it orange [Laughter]
what keeping that in orange will be partial okay yeah
but in i think that the 22 of may the next year will be
completed to the east to the west i i will have here in my home
and well i i was imagining right where it going to be but
well here's another deep sky objects there's a little a kind of group of
galaxies uh also in fornax and
well i think it's more like inevitable played but it's no it's information
because it's near to ngc in 1365
and you know there are lenticular galaxies and spider spiral galaxies and i think
irregular balances there are too many kind of them but they
are too very far away so
well let's see if we can go well there are too many tiny galaxies
too many do you want to go to the
to this to the that
1845 and 2052. it's in dorado
uh this is causation dorado or office
one of the few constellations that's not an object or a part of a boat [Laughter]
which will be also interesting everything that i don't recognize is probably a part of a boat yeah karina uh
is it yes it's about here exactly if you see
broken up into a bunch of parts yeah and just put the boat back together make
it one super constellation like it was it'd be easy to remember that's the ginormous boat
it's it it's in karina it it's on the opposite side it's like you know 50 degrees away from the other
object in karina karina the well yeah one of the one of
the many things my goal would be to see the southern cross it'd be even cooler if i could see
it the way that uh david shot it that's cool gorgeous oh that's
cool this is the great magazine cloud at first ah oh boy beautiful cool
close up oh yeah yeah yeah what is that where what
a tarantula nebula right no it's near from here
oh it reminds me i saw a real tarantulas at in kenton nope they didn't look anything
like the nebula nope and they didn't want anything to do with us
they wanted to just walk away and please leave me alone
oh molly you don't have like a fear of spiders like arachnophobia or anything like that right no spiders aren't as bad
for me as uh like bees spiders i can deal with spiders only move in two dimensions all right
oh sorry for the shape of the stars some of them can jump so they wouldn't be straight for the stars yeah but like
i have my my tender the clothes
we understand that you know so you've got your saturn filter on we understand it makes everything have
rings all right so guys we have um we have
uh doug strouble waiting in the wings here uh caesar's like well you know normally
we call him 100 mile per hour caesar okay because he gets up on his patio
hear the wind howling like crazy right now it's only 30 miles an hour so but
it's still it's still not logged on right now you may come on a little bit later an image with that no problem it's not as much cameras
these are good that's true and i've got i've got my scopes up and running as well
yeah so you we have to set it outside so we have to decide if my dear friend doug scruble
we have a unit of measurement act named after him it's called destruval 30 hours of
integration okay you get 30 hours of integration into your project you have done this drupal
all right very cool that's we have we've officially come up with it in michigan
and we're trying we're trying to get it passed through the iau or whatever governing body we need to get it in
we're working on it that looks like actually why don't you once you hang in there with us okay
and we'll transition to doug struebel and uh he's got some great new images to
show us so yes yes well here to glue the session
okay it looks kind of like what we saw crawling around it is beautiful
i know you want to go down there yeah we know what molly will be imaging as soon as she touches down he's going
to aim right for it's going to track for like about a strobel's worth of time
right at the tarantula it's going to go around that and that's what she's going to get
we know it's coming yeah when i was in when i was in chile um the
uh the tarantula number that wasn't rising until like four or four thirty in the morning so i didn't
stop very much yeah just you just waited till four right i did get to look at it but didn't
really get to image it but i did get some wide shots of the uh large magellanic cloud to be able to
to see it in there but this is a gorgeous view of it this star i think i
a a unique startup here or there's a lot of stars but
here's practically the core of the nebula and this particular star is like
you know alone the different colors more red and
when you see the take the pictures and you start to process them
you see this tiny red that there
surrounded by all this and you know you know
actually i don't know i really don't don't know
we call it shelley star that's what i'm going to call there you go yeah abby's got a star barnard's got his own star
yeah shelley doug's got his own measurements
so she deserves at least one star yep i give her five stars okay
that's great that's great okay thank you and sorry information all right we had a
great up is doug one of the i i think hands down one the world's
best uh planetary nebula imagers so uh
doug i'm gonna turn the stage over to you dude okay um yeah
can you hear me yeah yeah okay here you go uh i have to figure out
how to share my screen here so you got a green button down at the bottom of your
zoom client okay yeah and if you have audio then you click share audio on the left
yeah otherwise you're yeah yeah
okay so uh we see your it looks like your desktop with the zoom client
yeah yeah so i'm gonna get out of that right here yeah um
so yeah so uh this is uh my main uh imaging telescope right here
[Laughter] it looks like something jason said the
field rotator on there
we're actually only as tall as halfway up the uh that's right halfway through the uh yeah you can't
collect possibly reach the eyepiece [Laughter]
so all right let's see what you've taken with it yeah so there's this planetary
nebula observatory for it yeah yeah this is the liverpool telescope in
spain and i was going after a planetary nebula
that was captured by it um and this is kind of what the liverpool
telescope came up with right here okay yeah wow look at that
yeah look at that network
yeah so i i took the explore scientific uh 165 millimeter oh thank you man
and in combination with the asi 183mm
has the smaller pixels and my pixel scale is at
0.43 arc seconds per pixel wow and i drizzled the data down to
0.215 arc seconds per pixel when i when i uh process
man that is beautiful so these stars that are in the background are actually like mag
mag 10 mag 11 yeah 12. yeah so there if you
yeah i take that toy telescope and think i'm gonna image it it would not
you'd barely even be able to see the stars let alone the um planetary you got
yeah exactly it looks like a toy telescope so what what i i tend to do i
tend to do a lot of planetary nebula um it works really well for me because
um in my boro sky scale of uh let me pull this up real quick here
um yeah right there uh
hold on one second not with fcd 100 glass or fpl 53 or yeah
i don't know so uh oh
yeah um let me pull up uh my actual telescope here
so uh
nope bad here hold on one second
so this is actually my my fly-off roof in the back
um i have uh two main rigs my main rig is the 100 explorer scientific 165
on that front right there and i'm using a 102 millimeter on my
second rig awesome do you like the roloff roof type of
observatory or do you wish you had a domed observatory you know i really love a roll-off and the reason
why is because a dome observatory only gives you one telescope to
true very true in fact i want to put a third rig in my
observatory if i can [Music] where are you located
uh unfortunately i'm in michigan and this is
yeah right there see that really yeah oh that's detroit are you actually
there i thought you were a little further in the northern part of the lower thumb doug no i mean i'm in taylor
which is 15 minutes oh yeah yeah okay yeah it's it's horrible so i i tend to
do a lot of uh so yeah so um where i went to take that
photo was in that thumb area of that other picture there was someone that had a
question earlier uh scott that thumb area where it's darker that's where i
drove but this is where your observatory is yeah check that out look he's crying
yeah he's crying because his images are so awesome that's why look at the border rating it's portal 9.
it just it's it's more convenient for me because i own a multimedia company so i
have to work and while working now i'll set the telescopes you know
automated to do you know certain things
so i have a all sky cam below my two telescopes to watch the clouds
and how my telescopes are reacting and then on both rigs i have a separate
laptop to control each one of the the two rigs which i'm going after
so if you look at this particular diagram right here um this kind of gives you an inkling of
what it looks like just with your naked eye
yep i think i've seen every one of those i'm sure you have yeah from the nine
until i had gotten to three and going to okie text i was finally
able to see one and it is there is a huge difference there
oh absolutely so um in my studio where i do a lot of
commercial production i also use my 2 max to process a lot of my data
good so that's mission control right there
yep yep and then i have an ip camera i use to you know control
what i'm seeing throughout the night and this is what i use for that
i you know i really have to point out that uh you know you can take your astronomy
way up you know the the rung uh by putting an observatory either on your
patio your backyard there's even a guy in singapore who just
aims a telescope outside of his window from his condo in singapore okay
so you can imagine how light polluted that is he polar aligned his mount inside of his bedroom okay
aims it out of a glass window and does narrow band imaging and it's unbelievable it really is
it's incredible i mean like i i think that like i remember when i was younger
um my uncle who was the one that really got me involved in this my uncle
my uncle bob back in the 80s you know you had to you
had to live out somewhere remote you know somewhere well that was kind of the mindset you
know if it wasn't like a shark you forget it you know you can't do really good astronomy and i i can
remember so many amateur astronomers telling me yeah i would love to do it but i can't get out of you know i can't
get away from my house light polluted here you know and uh and here we are
i think you're close to your mic doug uh what's that i think you were a little
close you were close to your mic we could we could hear you oh weird okay that's all right but we can still hear
you when you talk too it sounds like you've improved your mic a lot over
i know the last couple zoom meetings in our uh plymouth astrophotography group that
mike sounds really good yeah the problem i have is that uh my speakers are
equipped for doing multimedia production so they
right yeah so um that's kind of what led me up to do
planetary nebula in this particular case the oxygen um
overwhelms the hydrogen alpha so i just
this is another one i worked on recently uh able30 or i'm sorry able80
and uh this was uh composed mostly of hydrogen
and oxygen data
and then oh look at that able79 now after looking at fornax galaxies and
sculptor galaxies with their barred spirals this is really kind of hitting home right now
we got the bard nebula barred planetary nebula that's pretty good
yeah the interesting thing about planetary nebula is like unlike a supernova
which has the mass to go particularly supernova most of these
stars don't have enough mass to go complete supernova so you end up with something like this
where it's just blowing off a lot of gas and and usually it's a hydrogen alpha
and an oxygen you know it's beautiful
thanks do you know anything about distance of this object or
other people um off the top of my head um i think
let me see here pull it up let's see
so this particular object is um
uh i'm trying to see how far it is away
yeah i don't i don't have a particular distance in this particular stable 79
we can assist with that well i heard that planetary nebulous sometimes are very difficult to measure distance too
yeah i'm not seeing a value in places i'm looking yeah which is it's
interesting and maybe it's because of the spectral you know the redshift or you
know the special analysis of these things but sometimes they're tricky
um yep doesn't say so
um you know most most of the time i tend to do planetary nebula because it works
out really well for me here they're they're small objects they're usually in hydrogen alpha and
oxygen which i could pull off really well here with my light pollution
and um these they're still a challenge because some of them are pretty small
but um with a lot of integration time you know i i can really
i can really hammer it doug i'm curious did you just like stumble into it going wow i that turned
out really well or did you somehow know what was the clues that led you to doing
all this planetary work so the thing that led me into it was like i
still want a major challenge sure i could do hydrogen alpha and
an o3 you know with a three nanometer filter like astron
um even with my light pollution here but if i were to really go deep
and do a lot of integration time i could you know there's still a big challenge and then
dealing with how small some of these are yeah you know i it kind of levels the playing
field a little bit in terms of what i can accomplish here i see yeah but look how good the the track
you're you're at uh you know you're a lot of magnification
tracking is really spot on you know this is really challenging you know as
far as getting images as compared to uh me using a
you know a tracker or something like that in wide field i tend to be more in that range myself you know so
i i know that uh yeah i tend to largely use more objects because like
i can you know i you know i can i can resolve some of the data really well
yeah by drizzling some of the data on pixel site and then by doing some um
extra sharpening you know and other other software packages you know
sure and then i'll uh i'll do about an hour each of rgb
uh for the stars just to give it you know the proper color for the star star field
beautiful but i've been i've been going after some older objects that i started out
originally like a few years ago when i i first got into this hobby like in 2016
and in 2018 i started to get okay with it so um
this is this is one i i just went after recently wow look at that it's just beautiful it
is and the bubble nebula yeah so like oh that's cool
right there so yeah yeah you got that extra the
region in there that i usually don't see in bubble nebulous shots you gotta psychedelic
it i mean it's crazy i think you gotta do it narrowband for it to really come out otherwise it's just red like everything else
yeah and even with narrowband usually that particular spot right there in the in
the bubble is usually blown out so i i had to do a separate exposure
uh for that and then blend it in in photoshop you know
and then another one i did recently uh was the tuba yeah yeah yeah
um unfortunately i didn't get the bow shock outside the tulip but i was more concerned with the
back end texture so that's kind of what i went after
that's awesome and then i was reprocessing some data
from earlier this year and did one at the california nebula yeah that's nice
that's a that's a wider feel for sure yeah that was done with a 70 millimeter
yeah uh in fact that one uh in particular ended up in astronomy magazine where
like a a show hubble palette version yeah great
thanks congrats yeah and then i did another one um in sky and
telescope with my uh um sharpless uh tooth 132.
