Transcript:
7:00 p.m..Tom Meneghini AHO: Mt. Wilson Observatory
well but okay
all right i see we're live we are live and um i'm gonna start sharing this with some
groups great oh i love this uh it's uh i can't get enough of deep-filled
7:15 p.m..Karim Jaffer & Khoa Tran “Seeing a Supernova for Ourselves”
galaxies i just love y'all at cc yeah and i know a camera
i know david we have that comet uh interference thing
but uh but yeah it's uh well you know like was talked about in previous episodes i mean the the great andromeda
7:35 p.m..Maxi Falieres – Astrophotography to the Max
nebula right i mean we all these things were faint fuzzies before and it's so neat to understand the
nature of uh of the universe um have a deeper understanding not
7:50 p.m..Libby in the Stars
you know we're just scratching the surface but uh i'm i'm just really thrilled i just
can't wait you know i'm jumping around here but james webb oh man that's uh that's gonna be fantastic i
8:05 p.m..Ten Minute Break
know i was looking at that that image again with the uh diffraction spikes and you know with because of
octagonal uh or not octagonals or hexagonal uh mirror cells but
8:15 p.m..Marcelo Souza - Sky’s Up Astronomy Outreach
you see those galaxies and let's like it gets me excited as soon as i see those galaxies in that field you know
it's like it's going to be really fun yes
8:30 p.m..Tom Field - Astronomical Spectroscopy
yeah here we are zooming zooming around so neat
well hello david it's good to see you how are you doing these days we're doing
8:45 p.m..Jason Wallace - Richland Astronomical Society
okay wendy's doing a lot better good less pain from her shingles and their treatments
her cancer treatments are coming on pretty well good i'm glad to hear that as always
give her our best of course she'll probably be in a little bit yeah
9:00 p.m..Daniel & Scott - Astroworld TV
good
hi carol it's good to see you good to see you uh speaking of shingles
9:15 p.m..Adrian Bradley - Nightscapes
uh that's not the most fun thing to have i have a family member who had that not too long ago and
it took a while but uh thank god for the proper medication to help along the way yeah
absolutely she's once he's doing okay and i'm glad your relative is doing her
better thank you thank you glad to hear wendy's doing so well yeah that's good yes
yeah my dad got uh shingles and i i just got the first uh shingles uh vaccination
uh last end of the last year so i still have to get my that reminds me i have to get my second shot
coming up here yeah we used to not worry about that uh particular
uh melody but that's another thing to be concerned with yep
vaccinations work as we can see with this uh it's so nice
you know i'm here i'm traveling right now this week in denver and uh this is my
third time uh since um since the uh kind of the
the opening up of the travel restrictions on our company and um
and i can tell you walking around denver uh it's so nice to be able to you know after you get out of the airport
you know basically uh most people are vaccinated you're walking around and um no need for masks uh
it's you know obviously if you're in a crowded area it's still a good good idea advisable but
it's it's uh it's nice to see things kind of where we're vigilant but at the same
time we're able to move on
[Music] vigilant it's been a long time coming to get to
this point hasn't it really it hasn't seemed like it has lasted forever
yep yep but it's nice to see all the uh
you know all of our events uh the astronomy um we're just talking about the star parties that are planned this
year it's gonna be great to see those and and and then complement those with our virtual star parties and really just
make it super awesome you know combination of in-person plus
plus uh virtual it's uh it's gonna bring a lot of nice dynamic
it really is
so how's everyone's clear skies doing now how's how's your spring are you getting some clear nights everyone yeah
i was clear here today oh yes almost
it's it's about cloudy about 90 percent of the time here these days um
midwest yeah the churning turning of the spring yeah
yeah we uh here you know i leave seattle seattle like i was mentioning earlier for the last four months i got three
nights of clear skies one was high humidity fogged up my my lenses but uh
those were the my nights in seattle and then i come to denver and it's been really nice
like super clear beautiful
[Music] some pretty high elevations near the
city there too to go up into the mountains for very clear air oh yeah
denver's one of my very favorite cities it's a great city yeah yeah
yeah a lot of good stuff
and here comes wendy ah how's she doing
she's doing fine she just said hi hi wendy hi hi wendy hello wendy
you're feeling better hello well i don't like this i'm standing i'm functioning i'm good
good spirits that's good to hear excellent so what what's coming up here we are you
know i today is the day that uh uh that uh margaret burbidge died uh in
19 or in uh i'm sorry i put down 1920. it's 2020. a little typo there uh
she um uh but she was she played a major role in research uh that showed that
heavy elements are constantly built up from lighter ones within stars she also did important work on rotations
of galaxies which led to some of the first estimates of the masses of galaxies on and on quasars
from 1972 to 1973 she served as head of the royal greenwich observatory the
first woman director in its 300-year history
so margaret burbidge [Music] did incredible science she
uh also was a champion of uh getting women um
in uh in in in the field of astronomy and science in general so just uh
you know it's it's good to um to remember someone that did uh such
important work but uh what's gonna roll next is a kind of an interview with her on a
documentary that was put together by nasa with her role with the hubble space telescope
so here we go [Music]
some of the most mysterious quasars space telescope
dr margaret burbidge they are very fascinating and mysterious
objects on a photographic plate they just look like ordinary stars but
when we break up their light and analyze it into its its rainbow of colors we see
that they're rushing away from us at enormous speeds and in our expanding universe that means that they must be
very very distant near the edge of the visible universe now yet we still see them
even at this these vast distances and that tells us that they must be creating
and emitting enormous amounts of energy to be visible from so far away
a quasar's light must be very bright as brilliant as 200 trillion suns
and yet quasars appear to be no larger than our solar system well we have no
way to explain uh anything so compact being able to produce such an enormous
amount of energy and that's that's the real mystery of the quasars
p.m. 02:30 Nico the Hammer
much of the light reaching earth from a quasar is ultraviolet light light that doesn't penetrate our
atmosphere what little of a quasar's light does reach earth shimmers because of the
turbulence in our atmosphere the space telescope will overcome both
obstacles it has a spectrograph that operates in both visible and ultraviolet light and
is particularly good for studying very faint objects like quasars the
spectrograph breaks light into beams according to wavelength the beams tell
us a lot about the object that produce the light its temperature its chemical composition
its energy state how fast it's moving and whether it's moving toward us or away from us
the space telescope also has a photometer that can measure rapid changes in light
since it's above the atmosphere we can use it to precisely measure the quasar's fluctuations
these two space telescope instruments the spectrograph and photometer
along with the telescope's cameras will finally put quasars within our grasp
well i hope we'll be able to discover the secret of the immense energy that the quasars are producing might we find
out something new about the laws of physics from studying the quasars
i speculate on the relationship between quasars and galaxies of stars like our
own milky way i sometimes wonder whether the quasars represent the birth of of
galaxies and or perhaps the even possibly the death of an earlier generation of
galaxies anything might be possible
[Music]
oh
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
well hello everyone welcome to the 89th global star party
we've got a special dedication to margaret burbidge who was
who passed away in 2020 on this very day she was a 100 years old
some of the information that i was able to put together i really want to
do a shout out for shelly bonus who actually met and knew marguerite burbidge and her husband
and as well as many other iconic astronomers at mount wilson observatory where she
worked so that was it was great to get that
unfortunately she couldn't be on tonight but i will have her on at some other time and we will talk about some of the
history and stuff about mount wilson a feature of this program also will
include john briggs who is currently the the new
secretary of the alliance of historic observatories and we are kind of doing a sequence of
inviting uh people from those observatories to give a little bit of a talk about what's going on uh at those
observatories you know what what happened why they're they're still functioning and how they uh you know
embrace and nurture the communities that they serve um so we're very pleased to be a part of
that at explore scientific um and uh you know and we have just an
amazing fantastic lineup uh here for our 89th uh starting with david levy uh
who is always here with us to uh you know give us a feeling of the
importance of uh why we do astronomy uh and to give us some historical
perspective through uh some of the writings that he brings up
especially with like his favorite author shakespeare and but also through uh poetry and you know
kind of revealing the beauty and the aesthetic of astronomy in the night sky
so uh david do you want to you want to come on with me now thank you thank you scott and welcome
everyone to our 89th star party it's really too bad that margaret burbidge couldn't be here herself in
person tonight but uh i have a feeling of her presence i remember
uh we were leaving kitt peak after an observing run and we saw this
middle-aged woman walking from one telescope to another and the person i was with said that is
margaret burbidge and you just had the feel of astronomical history walking right
before you i did get to know her husband jeffrey burbidge pretty well
and the two as a couple i think margaret was the better astronomer jeffrey was mostly
well known as the long-time director of kid peak national observatory
anyway
excuse me all and uh today's poetry will come not from shakespeare
but from william wordsworth and i remember quoting from his poem stargazers a few weeks ago
i'm telling you the story about how my professor
at queens said that his only comment was wordsworth wrote from wretched verse
there was a comment into one of the published versions of that poem recently
and the comment was that a lot of academics really were very narrow-minded about
the worth of the poets they studied or didn't study
and but i didn't think it was that case with dr mckenzie i think he was very very broad-minded
and certainly was was very special very special to me
so the component in a quote for you today is one of his most famous words earth's most famous i wondered
lonely as a cloud it was written at town's end grasmere the daffodils grew
and still grow on the margin of all's water and probably may be seen to this day as beautiful in the month of march
guarding their golden heads beside the dancing and foaming waves
i wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high or veils and hills when all at
once i saw a crowd a host of golden daffodils beside the lake beneath the trees
fluttering and dancing in the bridge continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way
they stretched a never-ending line along the margin of a bay ten thousand saw eye at a glance tossing
their heads in spritely dance the waves beside them danced but
they i did the sparkling waves and glee a pope could not but be gay and such a
joke unto company i gazed and gazed but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought
berraft when on my couch i lie in vacant or in pensive mood
they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude
and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils
beautiful thank you scott and back to you all very wonderful thank you so much
well um we are always pleased to bring on the
astronomical league the astronomical league as i've mentioned many times
but i i'll mention it again they are the world's largest federation of astronomy clubs over 300 clubs
over 20 000 members growing every day which is wonderful because
they offer so much to the astronomical community through their observing programs through their recognition
programs through their conferences their magazine the reflector
which you know gives you all the details of what's going on with their community but
they're growing they based in the united states they are growing worldwide and you too can become a member of the
astronomical league by becoming a member at large and all you have to do is go to astroleague.org
tonight we're honored to have the president of the astronomical league with us uh mr carol org and carol
uh will conduct our global star party door prizes so thank you so much scott
and uh thank you for those nice words we really appreciate all of your support over the years and the support of all of
our my colleagues on tonight as well and david it's hard to follow you you always give us so much inspiration
and particularly this spring season uh talking about the connection before we hit the
the skies at night talking about the flowers as well so that's very appropriate
i would i'll switch my screen here and
okay any uh instrument that involves looking at the sun we have to have protection and
that's why each time we do these we show the screen encouraging you well
really strongly encourage you not to look at any instrument uh without proper protection uh
if you're looking for the sun sorry but we are still seeing you
coming through let's see here i thought we're there sorry about that
how about now not yet
[Music]
how about now not yet you you have to go down to the
um you'll see a green share screen button right there zoom
and you click on that and then you pick the um application you want to share and then you commit to it
right
we can see you cameron at least yeah we
yeah when you get a new computer it's sometimes you get a little k
all right there's our screen that talks about the precautions uh earlier
so we've talked about that oh okay the answers from the last star
party which were on uh march 29 2022
the first question was when astronauts come back from space they're slightly
younger than that they never left and the answer is true and that's a nice objective isn't it
number two getting real deep into trivia pizza hut delivered
a pizza to the international space station in 2001.
