Transcript:
6:00 p.m..Scott Roberts - Introduction
yeah indeed me me too of course but but still you know and going to Antarctica is as tricky as you can get but still
6:05 p.m..Dr. David H. Levy – Intro and Poetry (David may be late, which will shift the schedule)
things are going to be a little crazy with travel might kill all those Penguins we we we did more a dozen PCR
tests in the span of a week and a half oh my
6:20 p.m..David Eicher - Eclipse at the Bottom of the World
goodness and I take it none of them were posi no and and actually we heard this
afterward you know there were two cruises and in fact J pasikov Michael Zyer and a couple of other people were
on one of the cruises that had to turn around because four crew tested positive
6:35 p.m..Astronomical League Door Prizes – Carroll Iorg
after we got down there and saw the eclipse we heard that if anyone on our
plane had tested positive they would have turned the plane around yeah so that luckily that didn't happen but we
6:50 p.m..Dr. Caitlin Ahrens - Dust Bunnies in Space
had been tested you know 10 10 days before that you know every
day that's uh well we've all been living under conditions that have been diabolical so
7:05 p.m..Jack Newton - Dust in Our Universe; The Jack Newton Astro Club Project
yeah and uh it was certainly the the year from hell for the BNB because we
would sell out and then have to cancel everybody they wouldn't allow them to travel oh boy so we'd fill it up again
7:20 p.m..Nathan Hellner-Mestelman
and then forest fires broke out and they wouldn't let them travel and so we cancelled all of them again and it was
over and over again and so we just uh as I said we were 40% down and normally we
7:35 p.m..Ten Minute Break
sold out every year 20 years and that's as I I said that uh we put 20,000
7:40 p.m..Conal Richards
people through the BNB which I metion that's amazing Jack that's
7:55 p.m..Karim Jaffer & Khoa Tran - Live from the RASC Montreal Centre
incredible well let's hope you know late this year we get some tracktion and and
Omron is the last big spike and its lack of severity leads
to you know less less serious illness and more of the uh 38% of
8:10 p.m..Maxi Falieres - Astrophotography to the Max!
the non-believers that that they actually get
vaxed so you're um Coming live in about 10 minutes of this
8:25 p.m..Nicolas Ariel Arias - Hammertime with Nico!
yeah I think we're actually live now if anyone's on early looking uh at us uh
now they can probably hear us I think yeah um but I think we yeah we have
8:40 p.m..César Brollo - Live from Buenes Aires
about six minutes to go until Scott I think starts things up I believe yeah
which is usually right on the on the hour make some notes because
I'm this is the only second one that I've done yeah and uh
8:55 p.m..Molly Wakeling - AstronoMolly's Universe
don't know what in the hell I'm doing so I don't believe that for a second
9:10 p.m..Adrian Bradley - Dust in the Milky Way
Jack well I can tell some pretty funny stories and keep them clean
so yes if there's a non-broadcast and star
party at some point we can push the boundary a little more well I'm pretty conservative
9:25 p.m..Ten Minute Break
actually yeah but Alice could come on she's the Irma bomb backck of uh of
9:35 p.m..Group Discussion/ Wrap Up
the astronomy Village here indeed
yes well I am going to go and make some notes so you'll lose me for a few
minutes here all right we'll see you in a minute how are you doing
Connell doing great David how about yourself good hanging in there there's a
lot going on we have our yesterday we went back into the office for the first time in two years that's fantastic news
so that was a an odd uh circumstance and we're we're in three days and at home
two days from now on so they say and I take it all as well so far
yeah yeah yeah good good well on my end we just got our
first clear skies in probably about two weeks so I got out to see the moon Saturn Jupiter EXC they've been putting
on quite a show the past month or so and I finally got to take some images so hopefully I'll share some of those later
well good oh that's good to hear yeah it's always makes you feel a little more settled a little better uh after a
cloudy period to see the sky again I agree you know something you can count on there
yeah
let's see so I'm putting together a little bit of a slideshow now I wondered what images I have that had some
relevance to Cosmic dust so I figured some Milky Way shots would be nice things of that nature
yeah there's a whole lot of dust in the Milky Way and even in the solar system sure sure the zodiacal light is
well exactly yes the zodiacal dust I had an opportunity to see that
just once I was at Cherry Spring State Park couple of what was that 2018 um and I caught it in the middle of
a of the summer and I think they say it's better in the spring and Autumn yeah but that was just a stunning sight
to see you know something you don't see too often from many other Skies no and it and it's that's a pretty dark site
for the Eastern us and of course you have to have a really nice dark sky to
see the zodiacal light especially as it kind of a wedge you know that goes up yeah that's that's kind of what I
looked it looked like to me and I mean I I've never been to a dark sky site before that was my first time so it
might have been a couple of hours after Sunset and there's still that light on the horizon so I had some questions and
you know it was kind of a nice light bulb moment but that was awesome to see yeah
yeah it's pretty cool that you can see light scattered off that
dust heard there were some papers recently I think this was maybe a year or two ago I read this that some of that
dust was coming from Mars it wasn't just drifting from the asteroid belt or the early solar system uh I think there was
some weather factoring in there the sun blew off some of the atmosphere was dust
included something along those lines yeah
yeah hi David how are you hello there David welcome back from Antarctica well
thank you I survived barely but I'm back yeah I heard you little speech last week
and I'm glad you're back safely well thank you we have another guest here
today you can see his face in the back there it's Ed gunler hi
guys say couple of things
and uh it's good to be here I'm not going to be here for very long today because we have to go out but I am here
for
now hello con hey good evening how are you fine thank
you you said you're going out is that I take it for
observing mostly going out
to oh have fun thank you hi
Adrian good evening de just uh stopping in quickly um about
to have a little dinner and listen in on the uh presentation it's good to see you
uh again well thank you Adrian I want you to be
G you can see half of them I'm over here there we are good evening yeah Adrian I didn't
see the bowl game the other day how'd you guys do H we did not do very well oh
I'm sorry to hear that we uh yeah we Georgia showed up and our team didn't
but uh it was still a good run there you go there it is so we uh Pinn state did well yeah uh
conel School um you guys got by oh wait I I thought you guys got by Arkansas I I could be
mistaken I think we did I didn't follow it as closely um for a while it looked
like it yeah con did you guys get by Arkansas I think so I can't remember um
the last news I saw was about the Bull game everyone was debating do we want to go on the side of a big 10 school or do
we want Georgia to beat our rival Michigan like no one really knew what to say there right but no the outcome was
what it was yes and two or three times a century a
massive star in our galaxy looks like we're St so we'll carry on the star's core May survive as a neutron star or a
black hole but the rest of it rushes into space as swiftly expanding debris behind a powerful shock wave as the
Supernova Remnant grows it sweeps up Interstellar gas and gradually decelerates yet even thousands of years
later its imprint on the Galaxy remains impressive exploding stars in their
remnants have long been suspected of producing cosmic rays some of the fastest matter in the
universe where and how these protons electrons and atomic nuclei are boosted to such high speeds has been an enduring
mystery now observations of two Supernova remnants by NASA's fmy Gamay
Space Telescope provide new insights because cosmic rays carry electric charge their Direction changes
as they travel through magnetic fields by the time the particles reach us their paths are completely scrambled we can't
trace them back to their sources so scientists must locate their Origins by indirect means which is where fmy comes
in the interaction of high energy particles with light and ordinary matter can produce gamma rays the most powerful
form of light unlike cosmic rays gamma rays travel to us straight from their
sources in 1949 physicist enrio fmy worked out how what he called magnetized
clouds could accelerate cosmic rays later studies showed that a variant of his method called fmy acceleration
worked especially well in Supernova remnants confined by a magnetic field
high energy particles move around randomly sometimes they cross the shock wave with each round trip they gain
about 1% of their original energy after dozens to hundreds of Crossings the
particle is moving near the speed of light and is finally able to escape if the Supernova Remnant resides near a
dense molecular cloud some of those escaping cosmic rays May strike the gas and produce gamma
rates but electrons and protons make gamma rays in different ways cosmic ray
electrons do so when they're deflected by passing near the nucleus of an atom accelerated protons May collide
with an ordinary proton and produce a short-lived particle called a neutral Pion these pons quickly Decay into a
pair of gamma rates at their brightest both types of emission look very similar only with
sensitive measurements at lower gamma ray energies can scientists determine which process is
responsible now fmy observations have done just that they conclusively show
these Supernova remnants are accelerating protons when they strike protons in nearby molecular clouds they
produce pons and ultimately the Gamay emission fmy sees NASA's fmy has
detected gamma rays from many more supernova remnants but the jury is still out on whether accelerated protons are
always responsible and what their maximum energies may be nevertheless the fairy team has taken a major step a
century after the discovery of cosmic rays in establishing just where they arise something that would satisfy but
certainly not surprise the original
[Music] fairy
[Music]
[Music]
well hello everyone and welcome to the 79th Global star party I'm Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore
Alliance and we have an incredible lineup of speakers for you as always um
starting off every Global star party uh and I'm going to get started kind of quickly here because we have David Levy
who has to get out uh quickly but he did sacrifice and make the time to be with
us uh at the first part of the global Star Party David um I want to turn this
over to to you but thank you for being so um wonderful to sacrifice and make
this appearance well thank you Scott and it's good to be here before I do my
poetic quotation for today I'd like to introduce my friend Ed guni he is one of
the regulars that are at on astronomy Retreat and he and his wife Wendy Gordon are visiting
us and uh so Ed would you like to say hello to everyone uh hi everybody from
Tucson uh I live just south of Montreal so I have really questionable Skies this
time of year uh we do what we can to view but I've been out here for a week and uh I just had some eye repair done
and I'm actually seeing things that I've never seen before uh while I'm out here in the nice clear sky so I'm loving
Tucson a lot and I'm always happy to be part of the star parties here so and on my birthday this year I saw two
Supernova remants for the first time and Mercury which for some reason in 55 years of trying I've never been able to
see and oh wow yeah we're seeing it naked eye here tonight and loving every minute of it so uh thanks for having me
well thank you and and for my poetical quotation today usually around this time
of year I head off to white horse in the Yukon territory in Canada for the Aurora
360 but it appears that that's going to be postponed this year because of the
Apparently never ending pandemic but anyway um my poetic quote
is going to come from someone who visit Ed a white horse Robert W service was
working on a poem at the time about a fellow from uh Plum Tree
Tennessee who excuse me who uh really wanted to go up to the pondy to search
for gold but he was worried about the cold and he told his people he doesn't
think he's going to make it it's just too plain cold and he says I'd want you to promise me if if I don't make it you
are going to um cremate me and uh the speaker of the poem says okay I will and
then of course he dies and uh here it goes he finally founds finds a place at
um at a lake uh in the kundik and he decides to
build a pratorum and I'm going to quote to you now the last three verses of The
Cremation of Sam G and I think you'll find this fun because it's um it's one
of my favorite poems and I believe it is the favorite poem of almost every Canadian and it goes like this I do not
know how long in the snow I wrestled with Grizzly tear but the stars came out
and they danced about here again I ventured near I was sick with Dread but I bravely said I'll just took a look
inside I guess he's cooked and it's time I've looked then the door I opened wide
and there sat Sam looking cool and calm in the heart of the Furnace Roar and he wore a smile you could see a mile and he
said please close that door it's fine in here but I greatly fear you'll let in
the cold and storm since I left Plum tree down in Tennessee it's the first time I've been
warn there are strange things done in the Midnight Sun by The Men Who moil for
the Arctic Trails of their secret tales that will make your blood run cold the
Northern Lights have seen queer sights but the queerest they ever did see was
that night on the march of La LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee thank you and back to
you Scotty that is awesome that's the first time I've ever heard that poem and it seems like you've
uh got that poem u in memory I I didn't even see you looking down really at the
last part of that those verses so my uncle knew the entire poem by heart me
recited it one night us it's a wonderful story it's awesome I really love it I
love it um so you guys are off uh David and um again thank you for coming on Ed
uh you know I I know I see you sometimes watching our programs and stuff so it's fun to see you uh on the other side of
the camera and in the broadcast so and I'm glad that your eyesight is uh you
know uh doing so well that's it's wonderful you can you can cumate your eyes Scott it turns out my eyes were
uncollated now they're col out of colation yeah it was out of colation so
there there's a talk in there somewhere that's awesome well I hope to
see you also at the Arizona dark sky Star Party ad uh you were at the last
one and and um you know we're still planning on that event in Oracle Arizona
so excellent all right okay so our next speaker is uh Dave Aker Dave is the
editor and chief of astronomy magazine he is um uh if you had tuned in a little
bit early and heard some of the the uh uh chatter um uh back and forth you
would have heard uh about the first time that David ier had met Jack Newton who's going to be on our program um and um uh
Jack was uh you know an admirer of the young David ier as well as David was uh
David was pointing out that that Jack is one of his Heroes um we got to also hear a little bit of uh what it was like to
be down in Antarctica to see the eclipse uh we were so lucky to have David ier on
so many Global star parties uh I really uh appreciate you coming on as often as
you do David it's it's great so I'm gonna turn it over to you and uh thanks
again thank you very much Scott it's an honor to be here as as always and I will
see if I can share my screen and share a tale of a very cold
PL one of the the the few places that I know of that's colder than
Milwaukee all right let's see here or Detroit can you yes yeah okay can can
you see me uh standing there uh with my uh parka open uh to take a quick picture
before I zip it all up again yes okay well I had the chance to go along with
some magazine readers and other folks uh down to see the eclipse on December 4th
it was a total solar eclipse visible only from Antarctica uh and it was a
real adventure and I went down in order to write a story for the magazine it'll be upcoming in astronomy magazine in a
couple of issues uh so I thought I would share a little bit of this before I get back into some minerology in the ensuing
weeks for a little while here um and as you can see uh Antarctica
is a very icy place it's very cold uh and we had 247 Sunshine except for the
eclipse itself when we were there of course in the it's the summertime in Antarctica so it was as balmy as it gets
and I'll talk about sort of the details and what it was like but it was a real adventure and and not to you know steal
a word from Shackleton if you've done any reading about uh Antarctic Journeys and Adventures but it was a little bit
of an endurance you know I've been to very very cold football games for four
or five hours you know outside and then during the game you know this was being
here under these conditions for a week we were on the ice for a week and uh it
was a tremendously complicated thing because of covid-19 of course to get down there uh and spend a few days on
either side of the trip itself in Antarctica in Chile um so I'll tell you
a little bit about what that was like and and we did it uh all for 46 seconds
of totality which we saw beautifully as happens uh at most all eclipses the the
eclipse Gods can you know torment you a little bit and it was you know photometrically clear in Antarctica the
whole time basically and then uh the morning before the morning before the
eclipse about a day and a half before the actual Eclipse we woke up and it was socked in entirely just clouded over
completely so but fortunately by the morning of the day on which we did our eclipse Adventure into the early morning
again it had cleared again and it was beautiful and and essentially photometric so we had a great view of
the eclipse it was a fancy thing to go down there and I'll explain why a little
bit a lot of people uh have gone to Antarctica via ship and tragically some
of our our Eclipse expert friends were on shipboard and they had a few people on the crew test positive so they turned
around and didn't see it um there was a huge amount of paperwork
that the Chilean government required of us to get down we went to Chile as I mentioned first and then to a portion of
Antarctica that's governed by Chile um so we for me it was Milwaukee to Houston
to Santiago to Punta arenus to Antarctica so it was about almost a full
day on planes not including the time between planes and doing uh testing and
so on we had daily PCR testing uh also on the plane and on arrival when we got
there and obviously before we boarded and so on both in the United States and in Chile so we had about a dozen tests
Al together and we had all of our folks uh test negatively which was nice we had
a group of about 50 people Al together uh going with us in our group um instead
of taking a a rickety Russian transport plane which has been done to Antarctica
many times s uh usually successfully but not always we uh landed a Boeing 757 on
the ice and so we went to a place that's called Union Glacier camp and it's about midway between the coast and the South
Pole it's a large sheet of ice uh we were still about 600 miles from the
South Pole where we were but we landed on a blue ice Runway that was about four miles long and this has only happened
with a Boe like this uh for about six years now so it's a pretty new uh uh
capability to land a major plane commercial plane on on a Runway uh right
on the The Ice as I mentioned we had daylight the whole time it was only
darker for the eclipse itself it was warm for Antarctica the average temperature in our camp which was pretty
calm and pretty warm feeling because the wind was not too bad usually in our
campsite it was aboutus 5 to about 10 degrees sometimes up uh a a tad over 15
degrees uh but icy windchills so when you went on Expeditions each day what do
you do when you're in in Antarctica for a week uh aside from a 46c eclipse one
morning well you go and you do Expeditions in various places and I'll show some photos of what we did uh here
and there and uh going up to higher elevation and in vehicles that took us
up on tracks or on heavy tires to see uh some of the mountains and and some of
the rocky areas and and explore a bit it felt much much colder because the winds
whipped up and we had uh wind shills that were down to in in the sort of minus 35 or minus 40 range so you had to
have a serious checklist of approved clothing multiple layers multiple layers
of socks of pants of undergear of multi layers of fleece and of uh down
and then a very heavy parka and of course a a hat and a buff and goggles
that go over your glasses and everything pulled up to cover every part of you and
heavy Parker boots heavy heavy winter boots as well over everything so you had
to be really really wrapped up in order to go which thank thankfully we were but
even you know when we went up into the mountains tiny little bits of skin you know between your goggles and your buff
you know just had a biting you know icy wind on them so it was uh you know you
almost you almost felt like uh you could imagine what it would be like and some of our guides actually had been here you
know they said this is kind of what it's like being at Everest Base Camp you know just a little sort of taste of that so
it it was an interesting challenge we followed the traces of uh
some explorers who actually were close to where we stayed in Puna oranus including Robert Scott and amonson and
Shackleton as I mentioned I mentioned the the heavy clothing that we had we had two person tents camping on the
glacier there and of course as you're driving around in these vehicles you have to drive uh along certain routes
that have been marked with Flags uh so that they they've been um checked with
sonar to make sure that the ice is stable so you don't all of a sudden have a crass open up and that kind of ruins
your whole week so it it's really an adventure and and you have to be very careful here you have daily meals in a
communal uh tent if you will it's it's uh um bathroom facilities and and
regulations you know it's it's uh uh quite heavily regulated and we had a
shower at most every two to three days and what you did for the shower in Antarctica was to fill up a bucket with
uh scalding boiling water that came out of a faucet because there was a snow
melting machine that produced this incredibly hot water then you had to shovel snow into it to mix it to a
temperature that wouldn't kill you and then you put the bucket into a pump hose got into the shower and you had the best
three minutes uh a couple times of that whole week because after a couple days
in Antarctica you're filthy you know you have you know so that shower was like
being reborn it was amazing um and you had to be very careful you can't leave
anything in anarctica you can't contaminate anything there was no life there at all where we were except for
the human beings and microbes of course but there were no Penguins there were no
polar bears there was no nothing where we were um that stuff is all much closer to the
coast so you have to be very very careful not to uh pollute or contaminate
the environment so that means doing something like taking a pea bottle along
with you in case you need it on what is a 4H hour Expedition say so you learn to regulate your
drinking and your your uh fluid intake and your hydration really such that you have to
make a deposit with some fluid only when you're back in Camp so these things you
kind of pick up and learn um as a kind of a roughing it well there were a bunch of interesting areas that we went to
near our camp driving several miles away and so we had sometimes a half hour a 45
minute drive in a tracked vehicle or in a heavy van with with big heavy rubber