oh yeah look at that it's electric it's beautiful
thanks doug what was what were kind of like the you know aha moments for you i mean
everybody goes to this path and you know they're they they they try and they try and they try
until they and there's a moment where things kind of click and then boom you know you've got something that's really
something that really shocks you or impresses you you know as a
as an astrophotographer what what when were those moments for you or what was one of those moments for you
um you know the the first moment for me
uh let me pull up this one image here um it was back in 2018 two years after i
started astrophotography and there was this one particular image
i was going after called the the squid nebula yeah
and i just i realized that you have to really hammer
a lot of integration time with some of this stuff you know
um so yeah let me pull this one up here so this is uh
this is my first image of the day on astrobin um where i really squid
yeah that is definitely now you know why it's called the squid nebula it's beautiful yeah so ghostly
looking and against that red hydrogen and yeah it's it's a it's a bipolar region
which you don't see a whole lot of when it comes to star formations
but um that's when i i really hammered out and uh
i realized after that point it just takes a lot of integration time
yeah um and you know it doesn't really matter where you live i mean like
like you can live in arizona with some really nice skies and you can get a lot of
integration time you know you can get a really nice image in a short amount of integration time
but when you're going after some of these really faint objects it doesn't really matter
where you live you know you can live in arizona and you live in michigan like me and you know
you know that that would be a great uh article for you to write because people don't understand
that right yeah but yeah it's really interesting you know that
to get this fine of an image
yeah there was an article i wrote for uh scott and explore scientific a couple years ago on planetary
yeah and most of them are pretty faint uh but
it's a main focus of mine not only because of what they are but because i can do them successfully
well where i live you know in narrowband you're always so the talk of integration
time do you see what i'm saying to to explain what that takes
yeah absolutely i mean like um i think my longest one ever did right here was
uh this one right here this is 106 hours geez
wow that's dedicated or if you do the math you come up to about four and a half
drubals that's right exactly
actually i think it's three and a half i i shot it i mean the interesting thing about this
is it's two objects superimposed over each other so you have a planetary nebula
uh ngc 40. and then the background we have cta1 which is a supernova remnant
which is the part that's really faint in the background yeah
and um that's kind of what i was going after unfortunately during this time period
this was in um august and july where we had like a lot of uh
forest fire smoke coming over you know pretty much the whole united states
so i this background data would have came out a lot better
you know if it wasn't for that i believe
brolo is sending me a message right now he says he's this connection i probably because of the wind i don't know but uh
his connection on the rooftop failed so he's uh he's going to try to
reconnect again but uh we will you know if not he's going to meet us up
meet up with us next week so okay yeah yeah this is this is great stuff
beautiful stuff doug thanks and i'm really happy you came on to the program
yeah a lot of fun yeah thank you yeah and you know scott you got some good plugs for uh
this was done with explorer scientific gear yeah it was i know i know i i when you see stuff like this i mean this is
not stuff i could you know i do myself okay so i'm
constantly blown away by what amateur astronomers do uh with their equipment and uh if you
know if it happens to be some equipment that you built then wow the feeling is really amazing it is
so it's it's like uh you know watching a a world champion skier use your skis or
something like that you know to to break a record and i would say that doug has
constantly broken records certainly imaging for where he is and i would say that uh you know whether
you're amateur or professional when you see doug's work you're seeing some really amazing stuff that's beautiful
and some and i call it easy dedication obviously doug you're very dedicated to
you know you're processing this stuff over a lot of time and you've got your processing uh
you know your your workflow down um and it takes all of this time
it's not something that you can just snap out in a two second image which is
i have the uh yeah the shortest integration time in all of my images 30 seconds that's called a bradley
you get something in 30 seconds it's the opposite of the spectrum right
it's like i can't wear stream yeah i know and most people you know when i
post the image they think like oh i i took a picture in the galaxy right now
yeah and that was it you know you know all of the yeah we've we've got there's astrophotographers that are in a
group that approach 30 hours you know they're they're pulling out images with 10 hours of time
and you know 15 hours of time and then they begin to approach
you know some of the some of the intricate detail and you can get a basic shape
of something you can go somewhere dark like that crab nebula right there
you can look at that crab nebula you can look at a hubble image of it
and you can begin to see some of the same detail that you know it takes hubble
maybe you know it'll take hubble maybe a little less time to get it because of its position in space
but you're seeing detail that you could only see you know looking at professional
professionally used telescopes look at that yeah the bottom of the line is like i mean
like you have some of the best processing skills you know there is but you're you're not
going to pull out there's no there's no substitute for long integration time
yeah and i think gary i think gary one of the other um astrophotographers here nazi says
he's saying the same thing um which is why i'm looking at you know if i want to do
a little bit of deeper work no matter how dark the skies i travel to being able to get longer times
just seems to make a huge difference the um the image of the orion nebula that i got into
two minutes without a modded camera it sort of showed me well if you can point at
something for a long enough time all of that light comes down into the sensor gets trapped and now you have
more data to work with so it's just it's just something i have i see your work doug and it's like you
know eventually i got to get you know i've got the 30 seconds everything down pat i'm gonna have to
you know work on that you know getting longer if i want more d if i want more detail you
know it just it's part of the process as it goes so it's this is a
real it's always a real reminder of it when we see your images yeah we're fighting uh atmospheric distortion
essentially yeah you know uh that along with light pollution what have you
um so yeah and i was gonna you know one of the things the proponents of light pollution
we talk about um losing our skies visually you lose your skies
you don't want to get to the point where the only way you can see this is through although that would that
would probably make you very happily employed doug um but uh
you know it takes all of that time to see these things in space
um so there's still a battle to keep like pollution from oh sure forcing you know
our hand with this but uh it's also not as easy you know we've been talking but it's not as easy as to take a picture
and you've got something as intricate as this um you know so that's
that's definitely uh you know definitely a lesson for myself and a lot of us that
like to do astrophotography no no i've done some broadband stuff
before like this one right here yeah i just i just really had to pile on the integration time to pull
that out you know yeah and you know just seeing the uh seeing the detail you've got over here with uh i think this is uh
51b basically i forget which one is a and which one's b but in most images this is almost nothing
it's just kind of a wisp and all and you see some detail in the galaxy the spiral
but in yours you've got detail in the uh secondary galaxy here that's that's
interacting with it yeah that's you know that these subtle little things that
always draw on my eye and it's you you want accuracy
as well as you know you have a pretty picture here but you've got it extremely accurate too
you know there's you could almost do a little bit of science i would imagine with an image that that's you know
that's got that much accuracy in it yeah yeah thank you very much guys that's
great okay so we are going to segue over to molly wakeling she uh
has uh been able to log in and it looks like maybe caesar might try a
little bit later we were supposed to have cesar brolo on but uh um i will uh i will turn this over to
molly for a little while there you are
you're muted i think molly no not anymore i hit the button on my microphone yeah i do that hit it hard
enough uh i'm trying to get the app open to to adjust my webcam lighting but uh it
doesn't want to open so here i am in the dark there you are
um yeah so i i was supposed to do one of my regular astronomy's universe talks but
i forgot uh this will be the uh impromptu
volley yes so what i'm gonna do instead is i'm actually imaging tonight because it's clear outside so i'm gonna show you what
i'm imaging and talk a little bit about my super awesome setup um so i'll go ahead and share my screen
here um so moonrise is in about 30 minutes oh by
the way um let me pop back over to
[Music] yeah okay so um i what i've got here is actually let me
show a picture of my backyard setup um
little open here man my computer's just not wanting to open applications right now molly are you keeping your telescope set up all
the time or they're set up permanently in my backyard um
uh and by permanently i really mean semi permanently because they're not like on piers and stuff like that
um i but this is my backyard setup and every morning i put their telegizma 365 covers
back on and then every night that it's clear i rip them back off so if it rains or you know how do you
deal with that so those telegizmus covers are are amazing they're just as good as tilly gizmos says that they are
so um this these scopes have been through some pretty heavy rain here in ohio and
they're just bone dry underneath of uh of that cover um
and the only reason i would take him inside is for uh tornado weather because the high winds um and debris finally
i was about to ask if they were tornado proof but i had a feeling that that was their failing point yeah so that hasn't
happened yet um the tornado that we had uh most recently back in june uh was
before i got my telescope set back up because i just moved out here and my stuff hadn't arrived yet so
um before two at his bounce yeah um i'll note that uh so right now in so
the telescope in the middle this one here um i actually have a different scope on there now but i haven't taken a
new group photo um i was testing a telescope for optical structures but now i have my eight inch
f4 newtonian back on there that i'm using uh for science scientific observing so i do a
lot of variable star imaging for the american association of variable star observers and so i've got my newtonian back on
here now and um that's imaging that's the newtonian here um with my qsi camera on there
so that's that's kind of the context of my setup uh with underneath of the of my main scope
here i've got a little intel nook computer and that is operating
the front two telescopes here the c8 and the takahashi as well as what you can't see in this
picture is i have a sky quality meter and an all sky cam sitting on the ground because i uh um i need to get some epoxy
to properly glue on a uh a nut so that i can actually put it
on the tripod so right now it's sitting on the ground um
but uh yeah so this this this little computer runs these two rigs and the scope in the back here uh my
newtonian is run just by one of my laptops that's just sitting on top of the power box
yeah and they just both live out there all the time uh you know their own heat keeps them warm and dry