what topping was featured on this pizza
item a would not be my favorite b maybe and d is pretty good as well but the
answer to this one is c salami i would not and she always i could do without but i'm sure some on this
program probably like angels they're not my favorite so it's probably also the world's most expensive pizza
yeah that's yeah i'm sure that's right i'm not sure how it was all delivered but i didn't get into that
right number three from that last star party if you weigh 200 pounds on earth
how much would you weigh on mars this is so refreshing to see b as being the answer 76 pounds
uh that's that's the way we would hope it would go if we're going to space we should have some bonus for making that
very long trip and the answers from that last star
party or a few that are on this broadcast tonight uh starting with john williams cameron gillis is on the
broadcast josh kovac israel monterroso paul and kathy sue
anderson rich crayling and max valeris
and for the march prize winners will you draw prize rendered each month from all
the entries from the four star parties the winners for that were rich crayling
michael overecker and john williams and now we get to the questions for
tonight april 5th 2022 and when you see the or when you
think of the answer send them immediately to secretary astro league dot org
question number one which four-letter word beginning with an n
is a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness then
gradually returning to its original state over a period of weeks to years
again submit your answers to secretary astro league dot org
question number two titania miranda and bianca are all moons of
which planet in the solar system
again send your answers to secretary astroleague.org
the final one in space the big bang machine is another
is another name for what in space the big bang machine is another name for
what secretary at astrolage.org is the address to send those entries to
a little over two weeks from now we will be featuring john
wesley on the uh astronomical league live that's the monthly program that
uh terry mann uh and he'll be talking about the range
points and the james webb telescope and that's been really very relevant lately as we've heard about that
special zone where it's parked out in space so that should be extremely interesting along with myself terry mann will be
here as long as scott and david levy and we encourage you to tune into that
it's very relevant to the situation we have now with the superb optics we're already getting uh already seeing from
with the pictures early pictures coming from the james webb and as i think we've mentioned before on
this program alcon 2022 the national uh convention the astronomical league is
a goal a strong goal we have people daily registration registering for that
convention so we're very pleased about that this is for the first time in three years uh even though we had a superb
virtual meeting last year but it wasn't as we've said uh in our pre-broadcast uh discussion day it's not
quite the same as getting together but it sure has been a good experience in reaching many more people than we could
otherwise the dates for that are july 28th through 30th of 2022 and we encourage you all to
come to albuquerque and see us at the embassy suites it promises to be a wonderful convention and we will
have uh many well-known speakers on sunday at the end of the convention
the very large array will be a featured a trip so i encourage you to
go to astrolake.org to get further information and with that back to scott
[Music] thanks very much carol well great so
definitely if you've not been to an alcon event uh you're going to want to
put that on your list of events to attend if you can't attend you know certainly tune in to
their facebook page because they'll be live casting uh the event there as well so what if i could
say one more thing uh there's one set i forgot about one thing we do at our national conventions is give awards for
what we call the master observer award winners that's an observer who is
uh from our multitude of choices for observations they've gone to many
different programs had samples all the way through whether it's nebulae galaxies the whole gamut and we
recognize those at our national convention so i encourage anyone who has not received your plaque for a master
observer to make sure you get a hold of us and uh sign up for
being awarded that uh plaque at the national convention now back to you
scott thanks thank you so much yeah absolutely well our next speaker got turned on to
astronomy when he was only 14 years old he was looking at the beautiful ring planet of
saturn and then he saw an apparition through a telescope of comet west probably by the naked eye as well
and that really uh hooked the guy and uh
addicted him to astronomy like nothing else he went on to write his own magazine called deep
deep space monthly or deep sky monthly excuse me and uh
that led to him being eventually the editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine
uh of course i'm speaking about david eicher and you know he is coming to share
his love of of astronomy through the lens of
crystals and minerals that we see here right on planet earth so
david i'm really happy to have you on each each global star party in fact you're on most of them
at this point and we're really really pleased to have you so what do you got for us tonight
thank you scott i'm going to talk about calcite tonight which is a very common mineral and it's different colors and
forms but first let me mention a couple of other little things if i can quickly
here first just to echo what david was saying about the the burbidges i mean when you
when you met them when you were in there they were really a a very very english
power couple in astronomy and and jeff burbidge as you mentioned david was
the director of kitt peak for a while but he was also working on you know uh how stars
uh transformed light elements into heavy ones and and the whole process of how stars worked and they both worked on um
extra galactic stuff margaret there in that clip and which i think was from the 70s was talking about quasars there
before you know another 10 or 15 years and it was clear what quasars were then but they were both
into that as well and then jeff burbidge who was you know a great big you know guy
uh a mammoth force um uh you know he was also very interested in sort of alternative cosmological
models and it was just fascinating to listen to both of them and david i think you could you know you really felt like
you were in a powerful matrix there with with the burbidges didn't you
absolutely and uh especially when i heard him speak at the texas star party
and that it was really being in the presence of true greatness absolutely as they say margaret was the
better astronomer and i think they're right agreed and and she lived long jeff lived
until he was 85 but margaret as scott said made it all the way to the century
mark um so that that was a great thing there and then i also uncovered something from
our pal kevin schindler at lowell observatory here and david i didn't have
the time to mention this to you but this is something that you will know better than anyone but our old friend clyde
tombaugh was a great punster you know you could be when we were there at the texas star
party observing with him we'd be sitting in the dark and about a minute would go by and another pun would roll out and
you'd just go oh no all right you know groaning you know at these things he would just one after
the other some of his favorite puns were about crows
remember that david and absolutely do i ever
and there's a list here that i can't that i believe kevin dug up here so i'll
read a couple of these and i'll save many of them for for later but there's a whole long list of them so but this is
this gives you a true look at clyde's humor i think david you'll you'll back this me up on this
with whom does a crow associate his cronies
ah oh clyde you know you just say
that was all you could say he wasn't
where do they meet in a where where else in a crowbar
[Applause] what do crows drink old crow
who was the first man to see the crow crowmanian man
[Music] oh magnum man where does a crow
keep his money it's really tiny clyde handwriting here
in escrow so that that's just that that's how there are many many more of them but i
mean that is a true sample in clyde's own handwriting of clyde humor
one thing about one thing about his puns is that not only did he punt all the time
especially about the annular eclipse of the sun did we get a ringside seat but he
listed on a response if he came out with a pun and you didn't respond he would repeat
the pun so that's a beautiful planet by jove by jove by job and you had to groan
before he'd go on with the conversation
it was exhilarating to spend the night with him and it could be a little bit exhausting too frankly
anyway there's a true look at clyde tombaugh um and i will go on to talk
about even more mineralogy we haven't run out of
minerals yet but i will try to share my screen and i will try to start
a slideshow and again we're looking at a rhodochrosite crystal here which is not
what we're going to talk about that's a placeholder tonight but minerals of course tell us about how
the universe is ordered i believe in a divinely ordered universe said thomas jefferson
centuries beforehand isaac newton said truth is ever to be found in the simplicity and not in the multiplicity
and confusion of things well the universe is ordered and not by supernaturalism however but by
naturalism by the principles of physics minerals demonstrate that and there
because we know through spectroscopy that chemistry is uniform throughout the universe
we have minerals here that we know could very well exist on countless other
planets other worlds throughout our galaxy and other galaxies their atoms are assembled in precise ways by
electrochemical attractions inherent properties of the atoms that make them up and guide them into assembling in a
specific what mineralogists call a crystal lattice
well calcite is an extremely common mineral and it can be somewhat attractive it's calcium carbonate
it's an ancient name calcite it was named as a mineral uh by pliny the elder
in ad79 from the word calcs which was latin for lime
it comes in many many it's often white or translucent or yellowish but it comes in many many colors including
red and orange and blue and green and brown and gray depending on various contaminants within the crystal lattice
if you will it's extremely common and it's a very widespread mineral it has very highly variable forms and colors
it's a member of the so-called calcite group the main member and of the calcite rhodochrosite series that reddish
rhodochrosite that's colored by manganese atoms is related to calcite as
well both are carbonates that are very similar calcite
as far as its crystallographic structure is trigonal it has calcium carbon and
oxygen atoms involved there you can see and i thought as always i would just
show a few examples of what calcite can look at and look like in different forms
this is a calcite from an iron mine with a little bit of iron that's coloring it yellow
there in it from kazakhstan uh and it's sort of typical
of the of the crystals that you get
sorry was there a question or comment there well i was just saying david that's beautiful this is really
neat thanks feel free to pipe in if if you have have things
um this is a little bit more uh pedestrian locality here from a very
well-known mineralogical region in missouri that produces enormous uh numbers of calcite
and and of also and also of iron various iron minerals here's a wisconsin
specimen wisconsin is not very rich in in mineral species but this is one of
them out in in the mississippi river area here uh lafayette county calcite
with galena galena is a lead mural from shulsburg wisconsin
calcite that's colored by cobalt atoms can become very very vivid pink and
purple and other hues and a recent mineral recent being the last generation
mineralogical area in morocco in the atlas mountains is very famous for all sorts of species of minerals including
some of the best covalent calcite as it's called that's very strongly colored
calcite that is cleaved in a certain way if you if you conk it on its head and
you cle make a cleavage you can get from certain localities a kind of calcite that's called uh iceland
spar and the this is a mexican specimen of it and the reason why it is called that is
because it produces uh optically it's fairly uh transparent and produces a
double refractive image of things that are shown through it and shows the
optical property of calcite in that way here's more cobalt contaminated calcite
this also from that moroccan region of the atlas mountains and you can see even from the
same site there is some fairly different appearances and and crystal structures
of the very same mineral that you can get one of the great areas for gold and
silver and for other minerals in the united states and even in the world is is the colorado the san juan mountains
and and related areas in colorado this is a manganese bearing house i don't
know if you can see that but it's sort of softly pink the color here from from manganese and this is from a very
famous colorado old time mine called the camp bird mine up in near uray colorado very famous
mine this is you can see the hexagonal crystal structure of this piece here
which is a chinese which is a relatively recent find of the last 15 years or so
and this is an interesting one you know we think of the interplay between non-living and living things in the
universe sometimes and how we know where many of the atoms in our body we have about seven
octillion atoms in our bodies on average uh each of us that's seven billion
billion atoms well most all of those atoms came from the deaths of either massive stars or the collisions of
neutron stars or the deaths of low mass stars like dwarfs even as well or a
small number uh as far as mass but a large number quantitatively from big bang
nucleosynthesis in the early history of the earth well it turns out that you know non-living atoms can turn into
living things we're all proving that tonight but this is something that was alive that has transformed itself back
into a mineral this is calcite from florida from a famous uh area called the
ruxpit okeechobee county florida and this is a
you can't see it's turned so you can see the top of the shell just at the very top of this image behind the yellowish
golden calcite but if you turn this piece around it shows you a complete uh
shell of a of an animal that died mercenaries per magma
and it's about one and a half million years old this fossil and what has happened is that the shells of this
animal which are almost entirely calcite has recrystallized into this calcite
crystals as a mineral here so here you have a living organism on earth
turning back with most of its mass and energy back into a mineral
the barnacle i'm sorry like a barnacle yeah yeah yeah yeah so so this is kind
of the reverse process if you will of what we often talk about that we as
we're living things talking to each other are made of the uh previously inanimate uh atoms of the
universe the reverse can happen too here's just to show one more specimen
and a rare opportunity from wisconsin this is a calcite from the area of racine wisconsin here
um that is sort of milky colored stuff and here is the the
golden yellow lemon yellow stuff here is calcite this is a famous area that produces these very showy lovely
specimens of barium sulfate that's called barite the mineral that's that
dark sort of tan color crystal that is on the background
calcite and this is from the elk creek area of south dakota
here you might be able to see somewhat faintly depending on our connection and
your monitors that a little bit of this specimen is pinkish and that's some manganese in this
specimen from another very famous uh colorado gold and silver mine the
otter idorado mine uh in telluride this is a very famous old time
mine in in the west and this is not what they would have predominantly been looking for
at these mines but this is a a gang specimen as it was called um that
they took home for a laugh they were really looking for gold and silver here
there's it says 29 to 1300 stop okay now this is
mineralogists just as we talk about say regions within galaxies that we're
interested in where there's a star-forming cloud say in ngc 2403 that's a gallic distant
galaxy in our sky mineralogists are very very interested in the specific localities of things as
exact as they can be about where specimens come from because that tells
them about the composition the mineral the mineralogy the the period in which
it was collected all sorts of things like that so a stope is an area within a mine and
a vein even is an area within a mine so this is from a particular little area uh
the 29 1300 stop that is mapped out in this huge famous
and silver mine predominantly within a particular vein that they were
exploring inside the mine and this simply tells you where this piece came from very specifically in
this case which is of interest to the collectors very interesting
here's a big hefty chunk of about a fist or a little bigger size chunk of calcite
from another famous mining region dal nagorsk russia
and you can you might be able to see their little tiny bits that are bright on the surface of
this and it's got little sort of blebs of pyrite which is a shiny like gold-colored mineral on this
calcite crystal here that's reflecting light here's another sort of more typical
crystal and this is a twinned one you can see there's one crystal on top that's intertwined with another one on
the bottom here a chinese specimen here that's fairly common
of recent years and this is a related mineral here the
pinkish stuff called kutnohorite now that's from a region in the czech
republic what's now the czech republic called kutna hora and it's a calcium manganese carbonite
with carbonate with also with some whitish calcite here this is a south african
piece and you can see there are these sort of very uh blade like crystals here just to show
you the all sorts of different forms these minerals this is a very similar
mineral to calcite called dolomites calcium magnesium carbonate
and this is again has cobalt atoms to make it very strongly purple
colored in it and from a very famous area in the congo which is katenga which is
most famous because it you can read about the prehistoric enormous
uh nuclear explosion that happened uh deep within earth in the katanga copper crescent
millions of years ago a nuclear reaction there was so much uh radioactive mineralogy in earth there
couldn't help myself here's and yet there are so many so few opportunities to show a wisconsin specimen that's
interesting here's another calcite from wisconsin from way out west the montreal
mine in iron county wisconsin up north as well
here's more of this unusual and these are very much needle like little crystals of coutinho right
with another mineral called aragonite in here which is inside this rock like a little geode if you will an italian
locality that produces this kind of stuff and that's what i had for calcite
tonight and again i will just quickly very briefly now this time mention starmus
and we're going to be holding this meeting the international science festival in september in armenia you can
see more at starmust.com and it'll have many speakers and a whole
lot of rock and roll going on at starmus as well as science astronauts nobel
prize winners astronomy chemistry biology and loud music
good loud music yes pretty good loud mute with brian may rick wakeman peter gabriel et cetera et cetera it's pretty
good stuff yeah it's going to be so scott you're going to join us for the star party explorer scientific this year
for starma so we're looking forward to that with telescopes there and with a we think a big crowd of maybe a thousand or
more people just at the star party event it's gonna be fantastic i mean look at this lineup of speakers charlie duke
kip thorne nicole stott george smoot garrick australian who's
one of the founders of the event of course jill tarter and
my friend and yours david eicher so there's there's got to be one runner-up
in every group of speakers but this is just the preliminary there will be many
more speakers we will announce over the summer time yeah so it's gonna be super exciting and
it's something that uh if you can make it you should go so right
that's wonderful um and you know every time that we look at the uh
crystals that you show david i i keep thinking well how's he gonna top this how's he gonna top that you know because
they're so beautiful you know and it's wonderful to be able to take be kind of led by the
hand uh to show um or to understand what these crystals and minerals are all
about you know so um i love it so well thanks scott it's fun stuff my dad contaminated me with
all of these interests so once you get into this stuff you can't really get out of it but eventually i'll get here back
into some pure astronomy to talk about i promise oh no problem it is pure astronomy yeah your astronomy it's it's
just a close-up look at it so which is great that's great
okay well we are going to uh move on to our next uh segment here
um uh with um john briggs uh john briggs is
uh has a very long uh uh biographical uh story but uh uh let me
just say this john has uh been involved in um
has been close to the fire uh so to speak with uh all things astronomical
uh he is a uh you know he is a living historian of
of uh you know people and artifacts and books and uh and all of these things and
very very appropriately he was appointed the new secretary of the alliance of
historic observatories and he has started a
series of talks that will include all of the historical observatories that
are associated with this organization last
last week we had kevin schindler from lowell observatory and this week we have
tom meneghini who's the executive director of mount wilson observatory so i'm going to turn this over to john