tires um that took us to a few places that I'll show some some brief pictures
of the Drake icefall The Charles Peak winds scoop roads Bluff and the Buchanan
Hills which were interesting for different reasons here so this was the first view that we
had of Antarctica I shot this outside the plane as we saw Antarctica and the
mountains on the coast uh with my Android phone this was shot so this is
kind of wow here all of a sudden you know there's no turning back back now you're coming into Antarctica here
pretty impressive and you don't realize there's a tremendous amount of topography and very high elevation
mountains uh in places on the continent here if this works I will show
you this and forgive me it goes on a little bit but this is our plane landing
on this blue ice
Runway
amazing so do you know if you have to be a
specially licensed pilot in order to be able to do this lights are only run at certain
times and and only by of all things Icelandic Airways believe it or not and
and you can see that it it takes you quite a distance to
stop how even even with the thrust reversers on you have a long ride on the ice to stop
the plane there you know with the mass of that
plane sorry Jack did you have a question or a comment how thick was the ice you
know uh it's something on the order of uh three kilometers thick oh wow wow um
so it's pretty thick but you can get cracks and crevasses that could be major trouble even for some something as light
as a as a tra vehicle so you need to be careful there oh we don't want that there we go
okay so now we're properly dressed and we're going out into a slightly higher elevation area away from camp and you
can see that wind erosion on the glacier now you're on Union Glacier which you
know is moving but it's moving so slowly that you don't notice it at all of course but you're on a glacier camping
and walking around and doing all these things um so you can see that wind erosion
makes these little scallops on the very hard ice um and the temperature here was
probably about zero or so not incredibly cold but windy and uh you have it you
know on your boots they have these little things they're not really crampons but they're called micro spikes
that the guides put on you that are little razor like spikes and you have a
ski pole too so you can kind of navigate around and you don't go flat on your
back and hit your head you know into something that's like concrete so so that was a bit of a challenge just
getting used to walking around on this surface and and this is one of the areas
where ice comes over the glacier and contributes to the the glacier itself
here this was inside the tent you have a twers tent and and you can see the
accommodations here it you know it's 24 seven daylight as I mentioned and you have this very heavy sleeping bag uh
that is a two- layer thing it's a bag inside a bag and then you have a hood
That's Heavy that pulls up over your head and another thing that pulls up over your buff so you can get in this
thing and have only your end of your nose and your mouth exposed at all and
on the colder days it was cold in this tent uh but on the warmer days when it
was up you know between 15 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit maybe for a little while you felt pretty nice and warm
inside that bag you know with with your under layer of of clothes on so but but
it's pretty primitive there and you can see and and you have so you have this and bathroom and shower and dining
facilities and then a little place where you can give some talks and a library and and that's about all you have at the
camp here well the Charles peak wind scoop was a
place where we went and as you can guess probably there there's a mountain here off to the left where the wind often
whips down and and pushes um the helps to push the glacier and and the currents
off of a part of the ice and a couple of weeks before we were here it was so warm
that the guide said where we were walking on this little frozen pond if you will that there was a little bit bit
of a trickle of water which is unusual
there here's also the the wind scoop and you can see this incredible sedimentary
rock here the the rocks in Antarctica vary a good bit there's a little bit of
volcanism and basalt but there's a lot of sort of granite you know and quartzite and nice and other sort of
dense rocks and some of them even actually holding because you know uh
long ago uh the continent was part of ganana land you know so there is there
is a a fossil stuff and unfortunately I desperately looked around for meteorites
uh here which are not supposed to take according to the National Science Foundation but as you can see here there
were field this is about three feet across there were fields of about a trillion rocks that you could walk
across and I didn't find any really obvious meteorites um with a fusion
crusts um but you know you picked up some interesting thing in the guides things in the guid and take it you know
so the rules were a little flexible um there are this is also the
wind scoop here and you can see some evidence here in the smaller piece that's on the big rock here of some
fossil uh action I don't know what they are actually I'm not a big fossil guy unlike minerals and meteorites but but
there are fossils that you can kind of abundantly see in in this rock uh that's quite a number of million years
old uh there's a uh self-portrait here that somebody shot of me this is the
so-called Drake icefall this behind me it's about a 4 kilometer long uh Ridge
of ice that comes off of a mountain and contributes to the glacier and pushes
the glacier ahead and one thing that was really interesting the atmosphere was so incredibly clear and bright uh and and
you know the incredible to breathe and I think some other people kind of said
this to me I got the best sleep I've ever had I think and I I slept like 10
and 11 hours a night when I was there which was really refreshing even though it was cold um but it was also played
some tricks on you you could look across there was a prominent Mountain near our camp and it looked like well I could
walk right over there and and walk back and and it was 4 kilometers away so the
distance scale is is deceiving a little bit because of the clarity of things there in
Antarctica this is a famous rock near our camp that's called Elephant Head uh
that is a kind of a hardened marble and quartzite and it's been studied because
it's permafrost uh and that is that a certain amount of of a glacier below the
rock uh even is always in permafrost um and the Chris uh McKay who's you may
have heard of or know he's a a good pal he's a martian scientist uh for uh JPL
and he's written an important paper about this actual rock being an analog
how there could be a permafrost of the same temperature on Mars and and the
same sort of composition so the sort of survival of microbes at certain depths
in around and below this rock could perhaps tell us something about
microbial life in permafrost on Mars you can look up that Chris McKay paper if
you'd like to this is the roads Bluff where it's a little deceiving here this is all wide
angle stuff but if you go up to this kind of ridge of rock here at the top where there's some Mist coming over
there um some some ice particles coming over there there's a huge falloff that
goes go into the the glacier over this Ridge so the guide said you know what if
you go over the top of this you're G to go down about five kilometers and be
killed so don't do that so okay we went up and we took some pictures here but we
didn't do that so so that we took that warning seriously but this was another place where it was extremely cold and
very very windy up up in this area and we're up at at pretty decent elevation
here this is another area where we explored lots of rock and so on the Buchanan Hills that was a similar place
and it was very very windy and you had almost a sort of an imagining of what it would be like to start off at the lower
elevation of a place like Everest when you were up in in the winds whipping around in mountains like this it was
quite an adventure and this is the group shot showing the uh the folks who traveled
with us here that we took after on Eclipse day after the eclipse and then this is my shy after I lectured everyone
all week not to take any pictures of an eclipse because why as Norman Sperling
and Michael bachet and others always say afterward every eclips last eight
seconds you know don't waste your time taking a picture well then I did take a few pictures though and and this is my
shot just with a Canon 6D of the eclipse handheld uh during the 40 six seconds
and you can see the we were not right at the center line and the eclipse was brief and the ice was very reflective we
saw the most incredible Shadow bands we'll ever see in our lives I'm sure on the ice and longest lasting it was
really remarkable but the sky wasn't all that dark and I don't know if you can see but Mercury is just to the right and
just slightly above the sun there and then Venus much brighter is over near the right hand margin there but but this
was our Eclipse side uh and basically how totality looked and fortunately we had a beautiful
photometric sky when when push came to to shove
actually uh and this these are some shots that were taken at our site uh
telescopically here and of course we're all looking forward to the next big Eclipse where we don't have to go very
far at all especially if you live near carbon Dale Illinois and saw the 2017 Eclipse there you could also step
outside your house in 201 24 and see the see totality there uh again at the
intersection of those eclipses but so let's look forward and hope that we have good weather in the United States for
2024 so that's uh sort of my brief introduction to uh Antarctica I I really enjoyed it
having gone to Antarctica once though uh that's enough I think I'm not no need to
go back now so not is cold enough for me I'm curious
when you guys de playay I mean you're you're getting off this 757 okay uh I you must have just had
like stairs that you were going down uh how did they how do they get you off the
plane with there people those people waiting for you or believe it or not we
we suit it up in large part to get on the plane uh because once you get off it
was cold as hell and it was windy on that airst strip on on the runway uh and
the ice we had no spikes on or anything so it was really slippery and they told
you they helped you off down off a a a an exit ramp you know off the plane
exiting out of the rear of the plane helped you off and stabilize you and said watch it this is really slippery
and kind of helped you to get over over to a tracked vehicle that would then take us to the camp because you know
people were going to go head over heels on this very because the runway has to be very smooth you know to safely land
on so it was like slick glass oh my god um so they but they
warned us very carefully and and yeah yeah yeah so there was no baggage claim
or like little restaurant you the baggage was all taken care and there there's a stat there were about 50 there
were there were some people believe it or not from Madison Square Garden of all places also about about eight or 10
people there who are doing a film about the camp and the eclipse for Whatever
Whenever you know um so there were maybe about 60 people or so Al together in
Camp and then a staff probably maybe of about 25 or 30 so there were a plentiful
staff people to kind of help us get where to where we're going so they took all the bags and everything and dropped
them right at our tents David what was it like leaving on that ass
Runway it was nice because when you're in AR in Antarctica for a week um you
know no offense Antarctica and for me it was the seventh continent so I was really fortunate and glad to be able to
go on an adventure after a week of this this temperature and and the adventures
we went you know I was glad to get the hell out of there frankly it was really nice to get onto the plane and and head
back towards some kind of assume they had to use most of that Four Mile Run uh Four Mile Long Runway to get yeah they
they they they went for a while before we were wheels up uh certainly but but a
757s engines you know have have a lot of burst too so they they sort of gun it
you know taking off from there yeah excellent so the plane it was about a it was about a 4H hour flight from from uh
from Punta arenus so you know maybe about two just a little over two hours
you are just seeing the ocean from Chile and then for a couple hours you're
flying over Antarctica before you land and vice versa amazing it's amazing
thank you for taking us down there I got to do it from the warmth of my own office here that's a little better in
that respect yeah yeah thanks Scott that is awesome thank you daavid thank you great okay so we are going to
um we're going to now move over to uh Carol ore and the astronomical League um
I do like to point out that uh you know if if this is your first time to watch Global Star Party um you're watching a
great one right now this is U we've got you know an incredible lineup of speakers uh tonight but um the
astronomical league is perhaps one of the world's most important uh organizations in the whole you know
astronomical community be it amateur or professional uh there are the the the
league has 75 years of History it has um uh included among its members some of
the most iconic uh astronomers worldwide uh it has um uh uh it has uh some
amazing uh observing programs recognition Awards um and uh you know uh
I might have mentioned this a little bit earlier but they have like over 300 clubs that belong in this massive
Federation uh that is the astronomical league and somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 members um if you are looking
for uh a way to enrich your uh astronomical experience I can recommend
nothing more than to join the astronomical League either as a member at Large or uh to join an astronomical
League club and so I'll turn this over to uh Carol um Carol and and the
astronomical League have been on almost all of the global star parties and uh it's been a real pleasure and um so
Carol thank you very much for coming on to the 79th Global star party thank you Scott good to be here on this first
Global Star Party of 2022 and uh thank you for your
continuing support of the astronom League we couldn't do it without you Scott so we appreciate that very much
thank you I'm going to go ahead and get into our questions and I'll share my screen
here here you go we're getting there all
tight okay the first slide we want to bring up
is the warning for a if you win a door prize that requires uh you to look
through the eyepiece you want to make sure you have proper filtering to make sure that you don't uh look at the Sun
without some kind of filtering so that's one we like to give from the last star
party of 20121 December 28th we had uh some questions and here
are the answers everybody see that's okay yes okay true or false there are
more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way and that is true there are
about three trillion trees on the earth I guess someone counted them and between
100 to 400 billion stars approximate in the
Galaxy the new catalog was assembled in what year the answer is it was assembled
in 1888 by jle dryer and expanded on work
done by the herss last question for that last Star
Party about 12,000 years from now we will have a new North Star what is the name of
that star and the answer is VGA that will be the new North Star approximately 12,000
years from now and we had several people get correct answers to the questions from
December 28th several which are are either on this broadcast or who have
been on many times Cameron Gill Jason Wallace Billy Becket Andrew Corel
Rich kaying Josh kovak con Richards Rick
rich reuck I think there's one more here guess that's it and they will be put
into to the door list prize for later drwings and now we get to the questions
for tonight for January 4th and if you know the answers to these
send your answers as quickly as you can to secretary at astr league.org
question number one what is the name of the tool used by astronauts that
combines a pair of pliers and a wrench everybody has a couple of those in their tool box but what are they called when
you're now space the combination of the two and again send your answers to secretary at astrol league.org
number two which fourl word beginning with n is a star showing a sudden large
increase in brightness then gradually returns to its original state over a
period of weeks to years and again send your answer to secretary at astrol league.org
and finally for question number three thology is the scientific study of
which Celestial body
and send your answers again to secretary at astro.org
toward the end of the month on January 21st which is a Friday we will be
holding our next astronomical League live event and we're still in our 75th
year for another few months actually our 75th Anniversary occurred in November of
2021 so we've got a few months to go before that year is complete so we're completing that
celebration we don't have the speakers um named yet however stay tuned and much
more information will be coming and I think that's about it and now back to
you Scott okay all right so uh we're going to shuffle a
little bit here um and um we are going to bring on uh Jack Newton uh Jack
Newton is in his uh his Southern Home in um out there in near portal Arizona and
uh Jack uh uh he is uh he's someone I've
known since the early 80s um and um he
is uh when I was introduced to Jack uh a
dear friend named Mark coko who worked worked at Celestron pointed him out to me and he said Scott there is one of the
nicest guys you'll meet in uh the amateur astronomical community and uh at
that time Jack had just come out with uh a new book called The I think it was called the
Cambridge uh uh or no it was the Messier catalog or something like that uh Jack
will have to remind me but the title of it was but it was it was all the messier objects um photographed uh
with an amateur telescope and that was something that we really didn't have access to before U most uh uh
compilations of astrophotographs were done with professional telescopes and so it was it was kind of a reality check to
see how beautiful and amazing uh deep Sky objects could be made with an amateur instrument and um uh so and and
Mark was right uh I got I got a chance to meet him at the Texas Star Park party
1983 and uh you know uh we've been uh we
after a few years after that we made a really close friendship and uh we've been friends ever since so Jack uh I'm
gonna turn this over to you but thank you for all those years of inspiration and um you know this is the guy that I
often say you know if you tell Jack Newton that that something can't be done in amateur astronomy he's going to go
out and prove you wrong uh he definitely is a guy that breaks the boundaries so
Jack I'm going to turn it over to you Scott you're very very kind uh we go
back a a long long ways and uh um um I
can remember carser Caverns uh um star party and uh I remember asking you what
would you like me to talk on and he said I want you to do your history and go back
and I want to hear about Jack Newton and all of the first that that you've
experienced over the years and because of that uh where uh I went back further
and further and kept finding um newer and more exciting things and uh and
adding to that and uh then I thought well gee maybe I should form an
astronomy club and so we've done that the Newton astronomy or Astro club and
uh Scott was responsible for that and uh
uh I must say that U um not only did I enjoy the talk and back then but it
caused me to delve deeper and deeper and knew and and more exciting things uh
kept popping up and uh done so much Shack it's it it must have been uh
difficult to kind of look back because you're not the kind of guy that does look back you're always like looking at what you could do next you know how you
can um capture that uh uh new Supernova or a Galaxy you know
so you have so many discoveries so many things that you've done including making
some of the first color CCD images um uh you know uh helping people back in the
film days with the cold camera uh you know and these are just some of the things I know about there are so many
things that you've done and and so many organizations that you've helped uh over the years so you know uh it's a it's
when you look at it all I'm really in awe of it I really am so well Scotty all
I can say is that uh um you're the best friend I have I'm sure and uh um our
careers have been intermingled and uh um we've done just
so much together and uh gosh what you've
done um you're going to go down in history as one of the the the most
famous Skookum uh astronomy guys that uh that
ever walk this this planet and I say that in all sincerity because uh wow
what you've done here and open the world literally open the world to astronomy um
I can't uh I can't say enough good things about that thank you it's very kind Jack what uh what I wanted to do
though is talk a little bit about dust um I think that's the the name of
this and uh if you uh if you go back and
uh and look at some of the uh um photographs that uh that we take and uh
look at the uh the witch head um that being likely the nose but
there you are with a nebula uh full of dust and making
everything so interesting to uh to photograph and uh let me uh Scott can
you switch me back or do I switch
back Scott I think you're muted yeah I am muted yeah I said I said there's like
a little green button at the bottom of your Zoom uh platform there and it says
share screen if you click that then you'll see the uh um the application that you want
to share and you click on that and then commit to it okay that's the uh the Double cluster I've got but I I need to
switch back can you
uh what's the icon look like on my uh it's G to look like um it just at the
very bottom you're going to see uh a green share screen
button okay I do not have a shared green
button down at the bottom I think if you move your mouse to
the bottom of the screen the uh it may pop up those icons May pop up for you
yeah [Music] okay if I um if I close this picture off
oh it could be hiding yeah it could be hiding behind whenever you other the
um now I've got uh can you see yourself I can see myself now and I've got a
share screen green button there you go click that yeah
okay sorry about that no problem obviously this happens to all of us so
yes but it usually happens to me more often than not um but I uh we do have
some examples of some really neat Dusty objects here oh there you go perfect
yeah there's a a shot that I took um over the last 12 months uh and uh of
course the the dumbbell nebula and what makes it so interesting is
that the interaction of of dust and and you can see the
ionized oxygen which is your um greeny blue um color and uh and then the uh the
red uh which is taken with your Hal Alpha filter to give you the uh the
tremendous detail that you can you can see um the other uh things that I wanted
really to to talk about here was U if you take a
magnet and uh you if you're young you get your father to get a a ladder up
when he's clearing the uh the eaves on the roof and drag that magnet along and
you will collect micro meteorites clung to that magnet which will show up nicely
in either a magnifying glass or even better um if you've got a small
microscope and I can guarantee you that you will pick up space dust and uh on
your magnet in about 20 minutes and that's anywhere on Earth so have a ball
doing that but do it safely and I don't want any kids going up on ladders but uh
with uh like I did when I was a kid or i' have gotten into an awful lot
of trouble yeah um now if I click
sharing the screen again um let uh or am I am I all right what I'm doing yeah I
can do that for you there we go okay all right the uh the other um thing uh if
you are interested in in the Astro Club if you go ww. Newton asroc
club.com you can uh sign up this is free and uh we'll be doing many stories like
what we're um doing here um on uh on what I've been doing over the years and
I must say that uh um one that uh that just popped to mind because of the
uh the eclipse Expedition uh I chartered a DC3 to take uh people up to the