and then when it rains they're covered by the telegizmus covers so uh works pretty good under this high
quality meter does it uh depress you to constantly see 18s and
17s or yeah it's a little depressing uh although tonight so we just had a
a front move through we got dumped on rain yeah and uh but now we have a cold front moving in so actually the sky is very
transparent tonight and i'm currently sitting at nineteen point two about as dark as i've seen yet here that's that's
probably about as dark as you'll get where you are the dark sky parks get to like 20 point
something yeah that's where a friend of mine went binocular astronomy tonight
i told him i'm staying warm and presenting so yeah it's uh currently yeah let's go to
my weather station it is 38 degrees outside it's gonna get down to freezing tonight
oh that reminds me i need to go turn the heater on in my camper because i haven't winterized it yet [Laughter]
i'll go do that but um yeah so uh let me show you what i'm what i'm doing right now so on the on the c8 on on this rig
here with the orange tube and the paramount uh i am currently uh so these are the
targets i have on deck for tonight in cinco generator pro is draco trio which is what i've got here now um
uh i don't think it's actually called the draco trio that's just what i've been calling it because it's in draco
and it's a trio of galaxies that i've seen lots of nice pictures of and the cool thing about this group here
is that um there's actually three different types of galaxies represented here there's a spiral galaxy here and i
think it's an elliptical here and a edge-on spiral galaxy here yeah so it
makes for a really cool kind of uh contrasting view and see i think i think the middle one
is ngc 5982 and then 5981 and 59.85 i think of the
other two um yeah so that's what i'm imaging right now this is a five minute image that
just came in using my light pollution filter my astronomic cls
ccd on deck for the rest of tonight is ngc 1333 which is a cool emission nebula up
uh kind of leads orion um so that's coming up a little later i'm doing the the heart of the heart the
melat 111 i think it is kind of that cool spiral structure in the middle of the
heart nebula i'm doing that one in narrow bands so i've got hydrogen and oxygen i don't have a sulfur filter yet
because i was going to wait to buy the sulfur so like i i have a chroma filters which when i bought them
were 750 bucks a piece oh yeah so i waited to buy this
well i waited to buy the sulfur filter but i shouldn't have waited because now they're 1300 uh
which is really unfortunate yes uh yeah so i just hide it in an oxygen
for now um and then i'm also imaging the ghost of cassiopeia also known as gamma cass uh
whoops looks like my guider kind of jumped here in this last exposure uh let's take a look oh yeah there's
there's the job sometimes i i need to i've had this paramount for two years it probably needs a new layer of grease
um i'll work on that sometime so i'm doing the ghost of cassiopeia
mainly in narrowband but i'm also getting rgb for the stars and to add some color to um
uh some some extra color because the ghost of cassiopeia a lot of times when i see it it's not just red it's kind of
got some greens and blues in there whoops it's uh uh okay yeah so now we're changing targets
to ngc 1333 the end time for the draco trio has arrived
and so what secret generator pro is doing now is it's it's uh it has just just slewed
to ngc 1333 which it does through the sky x so um the sky x is what's
controlling the mount and then it takes a an image and it
plate solves it so here's the image it's going to plate solve um ngc 1333 it's really kind of dim in
the slight pollution so uh i have to stack a lot of images this anytime you're doing broadband you need
so much exposure time and and for narrow band as well uh from the better get a strobel's worth yeah
i i have had one data set with a struggle's worth of data i've had i have a
i have one 34-hour data set um that i'm incredible that's pretty long yeah
yeah so it it um it took a an image it plate solved it and it was 14 000 pixels off which i
expect because my my uh my pointing model in the sky x is not great
unfortunately schmidt casted grains are not great for making pointing models um so it slewed the telescope and it's
still off by a little bit by 400 pixels so it's suited again and once the coordinates that i have
specified are centered in the image within an error of 50 pixels then it'll say yep this is good enough yeah and
this this is kind of the the heart of ngc 1333 here so it has finished
uh plate solving and it's got that target centered it's resuming the auto guider
it automatically flips the calibration from uh uh west to east because now we're back in
the eastern part of the sky resumed guiding and uh once once it takes a little bit of
settling time then it's gonna start the next exposure here so i've got this uh all automated it
auto focuses every um uh i thought it was supposed to auto
focus every target i need to go double check that um and uh it auto focuses it changes focus
between filters from a pre-measured focus offset that i've that i've gone and measured already uh it meridian
flips it it does everything it's pretty great that's cool um over on the
oh yeah let me show you also this is the all skycam so you can see that i have nice clear
sky out there the takahashi's here on the left the c8s over here on the right um there's the nook glowing with a super
bright blue light that i haven't yeah i'm off yet oh this is live that's live right now from your all live yeah
i take a shot every minute so this is the scope was still kind of slewing here but um we are playing
hi we are playing both the place in on the planet
we are here in the south you are taking pictures oh yeah yeah
that's the real global of global you know yeah oh okay yeah now it's refocusing it
refocuses after the uh um the slough so it's suing my uh primal lucha lab as
auto focuser in and out until it makes a nice quadratic curve that will show up here and then it finds the the bottom of
that curve and that's where it sits the focus point to be and it works pretty it works great on the c8 it's a
little bit dodgy on the takahashi just because of um it's got a really tight
focus point because of that fast focal ratio yeah um so let's hop over to the takahashi
um so uh what i'm imaging right now this is a
live image well the previous five minute exposure of the bubble nebula
and i'm using my color camera but uh sticker generator pro does not auto debayer so it's black and white right
now but you can see the bubble here the cool open cluster that's down here
and another little bit of nebulosity that i don't remember the name of offhand uh this is using my
opti-long lx stream filter so the background is much lower than it was over on
on my other scope because um over on scope i'm using a broadband filter at the moment this is narrowband so it cuts
out really a lot of light pollution and i have a nice nice dark background here
other targets i'm doing tonight uh actually i'm just doing the bubble and the flame and horse head nebula which
i'm also doing with the lx stream filter um i've i've been working on simon horsehead for a little while already
this year and the takahashi keeps not wanting to focus
uh or at least like um uh sequester inverter pro keeps missing the focus point
so um it might be because i'm starting it too early might be too low to get good images from
or might be behind uh like some tree branches and stuff i gotta i haven't been up at three in the morning to watch
it happen you just go to sleep and it does its thing right yeah so so i back when for
the first several years of me doing this hobby i would pack up my gear go out to the observatory that the astronomy club
here uh owns and would unpack my gear and set up and be up freezing my butt off with my
equipment and run back and forth inside to warm up and then back out to check on things and there um i thought that was
the only way to do it yeah you know that that's how i was doing it for a long time and i kept
having dreams of being able to automate stuff and i i got sequel generator pro like the free version
and um even after the trial expires you can keep using it it just has fewer fewer features but
i one by one i uh i automated filter changes and then i automated meridian
flips and then i got a focuser and automated focusing and just kind of one by one added more
complexity until now i have a backyard set up and i'm remoting into my computer outside
from my computer inside and i can rub it remote into it from my cell phone in bed
which is really okay so molly beyond this i mean you're switching from scope to scope you're all automated
you're in you're cozy in bed and everything are you like listening to music or something at the same time or
now if you are listening to music is it like mozart or is it like acds be black
and black i mean what are you listening to so so when i'm doing this i'm not really observing i'm not doing like
electronic assisted astronomy or anything like that but when i process my images
especially when i'm pre-processing doing all of the calibration and the registration and like waiting
for stuff to run i actually listened to a couple of linens and dragons podcasts then the dragons like
uh live play games um listen to critical role and i listened
to um uh our friends at the table and i listened to the adventure zone so
there you go that's what i listen to all the time or something it's different from huh that's different from nas that i
listen to while i do my quick processing on my nightscapes and get done with them
well sometimes i listen to uh to like a lo-fi uh low-fi
panel on on spot yeah i like those too yeah and that's just kind of some nice like mood music when it's raining
outside and you can't image but you're processing data and drinking some some earl grey and it's real nice
very good no i do i i endorse that uh i approve of that
choice of music the lo-fi uh lo-fi i guess you could call it chill hop you can it's called lo-fi hip-hop
it's all instrumental and it's all really downhill yeah it's very chill and downbeat
all right once i discovered that i i don't listen to nas as often um
i'll sometimes go to that and and finish a few images yeah yeah it takes me
anywhere between like four and ten hours to process an image um depending on how hard it is some images
practically process themselves and those are mostly ones i take under dark skies anything i take in my backyard requires
a lot of effort to uh deal with with gradients and noise and
all right so here's the series here's an actual serious question for me which you know i don't have many of those tonight
i'm noticing kind of the ring in your imaging here do you have a set of flats
that you have already taken that you just simply apply to all of
your processing are taking flats and darks and things a
part of your overall process yeah so um i take new flats anytime i
take the camera off of the scope because there's no chance you're ever going to get that lined up the exact same way
every time um and i and yes i most most of the dust bunnies i deal with uh
on the regular are the little ones that are on the filter and on the camera sensor which um won't change by taking
it on and off because i take off the cameras in the filter as as one unit but i also especially on the sprint cast the
grain have ones that are out on the corrector plate that do show up when you step back
images um from from light polluted locations where i have high backgrounds so yeah i do
have to so i take i take knee flats anytime i take the camera on and off and i actually have a
i have a um electroluminescent panel for my eight inch now and also for my takahashi and
smaller so i have a four and a half inch one and an eleven inch one
so do you go ahead and put like the do you just use the panel or are you
putting like a t-shirt or something else on panels
since they're electroluminescent they don't they don't have like the refresh rate that uh um like lcd tracing panels and stuff
have okay uh which is um why they're kind of special and um probably pricey
yeah uh yeah a bit um although the uh so the one i have for the the
four and a half inch one i have on loan from optical structures right now um and the 11 inch one i bought used
from another club member out in sacramento when i was out in california so uh yeah that helps a lot but