and let him talk about the alliance a little bit and what he's currently up to
as well as making an introduction to tom meneghini as always scott uh thank you so much
it's great to be back again uh everyone and uh
we can look forward to conversations with tom and in in uh in just a few
minutes here um but it i was uh
very lucky as a young man to live and work at mount wilson observatory for a while in the late
1980s and mount wilson um
really brought astronomy to the american uh west coast
southern west into southern california in a in such an amazing way
um uh both in terms of how the public
became aware of astronomy and and and what was going on at mount wilson uh
redefining what we understood about the universe um and and
inspiring uh uh eventually uh cal tech
and uh mount palomar and really so much of uh 20th century astronomy uh
connected with southern california and and starting with mount wilson
um and i before we talked with tom i just thought i would hold up this book
that has just come out if you guys i hope you can see it it's got a really cool cover
a public astronomy los angeles style uh published by
griffith observatory foundation and i'm very proud to have contributed a
chapter to this book that just became available on the um uh observatory
website and it's really it's a history book it includes history of los angeles
astronomical society um a lot of history about the creation
of griffith observatory and uh our east coast uh united states
friends the east coast uh know a lot about russell porter uh at stellophane and russell porter had an
awful lot to do with the creation of griffith and its design its elegant
design and a lot of people contributed to this book was edited by david devorkin and ed
krupp dvoraken being at the smithsonian and ed at um the director of griffith
observatory and the chapters include uh public astronomy los angeles style by
devorgan um the early years of amateur astronomy in los angeles um by tom williams los
angeles astronomical society by lewis chilton and the space age age legacy
of telescope designer george carroll i that's one i wrote and especially
wonderful uh trading griffith observatory by anthony cook so anyway i
shouldn't go on and on about it but it relates to southern california and a lot to mount wilson too
and it's it's beautifully illustrated was very elegantly designed so i wanted to show
it off a little bit but uh with those words um we spoke about um
um the alliance this organization of historic observatories that had its
first meeting a little over two years ago and we spoke about that some last
week and we spoke about how the the formative meeting was at mount wilson at
the wonderful monastery library room some very intimate discussions with some real
leading astronomers and um this is going to serve as a forum
i hope for small observatories as well as big observatories to share
information and vision of how they might best uh define themselves in the future
with changing research priorities but of course ongoing opportunities
for for uh public education and inspiration and there are a few places in the world
where more of that is uh or as much of that is going on
as mount wilson still and uh tom being with us
um i would like to uh have him uh join in and tell us a little bit about uh
the current activities uh as as as a director of mount wilson
and um uh it's it's opening up as so many other things after the pandemic
and it's a very exciting place so tom um can you tell us a little bit about
what's going on at mount wilson right now um everything uh we basically had a
two-year hiatus on operations and
demand is overwhelming we're getting crushed with bookings for telescope reservations
in january i was they were people were asking about tours and visiting uh while
we were under snow so i i think there's a lot of pent-up demand for people to get out and i'm
glad they're uh considering mount wilson observatory as one of their destinations
and uh back to the back to our our um
historical observatories uh i think one of the impetus uh impatai if you will is uh
survival um we are a hundred a century-old
institution uh with you know century-old instruments that are are good but they certainly
aren't cutting edge we have old technology that we've updated
in trying to make these instruments uh useful and relevant even for student research is something i i
personally want to get into so i'm i'm really pushing student science stem education
um wherever i can and trying to find purposes for these old scopes the 60 inch and 100 inch uh especially
which i think are are large enough to be effective and uh i think can be made useful for student
science we have several groups that are going to do speckled interferometry and other projects up there this summer
and uh with the goal of publishing their own paper which they did a couple years ago so i i i love to have that happen
because i like that type of activity um and that's my reason for being with the
observatory is to have that happen so we have infrastructure uh issues
um we're putting in new restrooms because there's only so many trees up on the mountain so
we need we need to have new facilities and uh and we have uh garnered a good good chunk of money
uh towards that effort so we're going to make improvements to make it more hospitable to to larger crowds
coming we've also diversified our offerings um maybe it's not a new one but we we're
doing lectures again monthly lectures up there and we're augmenting them by opening up
the uh 60 inch 100 inch for observing so the attendees for the lectures can when it's finished
can go have a go have a hamburger from a food truck and then go uh look at one or
two objects in one of our telescopes and so those are very popular as well um
mount wilson is very fortunate having that great auditorium uh right there
available for you to use and and uh but i don't know when that was built but it dates back to the early
days of the observatory and is as focused as the astronomers there were on the research they obviously recognized
the importance of having a facility like the auditorium to do what you're doing now
i think that was a russell porter uh construct as well i did not know that that's very
interesting i think it is i might be i maybe have the wrong architect but i think it was i think it was built in like 30 1937
was a highway up there at the time so angelus crest was had been built and they didn't have to come up a wagon
trail so that was that was there and it is good and we've uh i've managed to
uh tag on to achara grant for for a new scope they're getting they needed a
public outreach component so i've tagged on for a hundred thousand dollars to improve the auditorium on that nsf
grant so we'll be looking to do a new projection system uh
we like to keep the character the same but at least doing the the restroom fixtures and plumbing and
and electrical systems all upgraded to to being very reliable and
functional wow that's great i i did i did not know is that construction going on now or you just
we just we just signed the grant um two weeks ago so it'll be going over the next two years
cool 100 000 won't go very far up there well it's um it
it's sure a start uh compared to how i know for some years the things have been
on such a shoestring there it's bound to make a big difference all right uh any
kind of difference is is going to be an improvement but i i think we're going to we have it well placed in improvements
um the other i guess program we have is is concerts
uh this was kind of a offshoot of one of the one of the passions of one of our trustees
wanted to bring different type of people not not necessarily scientists but maybe arts
arts related people who would who might enjoy the aesthetics of the mountain
and the telescopes and so forth so we have we're continuing our series of um of
concerts in the dome those are on sundays uh we'll do them once a month every month during the summer
and those have turned out to be wildly popular uh i'm trying to get some rock and roll in there though um
so many shouldn't be so many strings so many strings i can tolerate after a while i gotta have a
they've been doing they've been doing concerts that i remember up at linc observatory at least back into the uh
1980s and i i gather they were always very successful as well
yeah uh i think uh getting to mount wilson is kind of more of a a steeple chase
uh uh it's it's amazing we get people up there i think that in the in the in the
numbers that we do um because i don't think we're the uh most accessible observatory like
compared to griffith or or um or or lowell uh but uh people managed to get
up there they they dodged the rocks and the deer and they get up there safely and back down
again so that's that's wonderful tom tell maybe you can expand a little bit more what you said
about um a real um uh like like like a pressure having
built up for astronomy over the course of covid um it's i hear that from telescope
vendors and various people that there's been something of a renaissance of astronomy through the pandemic and you
think you see evidence for that too as mount wilson comes out of the pandemic
yeah i think a lot of it's cabin fever too uh people have been been bottled up so long that they want to get out and do
something this is a destination that's 45 minutes you know up a mountain which isn't too
bad um they get to look over the city uh look down on the clouds instead of up at
them so it's it's a it's a it's a refreshing uh perspective um they have we have walking tours we
have uh guided tours we have private tours we have we started
engineering tours for the uh for the uh for the for the machine heads
um we have our our engineers go through and they go down into the guts of the scopes
and the generating machines and everything and they go and it's wonderful it's it's wildly popular too
so that's back again this year we're doing two of those a month but
it must be true that so much of what you do is is uh phil
uh uh facilitated if not absolutely made possible by a fabulous uh a team of
volunteers could you tell us about uh the size of your volunteer folks and
and all that oh my okay i'm i'm i'm one of them um
and and most of our most of our people are um our telescope operators our tour docents uh the people who help with uh
uh sales of merchandise and uh i i think um we just had our uh last
annual meeting that was delayed for two years but we had our annual meeting in the hundred inch two weeks ago and there
were 80 people in attendance wow all volunteers either current or
prospective so that's that's the type of of draw we have for volunteers and we wouldn't
survive without volunteers at all we couldn't we couldn't we don't have enough money to pay all these people for
what they do you know i think that right there uh as as easy as it is to take for
granted at mount wilson um it's a lesson that you can teach
a bit based on your success to some other observatories because you know for example when i
worked at yerkes in the 1990s
there really wasn't anything like a core of volunteers
um there even uh when certain outreach
activities expanded at yerkes it was really quite a novel idea when we
had members of the milwaukee astronomical society come and throw a star party for us on the
south lawn of yerkes that simply hadn't been going on uh at yerkes but
fortunately i had been at mount wilson before i worked at yerkes and i knew
about mount wilson observatory association back in those early days and
how important it had been for mount wilson as soon as carnegie institution
uh redirected its funds down in south america or whatever and the mount wilson
institute had to form and uh but i witnessed uh some of those early days
and how so many wonderful things uh kept going maybe
outreach things may be better than ever thanks to your volunteers there so
um but i think that kind of uh insight and experience is what uh the alliance
is going to be all about as observatories like mount wilson yerkes lowell lick
others share share a strategy for the future
do you think that's that's correct yes that is and i think that's the path
forward for for us some old old gray observatories that's that's the
only way forward um but we find one characteristic is all
these people are very passionate either about astronomy or the observatory
or something connected with it and and they they enjoy what they're doing that's why
they do it and just for that just for the pure pleasure of of interacting with people um
showing showing off the observatory we've done a lot of improvements so they our engineers like to brag about what
they've done and rightly so they've done some wonderful work in upgrading the control systems on those telescopes it's
amazing um and and that people genuinely enjoy it and uh the public
enjoys interacting with them and that's i think that's key yeah the the uh even the uh the smaller
instruments like the snow hasn't that recently been very significantly renovated
at the site yes one shipping hammer at a time uh
i think we we uh we knocked off about eight coats of paint off the uh pedestal
for the selastat and got it down to uh to white metal and um did a two-part uh marine coating on
it and it looks beautiful it's wonderful it's uh it's like like showroom ready again
that is great um i was very lucky uh in the early
early 1990s to have a chance to learn about the snow
and we reactivated it for uh curia the consortium for
undergraduate research and education in astronomy that has been an annual summer program
for mainly for college undergraduates but um nobody was
learning more about solar astronomy and uh literal spectrographs than i
when i was there for the first couple years of korea and you know um i believe that
hale himself had um a
particular passion for the importance of how beautiful
the solar spectrum was for people and students to see it
and and for it to um inspire very intense curiosity about
physics and optics and what the heck are all those fraunhofer lines as a as a
rosetta stone for the chemistry of the sun and there is something about seeing
the solar spectrum with a high dispersion spectrograph or spectroscope with an
eyepiece on it like you can do with the snow tall scope that is simply
undescribable and indescribable it's it's um uh and there are there are a few books
out there that convey this but they're not well known nowadays maybe to many uh amateur
astronomers that's why i can't help trying to inject a few words here
about just how beautiful and interesting and dynamic
surprisingly dynamic the solar spectrum is when you get a chance to experience
it with something like the snow right and uh we we found out by measurement that i don't know if you knew this john
but that that grading is blazed in third order
and it is it is a superb dispersion at third order it is yes
i remember i remember well because as i recollect um third when you're
using it in third order um um you still don't have to use i
don't think um an order separating filter and now these are technicalities now but it's so
interesting to learn what this stuff is getting your hands on an instrument like this is as a student
um uh but but the the the the the way diffraction ratings work it's central to so much of
astronomical in instrumentation but with the facility like the snow
students and teachers and visitors can really really get personal insight on
these things that is um it's a very precious thing and i wish more people
could enjoy it too there's a book that i that i love
simply entitled the sun by charles young and it was published
back in the 1890s and charles young was a real pioneer of
uh solar physics in american astronomy had anybody interest interested in learning
about how exciting the solar spectrum is i recommend starting with the book the
sun by charles young and i left a copy of it in the snow telescope that i
believe is still there in a cabinet i know which i know which cabinet
yep oh the one on the top like if i could share this available
john i could if i can try and i'll try and get this up here this is the snow with its
its new paint job right on oh here it is i don't know if that's visible or not
there oh it is wow so that's patricia hill she's now the
the keeper the keeper of the snow she's she owns it right on i look forward to meeting her
yeah she's uh she's an elementary school teacher retired and she latched on to this project and
she handles the stem students does our lecture on spectroscopy
excellent you think she was a phd and that's great in solar physics she really
does a great job there's a there's a box there on the lower left um it actually has like a
plexiglas window the dark surface facing us on the lower left and i of course you
know but it's fun to explain this for our listeners but that's the uh the governor mechanism
in there for the weight driven clock drive but one of the interesting features of the instrument is that there
are interchangeable uh gear boxes that slide into ways in right inside
there and one of them is labeled sidereal for the stars one of them is
labeled solar for the sun and if i recall right there's the third one
for the moon yes yes it's not right for the moon that's right yeah because so that the gears are ever so slightly
changed uh to approximate the average tracking rate of um of the moon and of
course the constant rate of the stars too so it was very much envisioned that the snow could be used for nighttime
work as well that i actually have looked at the moon with it and a couple other things like that just because you could
do it and i mean who could resist not giving it a try so
oh nice look at that so that's really cool that's with the crowd with a group of students in there we have the uh
silastat of course aimed uh and you see the the uh folding
mirror there down to the ceilistad and back up so we are we are producing a uh
solar spectrum there on the stage um uh and this is the great beauty of this
scope is you're standing inside of the telescope you're teaching students and they're
standing inside the telescope and that that just that is so so powerful that they're standing in a
telescope and they can see what's happening with the light and what's happening and so it's very powerful very reinforcing and
i think it's one of the best teaching instruments around absolutely absolutely
it produces an image of the sun about seven inches in diameter with an
f30 focus from a 24-inch uh paraboloid
and that's what's being illuminated way far back there in the room the sun beam
coming off the uh the the two flat mirrors outdoors goes down through this room
hits that um one concave mirror down at the far end
that's so bright there but then it comes back and focuses um bouncing off a flat on the ceiling
and then down towards that white thing in the lower left which is the head of
of a of a spectrograph a litro spectrograph that goes down deep into the mountain that pit um underneath
there is something like 30 feet deep i think isn't it tom yes yeah and there's a hatch you can open the hatch and
there's a ladder that you can climb down in there to work on it and it was so
amazing having a chance to learn about that um in my case back in the early 90s
and i had worked as an observer with the 60-inch telescope
uh in the late 80s but the snow was simply locked up at that time
and it was just a great mystery i mean i knew a little bit about its history
but i i it wasn't part of my job to go in there and i was usually i was too busy
um to to to to get you know to ask or or or
just poke around in there it wasn't appropriate until the time came in the circa 1990
when uh the summer educational program started and i volunteered to get
involved because the to me the snow it was you know it was like uh the great pyramid in egypt or something
it was very very mysterious and when i did finally have a chance to get in and learn about the hatch and the
latter and the spectrograph uh all these cool things all the little the the
gearbox details i'm um well it it it's it lived up to expectations for
coolness that's all i can say for sure it's it's the land osha forgot oh exactly you know what man
stuff like that that actually makes it good [Laughter]
right on well and and i know we're probably running out of time and i'll leave it to scott to get out the hook
you know and pull us off stage here but um my dear friend going back through all
those years larry webster he continues to be um
one of the astronomer engineers who lives with his family right up on the
mountain is that not correct tom continuing yes wonderful and and do i
understand correctly that larry recently has been working on a big upgrade for
your illuminizing chamber he as part of an nsf grant um i think
what they're going to wind up doing is redoing the wiring loom on it i don't think they're going to
i don't think they're going to do much with the ceiling or the vacuum pump and i think that was one of the things they
were looking at was the vacuum pump but i think it's it's adequate so i don't
know if that's been scaled back a little bit or not but um um the the man who pioneered
the vacuum deposition technique for um a telescope mirrors evaporating
aluminum rather than the chemical deposition of silvering on mirrors
as many people here know but i can't resist bringing it up was a guy named john strong
and he ended aft and he pioneered this at mount wilson and but in his later
years he went to teach and do research at university of massachusetts
and i have a confession to make i have a confession of what was probably one of the the
great mistakes of my life was that i was a student my freshman
year at university of massachusetts and i heard something about john strong as a
profoundly expert man in experimental physics and telescopes and all kind of
stuff and i actually had a long telephone call with him
but i and he invited me he said i called him up you know as a as a kid up in my
dormitory i called him up and he said well gee you know you're very interested
in telescopes and optics and you should come down and visit me in my laboratory
you know what so i was there for one lazy corrupted year i never took advantage