Northwest Territories uh which was uh just off of H Baker Lake and uh that was
a really exciting trip and uh we'll we'll cover that and uh in detail in in
the future or maybe even future talks here I love this venue and uh I'm am
very very pleased to be part of it and uh thank you I think I um for for a
start I'm going to uh I'm gonna let it slide although I do
have a final image that I want toh I want to show you and uh I was hoping
David would be here because um I need to I guess do I switch my screen then um
share the screen yeah go ahead and share again and uh the uh the image I want to
show you is Shoemaker leing n and uh of course David is the most
famous amateur astronomer on this PL Planet I'm
sure certainly the most famous
Canadian astronomer and uh when the shoemakers and David discovered this um
about three or four four hours later um David gave me a phone call with this discovery and they really didn't know
what it was at this point and uh had uh and uh so I took my telescope and uh
this was within 24 hours of Discovery and you can see the uh the what they
call the string of pearls and uh but you see the haze
around it and again Cosmic dust that uh
is associated with all of these objects and Jack what what did you think of this
when you first saw it Oh I just blew my socks off I thought
holy cow what a discovery and now by this time you knew it was a comet correct well we uh um we uh you see the
haze around especially down in here it uh it sort of G it it uh it U
you know it it's the funniest Comet I've ever seen because there seems to be individual parts to it and uh and it
wasn't until uh I guess uh I think maybe 48 hours or 24 hours I know that Brian
Marsen was at and of course he takes the reports and uh he was at this U huge
convention at the time and uh he had just been informed by his staff that
this thing was going to go around the Sun and hit uh Jupiter on the way back
and he couldn't believe his ears and he didn't want to make an announcement at in case he was wrong and uh but they
knew that within just a few hours after the discovery on once they they've got
the orbit of course and uh traced it no it's okay it's good it went in right
into right into any rate I'll wrap mine up um thank you for having me on and I'll
be on many more times with lots of great slides for you that's great thank you so
much Jack thank you uh I had never seen that particular image that you did
before uh but uh we were talking about it earlier and you had just started
doing uh color CCD work and really one of the only guys in in in the field
doing color I took the first color picture ever taken with a CCD camera that was a prototype of the
st4 and uh the Santa Barbara group sent to me and then uh we were stopped in
again on the way back and uh and uh they took out and
showed me the secret project they had if I was sworn to secrecy and they had um
just a prototype of the st8 and this was in sort of alpha um had uh had circuit
boards in it that they had to clip in voltages in different spots of it it was just a pile of wire and and the camera
stuck on it and I said send it to me and I'll take pictures with my big scope and
um so they did out of the country wowed to Canada and uh and I took uh I took
the first uh shot color shots and I was using the film off of chocolates uh that
you get at Christmas time and I got a red green and a blue my go machined up a
little slide holder and took pictures uh and sent the them on floppies to Richard
Barry who was the editor of astronomy magazine and they sat on his desk for
about uh four or five hours and it was driving him mental because there was no program available to put a colored
picture together on the computer and he wrote one and uh put the uh red green
and the blue into it and then he phones me and says you're not GNA believe these images and I think it was the dumbbell
nebula that I sent and anyway it was the and that ended up I
guess ended up on the cover CCD yeah I remember that yeah it was
mind-blowing enough but we've had a lot of fun any rate have a good you thank
you Jack that's awesome uh and we look forward to having you back on uh when
you're able to come on SO and good luck to the Newton Astro club uh I have
posted a link uh in chat so if you're interested in supporting uh the this
project uh you know check out the website and um I think they have a
Discord uh group that you can be a part of and um uh you know so and I'm sure
there's a lot more to come with this project so you know Jack you've uh once
again proven so many of my mentors that have uh done astronomy as a hobby or
professionally for a long time the old adage is if it doesn't exist yet build
it yourself and I I think that's something that we who have come in you know later
kind of missed that whole part of you know instead of buying it
which a lot of it's available uh just getting some glue some scissors some
tape and some chewing gum and put it together and it'll and make it work um I
really admire that Spirit from you know where you know astronomy I guess can't
comes from that to where it is now so really appreciate um the stories and the images
yeah we'll tell you how many stars you can see in the daytime through my
telescope I know of at least one that you can
see I can split the double double Epson Lyra in my telescope at
noon that's impressive yeah it's incredible that's a
whole other story all right well guys we are going
to uh bring on uh someone from the Gard space flight center uh Dr Caitlyn erens
who um did a program called seven months of science with us where she brought on
scientists from all over the country and uh uh she during these programs uh she
didn't speak a lot uh I mean someone for someone that knows so much okay um to uh
you know and has so much to say uh to kind of give her her guess all that
space was really cool um but uh I I'm
really pleased Caitlyn that you you agreed to come on tonight and to talk
about space or uh dust bunnies in space thing is what you so perfect well I
gotta ask I mean uh usually when people ask me to give a talk it's usually about
Pluto and planets yeah bigger things and so whenever you
texted me last night saying hey you want to talk about dust and I'm just
like yes how much of a nerd am I really I can talk people into talking about
dust okay so let's make this the most exciting presentation about dust program
ever okay it's all yours oh my goodness well okay so a little bit of backstory
too so I during my undergraduate years I was an astrophysics physics and geology major
at West Virginia University and when I started to learn about dust and that people actually
studied Dust In Space my first uh clue
on that was like why just just why it's
it's truly just dust bunnies in space what you know okay I I'm quickly eating
my words now uh years later uh because now I'm part of the Dust team on
Interstellar proe which I will happily talk about later uh so now I'm I'm uh
part of my research is actually to learn about dust uh what all kinds of fun
questions we still have about dust I so let's let's jump right to it shall we so
I'm gonna it's so weird because I have my camera here but my monitor monor is like behind my camera so you're GNA just
kind of see me Dart around a little bit here so all right that should that should do it all right so dust bunnies
in space again when Scott asked me to give this talk and he's like what's your talk title that was truly the first
thing I texted and I hit send and I'm like am I gonna regret I love title
No we're we're all here to have fun so uh that's right mean if anything dust
bunnies in space Sounds like the perfect movie title that you would have with um
Mystery Science Theater 3,000 it really does oh my goodness uh
so the fascinating thing about dust who studies dust uh there there's no just a
dust person in astronomy instead it's actually very very
interdisciplinary I so so we we Dust Bunny people some of us are geologists we have
chemists we have astrobiologists uh we have to talk to heliophysics people because we need to
understand our sun but we also have to figure out other exosolar systems as
well so we need to learn about other Stellar systems so we talked to those types of heliophysics people um Proto
solar discs and circumstellar discs and uh nebuli and everything like that that
goes with more of the astrophysics dust people um and then on a planetary scale
like I said geology chemistry astrobiology and also climatology as
well I unfortunately a lot of climatologists are pretty much ignored
uh but they're very important to understand how dust uh would form in the
planetary atmospheres or even some moons uh so take like Titan Saturn's largest
moon there's all sorts of dust that can rain down into the atmosphere it's very very thick
and Luscious atmosphere and cause all sorts of really fun atmospheric chaos uh
if you will so very fun chemistry there I so what are we talking about
when we say space dust bunnies um in this case it's it's Interstellar grains
I this is mostly soot of space but I
don't really like saying slot so this is why I'm saying dust bunnies I it's essentially material somehow just
ejected by energy ejected by stars uh especially when stars are are dying and
then also being reborn uh and so on and so forth so the whole Stellar cycle just
has so much dust Now dust is typically uh very dense uh they form in very dense
and relatively cold and environments but they're released out into the the into
the wild into space you have the interstellar medium which is essentially just the background of everything uh but
they can influence Stellar winds they can uh influence material how does
material Clump together I all of that dust space is so so dusty and yet it
only makes up about 1% of the mass of the interstellar medium so really not
that much but they are still very very important uh for Stellar
regions I'll go to that here in a bit I so why exactly are are they important
well if it wasn't for these magical dust bunnies of space we wouldn't have stars
and we wouldn't have planets so you know that's a pretty big responsibility for
something that's just so tiny and essentially just dust but think of it
this way you have a Dust Bunny Ice Cream and these ice creams uh act almost like
the lib tarpits of space they attract molecules and stick everything together
so let's let's think of it this way hydrogen is the most basic molecule we
have in the universe and you you try to get two of those suckers to stick together
no it's not g to happen however Interstellar grains the surface of these
grains are just sticky and cold enough that hydrogen atoms can stick to the
surface and just happen to Clum together all with the help of a grain so while
all of these hydrogen atoms are now finally making H2 a molecular hydrogen all of that
starts to build up and build up and build up so as it's building up again these ice grains are supposed to be very
cold and very dense on the other side of the fence with this you have just this
hot nasty rapidly spinning gas all over the place you need it to kind of settle
down and get it cold so dust comes into play here cools that whole Cloud down
and as the cloud starts despinning and cooling off everything starts clumping
together now you got stars to form better you got planetary systems to form
better everything is starting to cool down and it's not just cooling down either all that hot gas and everything
is just bursting out what we call ionization all this very hot
energy again dust grains could also act like shock absorbers so they actually
take in all that radiation and instead it bounces right off of their their little Dust Bunny bodies I into infrared
light infrared energy uh so they act as shock absorbers they act as like the the
cool down uh Pebbles of of Stellar clouds and essentially helps with
Stellar formation so very cool thing for just something so small I and there's
different flavors of dust bunnies out in space too so the typical ones that we
would have in most uh solar system areas are the silicates uh so you have silicon
magnesium iron uh anything with oxides uh you could have carbon uh
grains as well so this is mostly graphite there are icy type grains which
is uh mostly what I'm familiar with so it's not just H2O either haha all so the
farther out you are in the outer solar system now you're dealing with nitrogen
ice and methane and ammonia ammonia makes a really fun ice grain as well
it's very sticky and then you have something called paw so P
P's polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons so pause for short so paws are the Lego
bricks of dust bunnies you would have uh truly just the most very basic Lego
bricks that would be stuck together and then you would have radiation to
essentially break apart those Lego bricks and then reassembled and then break apart and reassemble break apart
and reassemble and they could form all these chains now I don't mean chains like
you're gonna see them that big no we're still talking very very small scale here
but pause uh really creates an interesting type of dust grain to study because it
tells us planetary people I am a planetary geologist but it tells us okay
what type of radiation are we dealing with paws are mostly associated with ice so that can tell us what kind of
radiation is happening now versus how much radiation happened Millions to
billions of years ago paws are also found in the atmosphere of Titan as well
so that can really tell us how in the world does Titan form all these hydrocarbons and uh how has it
maintained that very thick atmosphere around Saturn paw can also tell us a lot
about our own Sun as well if we know how much radiation it is going on through
these chains all throughout the solar system that can really give us a clue as to how much radiation our own sun is is
pushing out presently and also millions and billions of years ago so in that
case we we look to the uh look to the Past what are we doing in the future and
then in the present and then how do we uh look to that in the future the unfortunate part about all of this is
that there really hasn't been that much done I there's been some but yeah we'll
get to that I so like I said the outer shell of these grains are very much like
Tar Pits they they attract as much material on their surface it can and then they act like a shock absorber uh
but looking at the very interior part of it I'm going to show you two different diagrams that I like that I I found uh
surfing Google earlier today uh but very much like an earth right you have the core and the mantle a
crust uh so very very Micron scale uh so
you would have your your inner inner metal or silicate and as the core your
mantle would be the buildup of either more metals or more ice depends upon where you are in the solar system uh and
then your surface is going to have more uh of the clumping of whatever it
attracts it's either going to be more grains or uh or something more
Organics this is also another fun uh diagram that I like too because then you get to see what happens to the outside
uh of this poor silic core in this case uh so you have cosmic rays beating down
upon it and reaction products would be um again breaking apart those Lego
bricks and sticking them back together and break apart and stick back together UV light so all that solar radiation
coming in it's just going to keep uh blasting out uh infrared wavelengths
back out so it's all about location location
location where in the world are these space dust bunnies are they under your bed are they on the stairs
are they in the fireplace so it all depends upon where where you're looking
at um so circumplanetary or interplanetary you're dealing with more
local solar system Interstellar means at least within the realm of our own sun
and then Intergalactic uh at least in between the different um well as the name suggests
different G Galactic regions I so
I'm just very briefly going to go through this though but again looking toward the heliophysics side of studying
these uh dust grains again we want to see how is our
sun I you know radiating how's the almost like the the heated heartbeat of
our own Sun uh throughout the whole solar system but then can we look to other exosolar systems as well so we
look at protoplanetary discs how do other planets form how do other stars uh
form as well other uh star forming regions I interplanetary you would again go kind
of go back into heliophysics and heliophysics and planetary people have to chat which is not easy to do I can
tell you that it is not an easy communication to do whatsoever but it can be done sometimes I so looking at
how planets are formed look at how our own planets are formed I what are the different levels of like terrestrial
planets versus gas planets ice giant planets and and the kyber belt and so on and so forth you're going to have
different types of grains in between and and far out and uh let's see here I I
love these pictures though so you have um trifid nebula M20 M20 is so pretty I
love M20 and then this is m78 I so I so I'm sure this has been
mentioned uh previously to me though but you know nebula are so so beautiful in
this case these are two excellent examples of what's called reflection nebuli um so reflection nebuli are
essentially have almost like a bluish uh Hue color to them all this blue is
essentially all that dust uh having that kind of a a reflection if you will all
that infrared radiation um being bounced off of the grains and it turns
blue so I'm not going to go through all these lines but there are several detection
methods one of which was mentioned uh earlier by uh by Jack I believe it was
uh meteorites so go outside with a magnet it's it's amazing how much meteorite micro meteorites uh can
actually occur on a daily basis so it can get really interesting so meteorites specifically larger uh you
know things of meteorites would be better to actually extract uh certain Stellar grains out of them though but uh
but you know what we have the technology to go to go smaller I NASA has done uh
several different kinds of capture of uh like solar radiation type grains found
in Antarctica in Greenland we you know the colder the better um better for preservation at least my particular
favorite detection method is something called aerogels so aerogel I how we teasingly call it as
the ghost Jello uh of material it is very very fun
to play with so I I'll talk about AR gel here in a bit because it is very fun to play with I you could also have space
telescopes so the the very specific one would be the Spitzer Space Telescope this looks into the 3 to 100 to 80
micrometer wavelengths so very long wavelengths but you're you're wanting to get really deep infrared thermal
infrared uh wavelengths you could also do polarimetry but that's it's okay but
back to aroel real quick this stuff is so much fun uh so it it
is I you can buy it uh for for research purposes that I may or may not have done
so in the past I have I so the the careful thing about gel is that uh it's
extremely strong uh you cannot break it apart you could actually heat it up and
it won't melt uh the only thing it is weak against is the O our own oil uh in
our in our hands in our fingers uh so if you were to touch it it will actually disintegrate within a couple hours so
you have to be very careful on how you handle it and wear gloves and everything uh but we do have layers of arael
in U more current astronaut suits actually because that they are heat
resistant so what you see on the right side of this PowerPoint slide though are
just bricks of aerrow gel uh used for one of the Stardust missions so Stardust
was a fantastic Mission from from NASA to actually just uh just goom right
through I right through a lot of dust and essentially just try to grab as much
dust as it can now the thing about dust I believe I have in here yeah so
typically dust particle velocities are very very fast 10 to 40 kilometers per second so that's
actually the there's pros and cons with this right so going that fast you're
going to need Aero gel as like that Jello to shock absorb the grains and and
essentially eat the grains as much as possible to get as much material as you can but at those velocities yeah the bad
side about this though is that if you have those grains going so fast there is a potential that those grains could
actually shock themselves uh or they can break apart or
anything like that uh sorry bad joke there um so so past missions we have all
sorts of uh fun missions that have done a lot of dust work so previously we've
had uh Helios missions Pioneer 1011 also did a few Galileo Cassini did some
fantastic uh dust uh analysis going around the Satan system Voyager 1 and
two there for a while uh was using their langmere probes as a sort of um sampling
of cosmic dust it didn't last long though but it was a good try I now the current uh use of dust detectors uh most
recently the New Horizon spacecraft and also Rosetta uh around common
67p uh cherum off Jano so these dust detectors are are
really quite interesting and they're constantly evolving how can we better be better about um you know licking and
sniffing uh and sampling all the dust bunnies of space so what's the next step of cosmic
grain detections well we have the interstellar probe uh so I highly
encourage everyone to check out Interstellar probe. jhu.edu
Interstellar probe is essentially going to be the next generation of a voyager
like probe it's going to um hopefully launch fingers crossed in around
2036 for a launch date it's going to have a Jupiter gravity assist uh but it's going to just zip
right through the solar system but it's going to look at interplanetary dust um it's mostly a heliophysics type
Mission so it's going to do a lot of radiation type experiments it's going to do some fun Lyman Alpha Imaging as well
uh but I'm specifically helping a lot of the astrophysical Dust uh folks on on
this Mission so it's going to be really interesting because like I said we have the Paw we have the silicates we have
the IES we have the different kinds of grains the issue though is that we don't
really know what is the extent throughout the whole solar system we only know maybe a little bit of dust
here and a little bit of dust here and oh look there's a comet oh look there's Saturn that's about it what is dust like
in between the planets and then past Pluto what is dust like is the
radiation variable do you have Paw uh type chemicals past Pluto more than like
lik yes but what kinds and uh and how structured are they so that's
essentially what's going to be some interesting questions to be coming about with Interstellar probe so that is my
presentation so I hope you guys enjoyed uh Cosmic dust Bud awesome it's awesome uh so
uh you know I think that the study of Interstellar dust is a relatively new New Field I mean it seems
like I mean when I got started in amateur astronomy when we learned about
Interstellar dust it was kind of like well you know it's stuff that kind of gets in the way of the stuff that we
want to see right it obscures like the center of our galaxy we can't see the core very
well because of all the Interstellar dust um and we didn't really understand
a lot of the Dynamics of how like a Galaxy breathed dust kind of you know to
um you know in its whole cycle of creating new stars and and all of that
so it's it is uh I think that uh you know these tiny little uh uh pieces of
our Cosmos uh are you know they do a big they do a really big job you know as far
as as uh um you know the creation of whole Stellar nurseries and and all of
that so um what do you think is the most interesting part or what do you think
will be the most compelling part of the study of dust for yourself Caitlyn for
myself okay good because I'm not gonna speak for the whole team all of all
time oh my goodness so for myself I'm really interested to see just the the
Lego brick structure how does that change in between planets and Beyond
because it's so fascinating that grains would like stick to each other but their
cores will be different their their surfaces would be different how well do
they stick to each other there's grains that we consider fluffy um so would they
stick as well as those that look very angular and sharp and pointy kind of dust bunnies but how does that change
does it go from fluffy to angular to fluffy again is there a certain point in the solar system that it it changes we
don't know I so so you're right I mean it's I it's interesting that we always