yeah they're a little pricier than like a tracing tablet but you don't have to deal with refresh rate and stuff like that and they have adjustable brightness
so i set the brightness level and i take a set of calibration i use the calibration wizard in sequestration
order pro measure all my exposure times and then secret generator pro will save those ex those exposure times to the
profile of your telescope so that when i say when i say uh when i set the image type
to flat it will automatically load the exposure time for that profile for that filter so
you get nice flat flats yeah yeah so uh and they're repeatable
uh because the exposure time because i keep the brightness at the same level yeah stuff like that so so i take flats
um whenever i change whenever i take the camera off the scope and that's usually just when i travel um
when so for darks i actually have a darks library and um
so so for so i any night that it's cloudy since i'm set up permanently i just take darks
and set the camera temperature for whatever i need and i i have found with my zwo cameras i need new darks about
every 18 months because either something in the firmware has changed or um
i don't know like my 2020 my uh january 2020 darts don't work
anymore they um they don't they're they're they look much different than my
2021 darks so i've been i've been working on i've recently finished taking a new a whole new library at every
temperature from negative every so from negative five celsius to 25 to negative
25 celsius in five degree increments for exposure times from
20 seconds to 600 seconds um and i only use one gain value so i
don't i don't have to um do different gains but if you do use different gain values you have to do it for different gains as well
and so i have that for both cameras uh actually all three cameras because i also have a set of darks for my um
scientific camera um and i keep that darks library so and then i update it every 18 months or
so or when the center dark starts to start to look different okay
real interesting yeah it's that's also something coming up in my life for um
even even in nightscape photography um having those flats darks and things
can make an image in what's what's seen in the sky and then it it gets into a little bit of
a couple of different ways that i can do it i can composite it with a single foreground shot if i want or
or if i do the entire thing um you know the in fact the only time i
wouldn't use i would necessarily use the flatter or dark is if i'm trying to do a perfect
exposure single shot and i'm somewhere where it's really dark and um so i'm basically trying to do all
the magic and post to you know make stuff in the night sky shine but um
but yeah that's definitely something i've been looking into a lot more and i'm hoping to get some eventually get a process by which
you know if i like to do wide field astrophotography i'm gonna have to have darks flats i've
biased files i even try and take some of those um stack them all together um so i back
when i used used to use a dslr before i got my astro cameras um and and and even
with my astro cameras before i had a backyard a backyard setup
i would take my camera and throw it out on the back porch and uh just put like a bin over it
um and maybe prop the bin to allow some airflow and stuff like that and uh for my dslr i also i got a little
usb temperature probe and it i just i could record i could i could say start
record stop recording it would record temperatures in like whatever interval that i set on the computer so
like five minutes or something like that oh cool it would record the temperatures and put it into a spreadsheet and then
uh for my ds for my dslr i would go through all the darks over the course of the night and separate them by two
degrees fahrenheit intervals which is kind of an arbitrary choice and
by exposure time and over the course of several weeks would build up my darks library and over the course of the year
buildup and darks library for all temperatures that i imaged at that's cool that started to my dslr and
then all right guys huh yeah uh i need to um i need to transition um
uh shelly bonus and steve pasquet on and we're running just a little bit over
um yep so uh great images great presentation molly
of course it's really cool to see as always thank you thank you very much
yeah yeah i have to log off for the night uh cause it's bedtime for me it's bedtime
all right guys thank you so much you guys
thank you very much enjoy the lo-fi chill hop while your imagers do their thing out that's right that's right
all right so we're going to transition now to shelly bonus and steve pasquet
they have uh they had an amazing experience um in zero gravity so
um i'm going to turn this over to you guys and let me bring this up so i have you hello shelly
hi steve hi scott hi everybody yeah thank you
hello oh that's right an honor to be in this there we go thank you very much for the invitation thank you so much guys thank you
so so tell me tell me about your experience i mean i've long wanted to do
the zero gravity experience myself uh you know and i think it's uh i think it's amazing that you guys shared it
together and uh so what can you tell us well as fast for me i probably would not
have done it if uh shelly had not um signed up for it um i knew it would
be a lot more fun if i was with shelley doing it so we had a blast together
and it was a very amazing mix of emotions and sensations both physical
uh and emotional uh i'll let shelley take it from here for a moment well the first thing um
i wanted to say about it was that from the time i saw a video this many
many years ago of stephen hawking on on zero g
you know free of his wheelchair really in ecstasy and they were playing with him like he was a ball
and when he got down from zero g the comment that he made was i could have
gone on and on space is the place and seeing that freedom and that that
amazing joy even the people you know that were around him had it was a dream
of mine to be able to ex experience you know this zero g this this freedom this
floating and um i used to lecture about it and teach about it in my classes and never
imagined that i'd be able to fly on the zero g plane and then
my students who knew that i wanted to go so badly
this quarter announced you've been talking about this for years we're sending you on zero g
so that's how it happened um and um it was just uh astonishing and steve i
came out from in baltimore now so i came out from baltimore and i was staying with steve and lisa
and steve was going to be kind enough to take me to the airport long beach airport to fly on zero g
and um lisa got up early and she i was sitting in the car and steve was telling her
goodbye and getting ready to kiss her goodbye and then she said well well are you coming back for lunch
and steve said no actually um we're gonna be back sometime after three and she kind of
cocked her head like a like a little dog said what what and she said yeah i'm gonna fly with shelley so
so that's when we found i found out and it was just astounding and the
experience um going to to long beach to where the you
know where we boarded the plane the the organization they were great everybody was great everybody was
excited like little kids as you could imagine and and the actual
the actual flying was was astounding i think you know i was a bit concerned i
think they give you literature you know because they call it the vomit comet i didn't want to vomit i had prepared to
get you know a patch for motion sickness but i'd sailed a lot and never got sick
on a boat so uh when when we're there i thought maybe the patch is going to be too heavy and it could make you dry
mouth or your eyes dry out and they kept saying no people really don't get that that ill on it you should be all right
um and just for safe keeping they actually were passing around um a drama mean to
people if they wanted to okay did you take vitamin c or do you no i um
i didn't take dramamine i i don't get um i don't get seasickness or motion
sickness very much but i did find it interesting that looking back on it now basically 10 to
the people that were flying with us not the crew because they're very seasoned but 10 percent of the the
newcomers are listen ourselves the newbies uh did get sick three out of approximately 30 with one girl
getting very sick and we felt very badly for her because there's no way to relieve her discomfort until we're you
know on the ground and that would take a while uh the company that does this zero g has
been doing this for a number of years they've got it down to a science and there's no no pun there they really know
you know what they're doing and how to prepare you so intellectually
shelley and i knew exactly what to expect because there'd been a lot of orientation not only uh prior to the
flight day but also pre-flight at the airport itself so they just like knocked that gal out
with like a hammer or what did they do say that again please i said did they knock the girl out with a hammer too no
no no we are seated for the ascent uh so they helped her back to a receipt
and cleaned up let's just say her immediate area oh okay so um but she was clearly suffering
and there wasn't a lot you know we that could be done until she could get back on the ground oh boy everybody has a
vomit bag if they need it um and three people did with her being the worst
right we knew i'm sorry i have to say that one boy
man boy he did he did puke and the puke stayed in the air
and they came with a bag i mean not even a drop they came with the bag you know i mean just grabbed it out of the air huh
they've seen it all the the crew has seen it all i'm sure intellectually we knew what to
expect and there was a tremendous amount of adrenaline
pumping in our system as we were getting to the cruising altitude
and we were going to be um slipping into it uh
in a sort of easy way the first time that they had the parabola drop
was not that much of an angle so we had what was approximate to
martian gravity of 33 or something like that
and then the next two times we did it was lunar gravity at about eighteen percent okay
so it was the third time that we did it fourth time we did it that we became totally zero g
and the stunning thing for me at least was how effortless it was
to float huh yeah he was he was a great floater
tumbler it was amazing the martian gravity was rather difficult for me i
realized when i got up you weren't floating right away and i was i was like my feet were like centering
around like a toddler you know almost trying to find my balance because there was a part of me that was starting to
uh you know levitate a little bit in the other part of me that was still grounded and um so that was that was um the
martian got a little bit easier with lunar but i was just
amazed like every cliche that you would think about space or or that you learn
in yoga go with the flow the force is with you you know you're just all of a
sudden you're you're floating you don't even realize you're going up and then
if if you're moving if you're if you're floating like over to the side of the plane it was just to touch the tip of
your finger that you would touch and you could just go in another direction it was it was truly effortless
to move around and so therefore there's this tremendous sense of almost almost being calm
as you're floating in space but that is also in contrast to how your
heart is pumping from the excitement so you really go through a lot of different feelings and sensations while
it's happening and then it's very brief it's 15 to 20 seconds
and then you were being honestly yelled at to get on the ground get on the floor yeah
because you're going to be suddenly 1.8 to 2 times heavier oh man okay so
you could hit the floor pretty hard you could and as you are floating down one of the things that kind is in the back
of your mind is who's on top of you is crowded because you're able to get
pancakes they did they did yell feet down coming down and that at that point
you're not supposed to do any more trick or somersault get down right because the only danger would be if if you were
coming down hard when when you were coming back to gravity and then the angle if you would fall on your hand or
your foot on our flight no one got injured and we were all very you know uh mindful of everybody around
us because sometimes as you'll see in the video in a moment we didn't bump into each other but it was never with