had i done that it probably would have changed my life but eventually though i
did meet him and he when he was a speaker at the amateur telescope makers of boston and along the way
i learned that he wrote a book called procedures and experimental
physics and he was a very close friend of russell porter when they were all together out there in california
and um people who are interested in optics and instrument making and glass
blowing the how to make a schmidt camera corrector and all kinds of things
precision machining all that stuff is in this book
famous book but because it has become all too obscure to modern students
procedures and experimental physics by john strong and i just had couldn't resist mentioning that too because i'm
telling you it's a good one so anyway i think i probably i've gone on too long
thank you very much for being with us and i hope before you guys before you
guys go uh i would uh uh i know that the burbidges worked at mount wilson uh did some very important
work there uh margaret burbidge uh did a tremendous amount of work uh at a time when
uh you know it was uh difficult for women to be on the mountain and uh but she did it anyways
and um uh you know what can what can you guys tell us uh uh on this day
it might it might have been a challenge for her given the traditions at the monastery i suppose in the
the the male dominated housing arrangement but i gather she persevered anyway right with
the was she the one who had to sign telescope time in her husband's name yeah for jeffrey burbidge that's
true that's the one she had to get telescope time she had to sign her husband's name to get it
and apparently she lived at the captain cottage okay which was up there and um
uh they could not she i i guess at one point she became pregnant uh
uh while working up at the observatory but they had to keep that secret at the time
uh you know just because of the protocols that were in place uh so so much has changed
um at mel wilson uh you know and some great uh women astronomers have have led
the way at uh at that historic observatory as well so mel wilson is uh certainly steeped in
all that history and old traditions but uh uh brought in many new traditions uh you know as as we
reach the modern era well scott i wanted to mention that when i was reading up on
uh on some of what she went through trying to get to mount wilson when a lot of the staff there were really upset
about the idea of a woman astronomer coming in and taking over time their argument was that there was no bathroom
facility available that would be appropriate for a woman to use and so when tom was saying that they're redoing
the bathrooms i was reminded of that and i was reading the paper from the early 80s about how we would never make
this mistake again you know we know now the the importance of women and yet you see with that space walk that was
cancelled last year because they didn't have the right size spacesuits for the women astronauts
these oversights these like this this approach that we have when we design and build an infrastructure
it it's it's it's endemic and we got we really have to work at breaking it and i'm glad that she persevered you know
you read all about her at every step of the way just like with cecilia payne just like with a lot of the women
astronomers who we now look at with such awe and esteem they had to work past so many obstacles
just to do the work that they found interesting let alone exceed excel at it the way they did yeah but they but uh
margaret burbidge uh for what i understand was uh uh very um
you know headstrong and and and making sure that she was doing great science
and uh didn't let anything stand in her way and uh and she did get her chance to
make her mark at mount wilson so the the uh talk about spectra of the sun i'm
just really curious uh to know more about what she learned about uh
spectra of stars and um you know because she is the she's credited as the founder of uh
stellar nucleosynthesis so and uh that paper that she wrote with
her husband and with uh fred hoyle and a few others is just it's the seminal piece that really explains the way in
which heavier elements were made all the way up to iron and it's incredible but while uh tom and
john are here um the summer school that you were talking about i actually received the flyer for soar for this
year it looks incredible is there any way i could pass for you know 18 to 21 if i shave or something
yeah you no you wouldn't have a problem really and why don't you uh volunteer too and to be an instructor
there you go yeah you know what maybe i can spend a couple of a couple of weeks or a month in in california i think i
could i could handle that work it's the altitude that i'm not sure my body can handle but uh the work would be
amazing some some adults have participated uh in earlier years with the younger
students the thing is when any of us are at mount wilson we
are all students and um it's especially wonderful when there's a range of ages
present because we of course uh learn all learn from each other in really cool
ways i i look i look back my memories of my own time they're among
uh the fondest astronomical memories of my entire life so um so yeah go for it
great i'll make sure you get a good room make sure you get a good room at the monastery okay
excellent that's right well thank you very much john and tom uh for coming on thank you
for having us uh hope to get yet another observatory from the alliance to come on for next week if
that's possible so great so um we are going to do a transition in fact
our next speaker is kareem jaffer um he'll be on there with uh koa tran but
uh maxi fellaris is has got his telescope all set up in argentina he's streaming
uh live views through his telescope right now we thought it would make you know since this is a star party
we thought it would be nice to actually show some live views through a telescope in
between speakers that's something you really can't do at a normal star party uh when you're in the conference hall so
uh we're going to switch over to maxie right now and why don't you let us know what you got
there well hello guys how are you thank you scott for inviting me
uh well i i came from my work this evening
and then i i have to be in the gsp so i put my equipment outside with my
homework clothes and everything but i i was trying to do some
pictures of course to the moon to this crossing moon
because i have here well right now no because it's below of the horizon
at this time but i was practicing the the the the alignments and everything and i
think it's going really really fine and then i well i tried to do some
some pictures of a serious star a practicing
focus and everything and now i'm in a particular area here in the south place
let me share my screen [Music]
okay do you see it yes yeah excellent so basically
or here is stellarium software okay we have here this the cell the the
southern polar a celestial border and of course we have the the median here
right now i'm pointing to this place nearby the canopus star this is this is
the a really brightest star like serious
star and we have here in the summer skies we recall they are like brothers
because they are very similar in in the magnitude of both stars and
here in in this going more to to the left we have this
particular star but it has a nebula behind of that
and this was this called the butterfly nebula but also the tubby hog nebula
because i think it was his discover so okay
right now i'm taking uh well pictures of three minutes
and you can see the brightest star it's like the the
and behind that star of that brightness you have
the homunculus and all that kind of nebulosity well this is some kind of that
and i think this can be seen by
telescope in clear skies where he i had my southern skies
really pollutional by a leather slide but
anyway taking three subs of three minutes is
pretty amazing for example let me well you know sorry it was uh two minutes but if i take
a single picture of five seconds this is a live view okay
i'm using a zwo azure plus a connected to to my wi-fi and of course
is the camera and everything but i'm i'm controlling it inside of my
house you know nico my friend doesn't like this because it's
i'm i'm like a i like to be comfortable when i do pictures
you know i spent a lot of hours uh
absorbing coal humidity and everything and now i say now that's
all i have to be more comfortable and try to enjoy this particular job but of
course i like to be outside when i wa when i in the in the field or in the the rural
skies that's that's worth it here in the city well it's
what i got um well you can see in five seconds anyway you you uh
you also able to see a particular arms of the of this nebula
and well uh nearby there we have so
some open clusters this is the well velocita i don't know how to say in
english pelosi's i think a cumulus so
if you want i will be there uh let me see ngc 2516
so we go to here let's put
the name you see we said while you're doing that maxi i just have
to see i love those diffraction spikes they're beautiful [Laughter]
now i know what to get you for christmas [Laughter]
no it is beautiful you're right yeah well right now the the the shredder plus is a moving the
amount to this place and doing the play solving to get centered the the object
that i put now is taking pictures the text and now is say is centered
sometimes not but you can you can [Music]
put it there well what was remarkable maxie was being able to see nebulosi
with five seconds of exposure now it's amazing because you can also well er
there is a thing here okay um for example well i'm taking also here a
five second picture let me because it gets the amount
still tracking but this software has an auto stretching
there you go [Music] okay let me put the instagram you can
see is really compressed to get the the details in a really short time short time
but if i reset it this is the single picture
because i have a 100 a game and five seconds it's particularly you
you'll only see the stars a few stars but
using this tool the it gets the the auto stretching
of the of the picture okay so this is what i
learned is that uh the pixel inside is called the screen
transfer function so kind of yeah yeah exactly a live stretch it doesn't actually manipulate the data but it
gives you a view uh real time in a quick and dirty way on what it could be transformed and if
you see the data you can always process it later exactly simulates what you're going to
see in or maybe you can get a of course when you get more
pictures when you stack it you get more info and you can stretch it a lot because
if for example you can see the background if i go more higher
it's it's getting shining but the background is starting to get uh noisy
so uh when you take pictures and stack it you get more info and that background is
getting more uh denoising for example
uh well this is a an open cluster here nearby i think i also is in the karina
[Music] the negotiation of la crisia because we have
here uh the the principal arm of in the southern
hemisphere of the galaxy okay now it's raising up the center of the
galaxy but uh here in the south almost uh we have here the
well i think not the southern cross here where we have the carinae
i don't know if we have time we can go to another place and of course i would
be online here uh i'll try to be in the gsp
and everyone is watching and of course here in the audience or and in
the the submitting and you can tell me what object you can want to
to see because uh this is not time you you always see this kind of
particular objects of and also of course in the in the
in the northern skies so if you want for example let's go to this
another object because i hear i have it
the jewel box is in the southern cross here
so so uh so we'll let the audience choose you guys
in the northern hemisphere look in the southern hemisphere star maps that you might have and
pick out some favorite objects we're going to continue doing these transitions and
maxie does have a longer segment here right after uh
kareem and koa so at this point we should probably go ahead and transition and
and keep moving through our speakers who are waiting in the wings here so
all right so um at this point uh we will introduce uh
uh karim jaffer he was on just a little bit earlier talking with tom managing and john briggs about
margaret burbidge but kareem jaffer is with the royal astronomical society of
canada the montreal center and he's also a professional professor of astronomy at
john abbott college uh he's deeply involved in astronomy outreach and
particularly with the focus on youth getting involved and so i've got some
links i'll be sharing that he sent to me but uh i'm going to let karine take it away
thanks scott and i'm really glad to see tom here uh as i mentioned i i received
their flyer for their summer school for students partly because i gave a talk to the
orange county astronomers and i ended up chatting with john hoot who is one of their volunteer instructors for the
summer school and he's been mentoring one of my groups who's doing sonification and so he's been working
with them providing them with some photometric curves and they're just absolutely loving this
and so i'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with for their project but for tonight i'm really happy to be
joined by qua one of my friends here at the rask montreal center and quan i have kind of fallen down a bit of a rabbit
hole over the last couple of days so i'm gonna get to that a little bit from now and to tell you about how we got a
chance to see a supernova for ourselves but before i get to that i want to talk a little bit about the check-in with
some of the places that i work with for outreach um as you're all aware i'm part
of astro radio reach out and touch space and we had a great show yesterday uh where we chatted a lot about the current
space news and then we ended up having a conversation for about 20 minutes about whether or not there would be life in
our solar system found somewhere and so you know some nice divergent uh discussion that's just fun to have
with the university lowbrows and with the rask montreal center i'm currently working on some newsletter articles but
what i want to chat with you about for my check-in is first and foremost the cosmic generation and the cosmic
generation is one of the groups that david and i have been working a lot with this is a group
of youth that are trying to organize programs for youth by youth it's an international
global youth organization for astronomy that's based online and we're really lucky at
the rasc to have a couple of members that are in the executive of this club as well as in the denver astronomic
society and in other parts of the us and in brazil and so their next event is this coming
sunday and it's one of their newer members de la le who's going to be talking about the james webb space telescope and she's going to be sharing
an understanding of what the james webb is meant to do why the architecture of it is so interesting
and sharing it from a youth perspective for what they hope to see coming from this telescope over the next
bunch of years so if you're a youth age 18 or under and you can be as young
as you know five six seven if you're interested in astronomy this is the group of kids to hang out with because
they're just like you they have a passion for astronomy and at some point in class their teacher is like okay enough about space we're moving on to
something else they don't want to stop so this gives them a chance to keep talking about space sharing their
enthusiasm sharing their joy so if you follow the bitly link here cg april 13th
reg or april 10th reg that'll take you to a registration google form and you'll
get a zoom link to join the zoom on sunday the zoom on sunday is being hosted by
cosmic generation and if you have any trouble you can always email me it's a rasmus or montreal rask gmail.com that's
something that you'll always find for me in the explore alliance ambassadors page aside from that for youth the other
thing we're doing at the rasc is we're launching a second iteration of our creation station now last year creation
station was our international astronomy day event we opened up a space for kids to share their drawings their passion
their stories their poems anything about space and this year we have the exact
same setup but with a special extra category with a focus on the moon so if you have stories or if you want to draw
pictures of what you think space is like or exploring space or trying to draw some images of the moon that you see
when you go out at night or when you go out in the morning on your way to school and you see that waning moon up there
draw it and share it with us and we will share it with the world on your behalf so rasc.ca creation station and this
will be launching in may 2022 but it's already open so you don't have to wait till then to submit any of your drawings
poems stories etc at the montreal center we have our next public event coming up this saturday and
i am so excited for this one this is a phd student olivia lim at the university
of montreal with the institute for research on exoplanets and she submitted and i love this a phd student and a
couple of them submitted research projects for the first year of web and hers was accepted so webb is going to be
spending time researching and trying to characterize the atmospheres of the trappist-1 seven planets that are all
terrestrial planets and she's leading this research initiative so she's going to be talking on saturday to our arrest
montreal public event audience it's going to be a zoom webinar and as always at the end of the webinar we're going to
promote everyone to panelists so that we can just chat away the night talking about astronomy
we also have our next citizen science series next wednesday and we have qua is going to be chatting with us tonight as
well as blake nancarro who was with us about two weeks ago talking about the rask observing programs and he's going
to be talking about double stars we also have a fantastic event that i'm
happy to invite everyone to next thursday on april 14th at 6 pm
eastern daylight time we have crater sketching with patina forget bettina is a local artist a past president of the
montreal center and she is the director of the artist in residence program at seti
and she is an incredible incredible sketch artist she did a a overview of the 30 craters named after
women on the moon for a wonderful exhibit that has toured the world and she's going to be sharing with us some
of the tips and advice that she has for sketching the moon so sketching the moon is a nice
transition to this rabbit hole that qua and i fell down and so to tell you a little bit about it i want to tell you
about last saturday because last saturday was the start of the current lunar month right it was that waxing
crescent it was the start of the ramadan month for muslims where many many muslim sex fast in different
ways some from food some take the esoteric meaning where they fast from
different bad thoughts and bad actions there's a lot of generosity and a lot of giving and so i have a fair number of
students that are muslim and so i thought i wanted to catch a picture of the crescent moon to share with them in class so i went out on saturday night to
a park and i got a really beautiful picture of the crescent moon and i was joined there by a couple of canada geese
that are on their way back up here to the north to spend their summer with us and so it was a nice peaceful night
and then i remember that i had a group that was they wanted to do some pictures of orion to create a star trail now
knowing that orion is setting earlier and earlier and knowing how few clear nights we've had i decided to go ahead
and start taking some pictures of orion for them so i just started to take a few pictures and i knew that the iss was
going to be passing close to beetlejuice so i was ready and set up to take that beautiful flyby of the iss and so of
course an airplane came in the view at the exact same moment and so i didn't actually manage to get the iss by itself
but what i got was this uh wonderful view of the iss passing from the top right and a plane passing from the
bottom left past sirius and past the belt that's how i see pictures yeah i love the picture i mean it really shows
kind of that just a position of the night sky with everything we deal with here on earth right
yeah so i went back to our clubhouse you know i packed up for the night i came in we had a zoom clubhouse going i sat in
and i started chatting with everyone and i was on facebook at the same time and gary palmer one of our vips here at
the global star parties had just posted this picture of a supernova this is supernova 2022 ewj
in ngc 3367 and he had posted this picture on facebook and i looked at this and i
started reading up on it because i wanted to know about the supernova so the supernova itself was detected
just a week and a half before that on march 19th and it was detected and characterized
for its spectra and you can see that it is a type 2 supernova because you have that beautiful emission spike for the
hydrogen atom and that's where i really wanted to kind of connect this with burbridge because uh
her work on characterizing the spectra of stars and an understanding of what that meant to what was happening with
the nuclear synthesis at the core of those stars and how it is that you get the heavier elements when the actual
star explodes and becomes either a neutron star a pulsar or a black hole at
the center those type 2 supernovae really give us those heavier elements that david eicher has been sharing with
us the the effect of having these elements generated by the supernovae and what
we're ourselves made of that's that's stardust that that stellar exhaust
that we are all composed of and so here we're seeing a supernova happening in
real time now ngc 3367 is 120 million light years away
this galaxy is less than one and a half arc minutes in size in our view
gary has a four inch refractor beautiful beautiful setup and he took seven 300