just kind of been like oh no it's dusty noise dust out of out of the way and now
all of a sudden we're like hey uh yeah that's right Caitlyn thank you
very much and uh thanks for coming on global star party again it was awesome thank you for having me take care
okay so uh next up uh we're going to um Nathan helner mestman uh Nathan's uh uh
presentations have been uh enlightening humorous uh and very energetic Nathan
it's great to have you on our program again um and uh I'm not sure what you
have in store for us today but I look forward to it oh well thank you so much for having me again um so today I was
looking back on an article that I had written about asteroids and I figured
this would be suiting for a global Star Party about Cosmic dust so this is
actually a um it's a sport involving meteors and not just any sport in
particular I call this um Cosmic dust the extreme sport so um as it goes some
people suck at Sports and that kind of includes myself because I like participating in sports but I'm
certainly not like exceptionally good at any of them luckily there's always a shortcut for anything in life and while
shortcuts may not be very good ideas as is often the case with these scenarios if you have't noticed already um I'm not
in a desperate need to be better at sports but I still wonder how I could improve so um the first technique to get
better at sports is to train that's Admiral but in the name of science it's not really the most direct way do it
there's a much more consistent technique which is of course meteorites and um it's important to
Define this first because uh meteorites are meteors once they've reached the ground and meteors are meteors when
they're burning up and meteoroids are meteors when they're still in space and that those three definitions have
divided the space clubs of the world and cause 10% of all the arguments in astronomical societies um so with that
aside it is technically possible albeit unlikely for a meteorite to land a score in a ball Sport and that is what I'll be
looking at today so for a meteor to make it to the surface and become a meteorite it only
needs to be a few centimeters across but it usually makes it to the surface in the in the form of tiny bits and
pieces uh so as Caitlyn mentioned these micr meteorites are really really commonplace but the bigger ones that
make it to the surface are significantly less so in order to uh really influence
a um a game meteors really should be around like maybe 10 centimeters across that was my estimate and most sports
have balls bigger than that but I figured that a 10 centimeter wide media would probably be more than enough to
impact a game no pun intended actually you know what that was a pun intended um
so yeah another thing we need to take into account is that the walls of
stadiums and gyms could stop meteorites so I'll have to assume this is taking place outside
um so there isn't really good data on how many 10 cm wide asteroids there are
in the solar system because with the telescopes we have today we couldn't possibly detect them all um but we can
estimate looking at the number of asteroids that are say other factors of
10 wide like say 100 kilometers 10 kilometers 1 kilometer 100 meters even
and with that Trend continuing I was able to estimate that in the entire solar system there's probably around
32.5 quadrillion objects around 10 cm across um that includes the Kyper belts
um and the asteroid belt um and the Trojan asteroids around Jupiter and
Saturn uh but of course objects in the Kyer belt probably aren't going to impact life on earth except Pluto which
I think about every day um but I wanted to figure out how many of these
asteroids could actually impact the Earth and of course these are going to be near Earth as asteroids but even more
than that they're going to be asteroids that are directly impacting Earth um so I looked at the uh percentage of
asteroids that are actually in a hazardous position and then I was able to estimate that there's probably a 10 cimeter wide
asteroid colliding with the Earth every 17 hours and there's probably one less than
two million kilometers away in fact that will soon impact the earth now once every 17 hours may sound like a lot but
as Neil degrass Tyson famously put it uh 70% of the surface of Earth is water and
over 99% is uninhabited so you would expect nearly all impactors to hit
either the ocean or desolate regions of Earth's surface so why do movie meteors have such good
aim um so this is the reason why you don't notice these 10 cimer wide meteorites often statistically speaking
there every square meter of the earth's surface is being hit by I'm going to
have to like take a deep breath for this 0.00000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000 3203 10 cimeter wide meteres per second to
say that a little faster in metric units that's 3203 zepto meteorites um but I don't know if SI
prefixes are working well here so um with those statistics I decided to look
at how long I'd need to play a sport for a meteor to actually impact score um so firstly I
think I looked at tennis which my sister has gotten pretty good at but me significantly less so so uh yeah I can't
hit a tennis ball very well but a meteor might be able to help me here So eventually after playing tennis if we
were able to play indefinitely like food and water compensated for and maybe even assuming that the Earth doesn't get
destroyed uh eventually a meteor would come crashing through the opponent's rack Mar
ET obviously a winning me the game that would take actually 161.5 trillion years
um which isn't practical uh the Earth would in all likelihood have been destroyed by the dying Sun long before
that uh so I would have to assume that the solar system would be Eternal and
given how many of the meteors would have actually already collided with other parts of the earth it would actually
start using up the Solar System's meteor Supply so I'd have to assume that it regenerates itself which uh is slightly
bending the laws of physics um it's also important to notice that I would
actually only have to wait 49 trillion years because by that point it would be likely that the opponent directly would
have been taken out by a meteor so that would significantly decrease the time if you think about it that way and also I
would um in about the same amount of time also be taken out so it's not really to my advantage
either um so the most straightforward sport to incorporate meteors into is
probably basketball um and case in point meteors would fall through the basketball hoop every 6 trillion 32
billion years which is again an awfully long basketball game uh it's also just
as likely that uh the other team would score a point via this method so it's not really to my advantage either um the
other problem here is that it's a lot more likely for meteors to fall on some other part of the stadium rather than
directly in the hoop so by the time a meteor actually fell into the basketball hoop it would be statistically likely
that everyone playing on both teams would have been taken out by a falling meteor so that's probably not the best
game to play either if you're counting on meteors to do it for you um so the next sport I looked at was
golf and that's an interesting sport to uh use meteors for because it's a hard
target to aim for but rolling to the Target is an option unfortunately most meteors aren't spherical so rolling is
kind of out of the question but it still leaves the possibility of meteors directly falling into the hole um and
that would take about 1.08 quadrillion years which is much longer than all the
other games we've discussed but sooner or later it would happen but then it also raises another uh interesting thing
which is that given that it's a 10 cm wide meteor um and it's a 10 centimet wide
hole that would mean it would have to have nearly perfect aim meaning that every other 10 cm wide object on the
field would have also been struck by that point uh if you wanted your opponent to lose a point via a meteorite
impact you could also wait 7.07 quadrillion years and wait for their golf ball to be directly struck by
meteor um to be fair these strategies aren't in the rule book and I did check
uh they're not there there's nothing about meteors so imagining a more within the rues scenario I decided to figure
out how long I'd need to wait for a meteor to actually hit the golf ball at such an angle that the golf ball would
be sent flying into the hole um so given that the average distance to the hole
and the hole's diameter um you can calculate the apparent size of the hole in arc minutes and Arc seconds that
stuff so it turns out to be about six arc minutes three Arc seconds wide um
and that corresponds to a part of the golf ball that you'd need to hit in order to descend it toward the hole and
that area on the gulf ball has a surface area of about 0.0041 um Square
millimeters which is really small and for a meteor to hit that it would take around seven sextilion years uh which is
about 14 times as many years as there are grains of sand on earth so maybe it's not the best strategy so yeah uh so
much for golf so how about volleyball now volleyball is probably my favorite sport and I'd say I'm decent at it but
I'm not very good at what they call spiking the ball um spiking is a move
where somebody hits the ball directly over the net and downward so that nobody
on the other team has a chance to hit it back up uh luckily I am decent at hitting it over the net and to spike it
I would just need a meteor to come down on top of it hitting it directly down I was surprised to find that that would
only take 7.7 trillion years uh not fast or anything but much shorter than the
other strategies discussed unfortunately most volleyballs can't withstand meteorite impact so the ball would be
blown to pieces and I haven't exactly read the rule book for that but I'm guessing it would count as a
foul yeah yeah I think so um so bowling
is an interesting sport uh because it's literally the objective of the game to hit things um a bowling ball like other
balls might actually be able to withstand a small meteorite impact um because the Earth's atmosphere slows
down rocks significantly so it might only end up breaking pieces off and that
would take 1.3 trillion years but having a bowling ball completely destroyed probably wouldn't count as a lost Point
either so if you wanted to gain a point you might think that you could stand in front of the bowling alley and just wait
until a meteor comes along and knocks over all the pins for you if you wanted to do that uh and the meteor had to
cover the full length of the alley that's another thing to uh take into account uh you could say that a meteor
could just come directly down on the pins that's not really bowling though so if you say it has to travel along the
alley like it was a bowling ball you'd need to wait 990 trillion years um it
might actually take uh less time than that because it's assuming that the meteor acts like a bowling ball and when
you're using a bowling ball you need to be very specific about the trajectory and stuff because if you don't hit it
right you won't get a strike but for something as destructive as a meteor you could probably hit the pins anywhere and still get a strike that would reduce the
time to 79 trillion years which is definitely sounding more convenient don't you think depends on how well
those kick plates are in the walls if it bounces pins around you have a better chance coming from a bowler so yeah that
might work perhaps at this point be before I could get a strike I sometimes
it takes me that long to get nine carry on um so yeah at this point I kind of
started to ask myself what the heck am I even doing I mean if I used this strategy to try to beat someone at
bowling they would have scored like trillions of points by the time I even got one um so in looking back on the
article that I wrote about this um if I I might have written something a little
bit wrong here I was probably wrong about the starting line so I might have to go back and change
that um so I feel the most fitting sport for this scenario is dodgeball um the
objective is to hit people out with balls and meteors could probably do that too um then again I couldn't find
anything about meteors in the role book but if my guess is serve me right that would most likely probably be okay um
like I mentioned it would take 49 trillion years for any given person to be taken out by a meteor but in a game
of dodgeball given that people are so good at dodging they might manage to significantly prolong the time it takes
to be hit by a meteor um and if the game extends long enough I found that statistically some very interesting
things happen um so if you threw a ball directly at your opponent you should
expect to miss a shot after 219 trillion years due to the fact that a meteor would Collide directly with your ball
while it was in the air knocking it off course uh and if you threw a ball at an opponent and it completely missed then
after 129 quadrillion years of playing it becomes statistically likely that you
would still get someone out due to the fact that a meteor would knock the ball off course and directly into an
opponent um if you were to play dodgeball against a team for 549 dilon
years which in scientific notation is 5.47 time 10 to the 35 years uh you
might get extremely lucky I mean actually lucky is a weird word to use cuz like you be pretty unlucky in this
situation um but it would be statistically likely after 547 Dillion years that while an
opponent was throwing a ball directly at you two meteors would simultaneously fall from the sky one of them taking out
the opponent for you and the other one taking out the opponent's ball and lastly just to finish things off If You
Ever Had The Misfortune of being forced to play a dodgeball game alone against 10 opponents all you would need to do is
avoid being hit for three million Google Google years which is three times 10 to
the power of 206 years and by that point it would be statistically likely for 10 separate meteors to simultaneously hit
each of the 10 opponents out all right the moral of the story I don't
know if there's anything to be learned here but maybe it's just to say practice hard to get good at something and don't
rely on meteors to do it for you so uh thank you so much it was amazing
NE so so okay what what did you think oh
yes I I I too am not good at sports either so this makes me feel better
about myself if anything this is fantastic I loved your presentation
thank you so much yeah it's a it's a great presentation now I did play sports I you know I interjected with the
bowling because I still do that um I'm not telling you how many bowling balls I have but it's a lot more than the meteor
that I expect to hit in the next five hours but um yeah I love the analogies and as far
as being good at sports you don't have to be um because we all get old and
creaky at some point and then can't do the things we used to be able to do when we were younger so while you're young
yet just enjoy it I'm pretty sure you can run faster than I can and um
excellent uh presentation on the time scale your math really really shows the
type of probabilities and time scales some numbers never before so yeah that
that can happen so you know we we worry about the meteor coming right this moment but the reality is the
probability of it is not as good as we may the movies may think it is I really
like that quote you had from uh Neil de grass Tyson how do these meteors have such great Aim so uh yeah excellent
presentation all around and you're more than welcome to come bow with me sometime when you're in
Michigan well thank you I'll try that I extend that invitation to everybody if
you want to come bowl we'll have a great time you need to put a timer ad because
Nathan will wait all right I I'll click the timer
right now I'll see you in three what was that number Nathan three I don't know you can just say any number with at
least 20 zeros after it fine there we go we we'll wait hopefully I'll be in
Argentina before that happens yeah I'm sure you will all right uh we are going to take a
10-minute break and um uh we'll be right back with um with Connell Richards so uh
stay tuned and uh go get a coffee or a sandwich or you know stretch your legs
we'll be right back
so Nathan some of the numbers that you predicted there are sports fans of my college team that thought it would be
that long before they would see our football team make a college football uh
playoff let alone a championship and uh we're still waiting that long for the championship but they
did make the playoffs so they came in well under the uh three
10 to the 20th time years that we thought it would take so so Stranger
Things Can
Happen hey Nathan quick question uh I heard you mention Pluto do you like plut
though oh yeah um you know I I went on this uh survey we were doing like a
class survey and I was heartbroken to find out that like I was the only one in the class that actually thought about
Pluto and you know it was just heartbreaking like one of the questions I asked was how do you feel about Pluto
status as a dwarf planet and like two people said undecided and the rest of them were just like don't care so uh we
need to promote this and I think it's perfect to be saying it on a global star party we need to start a movement to
make to an honorary Planet oh my goodness
yes 100% oh no no no you you need to you
need to get my contact info from from Scott we'll we'll chat Pluto okay cool I
think whichever organization we create it'll be a plutocracy ah oh the puns are strong
with you young patalon oh my goodness
but yeah we definitely need a chat blue though
yes Nathan I have to ask you have you ever read a book called what if oh yeah I have all of random lro's
books really yeah I that was uh mainly my inspiration for thinking of these
just like wacky hypothetical scenarios um yeah I have a very large collection
of these just weird scenarios and I think that was what inspired me
so yeah that's awesome I I really do love that book I I thought I saw a little bit of his inspiration and some
of your jokes so I enjoyed that a
lot
those of you that are chatting Chris the silence is deafening and Pluto is
definitely a planet um I'm in agreement with you on
both um we all went to get coffee and and take care of
um other things I've got mine here you can't see it because I have a virtual
screen and I don't know if you can even see you can hear me talking but you can't see me anyways
because the uh chat is visible I think everyone else stepped
out
I put up a um uh in chat uh um the uh
page for uh visual comments in the future um this is uh a and there's quite
quite a few of them uh that uh are listed on here it looks like maybe I
don't know maybe a hundred are listed this is by saichi yosida uh and his comment page uh but it
it's an incredible resource and I think you'll enjoy it I don't know maybe a hundred are listed this is by saichi
yosida uh and his Comet page uh but it's an incredible resource and I think
you'll enjoy it I don't know maybe a 100 are
listed I think I heard you twice Scott but uh we'll have to check I think I heard myself twice as well I don't know
why well it's not happening now so we're all
good yeah when you mentioned um the topic being uh dust in the Milky Way it
uh changed the directory of my talk I think the word is directory it's
more direction of what I'm I'm going to present much later on uh down the line
so I actually did a little research for it and found some uh found some
interesting things about the center of the Galaxy that I'll be sharing um not as many pictures but um
still uh some interesting uh things that I noted um the hint is I found a spitzer
Space Telescope image of the center of our galaxy so I'm G to work that in
somehow so we'll see how it goes
excellent to uh Chris Larson who says Pluto is a planet congratulations
Caitlyn we've gained our first
revolutionary
yeah I think we we already had with Dr uh Allen Stern
um spars with uh Neil Neil degrass Dr Neil degrass
Tyson and many others who cite the properties of Pluto and the fact that it
may if it were closer to Earth it might grow a tail but I like the argument that
that if you're close enough to the sun you're probably going to grow a tail regardless just because you're the
material on you is going to begin melting off and if you're moving
um you know a tail will form uh regardless so that's you know
there's other characteristics of Pluto that might resemble the makeup of comets
more than the uh makeup of our gas giants and our rocky planets
but I the debate rages
on well hello everyone we're back after our 10-minute break here uh you know uh
we were talking a little bit about Pluto and and someone mentioning I guess it
might might have been Neil degrass Tyson that uh if Pluto was closer to the Sun
it might develop a tail I'll argue that that Mars uh has a has a tail it's got
uh dust that is being uh uh spread around the solar system and uh is they
have determined that it is the uh probable cause of the zodiacal light
that we see so um anyhow um you know
it's and and perhaps maybe even the Earth itself uh outgasses uh some
material out into space as it zooms around the sun who knows um well we definitely outgas a lot of materials to
space as human beings so that should count and uh and as a zodiacal light you
just gave me an idea of other things to present so I'm going to go look for those images Okay carry on this theory
about uh things being close to the Sun developing Tales are we then to believe that cats and dogs have developed Tales
because their surface material is melting off from the to the sun yes yes
yes that's the reason fascinating and rabbits too most animals all right well
Connell uh I'm going to give the spotlight to you um uh thanks for coming
on to Global star party yet again uh you're becoming a regular so it's really cool um and uh what what is your program
uh your presentation tonight well tonight uh the theme being cos dust and dust bunnies and everything
that comes along with that I thought I'd go back and share some of my photography I have a couple of old shots from the
Milky Way from past summers mostly looking over towards Sagittarius and also through signis they're some of the
brightest regions with a lot of definition and contrast and dust and nebula and and things that we can
observe so I'll start by sharing my screen here um of course uh let me know
if you can see everything all right should see a folder in front of you yes okay okay so we'll pull this up here um
this was actually taken right from my backyard this was a shot right around signis uh taken from a summer or two ago
and if we look up above these trees right here is denb and sigis and over here above and below are the wings of
the Swan and it's a little hard to follow through because there are so many stars in this image but if we Trace back
I think this should be Albero right here uh we have colander 399 the uh coat
hanger right there so there's so much to see right in this Widefield image of the Milky Way But most apparent we see this
star Cloud here this kind of white patch against the darker sky where we're looking out of the plane of the Milky Way we see another white patch and then
it gets a little darker as we're moving away from the Milky Way but right through here is a part of the Milky Way that we call the Great Rift and Dr erens
was talking a lot about some of the particles that we find here some silicates hydrocarbons all sorts of
clumps of carbon and dust that even get a little bit icy and they block out some of the Starlight so of course we're
looking way out in the Milky Way the Milky Way is about 100,000 Lighty years in diameter so this could be tens of
thousands of Lighty years of material that we're looking through and with so much of that space and so much
Interstellar dust filling that some of the Starlight might be kind of uh dimmed
or or hidden behind even with so much dust in there and if we look at other
galaxies in our telescopes M51 is a great example you can see dust Lanes in there the Sombrero Galaxy where we're
seeing it Edge on you see light above and below and this huge dust Lane right in the middle and this is kind of what
we're looking at but from the inside out in our own Milky Way so it's a feature I find really interesting you can see it