force because everybody is just floating around like bubbles in the sky what does it feel like if you bump into somebody
else so is it hard or is it kind of it is not hard because but it's like pushing against the wall i
mean it's like you hit someone's leg or your leg hits someone's head okay they
just slowly move away and you slowly move away weird huh
so did it feel like a roller coaster ride for you guys or no no it wasn't that quick as you know um
it was probably 20 seconds up 20 seconds down and okay
and then in the middle of it they gave us a break for two minutes just so we can
get our gears back in order um total time for us weightless probably
somewhere between four to five minutes in in zero g after
12 parabolas and they said that they've come to this number of 15
parabolas because they find if they push it more than that number that's when people start getting sick
that's when they really start getting sick i see but the idea that you're really
uh going with the flu that you're floating at one point i i had turned my head and i said oh my
gosh i'm almost up at the ceiling i did not feel myself even going up it's not like um floating in water water is there
it's a substance it's just complete freedom and ease i intentionally closed my eyes
during one of the uh one of the floating flights okay just so i could get a sense
of where am i in space yeah and i had no clue
wow once i closed my eyes i had no idea where i was
but i'd like to say that the next day uh after our flight there was a group on
the plane and the and the organization is called astro access
and the white sides george white's side was with richard branson's company and
the red or white side galactic now yeah loretta whitesides who's with yuri's
night they sponsored this group and this was a group of differently
abled um phd's from you know scientists from universities all over the country
um you know whether they were on crutches had prosthetics whatever and
also one uh blind completely blind uh scientist which i thought was really um
interesting because we didn't know you know what did people get sick was it a disconnect because you have no sense of
up or down or right or left when you're in space and you're turning around and it was interesting because i
called the company i wanted to know how how he fared and they said that actually
the one question he said he was all that he had that same experience like me he was almost up to the ceiling and and and
felt he said wow i'm almost to the ceiling he could feel it and had no idea
because you don't you just don't feel the the glide you know yeah and that that's
a marvelous thing and they are trying to um do more flights for for differently abled people because you
know it's time they say that you know differently abled people are also working in space so it's a very
interesting organization and that will be really amazing if they bring um uh
some of those people to the international space station just to go to work you know so
right they've got a lot to offer i'm sure the company was smart in advising us not
to take our own photographs because you want to be in the moment and not worry about recording it so they were very
good about taking a lot of great stills and shooting video with gopros that were
um anchored to the sides of the interior fuselage which is what we used what i used to put
together this small video okay all right let's play that i'm gonna show it the
video yeah i'm gonna show it hold on for just a second hold on
hold on yep we see i see it let's trans transfer
something here um make it a little larger i guess yeah
i've got you guys on spotlight here there we are and uh
that'll bring it up bigger here steve is quite a flyer flips and
everything wonderful okay so that's the plane in 30 seconds and counting
[Music] astronauts reported feels good
all engine running liftoff we have a liftoff 32 minutes
past the hour yeah how could you take your own pictures doing this i mean
i'm the one wearing the yellow mask with the white hair [Music]
[Applause] okay
[Applause] look at you wow and look at shelly's hair
that is amazing that is amazing this looks like
something i don't know that anything without doing this
you know it sounds like the reaction of people when they see a total eclipse of the sun you know
yeah absolutely
there he goes where's his boyfriend look at steve go
and they had us do a superman shot [Applause]
great steve shelly that's awesome and we were trying to catch catching
water [Applause]
awesome thank you shelley
thank you steve but what i wanted you to know is that i don't know how many years ago it was
that i was first introduced to the idea of doing this um they had something i was running the
planetarium at santa monica college and they had something called the space tourism awards that i had to host
and um there was they were going to give an award to dennis tito and bert ratan who
designed richard branson's plane was there and peter diamandis who actually
was one of the founders of zero g and um when they talked about this and then
i saw like i said when i saw stephen hawking have this enormous freedom
you know i just i just swept it's just the emotion of that that freedom that in
a different time in a different place and in space your life could be so different
and my desire to have that experience was enormous and i just got very lucky
because um my students said you've been talking about this for years and we're sending you and that's
how it happened so it's cool yeah that is so cool well i could i can you know i i will uh
i will brag for shirley and myself in that uh uh william shatner had a better view but
we had more float time yeah there you go we have we have more fun you know yeah
yeah yeah there was one man on the uh on the plane he was an adventurer and he had just been down to
the mariana trench in in uh in the march he was i think the 19th person that went in the
submersible his friend had built the submersible there was a couple who had been doing this for their second time
there was a family of four uh with an 11 year old and a 13 year old there was a fellow shelley if you recall stage four
cancer yes and it was a bucket list thing for him and he wanted to do this with his son
yes yes and he he he he is uh was a reporter for the long beach report
quite fragile he was quite you know i i had a conversation with uh
tom and linda spilker who work at jpl we're on the voyager mission and all of that
and uh tom is building like a huge uh space station uh that will that
will be up i guess within 10 years or something i mean it's just enormous ginormous okay and uh one of the things
he touched on was the fact well i don't know if it's a fact but a point that uh perhaps
people at different levels of gravity would actually
have better health benefits okay um you know depending on what might be
wrong with you so that is something they're studying and uh maybe they're studying on on the zero g aircraft as well i don't know but
well i'll tell you it that's very interesting because you know i'm i'm pretty arthritic you know and floating
was was floating it was fantastic was that a release of any pain or discomfort that
you well i didn't have any pain or discomfort at all but the next day when i came back down
the earth you know i was like grandma you know later that day
both shelley and i kind of crashed physically and um you know strength wise
crashed and i think it's because we had such a rush of adrenaline for such a long period of time
that when it was finally over later in the afternoon uh both shelley and i just
we were spent yeah i mean it was that exciting and that
thrilling and that elevating no pun intended yeah that there's no
place to do except come down a bit so would you guys do this again yes
yeah uh it's uh you know it is not for everyone
certainly not for someone who's got motion sickness and it is you know rather expensive
um but uh it's something that is uh i would encourage anyone if they had
the resource to do it to absolutely do it right yeah yeah thank you go ahead
shelly i said it was a delight and the and the young people that worked on the plane you know
they were they were very well trained they were very professional but they reminded me of the kind of people that
would be running a zip line you know what i mean in hilo or you know
athletic um focused and professional but the feeling was
fabulous and so um yeah and you know i once had a dream
where i flew which was really strange and i i don't i don't dream a lot and i
had remembered my dream and i was kind of low flying and gliding and i was over a city and it was really incredible and
when i woke up i mean this was like maybe 10 years ago and when i woke up i
thought i wanted to go i wanted to go back to sleep to have that dream yeah and i had that dream in
awake in the plane i mean that's how yeah okay that's worth it right there
that's worth it right there and there's no it's not like floating there's no water you're not pushing
anything you just you know even if you did tai chi move and you're raising your arms and it
looks like your hands are floating but you have muscle tension but there it's nothing no it's uh every part of your
body is just loose and when you turn upside down blood does not rush to your head
it's not going anywhere you're just you just happen to be upside down and you laugh a lot yeah
i could hear that in the video i know i would be laughing and i would i would be yeah it would be like giddy
over that so um well that's wonderful i'm glad that you both had that experience and you could
share it with us yeah i i hope i hope you get to do it someday yeah i hope so
too yeah i hope so too you know um i i did want to mention um
uh shelley's been on with me before and we've done some shows together uh but
shelley uh worked for a very long time at mount wilson observatory she's very very interested in astronomy you know
i've stayed close to her for a number of years steve uh you know i've learned a little bit about you
uh do you have uh what is your fast do you have a fascination of space exploration or are you also well having grown up in florida
i grew up in florida and i uh got a chance to witness a lot of
launches from okay right including apollo 11.
and and then in the middle of my college years i got
drafted by nasa and i worked at the marshall space flight center in huntsville alabama wow
in the photographic division okay and we would uh we would do a lot of um
films that were documentation of tests whether that be uh rockets because that's where the
saturn uh five rocket was built and tested that's one of the skylab things at that
time uh but also we got a chance to do a lot of educational films and so i got more
and more interested in the idea of bringing space down to earth
yeah for people to really understand our our position
in the universe as special as we all are we're still just a speck of dust in a much larger
arena and so i enjoyed that aspect of doing that
work i i did it for uh two years in alabama and i moved out here to to california to start my career in in
television right and uh now i teach um english as a second language as a
volunteer with the la county library system very interesting i met shelly when she was a neighbor of ours many
years ago maria del rey yep we had a common interest in solar eclipse
is uh i have seen five total solar eclipses oh wow uh and
uh planned to see the next one in i guess april 2024 uh near san antonio very cool yeah well
maybe i'll see you down there that's yeah you're really cool right you try to get shelley down there too i have we ha i have one friend that's
going down to antarctica right now because there's well in about a month because there's going to be a
total coach down there so tyler nordic is going in yeah it's very
cool i am so happy you guys came on to our program thank you very much we enjoyed uh enjoying being here thank you
that's awesome amazing yeah yeah i enjoyed listening to it i've
decided that the cure for that nagging injury in my back yeah i think i just found it i could go
go on the vomit yeah that's right
that's right that sounds good i wish you all a good fly you too
thank you so much thank you all right
thank you man thank you we're going to take a 10 minute break uh and we're gonna come back with um
uh carlos hernandez uh and uh and then on to the after party so stretch your
legs and we'll be back in 10.