second images to get this so i started chatting with him online talking to him a little bit about this and he's
actually done more work since then and last night he sent me his entire field
of view processed much much better and you can see the zoom in showing such amazing
detail on that galaxy it's incredible what he was able to put together over the last couple of days
wow but at that time on saturday night when i saw this first picture of his i shared
it with the clubhouse and i told them i said look there's a supernova and they were like oh that's awesome but we have clouds and i said i know so i want to
find a way to look for this supernova so i went online and i found the virtual telescope project had looked at this
same supernova a week before on march 23rd so it was discovered on march 19th
the virtual telescope project in gianluca massey had looked at it on the 23rd gary imaged it on the 20 or on the
second first of april first of april he imaged it and so i thought well let me look at the
resources that i have available to me and i went on to the lco archive and los cumbres in the archive i found data from
the 0.4 meter telescope in chile and it was rgb filters plus some
infrared dated march 28th now the type 2 supernova that this one
is it's a type 2p it's type 2 linear that one dips dims away very quickly the type 2
plateau actually holds on to its brightness for a short amount of time
so my thought was by march 28th if gary was able to see it on april 1st we should get some good data so i did a
quick and dirty uh image processing of the rgb filters combined them in with a very simple
workflow and i managed to see the supernova myself and i was really really happy about this but i knew
that my approach for processing was really quick and dirty so there was there was better ways to do it
so i shared the file with some of our rasc montreal center members and i invited them to play around with the
image and see what they were able to come up with so qua who's on with us tonight did a pre-processing with cyril
to get rid of some of the noise and then use like i had used and got a much nicer image
and then russell got us all beat when he used pix inside and got just a beautiful image of this galaxy using pix insight
now at that point i was finished with my part of this rabbit hole it was just past midnight on
saturday night and unfortunately i appear to have taken qua off of his normal nighttime schedule
so qua let me pass it to you
hello i'm on now and i will share my content
starting broadcast and
and you see me you see me now uh yes
fantastic all right so i guess to segue into that i'm my name is kwa
i've been on here um on the global star party before uh my shtick i guess is deep sky from downtown
because um we're raising a toddler i live downtown and and trips out to dark sky sites are
our precious precious commodity so we've got something like uh i'm just
looking it up on on clear unclear outside montreal downtown montreal is something
like 12 000 um micro candela per square meter of artificial brightness uh i
looked up my closest metro station or close to subway station here we're over 10 000 and i i'm willing to bet actually
that's that's worse than any place in this country um so that's what i do and and
uh and also what i do i'm really kind of um
very limited in what i've got uh i i shoot with you know um drinking drinking
straw telescopes on um on a star tracker mount so uh the season of galaxies
galaxy season is the cruise of them all because all i can really do is you know galaxy clusters and
and wider field sort of things so on the night of the 23rd
um i decided that i i'd try a test framing um and and some filter testing
uh on my on my balcony uh borderline um here in the plateau downtown montreal um
and i got about 76 minutes exactly 76 minutes of of data on the other leo
triplet so that's m95 96 105 and you know whatever bonus galaxies you get
into the frame um it's nothing to write home about really because 76 minutes with this much sky glow and and with you
know my fairly basic gear um things things get really really grungy
really fast and it takes a lot more exposure and integration time to really
tame that noise um so you know i did that that night
and then cue the endlessly cruel knights of endless cloud and then this past saturday at uh i
think i checked the email it was 11 35 eastern daylight time it was early yet
and karim sent us this this data that he was able to gather from the
from from a robotic telescope in chile um so i guess he shared this image with
you already and this is you know what i what i got is a 60 second integration um
with rgb filters um and you can very very clearly see the supernova uh the
kaboom star uh in this frame you know to the left of the of the galaxy core
and then um as as i was you know thinking about things you know like ngc 3367 that that
name rings a bell um i was like hey it's one of the bonus galaxies in my white field
and uh so you know i i pull up the white field again um
and and then i uh try to zoom in enhance as you were um and and i don't know
if you can see it because i can barely see it here on my screen i don't know if it'll show up you can see the galaxy
okay um but you'll have to you'll have to believe me that to the right of the galaxy core there's a tiny little one
pixel thing yeah i can see it yeah yeah yeah and so amazing yeah that particular
moment for me was like wow kaboom star i caught it accidentally
um with my two-inch you know uh drinking straw refractor awesome um
and so that that was that was approximately uh my my distilled reaction
um and and of course and cream asks if i can zoom and enhance anymore
my answer was no fine but what i can do is i can invert the
image and i hope you can see it a little bit more clearly there
yeah you can see it absolutely yeah and so and actually at that point for a hot minute um
krim and i wondered uh if if if the 23rd of march was early enough uh for
accidental co-discovery credit but of course it wasn't but it's nice to dream a little bit uh here and there
but you know it's like writing yeah very very mel wilson-ish you know yeah
very authentic yeah this this was what was it at this point it was maybe two
two in the morning i think two in the morning karim checked out at 1 30 and and i kept going because i'm like no
i i can do this i can find it and and and uh yeah so it like i said it's it's a it's
a beautiful beautiful honor just to witness the death of the star you know this far away and even in even in the
visible spectrum like it it appears like it it rivals like the entire galaxy core
in in terms of brightness and and that is one of those really amazing things
it's a 15 and a half apparent magnitude 15 and a half with a 2 inch
with the imaging of these days you can make it like an 18 inch it's amazing
and this is in the middle of like a light pollution sink like it's ridiculous how bad montreal is and this
is what he's able to do from his balcony i'm in awe yeah i looked it up recently and and uh
i put in my i punched in my postal code and then for comparison like i was born in hong kong when i punched in uh the
coordinates from mongkok in in hong kong we are worse than that then i punched in the coordinates for the shibuya crossing
in tokyo the the famous scramble sidewalk we are worse than that
wow so there's no excuse everybody all of you guys watching or wherever you are in
the world excuse me it's very important you're not hooking the camera to your telescope
that's our lesson for tonight photography if quad can do it you can do it
and here i am waiting for the skies to darken uh tonight hopefully when i when i go back outside it will still be clear
and this time i'm serious i'm i'm going with a three inch this time this is that's an st80 over there
watch out all right thank you very much everyone that's awesome thanks claw
really incredible and we've actually been having more fun since then because last night russell
went out with his c6 and started to take data of that same area of the sky and
pulled out the supernova himself and so we're we've we're kind of all turning our attention to this to see how well we
can we can not just spot it but also how much you can characterize the photometry
of it if you can uh would be amazing i thought would be to actually get a spectra of this ourselves
but it's so small and so i mentioned this to gary and gary's like well i have access to a
couple of bigger telescopes let me see what i can do so we might be seeing some spectra of this supernova coming from
gary palmer over the next couple of days or from the virtual telescope project wonderful maybe tom field uh when his
segment comes up he can talk a little bit about this uh supernova so that's very cool
wonderful okay so uh i always get energized by such things you know it makes my mind uh stretched to think
about okay it's 120 million light years away that thing exploded
then uh we're getting the photons now um
you know and then i start thinking about how many miles there are in one light year roughly 5.9 trillion
i don't know how many zeros it would add up to um to take 120 million plus five point or
times 5.9 trillion but if you want to know the miles that's it so
plus it's actually even further out because the expansion of the universe so exactly and it's kept moving your mind i
don't know it does but it is beautiful to know that these these candles these
beacons exist and that we have learned so much about the universe from observing them so
much of that worked out originally at mount wilson observatory
um okay so uh you know we have been uh we started doing some transitions with maxi
fellaries as we went from speaker to speaker uh so i'll let him transition into himself because up next is maxi
filari segment so with the astrophotography to the max maxi you want to jump on
well thank you again scott well that's a a pretty good presentation that's a really
good nickname and i and also i saw another one in the chat in youtube a max division
okay next version yes next page that's that's really good uh well
right now i see that cameron wants to to see some
places that we have here in the southern hemisphere right now i'm pointing to
[Music] a planetary nebula let me share the screen
um [Music] here okay
uh right now i'm in the place called c90 because it's the coldwell
catalog but also is ngc
2867 and it's a because i have this field of view
i have an eight inches f4 telescope and my camera is a
almost ipcc uh here's a 60 seconds picture of the that
planetary nebula is pretty really small but
i think using using a normal telescope and trying to
to find it you can you can see it uh this particular place
uh these are these are wonderful i love the planetaries visually as a starting point
you know as the sky is getting darker and and this is these are this is a beautiful look at the beautiful shell
and probably if you had a longer focal length like you say this is more for wide field
but uh then you you you might even be able to see some some structure in it but uh but thanks maxie i i
appreciate that now that that's some problem hey cameron uh
i don't know if this is taking visual because i'm just passing to my cell phone and also to
this software and well the guiding is is guiding
but let's stop this
also you can you can do the way you do planetaries i found and they have such high surface brightness you can go for
like 10 second subs uh you know really short and this just stack the heck out of it and it's
amazing it will it will help uh average out the the seeing and the noise um
and that would that that really helps on on the structure yes yes it's a really really good tool
uh let's get try to go to the tarantula nebula is here in the large
marginal cloud because he camera asked me to to take forward but
from where i have my scope more down here i have my rooftop
and i don't know if i could able to to capture but
we are nearby there so well let's wait for this picture
because i want to see the focus
there you go now i think the focus is little go
blur but okay that's it i i don't i don't have the
this tool that i can get focused from here but you can see in this planetary nebula
it's a they have some kind of core and
white places but okay let's go to ngc
27 20 70. paint a set and
let's see if i can go there okay right now is the
the moment pointing to this place and
well
yeah you'll be able to find out pretty quick if it can do a plate salt yeah if there's shadowing or whatever
then you'll see if you got it but i yeah i noticed that too actually i didn't know your horizon but
i saw a tarantula nebula just like our orion nebula is going down over the
horizon so it's uh yeah we want to see if you can catch it but yeah that would be nice no no it's
it's kind of impossible here right now i think yeah it's really really low but
i think the tarantula is i couldn't get there well
it did the place also [Music] let's cross our fingers
and okay let's reset this let's put auto
and here we go let's take another picture all right you got it 30 seconds
let's close the histogram well in this case it's get a move because
when the mount when the camera started to take pictures it was still
the mount moving so we have to wait a few seconds and then just
you can do the a shot but it's pretty
pretty amazing to to to find some kind of places uh it helps a lot
pretty lots okay let's wait to upload it well i
because i using the wi-fi connection and it only works in this case with a 2.4
gigahertz well here we go is that a 30 second sub
30 seconds up exactly yeah you started with a five second preview right uh i think it goes with a one second
because it only has to find the the stars and then goes to play sold but
in a 30 seconds picture uh here you have a lot
and also when you go well in more seconds it gets more
details you have here a lot of clouds and dust and i'm amazed how green it is that's
really neat that means it's oxygen right oxygen-free it's a lot of oxygen oxygen
here also hydrogen but a accession too
uh maybe two minutes so then
what to the small microgenia club we i cannot be able to go but
if you want let's take a
well i found this particularly area let me find it i
don't know where it was it was pretty high but i hear and
the pen i can only have this kind of shape
because i don't use a filters i don't have narrowband filters
but well these places are also
good to you can need too much info to get
there but if you want i can go to the eta
well that goes without saying we have to do that but also we have the neighborhood statue
nebula the running chicken nebula because
i don't know what they call like that but well he we have the southern cross
and the jew will close their box
see the omega sentry is not up yet right it comes later no i i have to
it's here it's nearby of the southern cross and of course
what's the name of that galaxy
yes i had a shot a couple days ago a couple weeks ago of these places and
they are pretty amazing uh let's hear let's see how it goes in
two two minutes so i'm already happy
thanks thanks max no i'm easily uh easily happy i mean compared to you know i love visual and
this is a wonderful enhancement i was just saying earlier you get a lot of rainy
and with pretty good telescopes it's really really good
well look at how that noise went down
and the the background is starting well i have the light like the pollution here but
anyway i was able to [Music] to capture well you can see this kind of
clusters here we have a lot of nebulosities
more like violets you know
i i can only do this kind of soon because i i don't
[Music] if i using my fingers in the cell phones go okay but here i have only to do
double click and oh yeah are you using teamviewer right
no no no i'm using a bluestacks
and i download the the zwo oh
five five version five uh 5.5 yes yes
yeah i haven't been able to get it connected to the network it's kind of weird but anyhow i i can run stuff on
bluestacks and i and everything but it doesn't recognize the network anyhow i'll figure out but um that's good that you got it
working this this is i only did it in 15 minutes i think
oh yeah let's go to the candy
and you see this
it's in the other place of the median but i think
there's no cable uh
um right now i'm having a n n e q six
of skywatcher uh connected to an eq mode
that i use uh using in the a couple of months ago it's a homemade
eq mode but it works and also works with
with this a little red box
oh i know i know it's so nice i mean with this the asir pro and the plus
they're they really make it so nice for for this type of thing what you're just doing i mean also
you you can re it really helps you organize your your images including all your
calibration frames and all the folders and the naming it's a lot like nina
except its course it's all self-contained but yeah it's it's a really nice tool
well here we have it but it's more down
let's get censored to this place this is the pencil nebula right and no this is the carinae
yeah because it zooms in yeah sometimes you get it off to the side and you see glow in the corner and then you have to
this place i get central yeah okay so
here we have the data karina star and behind of this place let me
set the histogram it's i don't know if you can see some kind of
a blurry color well that's the omon colosse
ah i don't know if i can go no
well it's there but let's take a sort of
60 seconds only that's that's all going to be okay and let's see if the
is working and then if you want it's interesting
well you know that was the the one second preview right that you showed so uh it's interesting
uh the it's more diffuse even though it's quite bright it's more diffused than the orion nebula orion nebula in a
one second preview you're going to have still the central part around the trapezium uh quite right already
quite concentrated and so seeing this you can see it's bright but it's it's
spread out and so as soon as you get the longer sub it's going to pop
i bet once once you get you're doing one minute or 30 seconds er this is one minute
yeah that would be good to be more fast in in the presentation but
uh you can see here is like a
in that you're gonna diagonally but
let's see what i get you know watching this place also with
telescopes and filters there you go there it is all right
ah this is totally awesome look at that and they have some nice salmon pinks in
there oh that's so nice nice cluster such a rich area
it's so nice to see this you know i like i say i never uh i've seen pictures of it in the past
but seeing this kind of semi live it's like you know we're right there enjoying it together it's really cool
really cool i that's well kind of what i would try to to do
here's another places here is this
they are like a lava lamps you know that's without shapes
going in floating and like oil and beautiful
and you know what the nice part about the hater karina just looking at this sub okay this is a one minute sub
uh you you you just start stacking a pile of this these guys on and you're gonna have a fantastic picture and you
don't have to worry about blowing up the the core like in orion that biggest challenge is the core like i said it's
so bright you blow it out you can't you can't see anything you have to do some fancy stuff you're only going to
to burn the star if you go more with more exposure you have to be
careful with that but in in the info of the nebulosity it will not happen that because
well maybe in this place it's getting more more brightest
uh well no but you can just look at the sub right i mean all stacking is going to do is remove
the noise now make it cleaner so so if you if this one this is already one minute
it will be interesting in the future doing like a longer see how far you can push it to get that signal to noise even
more and then just start stacking that'll be really cool oh it's beautiful well we have also the
liberty statue now you're welcome cameron but i think this a r h
a region and i could not able to
to get more too much info but we have here this open cluster
called the wishing well cluster and this is a pretty a pretty
shiny cluster watching this place in a telescope is amazing uh
that red that's your image image frame right that's that's your image
yeah but that but the red is the actual uh uh field of view
nicely yeah that's the good stuff of having an f4
well you know that's another thing by the way i want to say i'll say it again in my segment later is uh
the biggest thing that i discovered with equatorial you know besides the obvious you need to have an equatorial
for for imaging uh the real thing the real benefit is the framing you can consistently
night overnight or any time the frame will be the same and and and that way you can stack over
multiple knights or whatever you want and so that's that is really important whereas if you alt azimuth is going to
be field it's going to be rotated all the time you can't reframe it properly uh so it's this makes it really really
good to to be able to just hey you're always going to have that field of view if you
center on that object bang you know so it's really reliable and repeatable yeah
yeah guys we are running a little bit behind right now we should probably uh
uh uh transition to uh libby next maxi i'm going to let you introduce
libby uh okay and um and then you can uh transition more images as we go from
speaker to speaker so that's okay well uh our next speaker is i are currently
invited in the stars hey hey david how are you hello how are you
i'm i'm good i'm good well uh libby it's all yours
all right so i haven't been to start partying in a while so uh i picked together
some of my favorite poems about like the universe and everything to read today and i even made one of my own
so uh i'll get right into that so the first problem i have is uh
the live the stars by henry wadsworth uh longfellow i won't be reading the
full poem i just picked out a couple stanzas out of all of them hold on just a second my cat's at the door
[Music]
okay i'm back oh anyway uh so um i just picked out
um two stanzas to read um the night has come but not too soon and
seeking silently all suddenly the little moon drops down