from many dark sky sites when you're looking up and it makes a great subject for some Widefield photography during
the summer and you could even do a more artistic take on this this was a much
longer exposure about 15 or 16 minutes looking South uh probably the same night I imaged that region of signis so we're
looking South here and you can see the star Trails I think they're quite beautiful along with the trees but if you look more carefully you can see a
portion of the Milky Way here and this should be right around Sagittarius so looking kind of towards the center of
the Milky Way you see a little bit of that white cloud here and a little bit of a dimmer White Cloud over here and
it's blurred by the longer exposure in the star trail and I was curious to see what this looked like but once again you
see this Rift of dark material in the middle and it reminds me of a lot of the old folklore and mythology that talks
about the Milky Way as a river I think when you blur it and look at it as a long exposure this kind of brings those
stories into perspective and I thought that was a really fun way to look at the Milky Way now once again this was taken from a
local state park a clearer image of Sagittarius we see the teapot asterism down here this would have been the
summer of 2020 I believe over here is Jupiter Saturn wasn't far behind but
then coming out of the spout of the teapot if you will is that darker region of the Milky Way we saw in that longer
exposure the star Trail and the Milky Way growing up and eventually reaching signis way up here but down here we see
different types of dust not just the carbon particles covered in ice that are kind of blocking out the staright we see
a reflection nebula here in the lagoon nebula you can see the little star clusters just captured as pinpoints in
there and a little bit of a cloud around that kind of standing out from the background of the rest of the Moki way
so that's a very bright and beautiful nebula it looks great in binoculars and of course it's a great subject for some
deep Sky photography of your looking at things with a wide field and if we go up here a little bit this is a an object in
messier's catalog M24 it's the Sagittarius star cloud and if you look at some of the papers and the research
behind this object you find it's actually not really an object at all if we see this huge clump of dust blocking
out the center of the Milky Way we found that eventually it clear up and you're looking through almost a tunnel of dust
to another part of the Milky Way and seeing this huge cloud of stars in another part of our galaxy so that's a
really fun sense of perspective to bring into your observations or your photography you can see the dust and
Light which is a little bit closer by even though it's uh kind of amorphous and and dimmed down a little bit but
then when you look through this hole in the dust here you see the Sagittarius star cloud and a couple of little stars
in there that are in the foreground and even even farther up I was just looking at this image earlier
you can see up here is M16 the Eagle Nebula and m17 the swan nebula and you
can't see much detail in them but like the Lagoon there they are as little drops of light kind of bursting out from
that dark rift in the Milky Way now I'll take us back again to that
image of the Milky Way I was looking at first that that signis region and I had one image that I designed to to look a
little more artistic and and pretty but with this image I wanted to see just to
find what I could if I really enhanced the contrast on this region of signis and what could I find in there would it
bring out these dark Lanes a little bit more and you can see the North American nebula is hanging out right there
another patch of light and then this great rift is passing through once again but one of the reasons I wanted to look
at this image is is a zoomed in portion of it here and it really doesn't look like much of course but if you look
carefully there is an e asterism this is of of course Barnard's e so you have Barnard 142 down here and 143 up here
you see that there and that is is much like the Great Rift going through signis you see these
dark nebula here there these huge clumps of carbon coated in ice and blocking out the Starlight that would be behind it
and sometimes they make some fun shapes and they make for some fun catalog objects and as exposed and and pixelated
as this is I was curious to see what I could find with my camera and it was really interesting to find that e-shaped
asterism now as for some other uh instances of dust in our solar system
this is commment neoi is an image I've shown a couple of times on global Star Party during uh its evening Apparition
after it came around the Sun there's the nucleus of the Comet there of course it's screaming out of our solar system
at a great speed but there is a really beautiful instance of dust in our solar system the comet has begun to out gas as
it got closer to the Sun and you can see the intensity is growing very close near the new nucleus and a little bit farther
away as that tail fans out in in these very fine wisps of dust now that's all I have for the dust
tonight but I do have a couple of images I'd like to share uh of course I was thrilled since I got on break from Penn
State our skies cleared up a little bit and I was out and I thought I'd take my chances with with imaging the moon and
Saturn and Jupiter up here these are only the raw images so far I got these about two hours ago but it was fun to
get the camera back out there and see what I could find um I think I had some moisture on my lens because these were only 5 to 10
second exposures and the moon seemed blurred a little bit I couldn't quite get it to focus so I tried to experiment
very nice I do too I do too sometimes you can make the colors really pop even with the settings on the camera and
that's really great in post-processing but this image came out a little clearer you see Saturn over
here and of course the moon but the moon I thought was really special because if you look carefully you can see the Sea
of Tranquility over here um the Sea of storms over here Oceanus Pro procellarum
and then that hook of of the the waxing crescent there kind of Overexposed against this Earth shine but
you can see some of the Seas on the moon which I thought was really beautiful I'd never really been able to image that before so I think our moon is only two
days old right now that was a really fun Target to to check out I got closer on the moon once again
here and you can see the Seas so much better a little more pronounced Sea of Tranquility over here and moving over I
think this is the uh Eastern limb of the moon right here I could have that wrong but nonetheless you can see some of the
Seas and some of the brighter craters and Ray systems through the Earth shine and then of course that uh well-known
Crescent shape in the the blue of Twilight through the trees so I think you know Cosmic dust always makes for
some wonderful images um I really enjoy looking at the Milky Way and and comets
and all sorts of things that have very fine particles but great quantities of them and they make for some great images and fun targets to observe and then as
always I like to look around the solar systems neighborhood and see what the moon and planets are up to they always make for some fun images so thank you
very much for having me on I'm always happy to share some photography conell thank you so much it's it's great to
have you on um I uh uh I know that you
give presentations to other groups and clubs and stuff like that what where where else have you given talk so
far well I started off actually um after I got to know Chuck Allen through the astronomical League I spoke on one of
the league Live Events and that was done to promote some of what I was doing in my astronomy club i' spoken a lot at my
astronomy club at my high school I founded that junior year and Senior year once we were able to get back in classes
and we really had the club rolling I gave some talks there about naked eye astronomy and binoculars a little bit
and we also had some small crafts and exercises to look at maybe the scale of the solar system we did another one we
took some cloth and some differ sized marbles with different masses to look at um how gravity can distort SpaceTime so
you have black holes then planets and stars on different scales so on this platform I really enjoy sharing
photography or sometimes some of my favorite targets for a given topic sure but then um Hands-On demonstrations are
fun to do as well have you done uh have you given any planetarium programs like in a planetarium setting no I have not
i' like to do that very good at it so the way you describe the sky and you take people through the constellations
and stuff you do an excellent job and and I think that uh I think you could be
a great presenter in that you know in that Arena as well so anyways just keep
up the good work and uh hope to see you back on another Global star party I
appreciate that hope to see you again soon yes okay so up next is uh Co Tran
uh from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada uh the Montreal Center
um uh he was uh he and Kareem J jafer were supposed to be on together but
Kareem had some family matters he had to attend to and uh so we are we're glad to
have uh Kaa on am I pronouncing that right pretty pretty pretty close it's uh
is it pretty close it is really not exactly right hey hey as I've gotten as I've
gotten older you know you learned to to give POS get more he shows sympathy towards those
that can't actually really speak very well sorry and uh and it's one syllable
qaqa okay qua yeah qua okay the
International Phonetic Alphabet it would be Kwa okay Italian for here perfect and
that's a beautiful collection of guitars behind you do you thank you very much do you play often or uh as much as as I can
now um you know working full-time uh 50 minutes away from curfew with a with a
toddler who I hope isn't going to start screaming during the middle of my uh of my presentation but but no yeah I've
that's about a a quarter of what I've got oh wow but no it's good I'll have to get
you on a global Star Party to hear some of your music sometime that would be great okay it would be pleasure all
right thank you for much um so thank you Scott H like I said my my name is quat and I've been a member of the uh Royal
Astronomical Society Montreal center for the past few years now um I do a little bit of everything I like to look at
pretty things in the night sky and I try to take pictures of them every so often um hello from Montreal we are about 39
minutes away from yet another curfew and uh the temperature uh has risen quite a
bit in the last uh over the last year so we're at 270 degrees Kelvin that's
that's Bal me uh even so I was supposed to give this talk uh back in late
November for the Looking Back edition of the of the GSB but I had to bow out because you know when you have a toddler
in uh daycare the first year apparently you catch everything so I had no voice I
I could barely you know like um you know read a read a bedtime story let alone you know give a presentation so we we'll
take a a a a trip back we'll look back um at the uh looking back edition of the
GSP all right from November um we're I'm very excited to to look back over a few
decades at the first book that ever got me interested in space uh and there's probably some Cosmic dust in there I'm
sure uh there is absolutely terrestrial dust in it because it's like 40 years old this book so I'm going
to for the interest of bandwidth turn my camera share my
content voila here we go there we go and I'm GNA
open that all right so um so I can't really pin it
down but sometime around 1986 uh when I was a little boy of six or seven uh A friend brought along this
big heavy picture book to class to share with everyone uh I probably only had a couple of hours over a few days with it
but looking back it was you know almost certainly what got me interested in space and astronomy of course that's the
National Geographic picture atlas of our universe by uh Regal land and I mean it
it's what got me interested in space and astronomy uh Beyond you know imported uh Japanese animation of the time like
Robotech astroboy and Voltron of course so um after after many years of
fruitless searching I I recently you know was able to to find a copy of this myself um and and so let's have a look
back at a simpler time uh when there were surprisingly so few real photos of
space that a picture book Atlas of the universe was largely filled instead with
awesome sci-fi illustrations like what you see on the cover um and as as we
look through it it it really shows how far we've come along in the past four DEC ades or so now in terms of Astro
Imaging especially at the amateur level so uh this is a glossy hard cover
book with the those aforementioned um you know sci-fi sci-fi illustrations and also some you know cheesy extruded text
uh effects that uh from from that time period uh published in 1980 uh it's it's
about 11 inches by 11 in hard cover filled with 278 G glossy Pages not
entirely unlike like the feel and texture of a contemporary n issue of Nat Geo um and to me at the time little
little six-year-old me it must have weighed something like 316 of a of a metric ton it was Heavy um and again it
was published in 1980 and by the time I got my hands on it later in that decade in 86 887 it was already quite
updated uh so you have a quick look at the the table of contents and what what's interesting is you have you know
a handful of pages um dedicated to you know the history and
prehistory of astronomy and while this is supposed to be a picture book uh or
an atlas of our whole wide universe the bulk of it is actually devoted to the solar system uh so here
here's the prehistory and History Section uh of uh you know in the book
from Sun God Saray I kind of like that chapter heading uh here's a nice little illustration of the zodiac um
and uh a lot of the photos in the book understandably because there were so few pictures of space back then uh compared
to today um are actually pictures of things on earth including this breathtaking one of the observatory uh
pum in the French Pyrenees uh and as an aside you know before drones this would
have been a really expensive helicopter shot but it's it's gorgeous I love it yeah um and here's a nice Illustrated
family portrait of the solar system Pluto's not there but that's just because this page spread is so wide that
it doesn't fit on my flatbed scanner um I I did not leave Pluto off on purpose I
swear I leave I leave politics out of this uh oh and you also see the the
Middle School library stamp uh from I can't read the uh the the the stamp from
here but where it was but it was from a middle school library NE um but what I remember most as a little kid were
actually the the portrait illustrations of the Greco Roman gods and goddesses For Whom the planets are named uh these
were done by an artist named Michael Wayan who would go on to become you know probably the most decorated illustrator
in sci-fi he's probably got know a handful of Hugo Awards um by this point
so Mercury was my favorite planet as a kid uh because of this very picture I mean look at him he's got winged shoes
and a badass staff I mean it's like for the longest time you me what favorite planet Mercury fastest thing around uh
and then there's G there's Venus and and according to to myth and Legend you know she had doves uh pull her Chariot I
would hope bigger doves than this one and speaking of fenus uh here's H
one of the very few images we have of the plan the the the surface of the
planet Venus it came from one of the ill- fated Venera Landers from the 1970s uh which you know and according to
the text here it survived for nearly two entire hours before it got wrecked by the by the surface
conditions um and and more planetary surface pictures from from the mid 70s
we have uh before perseverance curi curiosity and the Rover predecessors we
had the Viking lenders on Mars and going back to Pluto because he was considered a planet back then of
course he gets his own section and uh the Earth's Moon gets her own section too I really like that that
illustration um so as we go through this book and and most of it is really about
about the planets in the solar system and and they knew their target audience well because you know uh school boys and
girls you know elementary school kids uh that that's that's all we we we knew about and that's what we found so so
fascinating um but what really strikes me looking through this book as an adult and as an Abid asro imager is just how
far we've come in terms of astrophotography um especially by amateurs um so I shoot I still shoot a
lot of film artistically but in astrophotography I think it's not so much you know the digital cameras
themselves but you know all the Imaging processing technology and techniques that came with them uh things like uh
long exposure image stacking for deep Sky objects and you know what and what we call lucky Imaging with that we do
with video frames on solar system objects like the planets so in this case uh voyagers flyby wouldn't be for
another year before this book was published so the groundbased telescope image of Saturn go Arizona um was one of
the best we had up until that point and and it combined 16 separate you know uh
film frames or or image plates whatever they they would be using at that time and these days uh I can get an
image like this with a 4 inch um explor first light refractor taking about a
minute's worth of of of HD video and then choosing the few hundred best
frames to catch um you know during those rare moments of best seeing through atmospheric turbulence it is all about
you know luck and and if you take enough frames you know you're going to luck into it at some point and of course you
know I know serious planetary imagers blow me away because they've got telescopes that are like planetary
cannons and what I've got is more like you know an antique musket um and and
speaking of antique muskets inset ignore the big image for now but little one I took
that with an actual antique mus with an actual antique musket uh it was a 1960s
Criterion dinos scope 4in reflector again using HD HD video and lucky
Imaging uh and and that's you know two Galilean Moon transits uh flanking the
Great Red Spot and you know but obviously there there's no way we beat voyager's close-up image um it it's it's
that that's just gorgeous I look at it and and it's even better in the book with the with the the really the amazing
color depth that you can't really get from uh from a scan of the image um and back when this book was
published we had this grainy picture of Neptune which was groundbreaking in
1979 uh oh also go Arizona and in 1979
it was the first photo that showed detail on the planetary disc and Voyager 2 wouldn't fly by Neptune until 1989 I
still remember that time because I was about 10 years old and th those brand new science books with that brand new
book like that brand new book smell um you know containing awesome photos
inside it was it was it was amazing um and then here's a 1978 photo of Pluto uh
and this is the photo that led to the discovery of its Moon Caron and I mean you look at this photo and then you know
you only have to cast your your memory back about five or six or seven years now actually uh to to what New Horizon
sent back in 2015 and and just think of how long how far we've come uh in that
in that time uh now for deep Sky photos uh here's an image of the Andromeda galaxy
uh captured by the famous Palomar Observatory um and you know you could
look at this image for days uh because there's just so much stuff in it and you think it's this is a a film plate like
or or like a chemical plate that that that's capturing this so it's got to be you know not what we do today with
hundreds and hundreds of frames you know stacked over you know however many hours that we're taking uh these days we do we
do in in amateur work uh but this is what I was able to do in 4 hours and 21
minutes worth of exposure time from my balcony in the middle of a city uh you
know a metro area of over four million people here in Montreal um so I call it you know hasht deep sky from downtown uh
so I don't doubt you know I mean let's let's be honest like you know's let's be real like the Palomar
image definitely has more detail um and especially if you if you had access to the original plates um it would have way
more detail than what I can resolve with a little 50 millimeter refractor but it's one of those things where if you
told me even a few years ago that I could pull off this sort of image from my balcony in Downtown Montreal I
wouldn't have believed it and I don't imagine yeah yeah and like imagine an
amateur back in 1980 um would you have been able to to to dream of something
like this nope uh and similarly here here are
a couple images of the the PES star cluster and of the H head nebula in
Orion and I still remember this looking at this this this very image and that was one of the the the memories I had
that kept taking me back as an adult to trying to find this book was just that this this image of what looked like a a
chest piece like a knight um burned into into my brain um is just that that
impactful to me and then so here's what I've been able to do with just over an
hour um in you know in a in a park about an hour's Drive outside of outside of
Montreal and uh the Flaming horse head nebula this time from my from my rooftop
deck um at at my cond uh and and it's just one of those things where it comes full circle it's like you
know little kid looks at a picture of of of a chest piece and then you know 30
some odat years later it's like hey look at this I I actually did that yeah um so
and I mean this this this stuff you know this is a a a what you might call a dual
narrow band image there's a lot of stuff missing I could go deeper you know there's there's a lot more you can you can add to it but it's one of those
things where it's like again you know 10 years ago you tell me oh yeah you know
you're going to take a picture of the flame nebula and the horse head and you don't have to go out to a dark sky dark
sky site to do it you can do it from from your balcony at home because you know you can do it after you put your
kid down uh after Story Time and and it's there's there's really something special to that I think yes yeah and and
so the takeaways is that I think we're truly spoiled today uh with the breadth and the accessibility of the options
that are available to us um in astrop photography you know and and I look forward you know however much time I've
got left in this world um you know what the next few decades are going to bring in terms of advancement and so this
concludes my little look back to to where it all started for me um we moved around a lot when I was a little kid and
so I was never able to find that book again at at school libraries or at public libraries because probably
because it was out of print and hopelessly outdated by that uh but you know thanks to some of the computational leaps forward uh that have
enabled modern asro Imaging I was able to find this book again you know coming to the rescue were technological
advancements in the name of Google searches and eBay auctions so so that's it that's it for
me uh I hope you enjoyed this little look back with me and thank you very much thank you qua that that um uh you
know looking back uh as you have um really took me back as well because uh I
you know I started off as a film astrophotographer uh back in the late
80s early 90s and I definitely I mean you look at you look at that um horse
head flame nebula shot and we would have died to have been able to capture that
you know on film and you know it would have been like climbing Mount Everest or something to get something of that
detail uh and to know that you shot that in bortle nine Skies um and it's just it's incredible
so it's it's I I I am with you on on uh you know understanding how far we've
come in in just you know these short few decades so yeah and and I started off
with you know like a barn door tracker and and slide film and taking you know
like and scanning that slide film and then trying to stack the frames yeah yeah know it's it's this is like