you asked me for my uh for follow the clips
maybe we going to see here but here i have some pictures uh oh
great and one that i took last time
in december yes the last year um let me see if i can send you from
here in the chat great to partner to to give you a gift
yeah i have somebody's talking to me from okay i just want to say thank you very much
you look great and i'll talk to you later thanks stevie bye oh max lexie yes
i'm here okay i'm sorry because yeah the pictures i would love to see
them um let me i wha and you live
where do you live in argentina uh i live in a city that's maybe
170 kilometers from buenos aires it's called chibilicoi it's a
almost at the center of the province of buenos aires also
it's a farm area surround us it's very
plain very we have too much horizon there is no
mountains here and yeah it's not just not too much it's
fabulous you have a you have a great horizon right
exactly i don't know if i can share no
uh maybe more more late but hey now i i'm
inside my house i i left the equipment outside taking pictures but uh here
let me search it because i'm not seeing you so i don't know how to
i see your name yeah i see your name but i don't see you uh
there you are okay okay and
i'm more comfortable right now here inside oh because it's cold is it
cold no no no no it's the the temperature it goes a little low but it's
like um summer nights but
like spring night and then it's
by probably the the kind of the the year at the time uh okay let's
research uh eclipse [Music]
here i think i once um was doing a lecture on a ship
and was supposed to go to buenos aires but i got stuck in the falklands
oh yeah so it didn't get back and
i had to go to to brazil to go home yeah because i was all set to tango you know
well we have a tango and also we have folklore or
yeah and that's more traditional
music that also
h
[Music] that well we have too much
uh culture from italy spain uh europe
obviously also from england uh from russia from germany
and well of course from here from marquette i i have
a my ancestors a i don't know maybe from
five different countries oh germany and also from brazil
and obviously most from france my my last name is french
but i have
[Music]
is
oh
well i'm glad to to to hear that i show you for the first time
this cluster it's a shame that we can see right now omega centauri but
maybe a couple months maybe in
march today to the to the east
here and that's more like a ball
of too many stars and if you if you're looking at a through a
telescope you be you will
see like little shiny diamonds no
um
inches the 100 inch telescope 200 inches
100 100
[Music]
[Music] like you you visualize that you was
feeling the center of gravity flying you can be here why not
it's but it's possible it's possible also if i go
is [Music]
look at the at the chat here in the zoom i send okay the images
oh oh okay the eclipse let's see if i can open it
i don't just uh let's see i tried this um
trying to save it but it open it oh here oh
beautiful oh this is magnificent
wow wow [Applause] and the prominence and everything
wow
let's see maybe starting to open
[Music] [Applause]
wow then oh okay sorry
i can't hear you scouting that's right here we go gotta press my button to get started here but we're
back um uh you know we saw an amazing uh uh video sequence with uh shelly bonus and
uh steve pasquet and zero gravity uh got to learn about you know what it's really
like to go into the so-called vomit comet you know with zero g but um
next up is someone that takes us to where often vantage points that you can't you know no camera could
go no no spacecraft that we built could get there uh and and that's that is in the realm
of technical space art um uh which carlos hernandez is quite good at and uh carlos
carlos is someone that i've i heard of for a long time before i met him he is someone that
learned how to draw the eyepiece uh years ago he worked
with some of the most amazing planetary uh astronomers that i that i ever got
the chance to meet with guys like uh donald parker and uh tippy deoria and
stuff and and so he was he was part of that group but uh he has his roots go
back all the way back to really back to percival lol and the amazing
drawings they made of mars and and that type of thing i think maybe he could tell us a little bit of that background
himself but i'm really happy to have carlos on uh spent some time with him under the skies
right next to the 40-inch uh refractor at yerkes observatory during the last
starlight festival it's wonderful to have him and uh he's here tonight to share some
of his work and some of his uh life and some of the stories so carlos i'm gonna turn it over to you man
hello scott and hello everyone and thank you for inviting me to the wonderful global store party
i've been wanting to be a participant of this for some time but my schedule has prevented me from doing
so but i finally got an opportunity and i told scott that i wanted to participate so
i'm glad to be here at this time yeah we're great we're glad too
um my background is like scott pointed out it is mostly visual i'm not a
photographer i've done a little bit of imaging but mostly with my friends as
scott mentioned the late uh excellent great friend donald parker
a great imager so i learned a lot of imaging from him but i'm primarily a visual observer
and i'm also an artist and so i usually uh draw what i see at the eyepiece and scott got an example of
that when we were at the uh starlight party and that was a very fun time
yes so um there's a lot of things you know this you know scott asked me what you know
what what can i talk about or what are my interests and i have many many interests and i like to uh try to
represent or draw as many and paint as many things uh subjects as possible
and so uh scott asked me what i would like to present tonight and i told him
well i i'm very interested in in saturn and i'm very interested in the
uh largest satellite titan and they're going to have a mission going to it in the next couple of years
and that's called dragonfly and so i said well i'd like to talk a little bit about dragonfly and titan so
this is a little short presentation that i'm doing uh on the uh dragonfly mission
in in the future
so let me see let me know if i'm doing this right since it's the first time for me so let me know okay see the green button at the
very bottom row it says share screen uh once you click that then you go and
find your like powerpoint app and just click on the powerpoint app itself
and then you can bring it up into full presentation mode so yeah you're there right now and uh if you go into presentation mode
it'll go full screen um let me see i'm trying to find
right at the very bottom of that oh the presentation towards the right you'll see a little
screen there you're almost there a little bit over to the right a little bit more one more
that one that if you click on that
okay there you go perfect okay so
this is the obviously a cassini image of the uh the planet saturn it's a beautiful image and
obviously a beautiful planet the uh sixth planet from the sun it's got a
gorgeous ring system second largest planet in the solar system and
the cassini orbiter orbited the planet from 2004 until 2015
when it uh destroyed itself by going into its atmosphere and it in the process it uh made
incredible images and studies of the planet saturn including the largest satellite the
largest moon of saturn which is titan
so titan is the largest satellite of saturn it's it's uh the second largest satellite in the solar system
it's actually one and a half times as large as our moon it's actually larger than the planet
mercury and 40 as large as the earth so it's a it's a massive satellite and
it's actually a planet orbiting a planet so it's a really fascinating moon and it
orbits saturn in a period of approximately 16 days in a synchronous which means that it's
always the same face of the satellite is always pointing towards saturn
so it's in a synchronous orbit around saturn and the average distance is a little bit over a million uh
kilometers or 750 000 miles or over three times the earth moon distance
and this satellite was discovered in 1655 by dutch astronomer christian huygens
uh using one of his uh primitive telescopes uh scott unfortunately not want to explore scientific no it wasn't
explore scientific but uh it was
actually a telescope of his own making that that was pretty impressive but he was able to
uh detect titan with it and uh titan has a very dense atmosphere
of nitrogen mostly nitrogen and methane and hydrogen it's actually four times
the this the satellites atmosphere is four times as massive as the earth's atmosphere
even though it's only forty percent as large as the earth and it's got smaller amounts of other
gases including ethane acetylene propane argon as sensing as we do but um just in the
different proportions it's got this as you can see you're not able to we're not able to see the
surface of titan because it's constantly covered by this thick smog
that's produced by the breakdown of methane in the upper atmosphere of titan
by the ultraviolet light of the sun and that's called photodissociation of photolysis
and that converts the methane and other compounds that it mixes with into
hydrocarbons which are called phtholons and that's what gives the satellite surface that
reddish color these hydrocarbons these stones
and uh the surface itself or the the satellite is mostly it's about 50 rock
and 50 ice it's the the density is a little bit less than two grams per centimeter
cubed which means uh as it says it's 50 50. wow i have a question for you carlos uh
you mentioned um that hygiene used one of his primitive telescopes i know that hydrogen's he also had like these aerial
telescopes which were extremely long was well that's yeah that's that's
actually what he discovered titan with the air wow okay
so yeah you guys got to see here i'm going to put this into a link so you can see what an aerial telescope looks like and
if you guys complain about your telescope and maybe how challenging it is to use look take a
look at this thing when you get a chance after carlos's presentation
i mean it was it was it's simply amazing to think how the those astronomers at that time were
able to see anything using those instruments because just just to align the two lenses the
yeah the lens and the eyepiece is very difficult yeah
yeah but um so this is an illustration that i produced showing the two
atmospheres the earth's atmosphere and titan's atmosphere and so
we've got the troposphere in the bottom and you can see on the left side that's the earth
and you can see mountains and clouds and stuff and that's where most of our atmosphere is in the troposphere the
lower the lower part and then above that is the stratosphere and that contains the ozone
layer then the mesosphere and then the thermosphere and but that goes up to an elevation
of 60 kilometers that's that's that's uh almost uh
but technically that's i think that's what the uh they define a space after you pass the
60 kilometer mark is what we considered space and that's where the spacex and the
virgin galactic and all these people they try to get above that that level so that's the highest the atmosphere that
pretty much goes on the earth on the earth whereas if you look on the right side
you see the diagram of titan's atmosphere and look how high that that goes it goes into
600 kilometers 600 kilometers yeah so
um it's just so it's amazing that this moon
the satellite has it's own 40 yeah has a uh
atmosphere as complex and as dense as as uh as the earth has
and uh the thing is is that this atmosphere of titan actually uh
is what they believe the earth's primordial atmosphere looked like so if you could turn the
clock back in several billion years this is what the earth's atmosphere
would have looked like so that's why we're excited to explore titan because we believe that it gives
us the the pre uh life conditions
that existed on the earth billions of years ago wow
then uh the surface of titan and we can't see the actual surface but
the cassini orbiter that orbited tight saturn
between 2004 and 2015 used what's called synthetic aperture
radar to penetrate the haze and atmosphere of titan and we were able to just to
discover different surface features uh over the over the moon of the
satellite including lakes lakes but not lakes of water
because at the temperatures at the temperatures the surface temperature of
titan which is uh almost 300 below
fahrenheit or 180 uh celsius um
water can't exist in a liquid form if it's it's frozen and actually at that at
that temperature it's almost like a rock so the only thing that can exist in
liquid form on the surface of a satellite with that surface temperature is either either ethane or or methane
and that's what these lakes are composed of and the surface is estimated to be very young between
100 million and a billion years old and on celestial terms that's a very young surface
which means that it's constantly being what they call remodeled that
means that it's it's constantly being recycled and there's got there has to be some
source for the the surface to be recycled and that's why it's got such a young surface
and they discovered bright dark features across it which are hills valleys
channels in the lakes and uh most of the lakes are in the polar regions
including this this large lake here is called like gia mari in the north polar
region of the uh satellite and it's it's larger than lake superior
wow on on earth and and very deep too it's a very deep lake also
so um they even have um suggested or proposed missions
to include submarines to go into these lakes to explore these lakes in the future
so now you know the upcoming mission is dragonfly it's a flight
but they have also proposed submarines as well in the future very cool
now this is a geological map of titan and the reason i'm showing it is to show
the different colors represent different surface features
the purple splotches across the central part of the moon
are actually dunes it's got this extensive dune system between 30 north and 30
south and that's where uh the you can see the in the center the huygens
landing site or the probe that landed on titan in 2005
um over the shangri-la valley at this angle of region near
what's called xanadu and that's where many many dunes are located
and then at the top to the to the top left you can see what's called crack and mirror and as it shows
one of the huge lakes kraken mary is actually the largest lake but most of
the lakes are up there and a few smaller lakes are located in the south polar regions wow
and you can also see there's a towards the center it's a crater called selk l-s-e-l-k
and that's actually close to where the dragonfly well that's actually the destination
for the dragonfly because they think that it actually can t it's a crater but
they think it actually contains organic compounds so they're going to send the dragonfly
there to do studies to see if they can detect organic compounds
so this is a drawing of the digital painting that i produce showing the entrance of the
the descent or entrance of the huygens probe which was part of the cassini-huygens mission
that launched from the earth in 1997 and it took from 1997 to 2004
to reach saturn and it reached it started it entered orbit into saturn
on july 1st 2004 wow and uh it had
the the huygens probe connected to it but prior to insertion
the orbit insertion they separated uh on christmas eve of 2004
and then the huygens probe went directly to titan at that point
and it landed eventually on titan on january 15th of 2005.