below the sky there is no light or in earth or heaven but the cool of
the cool blighted stars and the first first watch of night is given to red planet
mars that's what i have for that poem um i just picked out a couple short ones
um next poem i have is called a night piece by william wordsworth
um this guy is overcast when a continuous cloud of texture close
heavy and lawn all widened by the moon which through vowel is in distantly seen
a dual contracted circle yielding light sophie please spread
that not a shadow falls conquer conquering the ground from rock plant
tree or tower and then another poem i chose was um
winter stars by sarah teasdale um this is really cool and it really
touches me a lot because she talks about a little girl looking up to the sky and that's how i remember a
lot of my childhood memories and like it's um
like clear nights whenever i can go outside and look outside um and just like even with just my plain
eyes or there's something that's where i get my whole tent outside in the driveway my neighbor's like what is she
doing so yeah um
i went out at night alone the young blood flowing blonde beyond the sea
seemed to have drenched my spirit wings i bore my sorrow heavily when i lifted my head from the shadows shaken on the
snow i saw orion in the east run steadily along as long ago
from windows of my father's house dreaming the dreams of winter nights i watched her ryan as
a girl i love another city's light years ago dream goats and youth girls too
the world's heart breaks beneath its wars all things are changed saving the east the faithful beauty of the stars
so that was that poem um i wrote my own um technically poems
don't have to run so don't don't try to i didn't really try um to make mine
rhyme a lot but i didn't write my home about you know our uniforms is bigger
um look in the sky a whole new world to see an adventure the younger reaches of
outer space see the alls on each other's faces the universe awaits you the even bigger step
for mankind the big blue sky during day time wait until night
the universe prevails the wonderful tiny humans like universe be on your
lines that was the one that i wrote um myself which i know it doesn't rhyme but
it's a poem oh i just wanted to say this uh so great to be back and have like
the world you know is reopening again and it's like uh i'm going i'm taking two trips to
summer one to space camp in huntsville alabama expedition 39
and then um i'll be going to the nebraska star party and speaking there too which i'm extremely excited for this
summer um it's all i can i cannot stop talking about it i recently got a new science
teacher and the old one went and she didn't know and i was like i'm speaking at a convention this summer i'm so
excited and she was just like oh wow she's like you need to stop talking about space for two seconds but i'm so
excited to come and um come to nebraska and i'm always up for a good road trip and
it'll be so nice to see everyone there um i've even gotten a couple books from
um clayton um clayton anderson astronaut
and um it's been so nice to have those and everything um i take them to school me every day
um my teachers are always like oh my gosh is that a real astronaut signature
and i'm like yes um but so nice to have everything back open and
the whole idea that i wanted to talk about for this presentation was really you know
uh with everything opening back up again and you know like we're still on watch but everything's open back up again and
everything uh last year i got to go to a planetarium at space camp and it was both
of my friends first time so just seeing them watching it and like they were both
like oh my gosh why have i never seen this before because it was so cool to see them
you know react to a planetarium before even when i went to my first planetarium when i was little picking my brother up
from space camp it was just like so much fun because
i mean like our universe the way that we see our universe is like for telescopes but another way is for
like you know like site scientific digital
you know platforms that can show us a rough draft of what most of our universe looks like because we have no
clue who have bigger universes i mean just our universe is huge
it's ginormous so it's kind of hard to look at it all from our little tiny
earth we're so tiny compared to the big universe that's out there so uh
i've been to a couple planetariums before and i wanted to talk about those and
how much fun it was and like i feel like every single time i lost the planetarium
the next day i went home and got up my telescope i was like it is so much fun to see this stuff
and then um even just seeing it through my telescope like you know that is the real saturn i am
looking at through my telescope that is a real jupiter those are jupiter and full moons i even have a photo um
of jupiter and you can slightly see all the moons around um
around jupiter and it's so pretty and everything and i flunked it off everywhere i'm like do
you see this picture as of jupiter and again and like uh
it's so nice everything's been back open um and i'm so glad to be in the star party
and thank you for having me on
i think we lost scott did we no okay i was waiting for it he did shine
back in well it's great seeing you again libby no i was writing so i i was just uh
i was thinking olivia honestly this is what i was thinking i was thinking about you
you know let's propel you know 20 years ahead okay and just thinking of you growing in science uh doing something
that you love and uh but i can imagine you on your first spacewalk you know and
uh uh thinking about maybe uh your early times on global star party and we'll we
can all say yeah we knew her then so yeah it was my first time that i went to a
star party it was downtown in my town and my mom just took me i was like i wasn't really into space
back then um i mean i looked at the sky and thought oh cool space
but like i never got into it until like i came to my first star party and i was like
oh my gosh i love this stuff i'm addicted like that was a turning point for me where i
was like oh my gosh where can i go and like get more
telescopes and stuff like that and even to the first telescope that i bought on facebook marketplace for like
25 dollars that i still have today it's awesome yeah i even go back and look at my old
videos on explore scientific of the tutorials and i go back and i read the comments
um i got a lot of comments about my shiny jacket protecting me from the aliens that's one thing i always
remember sure yeah i have a question for you libby um did you mention that a teacher
told you stop talking for space for two seconds
yeah yeah we recently just got a new science teacher and i went up to her like the
second or third day that she was teaching there i'm like hey so like i'm kind of a big astronomer
i own a bunch of telescopes and like i kind of like have a couple books signed by astronauts do you want me to bring
them and she was like yeah cool so i started bringing them and then like after a couple weeks or so she was like
okay um do you have anything else than like a charming is like nope
i was like that's it okay yeah i was my comment was gonna be
that it's your passion for astronomy that that drives you and it's like you have
to tell her if she says stop talking about her for two seconds you have to look at her in the eye and
say lady that's something i'm incapable of doing
i will talk space yeah and it it's that kind of passion that leads you to
discovering things even further so it yeah i would i wouldn't this is the one
case where you just kind of have to look at your teacher and say i'm sorry but this is where my this is where my heart
is now you learn other areas of science and then you can relate them to
how they also play out in astronomy so you know that's all my teachers are like very
amazed by like what i do and everything and they're like even like they're like bring more books
bring
other quick questions i know i have to move on did you start that uh astronomy club
at that school um so i did have one meeting and then um
when i uh so i actually reached out to the principal and i said hey i would like to
start the club but then i kind of backed out on it because then you know if i start a school club i have to have a
teacher with me 24 7 everywhere we go um if we were to travel out anywhere um
if we were to travel out like anywhere um we would have to have a teacher with us
like everything would have to be for school and i kind of didn't want that so i just posted on my page and um
we didn't have people the first meeting it was just my friends who came but we didn't come across this like little
three-year-old girl who came and we decided on the club in the name of the club and then um i've been waiting to
host another one um i do have more people on my facebook page who are saying they'll come and
join and everything and my area and everything and another thing i'm going to do is start
it virtually because i know there's a lot of kids like all around the world not just in my
little corner i don't live in a huge city so i'm going to start it virtually too so
i've been trying to work on that oh that's great yeah we had a little kid
who came up to our uh astronomy club meeting i still talked to my friends how to use a telescope and
told them you know like this is this don't touch that and stuff like that so we have the
finger on the eyepiece yeah well that's excellent yeah
i was like i like to look at stars not your fingerprints so anyway um we had this little kid who
came up it was a little girl and she came with her mom and then we she just started drawing with us
because my first activity planned for the first meeting was to just draw your favorite planet
so she came and she draw she drew her cat and she dropped
drew her favorite planet and so it was so cute to see her and then she came her
mom said hi and then she hung with us like the whole meeting she was like five
four i can't remember her name i have a bunch of the drawings in the club back
in um my club basket and i've been waiting to host another one it's been really cold and we've had all
these snow and then everything but now that everything's a lot better now that it's springtime i'll be able to
host again more oh yeah that's great olivier thank you so much for coming on
to global star party again and we're going to take about a 10 10-minute break right now and then we'll be back
with with more programming uh with marcelo souza in brazil so
give us about 10.
for those of you in the chat this is your chance to get your uh words on the
big screen hey adrian good to see you man
good to see you again cameron i've seen your your great excapades i know you're doing
pulling triple duty on a lot of things but uh it really showed uh
that was great work you've been doing a lot of those shots just really nice
nice dark skies too it's been fun to uh just get out there um
even if sky is not perfect or the clouds come out um
it's just great to take whatever whatever i can get what do you mean even if half of your awesome pictures have
clouds coming through them and it just gives so much texture to them they're amazing that was
nebulosity nebulosity yeah yep that the story behind that being
you know how whenever it's too cloudy you can't image you can't you know
the very object you might want to shoot will be behind clouds so you can't take
frames well if you do an entire wide field i said why not shoot with the clouds and
then in post-processing i'll see what i can get and and stuff turned out pretty good
because you had some especially at dark areas things from the milky way or like nebula
that's in the same plane just shine through the clouds it's something you just don't see
um you go you know to anything less than say portal 2 you just don't
see you don't see m5 shine through the clouds like that that's uh
that was pretty awesome for me and um the type of images you can get
um within just 30 seconds you know they match the type of images i have to do a
two second or two minute composite shot to get similar images
i go the ones in the south i can just go or dark skies 30 seconds boom
it's uh it was amazing just you're talking to some people who've never seen really real dark skies so uh
you know it's it's it's like you're taking us there and transporting us there which is awesome and derek we see
you it's great to see you and uh portal one to six are forbidden there yeah well we're at portal 9000 here in
montreal so i totally get that hey tom it's over
tom
this is this is the uh we're currently just in the uh chatting stage uh this is the coffee break adrian hosts our coffee
break by making everybody else feel bad about our our awful skies and how wonderful the skies are he gets to
do that i'm sitting in portal 7 000 skies
i have to drive roughly three hours just to get to the sky that begins to show
you what's really out there three hours that's it that's it that's it
yeah i i i actually consider myself fortunate hey avery let me just let you know i i live vicariously through you
and your images so i'll tell you that because i wish that i could get some i mean
it'll take me like 45 hours to get the shots that you get because of my light pollution
i was so happy to just get to see uh to just get to see orion and yes harold
we're we're able to travel and uh able to share our adventures which is really awesome
actually speaking of which is david eicher still around uh he's not on screen he is logged in
though i'm not sure yeah i'm wondering if he's still here i have something to share with him uh if he is but it
doesn't look like it that's okay well i know i just booked my hotel for cherry springs so oh wow
so uh first time in four years i'll be there because it's just been such horrible weather there
but um i'll be i'll i'll be going there from like i think the first to the sixth in june so
uh josh got clear nights that's that's fantastic but his computer's taking all
the time downloading so [Laughter] yeah
once my buddy josh joshua josh has some great pictures too yeah and i will i did
see the note respect portal 7 through 10 skies i'll try my hardest but um
i made the choice to be mobile and to know where i could go where the sky is the the contrast in the sky just changes
right there on the tip of the thumb of michigan is where it begins to change and then if
you go further north you're in that zone in a lot of different places in michigan
shooting over the lake helps because that's the one place you don't get light pollution is directly over a large body
of water so you notice the clouds are darker underneath when you're looking over water you can look on land and you
can see some of the towns lighting up the underside of the clouds so it's uh
so i do try and shoot in the higher portal zones there's some
i think i have a picture that i'll share it'll be like an hour from now but i do have a picture taken in a uh
a lesser inferior portal zone so i don't i do try
not to not to ignore you know the portal 4 dark sky parks i
think you have to be you have to be dark enough to see a few different things naked eye i
don't know you know if if it's not dark you just imagine you just are like you know that that looks
like that looks like it's a globular cluster i'll just you know oh i'll take a picture we'll see what comes out uh
what are the skies like over there i live in seattle so there is no sky yep
there you go all right you know people had me at seattle town you can drive into the
mountains in just a few you know houses per hour that's true you just get over the mountains and get just great skies
but you know i look at some of the images that you all do and then i look at the amount of integration time you
know like the in the backs of some of the magazines some of the showpiece images too and it's 10 or 20 hours of
imaging i don't get that much in a month even in the summer sometimes here because of the skies and the clouds my
wife's planning a a deck party in late june and i'm going are you kidding it's still going to be rainy in late june
so mom i was just telling the guys earlier i'm in seattle and over the last four months we've had
three clear nights and one of them just fogged right over and just cleared
out all of my optics so basically i know exactly how you feel but that's why we're saved by the imaging here you know yeah i was just
thinking you you get whatever images you can and that keeps you through the the winter and the cloudy nights yeah plus
you know i was out at the bush school a local school here with some kids last fall
and it clouded up and we had a video camera pointed at vega capturing a live spectrum and you
couldn't even see the star and we were still getting a spectrum which is just astonishing to me i think you were
mentioning adrian that that kind of thing happens the starlight the starlight cuts through
and that actually gives me an idea i took a picture like that where i had a lot of cloud cover and it
was shooting right in the face of um brighter city lights in the back and um
you still can see you can still see the difference to most people there are exactly 24 hours in the day the ground
only moves during earthquake and the earth rotates just like it does on a globe and generally speaking that makes
sense but scientists who like to find out exactly what's going on know the ground actually moves around quite a bit
days are never quite 24 hours and the earth actually wobbles on its axis in a very particular way as it revolves
around the sun scientists know all this by using a technique called very long baseline
interferometry which is basically a fancy term for using radio dishes to very precisely measure the earth's
orientation vlbi was originally developed back in the 60s to take pictures of quasars early on though
someone realized that because quasars never really move you could use them as reference points throw the whole process
in reverse and figure out how all the telescopes were moving relative to one another basically when a quasar emits a
radio wave that wave reaches different telescopes at different times for astronomy you'd use a computer to
imitate a giant telescope and get a good picture of the quasar but if you instead pay close attention to the time
differences you can use geometry to figure out how far apart the telescopes are and by making lots of those
measurements you can start to see how the ground beneath the telescopes moves around when you have to adjust your clock and that the earth wobbles on its
axis as it moses around the sun so the next time you feel like you've had a long day or that your house is a few
millimeters from where you last left it you can switch on a bunch of radio telescopes point them at quasars and
find out just how right you are
pretty cool 3d video definitely and i like the music
man we were playing with a 60 inch few months ago [Music]
150 megapixel camera [Music]
it's about a hundred thousand dollar camera though
uh we are back after our ten minute break here and um you're watching the 89th global
star party and we are going to transition to
maxie who's going to show us a live view for a minute and then we're going straight to marcelo souza down in brazil
so maxie you want to take it away
do we still have maxi
i'm not sure we still have maxi i said he wanted to go get a sandwich
okay well we'll go straight to martial
and maybe we don't have marcelo either no we have marcelo yep yep i'm here i'm here are you there
michelle oh yeah yes i'm here nice to see you
that's a cool shirt you got on he's very hot today
oh yeah that's what i hear so what's happening in in brazil uh with
your astronomy activities uh we are planning many things the in
april is the global month of astronomy then we are planning a lot of activities
here this month and we are organizing our international
meeting now that you're happy in in on april 22 23
you'll be on hybrids events but you have also presidential parts we
feel the participation of students here in a theater in our seats
and we are we are also making plans for the total eclipse
total lunar eclipse on may 15 16
it will be a big event here in our region in brazil and having many seats that we will have
the telescopes there for the population then i hope you have
a last time we had 10 000 people participating i hope that this time you had more people involved
i today i was remembering
uh a book that was the motivation
main motivation for me to to study astronomy i made
physics but i worked with cosmology but since then i work with
their astronomy popularization teaching and this book is i think that's for
everybody is a fantastic book i wish i have here
my original edition that i bought in 19 8 i don't remember the year but as if
i was very young then i will show some curiosities that say motivated me
to study more and this is one i will talk about mars curious is about mars
and it's not changing what is happening here
oh yes and these are the two moons the small moons of mars
phobos and the deimos and the i curiosity about these two moves that's
it when i was very young that's a recent thing that
i try to understand is this book universe travels
written by jonathan swift in 1726 and in this book
he oh sorry i come back here in this book he
have information let's see for me when i was very young something
that see i tried to understand more how that he made this prediction
he predicted that the laptops have discovered two lesser star
satellites which revolve around mars whereof the innermost is distant from
the center of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters
and the outermost five the former revolves in the space of 10
hours and the 21 and a half hours
this is something that for me was fantastic because these are the
actual information about the satellite the two moons phobos the distance is
2.676 mass
radii that he predicted three times considering the center of the planet
then is to tower he predicted two and a half times the distance
the main distance and the art appeared that you know today is almost 80 hours no less than 80
hours 7 hours in almost 40 minutes and he predicted 10 hours
and the demos have here the distances c 6.