astronomy on easy mode now true that's true but when you you know it shows you
also if you apply Digital Imaging as hard as we did film you know how much
further you could really go you know so CLA thank you very much and uh we'll see
you next time you're able to come thank you very much absolutely that's a really cool guitar behind you yeah I know I was
thinking the same thing theed the red the red one in the middle
that's a 1960s uh it's a Mastro mcaf faery guitar uh it's made entirely out
of Dow styron plastic um and and so this is this is more like a toy but uh mariio
mcair was a New York Guitar maker and and he you know set out to prove that
that he could make serious instruments out of plastic uh he failed miserably but
uh but but now instruments are worth money because people you know kind of got over you know that that that snob
just made out of plastic yeah right could he play them well uh he probably could I think you
know he was a classically trained guitarist and interesting okay all right so uh we
are going to go to uh we're gonna have Hammer Time with Nico uh Nico it's great
to have you back on global star party and um uh you know uh looking forward to your
presentation thank you Scot hi everyone I hope uh you all had a great New Year
night and yes a few nights off for me but by different ways but I am really
happy to be to be here with you um okay let me share my
screen here okay are you seeing it yes okay well H
tonight we we are talking about the the comic dust and we had amazing
presentations I was fascinated with the the K presentation about talking of the
components of the cosmic dust it was amazing and H I I would like to talk to
about we what can we see really see from here from from from Earth so I the first
thing I the first thing I I think about was the the zodiacal zodiacal light that
uh we can see on the sunset or sunrise and I don't know if if you get
the chance to see that I I am trying several times to to
be in the right place in the field but I I had no luck yet uh this is an an image
I took from internet uh but the the zodiacal light
is really Cosmic dust that we are watching that is in our solar system
it's dust from com from asteroids from dust on the CER belt
and almost inter inter dust that is just passing
through our solar system and in that two moments in the sunset and and in the
Sunrise it's maybe less than an hour than if you are in a really nice sky and
is a is a clear night you can watch this this light coming from the from the
Horizon I really hope I I could watch this this in a field sometime
uh so uh as always I I I want to to
show about hand chasing this this kind of objects and things that we talk and
talking about dust I I saw I I thought in the in the nebulas that I I could get
with my Dobson my my hand tracking Dobson because I don't have any any
Motors and I was looking for some nebulas that
actually have has a lot of dust in there like this is the the kol
nebula in in Karina nebula and I really love to to chase
this dark spots dark nebulas among the the
nebulas here we have another another example this is the the in the
Eagle Nebula the the P of creation this I think is one of the most beautiful
image I can get here from my home I I never I never thought that I I could get
this image with my doson because I I was making a like a machine gun a lot of
exposures of 0.2 seconds and when I stuck when I
st and I saw that pillars I was mindblowing yes how many how many
seconds have or fraction of seconds have your picture each each uh take Nicholas
this take is each each image each each frame is 0.2 seconds of exposure you you
listen Molly that's crazy I don't know this guy
is yeah yes I think something
that this guy is amazing uh we found yes yes where I where I grew in my
child who he he live actually maybe at no more than 20 blocks um I don't know
if it's the water of the neighborhood or something but this is Magic but not for
me of course it's it's yes you think for for this picture I
with my monochromatic camera so I was switching filters and putting the game
the camera again and refocus and keep shooting I was maybe one hour shooting
and 500 pictures of each channel to get this image so that's 02 seconds unguided
right yes yes unguided no it's worse than that it's seconds hand
tracked this is not tracking Mount yeah let's underline that
yes very good point yes skip right over the fact that it's hand
tracked in the two in the two moves because you need to move the the altitude and the acid move no it's
really contract GRE no I I need to go to Van field your neighborhood to with my C WBO 224 it's
okay for that yeah sure it's not monochromic but okay okay I go with a
small with a small sensor it's okay yes this H this is what was taking with the
wy5 is like a really small sensor a it's a guing camera yeah my idea is is um
teach to the kids uh using this small telescope no this m if not with the
normal M that is M to make something like this because with the cell phone or
much better with a um camera uh with a a a cheap camera for
planetarium or wiing yeah I need to learn for from you
really yeah yes we will do I pay you no problem no no it's it's for teaching I
love that I I can with with IES yeah Jeff Weiss on the YouTube chat
Nico has called you uh absolute encoder fingers encoder
yeah it's another Branch we need to to register Scott Hammer
Time Hammer Time yes it's Hammer Time Scott said yeah yeah the new I don't
know the program yeah I don't know if is this the first maybe the first time that
are in the in the same time in the GSP moolly and Nicholas because it's
something that that sometimes we start early um we the GSP start earlier and we
we went later in the in the second half and
I don't know if I've been on here with Nicholas before uh okay was a while ago
yeah one how many time yes the first it's the
first impression like I remember when I when for me was the same impression because I invite to Maxi Maxi invite to
Nicolas and when Nicolas start to talk about the time of each ER
exposure come on is see repeat again where is the motors where is the go to
yeah the funny is that this
starts like an accident because I was trying to get some double stars and
maybe a global cluster and they said what what can happen if if I stack a lot
of frames and these things just appear
is amazing well this this is another example this is the drif
nebula this is not a great image but I I really love the all the the dark spots
and the shap and this this dust Mount
down it this is one it's a really nice picture yeah you got a lot of great uh
the dust Lanes especially and the uh other detail I wouldn't say it's not a
great picture I it's no for the way you're doing it I think it's a fabulous picture I mean no I I correct I I love
my pictures I I I always say we do the break pictures because we you usually
read after photography and Watch images from
hourses but yeah of course we yeah we've seen all the amazing you know very colorful
and um you know the images that Molly puts out that put everyone's images to
shame but but at the same time scientifically you've got a lot of the
detail that the trifit offers and there there's so much room for an image like
that and remember you're using one hand you're not um yeah you know we're not going with the motors so you're showing
what's possible um without you know if if the budget's tight and you have to
choose between bowling equipment and astronomy equipment you can still do astronomy if you spent all your money on
stuff yeah that's for a technical question here Nico Jeff wise wants to know how do you plate
solve okay to play you you see to if you want
to to make some astrometry of that image I I I make a few asteroids try
with my dog but I use single frames uh in astrometric and it it
works yes it it works but maybe as you can do long exposure
takes you need a a place in the sky with a lot of stars yes because if there are
tiny stars or or a few it was really
hard so and this is another another one of barard 86 the this dark
nebula and was early con was talking about the those dark nebulas and that
literally are hiding as what is behind so I I love to to
watch this dark nebulas when I go to a field or a a nice skies and this will St
in a bort 2 skes was amazing and I was with my and I said okay I need to
capture this dark NE I put my camera and take maybe 20
frames for that for this
picture Harold lock who's watching on YouTube wants to
know how high do you set the gain or ISO settings on your camera oh okay the yes
that was a I really try and fail and continue and because when I start I need
to to see something on the on the screen because the the the whole sky is moving
but we are moving so I used to set High Gain for B right there and then drop the
gain at the minimum and just watching one or two stars moving I know I am
there in the R Place and I I captured with maybe one or six gain at most
because with the the short exposures if you use a lot of gain you you
get much noise it's really hard to press then so
I prefer to use less gain and take a lot of pictures really a lot 500 or 100
pictures incredible something that that Nico says is that any times that that I
tried make some deep Sky pictures ER yes
the the game is need to to put in the lowest possible yes it's real Nicholas
yes for every for every camera for this the three
HQ qu sorry CWB we're using now Sion
and is the same because the sensors are the similar All Brands the gain helps to
to bring more detail but also more noise and more maybe sensor defects or
so it's better with less gain and a lot of image sing so U where I I think okay
where Cosmic dust begins and is literally the and it's impossible not to
think about the the phrase of second as is we are Stardust and yes all the the
cosmic dust begins in the stars with a massion or the explosions of the Stars
so I was getting some image of planetary nebulas I I get also with my doson this
is the the ant nebula in in
Scorpio this is NGC 6153 this is also NE or Scorpio I I
don't remember exact exactly the the constellation this is a really nice
planetary neula that you can observe even the in a city Sky if you use maybe
100 magnifications you can watch it this is one of my favorite planetary
neas but well as always my
favorite nebula is the Ulus nebula in inar in the nebula of Karina and I think
this is the best images I get with my do is of theong star is is
amazing that's incredible you can see the structure yes yes yes when I start
getting this h i I cannot believe it because you also you are in the best Sky
you watch in the ipce and you see all the Karina nebula and the star so bright
but here in this in a city Sky if you put a lot of magnification as you cannot
see the the the whole nebula you start watching the the whole nebula uh
in the in the star is amazing I to observe this is one of my favorite
object I I wait all year for this these times where
just here if if you if you wait maybe to three or 4 a.m you can watch
this we we have the the nebula Karina really high in the sky
so this is my favorite so okay this was my my presentation and I really love I I
really hope you you like this yeah it's very inspirational Nico thank you so much thank you we always love to have
you on uh it makes all I think all of us want to go get a dobsonian and a camera
and just try hand guiding ourselves you know to see see how well we can do yes
and it's so funny it's really funny and uh I love I have my aquatan M but
I it's there is always time to say okay this is Dobson night and I I I I really
fun right you reach more your Optics than the mechanics it's
incredible yes you you you make honor for for Opticians it's great can you
imagine the astronomers even in the early 1800s uh watching Nico work you know
with with his cameras and just pushing a teles to capture images like that they wouldn't have believed it you know
absolutely we can't believe it I mean it's it's it is amazing too cold too
cold I think we we we didn't realize that uh it's
amazing and few years ago no one can think of doing this with these cameras
no so conell says we don't know where we are going on in in a few years
the the technology we are in the Golden Age you say SC that's the golden age
that's right that's right uh Jeff wise is wants to change your last name to Nico Dobson
so all right well uh up next is uh Cesar
brolo Cesar is uh heads up uh the Optics
uh area of optica srao in bues and he is a great friend to us here on
the global star party and uh to many I I'm sure now thousands of people around
the world that have watched him on this program and other things that he does he has the nickname of 100 mile per hour
Caesar uh he is fearless on his patio and uh with his cameras and his
telescopes and will take on any Celestial uh challenge so Cesar thanks
for coming back on to Global star party thank you scottt thank you to everyone
uh it's a pleasure to to be here um
happy new year for everyone we are starting the year the first Global party
of the year um well ER tonight I I was
uh I was H sus the sky is cloudly is very windy
uh of course that many times in many windy nights I was watching I I was
showing something in in in my balcony but maybe I'm too whole too old sorry to
for to to to start um in in my balcony with a a very heavy
wind we have hold you up yes maybe the idea of that
yes yes yes the this 7 this evening was a little Dusty with the with the wind
and uh you know the summer storm Without Rain only with dust um well I I I am
unable to I not be able to to go to the balcony because I can with this this two
very light in farb in carbon fiber Maybe they can blow blow start to yeah blow
away and start to fly and and but the in the last last week uh
uh while we was talking about many different things I was uh taking
pictures of a of a open cluster I say I
say that I don't know which open cluster is I was more confused if if uh was only
an asterism I I thought that this was in
the area of the of the vea or Karina or the Argon out
especially but you know uh in the night um with without um see the stars and
between the buildings I don't have more reference STS to say okay is this
cluster no well but the interesting thing that in the week I return to the
to the picture that I took in in the last H with my cell phone in the in the
supplier um Supply vacuum how do you say the name
of the name of the small vacum um you
know the the the cell phone the cell I don't oh yeah the are you talking about
the um uh the small ones um have made on
the back so you can hold the yeah yes yes I don't remember the name of each each
small if somebody can help me with the name well and I
I I was h making pictures of the sky not
in the level of Nicholas of Nico of course but only to to make something and
um let me share screen if I can show I can show you first the same first the
same pictures that I took the last
week maybe here sure well this is the the telescope in my in
the telescope that I choose uh to have in in home to okay to to make practices
because if I have one of this I can make this the same that I can tell to the
people to make the same to to to teach to the kids to make something different
and first of all the pictures that I took well this is the picture with a
little of substract of of uh you know of uh light pollution only to see the stars
and I reverse the image like you can found in stellarum or if you see in the
sky the same uh only a reverse this and
the last week I told about this this asterism here that you can see that it's
like a an M letter yes M okay yes yes and this is yes and
when when I start to found sorry it was my first my first star
cluster that I observe M for Molly yes M for Molly excellent Molly
constellation yes M the Molly asterism of course you have to be in the southern
hemisphere to see it Bradley yes yes it's for Molly excellent
our Molly okay you can see the the screen
here the map yes yes okay here you have the M
because was not uh in maybe five minutes I started to see in stellarum the the
how do you say the the the globular cluster the open ones and I found the M
of Molly uh and was the this asterism was excellent to see that this one is
the southern playes yes and this is the complete exercise the most important thing with
our telescope is watch something and uh
and know which object is and this is Magic for for for the kids H or for
teenagers of course because the or people that starting to use the telescope because the moon the planets
are okay to to watch but when you can say we can say that okay I found this I
took a picture and I know this object is I this was for me was the was the same
the same object that I to which one uh
was and was a open cluster in Norma constellation in the South ER in the
South turn Skies um for me at at my 16
years old um maybe the first time because I I remember there was was my
first time with a telescope that I prepare and I'm I make the the lenses um
16 17 years old for me was masic to say okay this cluster of course that only
watching without pictures and watching the in the in the uh in the um uh map
star maps and say okay is the is the first time that I
understood uh who I I H I can
think I and I can understand that the same that I the same that I watching
exist in a map and I can um I can say
okay this is this cluster and where's the first one um this is very interesting for me um something like
that that last week I couldn't say okay I don't know who is this cluster because
you know in Reverse um and say okay tonight uh I can show and I
can say okay this is the cluster that I found with a telescope without um
without goto or you know um yes and the idea the idea of of this
is is that um sorry that I using a big screen and I
move the the the pictures of all of us um now it's in the line of the camera
and sorry and yeah and um and the idea
is is uh that um when I can make something that is is this telescope is
okay for that okay I have big field of view uh with the with the eyepiece H the
the position uh and the distance the ey relief uh it's something that I can I
can teach to the people to use properly how to use and have maybe uh two degrees
of fi in the picture um with two degrees of of uh of field in a cell phone you
can find everything you can search a lot of different object in the sky and this
is why I started to to be interested in in import a a a telescope without in in
inner Barlo lenses because I like uh short focal length especially for the
people that start astronomy and this is not only something commercial and maybe
maybe for me it's more uh you know it's maybe more a hard to explain to the
people that that the low uh magnification is an it's a great it's a
great value low magnification magnifications and big big uh field of
view it's great to start to view and take pictures especially with cell phone
um this is this is the the beginning of something uh because was interesting to
say last week I took a picture without recognize which uh um object was in the
sky but when when you start to to watch in stellarium or another star uh
software astronomic uh astronomical software you can see the magic to say
okay this is the same this is the m of Molly and or something is say it's great and I
can't imagine the the you know the happiness of a kid
making the same this is amazing it's got
yeah well this is this is was the this is was the the my my impression
with this well of course I us it uh last week I us it in in the in the
small one uh um the alut mount not not
with this with the exos 100 yes no I press I press the button and say okay go
to right yeah but but the idea of Optics that the idea of open open feel of view
um in in a easy in an easy idea of neonian telescope is is really great yes
yes and it's great that uh you can show some objects and you move the the
telescope finally with with your eye it's amazing because you you found different star colors and and you you
stopped to observe and to press attention excise Nicholas yes and first
of all in in the F ER 4.38 is exctly exctly um
[Music] exactly yes the F number but I think
that is shorter because I need to measure with a
FAL lens because this the the the manufacturer and the designer is is
really I think that they have a less millimeters than than I think that it's more near to to 4.3 maybe Scot you can
you can check yes you know that sometimes when you
translate the the the manuals or maybe is is a little shorter um and I I well I
see last week I I say that ER we in the laboratory we put in the
fal and you know only one met and was less than one meter to take you know the
the fal test well I need to show you next time right how how is the is or
maybe a picture or video when we make the the test uh normally we use in the
first in the first H uh situations uh normally we test telescopes to be sure
that for example um when we re re realign a
telescope and we assembly again the mirror in the cell of the primary mirror
we use this uh to put to put a um the mirror without
tensions without forces that can er er
change the shape of the a disc and this is because normally we we
receive telescope that have a gray sh geomet
shapes of quality but when we disassemble a telescope to clean or
something we are every time we are concerned um uh to to put a g in the
with the Clips in this Mir cell you can the glass you can absolutely yes yes you
know Scott that this is something that is very important to don't press a lot
yes only TI a little um well and uh we we see one of this um
we we know the you know the shade the shadow of the parabola and we say how
these guys made this Parabola for hindal Telescope yes is is really we can see we
can we can watch a a great H shadow of the parabola the the the the that is the
fa when you see in the fal lenses FAL image the mirror you can see when
it's parabolic but we can we can take a measure of this with a diaphrag c
diaphrag yeah sorry my pronunciation to the b i I need water but it's okay
you're you're good Caesar okay thank you thank you thank you it it comes it comes
out of all of us and uh and yeah we Molly we found you a new constellation
we officially calling it the Molly cluster or something so completely agree
completely our first discover SE I have actually seen the southern plees when I was in Chile in 2019 so I've seen it
yeah but did you look at that part of it and no call it the see now you gotta now you got to look at it you got to go back
a special got to go back and look at it it's got special significance now
Cesar you've discovered something new yeah yeah exactly and moolly deserve
that yes she does absolutely absolutely um and this brings up uh you
know some comment here that uh uh Josh kovak is saying I probably need to
realign and loosen my primary mirrors uh it is it's very important you want the
best images uh you just want the you know if you have a Newtonian telescope you want to
just hold the mirror you don't want to squeeze it down you'd be amazed at uh
literally just finger pressure on a mirror absolutely can U can start to
pinch the Optics and yes yes pined Optics look can look triangular they
look I can say absolutely I can say something when I was polishing uh mirror
lenses in my teager a Time many many years ago with a with a a
couple of with a friend um we with we
found we found a little area because we had sorry something technical that Scot
know absolutely a many people that that polish their own mirror notes we had a
problem with a with a you know polishing
tool in the in the pitch we had a little little depressing and we we found in the
f f f test for test a little mountain you
know yes yes we we thought in make of
course that we made this without the machine earlier I had the machine but in this time we started to to make all and
especially the polishing is much better in making in in by hand yes and we we
say why we can we can figure in with the with the finger just your thumb yes yes
it's really yes it's really so you put like some polishing yes down on your thumb and seran oxido yes I make of
course making a wrong that is cool you make a hole we made a hole of course a
hole of the in the only maybe in 10 T
times around the mirror we made a hole we needed make a press a press with
a paper again and make again a little mountain in the tool to to prepare not
sorry a little a little again hole in the tool to yes yes of course and three