as you can see the the the haze and the smog you can't see the surface so if
if you were orbiting at least in my mind if you're orbiting titan
at that time and you saw the probe going into titan this is what you may have
looked may have seen it would have just disappeared into the cloud into the clouds as it entered
into the haze yeah yeah no so the probe using this massive heat
shield when entered titan on january 15 2005
and as it descended through the atmosphere of titan over two and a half hours
it started to image what the surface features on titan
this is my painting of what the probe would have looked like as it
descended through the atmosphere of the planet you can see the huygens probe at the bottom
in this parachute that's slowing it down as it descends through the atmosphere of
titan over to a two and a half hour period wow and and while i was doing that i was
taking measurements of the atmosphere of titan it was already doing science it
was already taking measurements besides taking pictures
now these are actual images wide scan images obtained by the huygens probe
as it descended into titan on january 15 2005
and what what it imaged was valleys and canyons
and uh as it got closer to the surface of titan it actually started imaging
channels you know uh nothing with water both with ethane or methane a
liquid ethane or methane but you could see that these were produced by some type of liquid
and in the case of titan it's either methane or methane
so it landed on the this is a painting that i produced of the oregon's probe on the
surface of titan on january 15 2005 and it was launched on october 15 97
and it landed in the what's called the shangri-la region of titan
near the area or the area continent called xanadu on january
14 i'm sorry january 14 2005 that's correct and
it just south of the equator um on titan and uh sangrila is named after the uh
the mythical uh valley and the lost horizon the probe itself was pretty big it
weighed about 318 kilos 700 pounds and it had six instruments
and it had a battery uh unfortunately not radio isotope so it only worked for
a certain amount of time but in that time it collected data and uh on the surface and the atmosphere
of titan it measured the humidity and the amount of methane and stuff like
that and it also imaged these round hydrocarbon coated water ice pebbles
which indicated that the landing site was probably a dry channel
a dry channel and the the surface temperature on titan is extremely long uh 94 kelvin or minus
180 celsius or 290 fahrenheit but the pressure is one and a
half one and a half millibars which means the surface pressure is one and a half times
the pressure as on earth and that's that's what that indicates
and it the methane was about five percent that's the uh one of the discoveries that it made
so the next mission to uh titan is called dragonfly
and it's a quadcopter you know we're so used to seeing these uh
these uh chat visa these copters all over the place for different
sports events and in the movies and just for for entertainment but they've
actually developed a design that's actually going to be able to fly
within the atmosphere of another object or the moon or satellite in the
solar system and this is called dragonfly uh it's going to be this is
this was supposed to be launched in june of 2027 atop a ula atlas 5 rocket
they initially were hoping to launch it by 2036 but this were some delays so now
it's going to be launched in june of 2027 and it's expected to arrive to tighten
on in 2036. because i mean you're talking a distance of nearly 800 000 miles so
it's it's a very uh very vast distance and what the dragonfly is going to do is is going to
assess the micro microbial habitability of the surface and
atmosphere of titan over different locations and the the rotorcraft it's about as big
ironically as the mars rovers including the curiosity
or the the perseverance so if you could imagine one of those rovers and then put on
these giant blades helicopter blades on that that's that's pretty much that gives you
an idea of what this spacecraft with this probe is going to look like
and each of the rotors are a meter in diameter 3 over 3 feet
and it's powered by these lithium-ion batteries that are recharged
by a thermoelectric radioactive generator the multi-mission
radio isotope thermoelectric generator because unfortunately
because saturn's atmosphere is so dense the sunlight is 100 as powerful as it is
here on earth besides the fact that you're talking it's a lot further away from the sun
so according to the inverse square law you're not going to get as much power so they couldn't they could not use
solar powered panels to power the spacecraft so instead they're using this
radioactive thermoelectric generator now the the quadcopter is going to
travel approximately 10 meters per second 36 kilometers per hour about 22
miles per hour at a time that's the the regular speed and its altitude is going to go up to
it's not going to be traveling at that altitude all the time but it can travel up to four kilometers or about 13 000
feet and that's a painting that i did of the dragonfly flying over the surface of
type now this is just a blow up of that other
map i showed earlier and you can see the huygens landing site which about was
about seven degrees south of the equator and then the destination of dragonfly is going to be
north of the equator close to where that the crater silk s-seok
on the little left there and that's uh it's going to land in the june regions
or that's where it's planned and then it's going to head towards that crater so the eventual target
is going to be uh the silk crater
now at night uh one uh one orbit of titan is 16 days so
a night on titan lasts for eight days and remember it's a synchronous orbit
it's always pointing the same side towards saturn
so the one night on titan is eight earth days or 182 hours
during those nights the the the rover the
quadcopter is going to be landing on the surface for regenerating its power for
regeneration of its power but it's also going to be performing different tests on the surface and atmosphere of titan
and it has all these instruments that i've labeled there the dry mass the gns the matte
and once a mass spectrometer the others gamma-ray neutron spectrometer so they're all going to be looking at
different aspects of the surface and the different uh compositions of the
atmosphere of of titan and that's the that's got its camera suite and other instruments as well
and it's going to be doing this during the night missions which last 192 hours
now this is a painting that i produced of the dunes and this may be what the aerial view of
dragonfly may capture when it finally arrives there because this is
this is based upon images obtained by the radar and
this is what i believe what the dune fields would look like if you were flying over them if you were
able to fly on top of dragonfly so this is the dune fields towards the middle of
the of the satellite
another painting that i did of the dragonfly flying over uh the ethane methane lakes
and they're not always going to be filled filled with the liquid with ethane or
methane uh it's it appears that the liquid on the surface of titan appears
to be cyclical it's not necessarily unless the it's you're looking at the
lakes in the north in the polar regions then the channels throughout the rest of
the uh satellite may or may not contain the the fluid at the time
but this is it flying over a river and channel and lake
that uh contains ethane and methane and this is another painting that i
produce at the surface and here we are actually at a shoreline of one of the lakes
of titan and if you were exploring it this is what i believe that
it would appear to as to a future astronaut that's exploring type
and at times titan does get rain and but the rains are obviously composed of
ethane and nothing and that's what replenishes the lakes and channels
and this is a painting that i produced of one of the tributaries of one of the
lakes uh showing the the ethane in the
in the channel and the the rain providing the the source of the
uh of the lake and the river
and this is a nasa illustration this is not mine this is nasa and it shows the
from the landing of the um of the rover or the rotor craft on
the left then as it it lands on the surface and then
takes off and uh it's it's supposed to fly approximately
for every every time that it takes off it's supposed to fly up to five miles
five miles or eight kilometers and uh and it's going to take hops
it's going to take these hops towards that crater that i mentioned earlier so
and uh in the in the process it's taking data and imaging and doing other things
and they hope that it can travel up to over 100 miles eventually from its
landing site and almost 200 kilometers and
it's that's over twice as far as any of the mars rovers has traveled on the
surface of mars so it's just uh i just decided to talk about this mission it's a very
exciting mission i mean i'm totally fascinated by titan and saturn and
i hope that everyone enjoyed it
that's great thank you very much carlos thank you
let's see i will stop your sharing there there we are
um carlos that's that's that's wonderful i i uh i'm excited about the dragonfly mission
and uh you know i think i know that you are too so it's going to be really an interesting uh
and historic uh time and you say it's only a couple of years away right that's the
the planned launch is 2037 in june of 2037 another 2027
uh but it gets there it gets to titan in 2036.