nine and he predicted five times when the mars
paid and more than disney because he predicted the distance
entity opto period he predicted 21 hours and a half and the actual
is 30 hours did something that see andy
they were only discovering in 1877. i do something that
he i believe that he can send the numbers to to using lottery
because he they had the idea of two moves around the
mast 100 years more than one of his before the discovery of the most
something fantastic we have an explanation why he
imagined that mars have two moves i believe that he uses the same idea
that he the earth has one moon and he knew in his time that he
had four moons then he can imagine that you have two moons on mars
and the in saturn probably eight moons something like this this may be
what motivated him to make this prediction but the distance and george appeared in
something fantastic that he made this prediction more than 100 years before the discovery of the
moons i don't know if everybody knew about this but this is a something that motivated
the also students to know more about mars well this is something that is fantastic
this prediction raised by jeannette swift in this book i believe that everybody know about
disney is something for me it was a big curiosity when i was very young
andy what motivated me was these missions viking one and we came
too [Music] and that landed in 1976
and this book that's how is my difference here cosmos
christmas from coffee this is the original one that i haven't chewed today i have a lot of
tapes here to protect and this was for me something fantastic
choice very expensive and there was very difficult to me to buy here in brazil that's a fantastic book
that until today i asked the students to read this book
even we have many things new about
the planets and the information about them and these are something that was amazing the first pictures
of mars well i didn't believe that i i was seeing the image of another planet
only when i i i bought the book that it was possible for me now these students can see everything
online just in time that's it when arriving and then uh these are the pictures
fantastic pictures of mars taken by the viking
yeah this is for me until today i show these pictures
to the students when i talk about mars i begin with the amazing of course and the results of emission
or vicking missions and something that is fantastic
you can see here amazing that you have trash there well since this moment we begin to
polluted mast and this is
another fantastic image i remember when i saw for the first time
this maze this is the region of sidonia hamas now until today if you
put in the google sedona you see a lot of information about the et some cities
there and because near the of this face here you have regions here
that you have the mountains like pyramids
here and but see this was 19
now this dark circles here is part of the image that you didn't
receive here no then during i had to wait 20 years
to see a new image of this region only here is near
we see like a face in the master face until today today when i showed this
image a lot of students didn't know about the dismiss because he
they [Music] are very young you know they tell us more about his niece and
this was responsible for this book that's a fantastic book like i was saying that it's a demo haunted the
words and that's very important also today man because the subtitle is science has a
candle in the back we need this today and in this book
what motivated him was this image and in 1996
the maguro about servaio took again images in this region
right sidonia and here you see the mountain here
and when we see near this is a mountain
a lot different yes you see that in the shadows let's give the
idea that you have a face there and here probably here
they sit here near you have a lot of like the pyramids here
and something that motivated the the series on tv that is these targets
that they come from pyramids something like this our nature of
mountains that we have here on mars but see that see many people imagine in this moment
that you you found something different from us this is how you really measure the
mountains you have to we had to wait 20 years to see this in age
that's only 1996. that's received this is a major filimanta oh wow look at that
very interesting and this is uh the face of the omas
martello do we know about the height of that feature on mars
geographical i don't know but it's not difficult to find this information it's not difficult to find because there's a
very famous region that is sidonia it's very famous reason and they also we have
as mayor in akrata and here in omaha here this mayor here i will show here
here is my own then you can find every anything that you want there
and like when you you look to clouds in the sky
and another thing that is fantastic for me that shows the technology that you we
have is this these are when the opportunity was on mars
this is the you yeah he
arrived here in this crap to victory and here we have a meiji of fiji's
hobo here
yes here is a region that you have here in brazil that received this navy is
code cape that means there's a city near us here in brazil and here i don't know
if you see the over here in the image the image was taken by
another spaceship that your eyes are in your heart
and he can show him i'm sorry he's here uh it's very small here in the but i'll
show near here is the holder now
this was 10 years ago probably or more then you can see amazing surface of mass
we feel one meter of the resolution in the camera there's
something that was fantastic we can now we can see everything that is in surface
of mass here near the over here anyways take it by
in a satellite that's in the orbit of mars and here you can see the whole thing moving oh yeah
this is something fantastic here it's like the a science fiction you move
you can see something in surf face the face of another planet yes that's
what we're controlling yes it's amazing yes something that's almost unbelievable
and here i did three hovers that is fantastic and something that
i ever talk about mars and i have the opportunity to talk with the students
here they asked to talk about mars and the possibility of life from mars i don't
have a water now almost that you know that's here now have a
very
magnetic field or mass this is what was responsible
to mask to lose the water from space because you have don't have
protection for the radiation of the sun and these immediate figures the
water and this is a fantastic image of the surface of mine my son is a
place that i when i have opportunity i want to
to know the news about the what they are discovering now about mars that is something that
it probably is the next step for forest no
[Music] news about our projects
these are the characters of our animated cartoon that
will begin to be transmitted this week in brazilian tv local tv
we have a farm and each one is received
in now this this one is jasi
that is the name of the degardness of the moon
for the brazilian indigenous you just see this is this rules in honor of the name
of our astronomy group that is name of astronomer that
is a brazilian and from belgium that say in english i don't know deutsche convent is a country in
europe here is katherine that we honor a catherine johnson from other
and this is another character is apollo well that's required the son of physios
and here is our that we talked like last week that is the
our first app about the variable stars that is available in this link that i'm
showing here and these are the our thing
this is our food team that is developing audio projects
that is developing apps developing animated cartoons and the educational
material about astronomy and space exploration this is our group in brazil
that we have we have support of the united states consulate here in hindi
supporting us here and these are the activities we have in schools we ever give to the students a
newspaper about the the first time that the mayor arrived on
the moon and here have his cv also a material from other
and this is part of our presentation in schools for these students and the
stephen hamilton sent to us many glass we are giving to all the students they
receive solar glass to see the sun
here in our team to go outside when we have the sun it's clear and they
look to this to the sun and we are now organizing the international meeting in on april 22 23
well let's be an online version of the events this week we are making contacts we
begin the contacts for the these speakers thank you very much
and i think i think that we are here to to finish the
next edition of the sky's up magazine we have we are receiving articles
and i think that's it so we will have a audio material for the naked next
edition of the sky's up that that is a fantastic magazine
thank you thank you very much my cello we look forward to it that's great that's great
okay um so do we have um do we have maxie here
with us at this point to show us another quick live view
perhaps he's still having dinner okay that's fine
okay so um uh thank you very much again our next speaker is tom field tom is uh when
i first met tom i thought he was the most enthusiastic guy i'd ever met about
studying spectra through amateur telescopes and um
at a few star parties he was demonstrating his uh his r-spec
software and uh how you could actually see what's going on in as you know in a
star with an amateur telescope that's something i really did not think that you could get much data on or that it
would be very interesting but it turns out that it's extremely interesting and if you really want to know what's
going on you want to go beyond the beautiful picture and you want to see what's really happening
in stars that you can observe through pretty
simple equipment you know you look no further than uh tom fields r spec and so tom i'm going to
turn this over to you and uh thank you so much for coming on to a global star
party well you're welcome and thanks for that kind introduction scott i appreciate it
uh good evening everybody and some of my friends i see here uh marcelo and kareem
and others it's nice to see some some people i've met over the years yeah karim i think it's better
with a mustache your daughter should put that mustache back on so
you know the title of this gathering i looked at when scott sent me an email and uh it's the universe within and
beyond and i was thinking well within we can talk you know nuclear synthesis and
we're all stardust and all that but i was thinking you know what is it that draws us to this activity and with
the visual imaging activities you know we're just drawn to the grandeur and just the senses scott was saying
earlier these just enormous lengths of time and distance and somehow
that makes us maybe feel small but it also makes our troubles feel small and that's one of the advantages of this
star stuff but i wanted to do some science in addition to the visual imaging i was doing which
is how i got into this and i think a lot of the time when we think about getting into new activities
it was like this for me in like 2009 was
scared basically i look i'm i break just about every piece of hardware that i
touch i you know telescopes die on me i have a lot of trouble with hardware
and i was never much of a visual imager and i was never you know i didn't get a degree in astrophysics or anything
and what i found was that all of us or many of us and these days i
hear it a lot from many of you out there want to do some science and
what i found was as scott was saying it's surprisingly easy my biggest
challenge i have a small business but my biggest challenge is just convincing people it's something that they can do that they can
capture the specter of stars and in terms of this universe within what i've found is the more i understand
the objects i'm looking at the more rich my visual observing is
so in fact if you think back to the first time you saw the orion nebula
think about it where were you or the first time you looked through a telescope for me it was a star party in the city
in denver i was all excited i got up to a dab somebody was running the dog much like
many of you doing outreach and they were talking about this great thing we were going to see and i looked
through uh maybe your experience was like mine i was really disappointed
i was in the city you know i had no idea what i was looking at and you know it it was just i was
crestfall excuse me and so i'm just grabbing a little prop here
the reason i tell that story is because if your experience was like mine
why would you ever go back and look at the orion nebulae well partly we've gotten better we have
dark sky sites we have better telescopes this is what i wanted to show you averted vision right we can now look at
things through averted vision and see much more clearly we understand how to do that kind of thing
scott's going to start selling these because they're a real observing tool
so manufacturer is yeah probably overseas you might have trouble
getting them there's going to be a run on them after this presentation so i thought those were eclipse glasses
yeah i thought they had diffraction gratings at the pupil it looks like there's something there in the center that's
right yeah there is that's right so but i'll tell you even though we have
all those advantages now when we look at things like the orion nebula i think one of the reasons we go back
and enjoy it as much as we do is because even if it's just this smudge like it was that first time i saw it
we bring our understanding to the eyepiece over the years we've all read a little bit about it being the birthplace
of stars and you know a stellar nursery and when we bring that understanding
then the visual experience gets richer and that's what spectroscopy did for me was it complemented the visual observing
uh you know the uh the visual imaging of which i did very little
uh and so what i what i got was this little inch and a quarter grading
and i'm just delighted i've never done this before i've talked a lot on zoom
but i'm just delighted at the possibility of showing you how grading works look at those lines
there so this is like a prism it you know it's pretty transparent you probably wouldn't
want to drive your car i'm wearing this as a monocle i'm just saying you know talk to your insurance agent before you
go down that route but you can see those lines and those lines
just like when you look at a rainbow through a prism will allow you to understand what's in
that gas tube or what's in a star that's you know millions of light years
away wonderful wonderful live demo wonderful demo yeah absolutely cameron the two
behind brilliant absolutely brilliant oh thank you so much i was i'm thinking why
haven't i been doing this all these years brilliant well thanks i really appreciate it so
that's the kind of thing that i wanted to do is i wanted to do spectroscopy
where i showed people including myself what was possible and so i just i have a
handful of slides here but let's not get carried away with slides but i wanted to show you
what happens and the way you can use a grating like this you know you can screw it onto the nose
because if you just have a dslr that is tracked then you can screw it onto the nose
piece or if it's camera or you know video camera or still camera you know
filter wheel so this isn't hard you know i think there's lots of obstacles to getting started in something new
especially something with as many syllables as spectroscopy i'm telling you this is off the record now but in my
next life i'm going to choose a field that has far fewer syllables it's too hard to pronounce
so when we put this on the telescope we get a rainbow spectrum
that looks like this that's it that's the whole thing it's beautiful just in itself
but if you look really closely at some of these you'll see like right there there's a gap
and now whether there's lines or gaps depends on some physics which i won't get into you can see those bright spots
on those rainbows but that's what they say like 70 or 80 percent of the
professional research that gets done in astronomy gets done with spectrum
whether it's detecting e.t including the face on mars you know if we discover e.t it's likely
to be done spectroscopically we'll detect the gases on these planets but even if we're not imagers even if
we're you know personally not imaging knowing something about spectroscopy can enhance our experience
um what i did that first night right here in seattle was i used i actually dug it out it's the first time i've seen
it in probably 10 years um this is
the the logitech webcam that you can even see some of the duct tape residue and i put a
uh you know eyepiece barrel on it and put it on my c8 right outside that window on my backyard and see how
i came in at midnight you know my my blue jeans the knees were grass-stained because i was looking at vega in august
but i was right here in seattle in a few minutes i'll show you what that spectrum looks like but it looks something like this
so that's the kind of thing i saw i was starting to say one of the obstacles is people think this stuff what are the
obstacles expensive wrong like a 200 dollar grading hard to use hard to mount no you screw
it onto your nose piece of your camera most of the time hard to understand no
i'm a knuckle dragging programmer uh you know and and the cool thing is you don't have to know all the deep deep
astrophysics to to do this kind of thing and observe it and
you don't need a huge telescope heck even an ed80 you know can do this kind
of thing and we were talking during the break if some of you weren't uh weren't around about observing in the city
and how you can spot things sometimes through the clouds with a ccd i was out with some school
kids the other day and last fall and it clouded over we had a video camera pointing at vega
and the spectrum just stayed up on the screen even though it was completely clouded a live spectrum i'll show you in
a few minutes also some outreach examples just really quickly some of the science
these differences here are fingerprints of the elements and these are called
spectra and we actually name these with that that's hydrogen alpha that what that's robin egg blue hydrogen beta
there's hydrogen everywhere in the universe and so when we see these we can use them to study what we're seeing tiny
bit of science here you'll recall the bohr model has electrons jumping around in