hours of polishing more we we found the
spheric shape like you you need
before make the par the parabol parabolized or you you told me parabol I
think the paring with with the mirror a little out
with the tool sorry a little outside the the the Center well I now is
it's not easy for for me to to talk maybe one time I can I can a I can show
a video from my machine drer machine to the difference
statement would love to see yes but explain the different things when the
center the center careers the the out out of the center the WB um all Tak zero
stuff a lot of technical words to learn in another language
so no yes moly but it's like computers though just about anything has its own
technical language so this is another words because I I I have the my first
Teo book Teo you know that is our Bible it's our
Bible it's our Bible yes and I have the texo in Spanish in French and in English
by Willman Bell with the the last chapters that are beautiful I remember
that I I put in my my basic uh
computer uh in the in the 80s the I
remember that I I write the you know the lines of the program of for B basic to
to make the table uh to the shet of of calculator for the for the parabolized
mirror for example um yes it's but yes
it's I don't know um I don't know in which language it's easy for me explain
in anyone probably EAS just to show them how it's done you know so yes and and
could be great to to show uh uh that what we talking about before about the
the clips that hold the mirror because yes many M astronomers doesn't know and
have problems with the view and say okay it's not good cation and maybe it's just
detail so that absolutely absolutely we I remember that Scott for
example um two years ago three years ago start to to call to the Distributors to
because they found um a some mirror with
a little of pressure in the first uh ER
fi carbon fiber tubes of 20 was the comet hunter it was the comet hunter yes
yes but not all manufacturers called to to the Distributors to say please check
that and and this is something that I love of spout scientific that they are
really Optics and and they are concerned all about a
the the different process of of uh of manufacturing and the control quality
and this is something that many many many many uh telescope dealers they
don't know nothing about can show you the first telescope
you are you are reverse you never say that the the the typical in in many
stores window stores and you say the maybe Nicolas you say that the Newtonian
telescope in Reverse with a with a mirror pointing to the to the
sky yeah yeah many movies and television shows absolutely yes maybe movies but
but but if you sell t C is words and see people people that that
show this in in their window uh in their window uh yes stores yes come on it's a
new type of telescope we we get customers who do call and they say I
can't see anything and um we do ask the question you know where
which way is the piece you know or is it down more towards the ground or is it more up in the sky with your yes it's
down at the ground where it's supposed to be we go no no no no not on this telescope this is a Newtonian and the
eyepiece is up high in the 90s I I came to the store in the maybe 90 no now
exist more things about the videos and the people search more you know when um
did nature that that receive receive a telescope like a gift and he came to the
store and showed me uh the telescope and told me the same that you told me no I
can say anything and you know and I removed this cover when I told me the
the cover the cover inside a back you show me a this cover and have a mirror
why yeah well the mirror of course totally show
uh with fingers uh of course they after pleas give me this give me this don't
touch anymore I need to clean this yes yes sit down
please our jobs I think what you do is you take the telescope and you hand them
a pair of binoculars and you say start here while we fix your telescope and you know and then come to
the class um it's I know it's not intuitive and when we when we get back
to doing Outreach we're gonna you know which way do we look you know that but
the joys of actually having someone be able to look at the moon or something through their telescope for the first
time is something that I missed seeing because of you know we haven't really
been able to do much Outreach so hopefully we get back to that t Castro
is commenting he says I've seen sellers put the Barlo lens in the finder bracket
yes we have all seen that you know because what happens is
okay the they're they got to put stuff up online so they'll build out a telescope uh the photographer will go
and build the telescope and a lot of times they have zero idea about how it all
works and before the YouTube before YouTube any anything was easy and many
people refused to read the manual but maybe yes I remember that we started to
BR our own manual actually we have one of this but not for for each telescope
because each telescope have the technicals things to to to assembly you know but we
we we send a actually PDF manual that I wrote in
the 90s uh to talk something about you know how care a telescope how how your
telescope is and maybe you know actually in this telescope is nice the manual
because it's have the things that I think which things in the manual can can uh
can be can can show to the people but in the in the 90s was not really easy um I
remember that I remember that for any any people say okay go to the library to
to and buy a David Levy book yes because because in this time was the the best
thing to show to to talk to the people because remember that we don't have cell
phones we don't have only was for me was
uh the David Levy book was the best uh way
to to give to the people uh the idea to to have a a great ER maps and I remember
that er um I that I found the
this this kumul this cluster in Norma with um willon
map um but was not easy but in the way
that lady leevy show the the catalog yes separ yes with the the sky for for South
or or south or north and the most visible
uh clusters in the skies or nebulas was the the best the best way to to
understood the sky for many many people um well we need to say this to David
Levy next yeah yeah party to say thank you because it's something
that something like I love Cosmos I love a lot of books but this book was so
so uh uh important for the people yes um to really learn about the
sky is that's right is it's uh it's not easy to found a book that that show to
the people in a easy way to found the things in the sky
that's right we need to say next week too Especial say thank you okay yes yes
thank you again yes absolutely Cesar thank you very much thank you so much for everything
I need to see a moly to moly M of Moly that's right it's uh so it's now time
for astronom Molly and um uh Molly thank you for coming on to Global Star Party
um we are uh we love having you on and we love uh we love what you are
Imaging uh and uh how you describe uh the objects that we're seeing up in the
sky not only with with their beauty but with the science behind it so thank you
very much I'm going to turn it over to you yeah thanks Scott happy to be back on again and uh excited to know that
there's an asterism for me now yes that's right and another reason to get to the southern hemisphere again yeah as
if you needed one uh well first a bit of of uh happy
news uh I spent some Christmas money on a new camera whoa
congratulations look like a big one congratulations thank you this thing is enormous it's so
big you can call a upside this is the uh zwo ASI 2600 MC Pro it's one of their
newer color cameras it's not the fullframe one that's the 6200 easy to
flip those around this is the apsc one um so a bigger chip than my fourth
pretty big chip like a BS around yes so this is like a like a DSLR in size um so
bigger than my 294 and my 1600 but smaller than than full frame so this is
going to go on my Takahashi and the 294 that I have now is going to go on my camera lens my rooking
on camera lens and one of the big benefits of this over my 294 is um first
of all this is a 16bit camera where my 294 is 12bit so I a lot higher dynamic
range this one has no amp glow compared to the pretty severe amp glow that's on
my 294 um and uh it has extremely low read noise it's it's less than an electron of
of read noise so um wow that's really exciting um it's cool isn't it yeah it's
it's a cool camera which is partly why it's so enormous you even have to do dark frames I still do um it's even
though even though it's cooled there's still dark current and seos cameras tend to have a fair amount of dark
current so I still do dark frames uh I don't do bias frames though um and I
don't do flat darks either uh because my flats tend to be very short exposure um
so um yeah looking forward to to uh getting that set up it should be clear
next Monday night so it'll be first light on the new camera we're looking forward to seeing
what you get have you got your target before yeah before you get your presentation have you picked a Target to
um I'm probably actually just going to continue the targets I'm working on now which is um currently I'm doing uh
sharpless sorry let me silence my phone here um sharpless 2-h
115 which is a large nebula sharp list 2-200 which is a cool looking nebula the
uh IC 443 which is the jellyfish nebula it's a very popular Target among narrow
band imagers and looking forward to doing that with my uh Duo narrow band filter um let's see m78 is also on my
list uh which is a um a reflection nebula right next to Orion um and I just started I needed an
early morning Target so just started NGC 2403 which is the Galaxy in Cel
camelopardalis I think I have to remember I yeah I'm trying to think
that's like a I don't partus it's hard to say you
know I I have so many targets because I switch back and forth between the wide band targets like m78 and the narrow
band targets depending on what what part of the moon phase we're in so isn't 2403
kind of have a tilt to it like Andromeda I forget if that's um I don't think it's it's not quite as tilted as Andromeda
it's a spiral galaxy that is like that is somewhat tilted but looking at the subframes I got last night it's it's
relatively face on but not completely that's a it's a familiar sounding number
Target it seems like I tried to go get it years and years ago when I was foolish but um yeah yeah it sounds
familiar it's not as popular of a galaxy but it's one of the larger galaxies um of I mean I've already imaged a lot of
the the biggest galaxies this is my refractor we're talking about so it's really hard to do Springtime targets
with the refractor because it's not a whole lot of large galaxies right it's small I think there's some significance to it I'll
have to I'll have to look it up I think there's something I don't know sephi had variable that was in it or okay okay
yeah I haven't done my I usually do my my um interesting facts look up when I do the write up after I finish uh taking
yeah well there's time for that but yeah well carry on let me go to m all right
um I will go ahead and share my screen here and start
PowerPoint all right that coming through all right yes ma'am all right cool had
to make sure I selected the correct screen all right so uh in the spirit of tonight's topic of cosmic dust I decided
it would be fun to talk about dark nebuli but instead of talking about a specific one I've SED to kind of cover
them as a category because um there's not as much to say about any given one um but they're really cool as a and and
interesting as as an object category so the speaking of the southern hemisphere this picture here in the background is
of the KAC nebula which is a very popular dark nebula in the Southern Hemisphere and it's it's really it's
kind of right in the kind of main core of the um or not the not the core of the
Galaxy but a really bright part of of the Milky Way so it's really easy to see
against the background of stars yeah this is the picture I took when I was down in Chile in
2019 so what are dark nebul they're also called absorption nebuli because it's
they're made up of uh of of dust that absorbs a lot of light so absorption
Nabil they're also called molecular clouds because they're largely made up of of molecules as opposed to uh atoms
of elements like the hydrogen clouds that we see so often in a lot of as
images uh it's still a lot of hydrogen but in this case instead of being hydrogen atoms it's molecular hydrogen
so H2 two hydrogen atoms bonded together there's also a decent amount of carbon
monoxide hydrogen 2 is actually hard to observe so we actually look for the
carbon monoxide that is usually in the vicinity of the H2 in order to to see
where these clouds are located and there's also small amounts of other organic compounds and there's a lot of
interesting organic chemistry that happens in dark nebula because you have these organic molecules in a somewhat
higher concentration than the rest of space but a much lower concentration than they typically are on earth and
that allows for chemical reactions to happen in space that don't happen on Earth because uh it's much they're much
more uh they don't interact as often out in space because they're much more sparse so a lot more interesting
interactions can happen out there and a lot a lot of what uh radio astronomy does is look at this organic chemistry
that's happening in space which is really crazy to think about this picture here in the background is um uh I can't
if it's a Hubble image it might be a Hubble image of Barnard 68 which is a particularly dark glob of dark nebula
that blots out basically all the stars that are behind it yeah so where can dark niil be found so
uh the large con largest concentration of dark nebul and where it's also easiest to see it is above and below and
inside of the band of the Milky Way so that includes both the summer and the winter Milky Way so signis and
Sagittarius are places to find loads and loads of of dark nebul even just if you
look at the Galaxy in a dark sky sight you can see kind of the dark band and um
in in these pictures you can see lots of dark nebil branching off all these um uh
dark molecular their clouds in the winter time as we're looking outwards from the core of the Galaxy but still
looking through the plane of the Galaxy there's a lot of dust between us and the
rest of outer space so that's constellations of Ryan and Taurus and
then the southern hemisphere the constellation Karina takes up a lot of a Dusty part of the Milky Way and a lot of
of dark NE that can be found in that vicinity the the picture on the bottom
of the slide is a is a dark was actually a carbon monoxide map of the plane of
Milky you can see where a lot of the clumps of the of dark nebul are and the
the the picture in the background is the picture I took at the Texas Star Party it's a mosaic of one minute
exposures um and uh I love this picture a [Laughter]
lot that's Jupiter up the really bright thing up over here is is
Jupiter yeah beautiful sorry I had gone on mute yeah that's a
beautiful shot oh thank you that's one that I want yeah so I used to Star Trek her for that and just like uh like my 18
millimeter camera lens all the way out um and uh yeah just tracked for a minute
for seven panels to make up that image from um y the hill above the the upper
field of the Texas Star Party yep that makes sense yeah um so I wanted to
Showcase some dark NE some some places to find dark nebuli that uh and also an
excuse for me to show off more images uh so this is a nebula called
Cedar blad 214 in the constellation cus and you can see there's a lot of of glowing hydrogen there's also a lot of
of dark light absorbing molecular dust and I included some screenshots from Sky Safari up in the corner to show so
here's like the the kind of the wintertime Milky Way or well kind of
partly you kind of getting on towards summertime Milky Way down here with with signus but um kind of more up here in in
the winter Sky uh it's just off the kind of plain of the Milky Way here in the
constellation cus in a similar position also in sephus
is the iris nebula and this is one of this is one of my favorite pictures that I've gotten of dark nebula because I
finally got that cool brown color that uh that is that is difficult to get um
this was done at a dark sky site about bort three and a half I think we've
determined um so I was able to to get some color in the dust there which was really
exciting um also another place is uh in the constellation Taurus which is a
little uh quite quite a fair bit up higher off of the Milky Way with the Milky Way kind of going along here um
but there there's this part of the Taurus mucular Cloud complex and this is the plees right here in the middle now I
took this picture using my DSLR from a bordal 5 site and I was mainly just
getting a Widefield shot of the plees but after I did Dynamic background
subtraction in pixon sight all this dark nebula came out in the background and I
was completely blown away that I was able to get dark nebula with a DSLR on uh on on this was on a um like a
like a tracking Mount so these are I think these were like 60c exposures or 90 second exposures um from bordal 5
site I wasn't even like a real dark sky site here so it was it was mind-blowing to be able to to pick these out of the
background using um Dynamic background extraction then of course we have the
trifid nebula which is called the trifid in part because it has three types of
nebula we have emission nebula the the red pink part here reflection nebula the
blue part and the dark nebula here going across the middle like uh like naik's
picture and uh so this has all three of the major types of nebuli and it's
really kind of right along the the main part of the Milky Way here where there's a whole lot of gas and dust although
this dark nibula is not in between us and this nebula it's part of the nebula
structure of the trifid in the constellation Sagittarius this is one of my other
favorite uh dark nebula pictures this is from I think my first Texas Star Party
in 2017 this is done with a DSLR on uh on a borg
refractor and this is called the snake nebula and there's also I I don't know
if other people call it this but this portion here I can't exactly see where I'm pointing because my screen's kind of blocking it but um I I this looks like a
bull to me like a bulll with horns which seemed uh fitting for the fact that we were at prude Ranch out in the out in
Texas so rename it the corn nebula you can do
it the bowl of corn
um so uh and it's also kind of right right up off the the the main part of
the Milky Way in the constellation of fiss here now um I just discovered this today when I was looking for that
picture of um of that really dark nebula that I showed on on an earlier slide and
I found out that it's actually this nebula right here right next to the snake nebula and I've been wanting to
image that really dark nebula for for ever since I I first saw it and I just
real today that I already have which is really exciting you can just see how
thick and dark this is and how it just blots out the light behind it so that was that was a fun Discovery
today makes me wonder Molly I mean if we could fly out there you know and go right into the molcular cloud would we
see it at all or would it be like getting close to our rainbow and you see nothing you know I was wondering that
too and um I'm I'm going to answer that question coming up in a couple of slides here actually okay
another place to look for dark nebuli is in other galaxies it's one of the ways
that that marks some galaxies as being really cool looking so like the needle the needle Galaxy here it's got a really
thick dark band of bands of dust in the in its uh arms as we're kind of looking
on it Edge on here the um the sunflower Galaxy the blackee Galaxy curis a or the
hamburger Galaxy they're all really well known for having really dark Central bands of of dust Lanes along their edges
and so that's another place to look for dark nebul all right so some cool facts about
dark nebul so uh stars are born in molecular clouds a lot of the material
for stars comes from the material in the molecular clouds and their High much
higher density means that those materials start to C less with via gravity to start to form
Stars a small Clump like a bot globule is as much as a lightyear across and the
larger dark nebuli are hundreds of Lighty years across so these these things look small but they're enormous
clouds of of dust and gas now um a lot of dark nebuli have
densities on the order of one to 300 molecules per centimeter cubed so that's
uh very sparse so in those you might not be able to tell that you're inside of one and they're quite
cold 7 to 15 Kelvin which for people who don't speak Kelvin is pretty close to
absolute zero or if you speak Fahrenheit 447
to4 so very very cold places in the universe but very balmy if you're from
Canada I've been told this yeah I was I thought negative 11
Fahrenheit was cold and I got laughed at so yeah oh man anyways carry
on now to answer your question about whether we could be able to see that
we're inside of a dark nebula bot globules which are those little balls of
of dust that you can see in like the rosette nebula and in uh some other really dense
nebula those kind of densities have 10 to the five molecules per centimet cubed
which is still a lot lower than like atmospheric pressure but is a pretty
significant amount of molecules per per centimeter Cub so um I didn't think to
run some math on that and see like what kind of like what that might equate to
in terms of pressure um or like light absorption but you I think at that point
you might be able to tell that you're looking through through some dust in order to see the stars outside yeah
probably you probably have to somehow AB you know with with you know this many molecules and without
so uh I um you and and i' of course you know
this goes for bright nebula as well would you be able to see you know that's a good question I've I've heard like
I've read other places that you wouldn't necessarily like be able to see the nebula that you are in because they are
quite sparse um at least for like kind of the larger emission nebula but um I'm
not sure I need to find out more defini I I I could probably figure that out by by looking at like I think we have good
ideas on what the density of at least um common types of emission nebula are and
I could compare that to say like um like smoke dens
when you're in somewhere that's SMY and and see if there's a comparison to be made there um yeah I should do that for
a future talk yes that would be very interesting because I have also under the impression like say you went into a
famous nebula like the Orion Nebula yet if you get you get too far in it you
don't even know you're there um where of course the Sci-Fi movies kind of have
you believe you can see it um you can fly in and and you kind of see it so um
I think you'd be able to tell from the extinction of the light uh of like stars of a given um magnitude that appear
darker but yeah I think if if you were to if you were to fly by one of these nebuli kind of up close up close enough
to where the light would be bright enough to see it naked eye I think it'd be from what I understand uh two too
sparse to be able to actually see the light from it because these things are are hundreds of light years across um so
by the time you got close enough to see the light brightly enough you'd be too close to really see it see it yeah right
it's a question that many many people like me think about if you fly
near in the area of the nebula how many how many like and this this colors show
to you um I think I can calculate that because
um we know like the distance of these things so we know kind of the absolute magnitude of or we should know the
absolute magnitude of like like uh of of fluence like the number of photons that
are or flux I guess the number of photons that I think you can see the same colors like in a
15in picture for example of oron very light very bright and very strong color
colors I think in a real in a with Naked Eyes flying in the in the in the same
area yeah well I think we have in like the medical community on
like like how sensitive your eye like how many what's the photon flux in order to be able to see light and stuff like
that so for meic thing that this is why I think in
this yeah the sensation but like that