but uh so far that's the uh so the planned launch of the uh
of the mission right yeah fantastic yeah if
anyone has any questions i'd be happy to answer what i can and then not the complete planetary expert but
it's just a very interesting mission right well jeff wise is commenting he says the
flying rover will be a tremendous resource and they're all very impressed with your
uh you know your space art you know that they're almost photographic you know so
very very cool um thank you
uh harold lock says wow my bortle seven skies with thin clouds i was just able
to see the core of andromeda oh he's he's observing andromeda right now that's cool um martin eastbourne says uh carlos
thank you for the program uh bravo um
and uh thank you thank you yeah and i i i i'm sorry sir ironically uh
we all are familiar with jessie banistel the the space artist and one of his most famous paintings
was saturn as visible from titan now that was before we knew for sure
that titan had an atmosphere and you could see clearly saturn in the sky above
titan but unfortunately if you were on the surface of titan you couldn't really see
saturn unless there's a rare break in the clouds which which is not common
and if you were standing on the surface of titan uh the sun would look like a a very bright
headlight in in a you know like in a fog and you would it would never
be like anything we can see here so uh it's just ironic how over time we
had this conception of what you you would you would see from titan and now it's completely different
interesting yes yeah [Music]
wow wonderful carlos thank you so much man well thank you we're kind of towards the
end of our program which uh we kind of call the after party uh you know if there's any uh
you know you guys have some more to share um happy to share that with the audience um
but uh it's it's been a great star party 70th event uh so far we're really happy to
uh have um participated in you know in hosting this and um
so and maxie thank you so much for you know showing us around the southern hemisphere skies it was awesome you know
uh for any of you presenters who are still watching the program uh you are awesome
um i think that you know cybella's program on the saturn
uh rockets was very interesting of course uh dave eicher with his uh minerals um
you know uh we had um chuck allen who was able to present door
prizes with us normally chuck can also he has given many presentations with us
as well which has been really incredible kareem jaffer from the montreal center
of the royal astronomical society hosting chris kerwin with the astronomy
by the bay program was very very interesting it was great to learn about the outreach programs that they're doing
um you know and uh then we had of course maxie come
on right after him which was really cool uh a little bit of an internet glitch but he saved the day by
coming back with some amazing stuff um and adrian bradley's nightscapes you
know uh really beautiful stuff adrian will show you know his some of his early attempts but he also shows kind of how
he's grown as a nightscape astrophotographer so that was really fantastic
jerry hubbell with mark slater remote observatory showing us around a little bit and um
we missed cesar brollo who uh i think had some difficulty with internet connections but that was okay
and um doug strubel
showing us those amazing planetary images really cool and of course shelley and steve pasque
with zero gravity it's just uh you know it's really a joy to see them uh on that
flight uh you know i've been talking to shelley for quite a while before she
went up and um you know she went through this whole kind of nervous phase and everything but
it was really uh really amazing and so i thank you so much you know
and um if you have any last words any last comments any last things you'd like to
share you know this is the time no um go ahead maxie
thank you now well i i really thankful for
being here you know sometimes it is
difficult with personal times and everything but i'm
i'm glad to be here to share what i do to share everyone well what's around us
and to invite people to to do astronomy any kind
of any way that you have a little telescope with
binoculars with professional gears everything everything that you have you
can do anything so i'm really thankful to be here and well
i this is the seventeen 7th
the global star party and i i'm glad like i said
i i'm honored to be here so thank you scott well thank you
to the audience thank you maxine uh scott did you want me to go into a
little bit like you said earlier about lowell and stuff that you want yeah actually it's interesting this is an interesting
story because um you know uh you know carlos has pointed out that
he's a visual astronomer uh but uh the you know kind of the uh
oh how would you describe it that you know it's kind of like uh from from astronomer to apprentice to astronomer
to apprentice you know and uh carlos is one of these uh people that actually has a direct link all the way
back to personal law so why don't you kind of share that with us
well as i was growing up in south florida we had i
became good friends with as you mentioned earlier don parker who's who's a world famous uh
planetary imager and uh researcher and jeff besh who's
also in south florida so the three of us we were good friends and we ended up
hooking up and becoming very good friends with uh an astronomer from lowell observatory
name of charles f capren or jake capen and uh chick chapin was a very
interesting figure he was actually one of the earliest astronauts
that participated in the astronaut program before nasa became nasa he was a
test pilot and he was actually one of the first uh astronauts uh or
pre-astronauts if you want to call it and uh he was a very interesting figure
and he was a planetary astronomer uh primarily went to lowell but he worked at other observatories as well
in fact he was he was good friends um you know he's he was our mentor he's the one who uh educated
myself don and jeff on how to uh do plan you know uh
certified planetary research and uh you know we were using filer micrometers and
measuring the size of the polar cap on mars and and the cataloging clouds on mars and
and all these things that that he would tell you he taught us and so we we
got used to the scientific method or presentation and
he actually was friends with carl sagan and he and carl sagan
actually did research on mars in the 60s in support of the
6 and 7 missions to mars that preceded the mariner 9 program
those those were two flybys in mars of mars that
he and carl sagan did um a research at
four and uh he he did a lot of studies with him
in fact he was uh at the mcdonald's observatory in 1967 or so
he was at the coup de focus you know these these big giant telescopes have different focuses well the kudai is the
the one that they send down to the basement and usually they use the kudai focus
for spectrographs because it's the the beam is so wide that they used it for a spectrograph but
that time they put an eyepiece at the kude focus and he says that he could see mars
with carl sagan as big as a beach ball and you could see this you could distinguish he could
distinguish the canals into these fine little spots so it looked again it gave the
impression to to chicken carl that they were orbiting mars and looking at it from
orbit because that's how that's how much detail they were seeing on mars it was
amazing and then um he in turn charles capen
was actually mentored in at lowell by one of its astronomers eminent
astronomers and one of the greatest planetary imagers of all time earl c
schleifer but he was one of the two sniper brothers there was earl schleifer and there was
uh carl schleifer the melvin schlepper melvin schleifer
and he was actually the one one of the uh first uh planetary or
astronomers that actually detected the redshift before hubble wow in 1912
when he was photographing galaxies because they they were called nebulae back then they were being called
galaxies right yeah so um he was uh photographing them looking for
evidence of uh protoplanetary disks to uh corroborate
lowe's theories and in turn he ended up discovering the redshift
so that was uh one of the amazing things that was done at lowell observatory
and so the you had this leifer brothers who in turn
so who in turn the schleifer brothers were brought to law observatory by personal
law so they in turn the schleifer brothers were taught planetary astronomy
and they developed the photography itself on their own in the spectroscopy but they were
actually taught planetary astronomy by personal law so through my connection with charles
capen his connection with earl slifer and schleifer's connection with lowell
that's uh i could say that indirectly i was trained by person alone yeah right
very very interesting it was very cool very cool yeah a lot of stories there yeah
yeah i know you have great memories with uh working with um you know that you know
chick apron and parker tippy uh you know i remember also um
uh the flash on mars that was recorded uh which was actually able to
you got a repeatable observation you know which was uh very very interesting so maybe like a frozen lake or or some
sort of high clouds but it was in the same area right right eat them uh right below the four
uh mourinho sinus that was uh don and jeff and tibia and i
wasn't there for the event but you know i was familiar with it and they they were actually in the keys in the florida
keys with tom dobbins you know tom yes and they um
they were able able to actually capture the flash it could have been a reflection on the surface it could have
been a a high elevated cloud carbon dioxide cloud we're not exactly sure
what the flash was resulted from but it would it was there yeah and besides that now remember they
predicted it would be in this area and it was in fact there so well i was going to say the reason the
reason they predicted it is because if it was a surface feature
depending upon the the tilt of the planet in the position
the declination of the sun over that area
then you theoretically could see a reflection on the surface of mars
and so that's how they
the flash in the exact same area had been seen by japanese amateur astronomers in japan
in the 1950s yeah in the 1950s they had seen the flash in the exact same area
so um that's one reason why they kept a specific eye out in that particular area
so that that was very interesting too yeah very interesting
wonderful okay but yeah i just want i just wanted to say that i'm so fascinated by everyone's images and
their their incredible work it's very impressive me too me too
that's great well maxie uh what do you think well i'm thinking it's impressive that
how he visualized and represented with painting how it
looks like well in this case the the surface of type python
and and based on scientific
uh and data for example yeah and you know it's
tremendous that you everyone can imagine
anything but you put like
if we you've been there and to plus
the plasma to put that in in a in a draw
it's very difficult i think because you have the
you need the technique you need to maybe figure out how works the
atmosphere the the i saw that that's that kenyan
with those range of the i think methane
the gas method and you know uh
i i think it's impressive thank you thank you maxi but uh you know
it's i i'm fortunate that that i have
incredible data to work with you know with all the spacecraft that are orbiting and flying by the planets and
and the incredible hubble images and other observatories so from the data that we've collected
over many many years and and looking at what you point out a moment
ago considering the perspective and the the conditions on the surface and things
like that i try i try to make the paintings as accurate as possible as
well as pleasing if possible but i just want to make them as as accurate as
possible because you know i've been observing the planets and everything else for
for decades now and i've always i always thought to myself when i was at the eyepiece
what would it look like if i was standing on the surface of titan what would it look like if i was
standing on the surface of mars you know and so i put myself in that position and i try to
represent what i think an observer or an astronaut would see
that's impressive i you know
of course the the astrophotography maybe has
i don't know 40 years 50 now 50 years now but
the first picture of the planet was orbited
but the for example galileo galilei
he draws the surface of the moon like he saw it into a telescope
i had a friend one it's got another niko the camera that he also do
observations and do and take a draw of what he's seen
for example i think last night he was doing observations in the very magenia cloud
and he uploaded his his draws but
it's some kind of way to [Music] to give the perspective of what you see
through a telescope to everyone that maybe they cannot allow
but also you they put a register
a for a with a date with
the object and everything and that's a more like maybe i don't know
500 years in the future maybe something changed
well i i you know i truly admire the beautiful images the ccd images that doug and
you and everyone else produce i mean they're just spectacular and
it takes it takes a knowledge and it takes skill to be able to process the
images to bring out the detail that you guys capture not everybody can just throw a camera on a telescope and and
obtain the images that you guys get so that's that's a talent in itself also i really admire that
and ironically by being friends with don parker i mean we
started you know imaging the planets before there was any of these cooled ccd cameras
and well he actually started with film he learned how to he learned how to image the planets from charles capen
from chick apan who developed his own techniques and filters and stuff like that in order
to image the planet so initially they started using film and then eventually
they got into the ccds but the ccds that they used were extremely primitive they weren't cooled
and you know they were very very slow but it's just amazing how
the the quality of images that most amateurs can just throw one of
these excellent ccd cameras and
and obtain these in the incredible images that you all get
yes what guys i think i'm i'm going to bed
okay all right well thank you
and my eyes close enough but i'm still taking pictures but i think i
will have a little nap you're getting tired okay well it's getting late here too so yeah
go ahead scott no i just want to say good night and thank you and uh
we will uh we'll be planning another uh global star party sometime next week i
have normally we have them on tuesdays but i'm thinking this next week it'll be on
a thursday so i have a family coming in and so i wanted to spend some time with them
but that's it for right now and uh you guys have a great night and um you know like
jack horkheimer always said keep looking up so we'll be we'll be back at you
take care let's go yes okay nice nice can i just maxi
i just want to say that when i was 16 i actually went to chile
flew to chile yeah i went with my my family uh we were on a
a a group and it was
at that time when the plane landed it landed on the runway and then you walked
downstairs and the plane landed it went from miami i lived in miami to santiago
so when i flew to santiago when it landed at night
and i was you know as an amateur astronomer i was always excited oh i'm going to see the southern stars and the
magellanic clouds and all these things sure and then so i get there and we get
off the start walking down the the the ladder from the airplane and i look up
and i say oh darn it's cloud it's cloudy and then i'll look again and it was the
imaginary clouds oh yeah right
yes yeah they actually i was told when i went to chile myself they said you know the northern
hemisphere they don't really have a milky way it's down here and uh absolutely you know i would agree
you know to you know i love seeing the milky way from the northern hemisphere as well that uh
the southern sky milky way is spectacular it really is oh yeah
yeah yeah but i still can't figure out why orion is upside down for maxi
it's all perspective it's all perspective that's right no but yes
i what you know when i told scott when i was a boy i remember that
you know i was afraid that oh this is orion but i was trying to
point the stars and figure the the the constellation orion
and i didn't realize how what
but then i realized that it's upside down so and that's
that's where the the greeks did the constellation
but here i know i i thought that rehab it was the head
but now it's the legs but um
yeah but thank you for sharing your wonderful images you know we get to see uh part of
the sky that we can ever see from our perspective yeah that's in
some i i love to share
what i do to everyone and also what we have here
that you people in the north maybe it's kind of
kind of impossible to watch but maybe it's a little bit to
to show what we have here in the south but also like molly
more early show us what is in the north hemisphere
so right and of course depends of the season right now we have we
having the great magazine cloud of rising but in six months we will have
well thank you maxine thank you and thank you scott thank you so much guys thank you
all right have a good night thank you and i want to thank the audience for watching and uh again uh keep looking up
guys and uh we'll be back take care
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