you you tell us is that we know the the the level of the magnitude of of the
area of gas because it's it's a fluorescent gas is is is um I don't
remember the name in English it's a Well it's not a reflection it's not
reflection emission emission emission it's emission the gas is yes it's like yeah so we so we we know roughly like
like what the density of the nebula is and we know um like like the wavelength
like the energy that's coming off of this I think I can calculate like the photons per second coming off of it and
then um using looking at like spherical Divergence and and stuff like that figure out what the what the photon flux
would be at a given distance and if that's enough to to see it yeah how far
away would you actually have to be to see it in order to for instance to have the to have the Orion Nebula dominate
the eye yeah and still see it it and then I would be curious because with our
own eyes for instance we can see the IR nebula through a telescope but we don't
see color whereas the see some color you see
somea but then you put the sensor on it and then all the color shows up yes I
can explain this because I am I work in oftalmologic Optics I am not doctor of
course but I work every in with glasses and contact lenses and especially low
vision that we concern in low vision how the people say the colors see the colors
sorry um you watch the in between green
and maybe little blue the first colors you that you can see of of um but
especially green of a Rion nebula because is the most sensitive color that
your cones are um but maybe you have more sensitivity you can say the red
color that of of so it depends on the actual eyes that you the eyes that
you've been given so yeah I'd have to next time we have all the same conos
from the same Factory yeah I could take like like uh I think there there's literature on like
what a standard person's like eye response curve is is so yes yeah I I
I'll get back to y'all on that how's that sound that's good interesting about
do I'll do a presentation on it at a future show how's that yeah and the other question I have is Molly are we
are we already in a nebula so I from what I what I what I
know I don't think with that we are um again I think that um that's something
we'd be able to determine with um like looking at stars of different of
like the same type in different parts of the sky and stuff like that and knowing their Spectra um uh I think the
understanding is that we're not in a nebula and that our star was formed in a
nebula and and moved out of it like stars out or got kicked out of it got
kicked out of it we were rejected not paying rent get
out in my house for the watching of the landscape no landscape is ridiculous to save in
the space but of of something that we can view very near to a
nebula uh in in a Starship maybe the strong color strong light with color ER
make that we can see as everyone in the in the Starship s red for example
because the the I think I imagine the the light very near to the nebula is so
strong like a picture maybe I'm not I wrong but thinking fast I think okay
near to the nebula I have the I I can see this like for example
maybe stronger like a polar um how do you say the pictures that you make
Adrian I forget the name of the the light North lights the Northern Lights
yeah Northern Lights nor Northern Lights and maybe I think that is I don't know I
never see Northern Lights in a real life but I don't know if you can see the
color you can barely see some yeah uh I
had a chance to see it over my head and I wasn't taking uh wasn't doing photography at the time it looked blue
to me overhead um had I put a camera on it I would have seen all sorts of other
colors now when I did see it distant and I took images of it um I could see some
of the green uh Mo mostly the green and I could see the movement of the Aurora in the
distance and the pillars being formed when I took the shots however purples
and all other colors showed up with uh that the sensor was able to pick up so
maybe the most near to imag if you are near to a nebula I think something else to
consider too is is the when when that nebula so nebula has
it's emitting some amount of light and the closer you are the more spread out
across the sky that light is so it appears dimmer like how the Helix nebula
appears much dimmer than the Ring Nebula even though they're roughly the same
physical size it's just Helix nebula is much closer and more spread out and
diffuse on the sky than the Ring Nebula is so that's I think the kind of the the
main the main like that that nearness yeah increases the the number of photons
per second but the number of photons per second is spread out over a larger area so your eyes are catching fewer of them
because it's it's a much larger thing yeah it also and I know we we ort of
jumped into your presentation but also depend on the uh wavelength of the light
that's coming because there's only so many wav links that we can detect visual
spect and stuff like that with the cones yeah maybe my my question is a kid
question because it's something that I ever ever I could imagine if I can see
the complet colors like a like Sci-Fi movies when uh in the past never you can
see in Star Wars for example a nebula but in the in the new ones they
start to show a nebula with very bright colors or in the in the but this is real
or or the nebulas in a in a near um in a near distance uh show uh
lower colors and lower RS I'll go do some math and I'll do a whole presentation on this how's that I think
we we look forward to seeing that and you know I didn't think of it but no nocent question I get asked it a lot and
not have a good reason to go actually now you do yeah right before before we
transition to Adrien uh Molly the question was asked uh quite a while back
in chat is how do you get the best images of dark nebula yeah so I'm going
to real quick go through what what dark look like in other wavelengths and then I have a how observe slide like I
usually do and I'll I'll talk about it a little bit there if that's all right yeah carry on um you have more
presentation I'll go through the rest of this quickly um so I like to show what these things look like other wavelengths
so I picked the horse head nebula as an example here so this is Optical both of these here the one on the left they're
both my images the one on the left is is in color the one on the right is is um with my bigger telescope in just
hydrogen Alpha so that's a um to kind of as a starting point uh looking at it in radio you can
still see the the hor head shape which I think is really cool and that was
actually kind of unexpected because a lot of times things don't look really the same in other wave flanks um on the
right is a pretty famous image from the Hubble Space Telescope of uh infrared
now infrared light can Pierce through these Dusty clouds and this was
on a near infrared so you can still see a lot of the Dust here but if you
actually go to the far infrared you can see through these dust clouds and that's how we look at like the center of the
Galaxy and stuff like that looking through all the dust and unfortunately I wasn't able to find any any images even
in the Aladdin data set of um uh ultraviolet or gamma ray or x-ray I
guess nobody's really interested in looking at the horse head in those wavelengths I think it'd be cool you know who knows what's in there but oh
well nobody else is interested apparently we're all
interested nobody who who has time on a on an X-ray telescope is interested ah okay no I prefer to ask more
question yes so uh observing observing dark NE nebula if you're going to observe them visually you really need to
be at a Dark Skys sight they're pretty much impossible to see because you you need to see them against a a you're
basically looking for a lack of light and if if that's covered up by light pollu you're not going to be able to tell the difference so you need to be
somewhere where it's dark and look in places where there are lots of stars because then you or a nebula because then you'll be able to see the lack of
light where there should be light with with a lot of stars or with nebula photographically you can do it under
sunlight pollution like the images I showed from bort three and a half and from bort five especially when it's
against the background of a bright nebula um so like the image in the background here is of the elephant trunk
NE nebula and this is a narrow band and there's quite a lot of dark nebula
showing here um because there's some really nice contrast when you do narrow
band Imaging there's stuff to see at both small and large fields of view for
visual observing well for both of them you really want a faster focal ratio so you can suck in more light so you can
see where there isn't light for the dark nili and a FAS your focer ratio
photographically will help enhance the contrast as well so yeah to photograph it you really go
to being the darker the sky the better the picture of the Irish nebula I took was in bort three and a half the snake
nebula was in bort like one and a half out at the Texas Star Party um and it's
it's it's very difficult or impossible and I hate saying impossible when it comes to things astr photography but I
think from the city you're going to be really hard pressed uh except for um well except for doing narrow band of
course uh then you can kind of see see that a lot better um but if you're doing Broadband you really got to be somewhere
dark in order to see dark nebula against um a Broadband background of stars
opposed to narrow band so hope that answers your question um and that could
be done in color or monochrome cameras and uh yeah finally made it
through yay you all are very chatty
tonight question the in the middle of the
sorry sorry no no question I'll put together a presentation on it after I do
some math and uh see what I can find out it's a pleasure really to here to
you because it's very interesting yes very we we need that
uisite in southern emere I know that you know you went in Chile well it's the
same Skies and of course that uh if if you came close to Argentina you are
welcome all right yeah we're gonna plan this trip we're all gonna make a big trip to Argentina just show up G on
location I consider you yes you Adrian have their own Visa Argentina Visa
because we consider to Adrian another Argentinian at this point yes CU I'm us
usually on with the argentinians so uh and I joined Facebook
page so it's official yeah yes yes and and something
that I I read earlier that was that I don't know
in the in the comments that Scott put that somebody say that er uh their chef
way H the Argentinian continent is asically astronomically very talented what not me
of course Maxi and ni and another one but was it when I I read this I said
oh my God what a lot of pressure for us yes Molly save us you've been delivering
delivering thank you yes yes we we all enjoy seeing southern hemisphere objects
and we're spoiled to see them from you all on a daily basis because we uh
normally we would have to look them up online or dream of going down there but
um you all help us with our uh ability to see the entire Sky we live
vicariously through yes yeah shorter way of saying what I just said thanks Molly
I'm working on it move on let's move on okay right so up next up next here is Adrien Bradley
ad Adan Graces the global Star Party almost every every week with this
incredible nightscape photography and um so uh I I did kind of steer the
conversation towards uh dust in the Milky Way and um so we'll see what
Adrian is is uh is ready to present all right
so um just straight to it I'm sharing the screen of an image that I downloaded
from the Spitzer Space Telescope there's a website that um this one from the
JPL um images Milky Way Center glow with dust so what I wanted to find was well
what would you see if you could have the five gazillion dollar Spitzer space
filter and just blow right through the Milky Way dust and this is something
that um has been imaged I did download this and you'll see how I tried to use
it um soon but uh what I'll do is just
quickly we'll quickly go through there were a couple of regions that were described on that web
page um and the significance to those regions and so what I wanted to do
really quickly was just sort of go through um the pair of eyes which is this um
this region that they're discussing here um star forming regions that
they're able to see once they get rid of the uh once they cut through the dust
with Spitzer Space Telescope um mly you might know this
there's a certain frequency that there frequency there's a certain wavelength that frequency or wavelength okay divide
by the speed of light and you've got the other okay cool well they're they're on
that frequency in order to see through the uh dust that normally presents
itself here the center of the uh Milky Way galaxy um your image that you had where
you had the kind of the the galactic center and the two sides of it this is
essentially that picture if we could look right through it there would be the
galactic center these are some other bright star forming regions that are
here what that made me do was Wonder
um so this is my image that I took of the Milky Way at a border one site so
you're seeing some of the uh the nebulosity here the dark nebula and I think this dark dark area here might be
that void or that um that dark nebula you were talking about Molly the uh if
I've if I'm in the right region in this image that I'd have but you have the
Lagoon it's a lot smaller than you'd be able to see from there okay so it's lot
okay so this isn't that yeah or right like right here I thought might be possibly that region but that's okay so
it's you can see all of the all of this is blocking
us being able to see what center of the Galaxy looks like um what
I did and it may be a little inaccurate because sizing I don't know if I have it
sized properly but this is what I
consider let's suppose you have the Spitzer filter and you shot at the same
region you'd see a whole lot more data I yep I aligned where the center
they pointed out where the center of the Galaxy was in the Spitzer image and it's
this region this real bright region here and I align that
region with this region which is
considered to Center the sizes may not quite be right because I noticed this
little footprint here that might be tracing the cat's paw but then I have
the cat's paw right here so I might be a little off in my sizing but this is
still yeah but you're basically there you know this is what the um yeah this is
how much more we would see of that real busy part of the galactic center if we
had Spitzer Vision or if we bought the real expensive Ive six gazillion dollar Spitzer
filter um I don't know if there are any filters that work at this uh wavelength
that we could that we could use um there are just not like on the commercial
Market they're for like research okay so there's that that that like like Fleer
for instance makes infrared cameras okay so they can do this we might not be able
to buy it and you know create a cool picture to look like this and just have a lot of money to spend okay so yeah
well when I hit the lottery I'll make the real image of this and that's where my money's gonna go or not I don't know
I may have to pay some bills so um so this is my entry for the
um as far as dust if we weren't blocked
by um you know our inability to see through all of these dust lanes and um
and things like that of course we as humankind we're not because we have the ability to push our way through it using
the right tools so so I thought this this made for an
interesting look to the Milky Way That We normally see
um also I was going to discuss the uh merits of
black and white photography and I can't necessarily tie them to dust other than
the fact that you can see dust
Lanes if you do black and white Imaging you can still
see detail in dust LAN to me it's it's similar to um doing narrow band Imaging
with uh classic astrophotography and um and it makes for it makes for an
interesting look and the image I wanted to make sure
I showed is see and I'll get to the I'll get to
the zodiacal light too because that also relates to dust but um we'll share this
image let see that goes here so this is an image where you have Milky Way and
we've seen it but when doing images like this where
you want if you want to see through clouds I think you having a dark sky
sight to where the light coming from the Milky Way is bright enough to illuminate the picture you can then do them in
black and white and you can study them or you can just enjoy
seeing what these images look like in black and white and uh Nico's no longer
here but in Nico's honor let's talk about the dust from um I have had a
chance to see uh the zodiacal light and this is as the Sun is setting this is
the around the time of the Spring Equinox so the zodiacal light angles this way
towards Orion I know I think I've discussed it here but um I would wish
for Nico to be able to see in the best times to see these um tend to be around
the uh equinoxes or sometime after and another thing to consider is
the amount of zodiacal light I think may have increased a bit this year um study
from Juno um suggesting that perhaps this is actually dust coming from Mars and not
um not just the regul you know the interplanetary dust or comets or things
like that but this may be be this dust is being left by um the planet
Mars and they determined they determined it through um
with Juno flying through it on its way to Jupiter and realized that the dust
traced back towards um the orbit of Mars and then
realize this may be coming from that's where this may be coming from right um yep in the in the
spring this is where the zodiacal light intersects with the winter side of the
Milky Way galaxy and in the fall one of my
absolute favorite pictures to have taken
um is when it angles the other way um this time
m44 is in the middle of the zodiac light and the moon can rise in the middle of
the Zod light as well um the plees M45
sits in the middle of the zodiacal light in the spring so it's interesting to different
and the fact that it still points toward Orion is also a fact not lost on me as
well um so there zal light and
Orion and down here you have uh Canis
Major and you've got again you've got m44 here further down here if I had done
this move this just a little bit to the left we would have had the Moon Rising
within the zodiacal light and I do have a picture that I tried to take of that um do not know what I did with it
but what I'll do is I'll end my presentation on that image
and just shows that from a photography standpoint
um dust plays a huge role sometimes in what we
image let's see if I have it here and this
is not where I have it let's see there we go it should be in
here should be of course it's
not that's my image of so there's a horse head there's a
flame this is a crude but quick image showing that in bort one skies and with
dust on your sensor there's more dust right here you can acquire these targets
pretty quickly um you can also see the zodiacal light a lot more
readily and um obviously my shot of the moon in
the zodiacal light may have to wait for another night but
um I know it's in here somewhere and as always I will end my
um I end my presentation that's nice with a bird image because we know Scott
you love the uh oh yeah bird shots this is an interesting uh yeah the birds
turning in mid Direction you can see the beak here and these clouds do do um look
similar to the uh clouds in the dust of is that a turning the
U yeah it's in mid turn that was its beak birds can Bird's heads are on a
svel so they you know their bodies can do this and their heads are directly
straight it's kind of like you know having they've got an uncanny ability to
keep their head straight no matter um where they're facing
and uh there so they can look at a Target and their wings are all over the place so so any rate that's my
presentation um you know we continue to try and in the cold uh weather continue
to try and do some Imaging um even if we and I've been experimenting with
black and white Imaging lately to see if the light of the images and the night
sky still carries it itself uh despite the fact that the colors may not be
there so that's uh that's something new to try out and different in most night
sky photography you won't see a lot of uh black and white images but you the
colors of the night sky are what draw people in but you know using the light maybe you
can you can draw people in just using the light and um and then as far as the
theme of our Global star party with the dust um there's ways of incorporating
that dust into pretty pictures but there's also some scientific meaning behind them as well and it changes from
year to year as uh as this dust is studied so um that's that's it for my
presentation thank you all for listening you Adrian and um yeah anytime I can mix
a birding into astronomy it's a wonderful time it's all you know since
everything's made of Stardust and so it's all good we could somehow mix hamburgers and
milkshakes into astronomy so you know yes so absolutely wonderful wonderful
okay all right gentlemen well uh it has been a great uh Global Star Party um I
have uh unfortunately I have an early morning meeting that I have to attend myself but um uh I wanted to thank all
of you that are still on right now for your great presentations um it was wonderful our
next Global star party will be our 80th and so we will do uh we'll give away something special uh for the next party
and uh we need all prepare something special yeah yes yes and so I I'm I I
have some topics in mind right now but I I want to think on it a little a little bit more and uh but
um it probably is going to center around the Golden Age of astronomy you know and
uh so I think that that might be a great topic in general you know so all right
well uh and I want to thank the audience uh you know we have a we have a loyal
audience as well and that's great um uh it's um it's always fun to see you uh in
the at and the see you where the conversations go um uh we and I want
everybody to know uh whether you're a presenter or you're someone in chat if
you're doing something that is for educational Outreach to raise awareness
about astronomy or telescope use or whatever it is uh you know you're uh I'm
happy to promote that uh uh you know to build up uh what we can do from
to tell our audience about uh your programs or whatever it is that you think is important and um uh because
that's what it's all about we're doing educational Outreach and um you know that's uh it's awesome so thanks again
and um at this point does anyone in the uh the presenters have anything they'd
like to add before we close not at all I think my video is
dragging though in about five your eyes are getting full of Interstellar dust
and it's time to go to bed okay that's right yeah absolutely thank you all right I will
add this for Nathan who stayed up to watch um maybe your sister in the background keep on with these
presentations we love it and uh you know how you're relating math and um solar
system to various things it's uh it's wonderful to see so just keep your
imagination going we can't wait to see what you come up with next and of course yeah remember I'm
time laps by about five seconds because of the way my camera works now so it
looks like a poor audio track but uh yeah keep going um I really do enjoy
those presentations I enjoy everyone's presentations uh qua give Karine my
regards and uh hopefully we'll see him again soon Cesar come on let's hopefully
the weather will be good next time and I need to return to the balcony yes abely
I will I will say that I did check in recently with the organizers of the
Northeast astronomy forum and it's still on at this point so uh that would be
April 9th and 10th so so anyhow we'll take care and qua we're going to have to
hear hear you play guitar sometime that'll be really cool okay no pressure no pressure I have guitars too here yeah
oh you do yes yes very bad but okay very
bad well I play worse okay so all right guys thank you so much have a good night
thank you play the radio simpish good night good night good night to everyone
yes and to all of you in the audience thanks again uh next Tuesday will be the
80th Global star party and we'll see you
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