in atoms and when they jump they absorb or emit light so when they jump between these two orbits you get
red light there's that robin egg blue and hydrogen jumping from orbit four to two and there's another jump there
so that's all we're observing and i'll be really honest i don't know any other
molecular subatomic physics or any of that to do what i do and have a great time
you can see what happens you have basically a grating in your light path and you get that rainbow and then we
study it and as you saw this earlier the kinds of mounts that we can use so what can we
actually do because that's what we want to do again coming back to this universe within
we're in this i think you know as humans we're learning machines you watch a two-year-old or a one-year-old or you
know any child and they're just in learning mode they're sponges
and all of us are self-selected the fact that we're here listening to talks like this means that we've really embraced
that in an inner learning machine and that's why i enjoy this activity so much
this is just a wonderfully colorful view wow and shows us something just
just this is really the bedrock of the science that we read about in the magazines
these are separate images captured at different times by torsten hanson look at the instrument here a 20 centimeter
newtonian with a video camera and again the details here we won't get into
a lot of the details but the stars go from hot to cool and so you can see the hot b stars here
and then a stars and then down to the cool k and m stars but look at the differences this is how we know what the
star temperatures are because these stars are different temperatures and their spectra are different
isn't that amazing so we can do this with a backyard telescope it's a big it's been a well-kept secret not
deliberately well kept i've been shouting it from the rooftops for a decade now but you can capture this kind of data
i'll be honest i uh photometry never really captured my attention i'm delighted the aavso has jumped into
spectroscopy stella kafka when she was there arnie before her
they now have a database for a spectra that you can contribute
and will be used scientifically so there are opportunities for us to actually
contribute with spectra i'll just show you one quick thing here notice that this robin egg blue line
is strongest on that star it's weaker here right and weaker there and doesn't even exist on
these really cool stars so that's how hydrogen lines like these like these
excuse me can help us understand stars so what about that can you see that feature there on your screen i doubt it
i can barely see it it may be averted imagination on my part but there is a feature there and when we
plot this data by intensity so that peak there
is because the star is really bright right that's an intensity axis there
and then this dip there is because of there's a little dimming there so that
we plot the data that's really what it's all about is looking at graphs it's not for everybody somebody some people
prefer to be with pretty images so i'm going to move really quickly here we have very little time but i wanted to
show you some examples of the kinds of things that we can do here's a star party for those of you who do outreach
uh again this is in france this is marseille uh they're doing a gas tube here like
that one behind me which i'm going to turn off so it lasts
um and for those of you who are teachers this makes a great activity uh in the
classroom i've just run over my airpods here
so uh if you set up a small telescope and scott was mentioning this is that the table mountain star party i think scott
that we first met on this we set up a again it was a explore scientific small
telescope with the jury and uh just pointed it at vega it's like a crowd magnet because it's
colorful it's live video it's moving around in fact just really quickly here
i want to show you how easy it is to get data this is an image that you could get off your telescope or off of your dslr
it's in my r-spec software but listen it's late nobody wants to sit through a software demo but i want to show you
there's the rainbow there's the spectrum that came off the star analyzer grading and if you just bracket that region in
with the software over here you get that intensity graph i mentioned so that peak is because the
star is really bright and see that little dip right there that's that gap right there that dimming
so those are the absorption lines this is from that first night out with my c8 and listen
like i said i'm a knuckle dragger i break things this is actually a video i shot that night
so um there is the video playing you can see the the spectrum jumping around here and
even over on the right here the spectrum's jumping around because my scene is changing but those dips
are from the hydrogen on that distant star and there's lots of things we can do to to measure that data and figure
out what it is but we don't have time for any of that so let me turn that off uh and just show you a couple more
examples um and that's certainly not the one we want since we saw that i wanted to show
you just a couple listen well this is cool yeah when janet simpson from the uk sent
me this again i have a confession i couldn't i honestly honestly i couldn't remember what a wolf-free a-star was
like many of you i'd read about them over the years but you know a lot of things go in one ear and out the other
but my experience has been once it's your data things start sticking and so again
quickly a wolf ray star is a late stage star some of you here can do much better explanations of it and understand far
more than i do blown off the outer shell the strong stellar winds create and
here's the the intensity graph and look at that graph we've got carbon carbon
carbon what's going on here well remember stars burn through the elements so to speak and at some point they're
they're consuming carbon and this is like the soot as if of that star and we're seeing that with
a dslr on a mechanical tracker and wolf ray and stars are very rare and
yes uh i had recently read that they are the source of fluoride
interesting i didn't know that yeah there's only fluoride so the fluoride that's in our teeth
comes from these stars that's that's amazing really amazing we can look at the spectra of comets
again beautiful little string of gems and see the the carbon the swan bands again really quickly here you know
earlier i think kareem was talking about supernovae and just real quickly here
i think most of us are familiar with doppler shift where things change in wavelength as they're moving
so if something's coming towards you the wavelength is going to be shorter like a train going through a station right where
we're higher everyone is coming towards you laura when it's moving away suppose we were looking for some those features
in a spectrum and instead of finding them there we found them over here
that would mean that it was blue shift and the object was coming towards us so here is a supernova again the shortest
supernova presentation you've ever heard two stars some guests from one goes on the other and it blows up
and i mean you can dilate that and you can talk about it for a lifetime
tom i need you to substitute for my class there won't be a quiz on this either frustration i just saw
yeah no i know it was a little fast like a small town blink and you miss it
well it's like supernova in some ways so uh in uh m101
there was a supernova and we know supernovas are as as scott was mentioning just enormously bright
there's an image of one that was local to us uh at a different time you can see it there's a spherical expanding shell
around it there's a spectrum that david strange captured and again just to give you an idea of the kinds of
sensitivity we've got just a nine inch telescope less than 15 minutes of integration time
and that spectrum had a deep dip in it so again there's the spectrum there's the star there's the rainbow in mono
because we're more sensitive in mono and there's a deep dip that's that gap right there
now again there's a lot a lot more to this that we can discuss i'm going to move pretty quickly here just because of
time uh i apologize that we can't really get much further into that except to remind you
that adam reese used type and his team used type 1a supernovae
for the work that they did on the accelerating cosmological expansion and won the super and won the supernova
you can't won the super bowl no we'll get that right yet won the nobel prize for that work i think the instrument
they used might have been a little more than the star analyzer grading what about again last example
measuring the spectrum of a black hole of course black holes don't emit light that we can see but
the accelerating matter that's accretion disk that's spiraling
in it gets very hot so here david hayworth down in portland oregon
captured this spectrum there's two little dots of light there let's zoom in on it there they are
so and there is the spectrum now this guy
martin schmidt was 24 years old when he looked at this and like any good science he tried to
prove or eliminate what those lines were and so he compared them to vega which by the way is what was in
my software a few minutes ago there's those hydrogen lines that we'd expect to find on most stars and there aren't any
lines or any peaks or dips up on this data that match that data so he went ah there's no hydrogen on
this object whatever it is except there was and he figured it out
massively red shifted because this object was so far away
this is the kind of thing that you can do with a backyard telescope this doesn't take hours of integration
time in fact a lot of guys and gals like doing this in the city because it's much more immune to light pollution
so again david calculated the redshift you can see he was pretty close to the published value
uh and um again we can talking about age of objects this light you know two
billion light years away it originated what astonishes me is that light that's
so old can still have this data embedded in it it's all around us every night you're
out under the stars all that data is just walking over us so
the amazing thing is that that light still has that information many things or most other things in the universe don't age so well there's martin schmidt
a few years ago now i've been accused of throwing him under the bus and it's true i'm jealous of his full head of hair
but anyway just to finish up here how do you get started doing this kind of thing first of all
i was going to say take my word for it believe me but ask around go to our forum and be convinced that this is
something you can do which you can if you've ever captured an astronomical image you can do this and i'll help you get
there um so diffraction grading you need some sort of camera
you may need a spacer and you may need some oh you do need some software this is my software you've
seen splashed all over the footer there there's some freeware out there it's what i started with and then i decided i
needed uh need to write my own so that's how you get started my site has a ton of information i continue and
it surprises me scott that after all these years i can continue to be as astonished by this i think you know just
to sort of recap that when something's beautiful and it captures our attention
that beauty doesn't really fade i mean when you smell a rose next week it's it's as beautiful as this week when you
smelled it and i think my enthusiasm comes from the same sense of wonder and beauty that we all get looking at the
sky and spectroscopy has surprised me in how much easier it can be than what i expected easier cheaper more
exciting and less demanding of intellect thank goodness for me so thanks again i know i moved fast maybe took a little
more time than i should have i'm here to answer questions uh from my site anytime you want thanks for
inviting me scott i appreciate the opportunity yes absolutely well i did
uh throw out uh your website out on the uh on the chat and i do recommend you
know they start with the 100 line uh grading and um
uh which looks like that it's on a you know standard inch and a quarter uh uh
filter ring and um we'll fit on a number of cameras as as you suggest and uh and
get the software and if you think you need the little space or something later you can do that but you can get started
directly with uh what he's recommending and i think it's fantastic i've seen it in
action myself and uh absolutely you know get started in uh
doing some spectra you know join the ranks of of uh research astronomers by doing that and uh uh you know his
software makes it uh easy and you're gonna have insight to what's going on inside of a star you know you'll see you
know i i wish i was doing this when betelgeuse was uh going through its
dimming effects and stuff you know what would i have learned myself you know instead of just
uh reading uh you know the science forums about it so totally totally cool tom thank you again
i i am so thrilled that you uh joined us here on global star party and you're always welcome back so
great okay so uh our next speaker um is uh jason wallace
jace i i wanted to start um putting on uh uh inviting presidents
of astronomy clubs and people that are uh you know working directly with the
astronomical league and or the night sky network and tonight's special guest
in this series that i hope to continue on is is jason wallace and he is going to talk
about the richland astronomical society jason i'll turn it over to you man
uh thank you very much scott i want to thank you for inviting me and giving us a chance to talk about our club
and i think it's a little unfair you had tom go first was a wonderful speaker you know so
um i'm definitely going to be looking into some of the spectrum stuff you are equally as passionate i know so
thank you gonna i'm gonna share my screen real quick let's see if i can share it here
still kind of new and zoom so i do apologize guys let me know and you can see
get to my beginning here it's coming up okay we can see it now we see it good
okay is the the thumb video kind of in the way or is it okay just like me drinking that right
now you're in presentation mode now all right perfect
all right so these are because uh the different organizations were affiliated with you know we are filled with night
sky network we are let me see if i can get my pen here to work uh
steve penn laser pointer so nice guy network with that astronomical league we've been with them for
i don't know how long very long time we actually have one of their officers come down and speak almost at every star
party i'm going to talk a little bit more about this as we go see his presentation and we were very excited about joining
explorer alliance you know we joined that about last month so thank you scott for
uh letting us join into your organization appreciate that thank you very much thank you
yeah so next time a little bit about myself god asked me to talk a little bit about
that so so my first scope you know was a tasco 60 millimeter my older brother actually
bought it when i was about 10 years of age back in 1983. uh there really wasn't any
world wide web or anything like that to learn anything off of there's only the library in our library it was very faint
on almost any kind of documentation for astronomy uh mostly just words and and no real star maps
so uh the next one you know we got my first look at the galaxies was actually a ninth grade uh my science teacher gary
cole he had a tennis cave i don't know if you guys remember those old scopes you know they're they're pretty nice
they're still nice today and i we actually still have one at one of our other clubs um
first club i joined was actually in 1996 the columbus astronomical society i soon
had to leave due to college and kids and it was about an hour and a half drive back and forth and at the time i just
didn't have time or money to to stay involved and it was very sad time for that later i joined ras with the richmond
astronomical society became a board member in 2020 still am today
um so this was a very uh nice club and i'm going to talk about that a little more as we go through
also during capac in 2015 was the crawford park astronomy club
i'm a board member and also the president of that club uh i built a couple telescopes in my my
short time i mean in astronomy you know i've built an eight inch i'm working on currently working on 32 inch with an f3
uh should have that done next couple months i'm hoping and of course i perform on average about
35 outreaches events each year which many people perform a lot more but i'm happy to do that because my true love is
outreach and looking looking at stars and galaxies and just enjoying astronomy to be honest with you
and off to the right hand side are just some of the different kind of scopes i own currently you know many scopes of
you're giving away to people or were fixed up and donated to different things and left hand side with my eight inch i
made for my daughter a dog the middle is my uh 32 inch i'm working
on currently and then of course me and my wife is the last pitcher with uh she
has a 12 inch knob and i have my 16 inch style there in front of the observatory
wonderful yeah so here's like an overall picture of the warren observatory was a richmond
astronomical society we actually reserve take care of and improve upon
you know so as you can see here this is the big dome that holds big blue so i'll talk about that shortly we have where we
store all of our our phone scopes and the club scopes inside this building here plus this education center
uh this is the actual clubhouse here and here is actually the the bob jet
uh dom that we uh we did we did dedication to him last year
it holds a uh mead lx850 so it's very nice telescope
used for astral photography this is right off our website just a
little more information about the club you know we are a non-profit organization formed in 1960
uh to perform to promote the advancement of astronomy um
we had 36 cents mirror diameter mirrored newtonian telescope conducting an active
club education program regular monthly meetings and public nights so beginning of every month the first saturday of
every month we actually have a public night in our meetings that we talked to this is a list of our current presidents
and board members and also officers i would say every one of these people probably know better about astronomy
than i do yeah dolores is our president she is one of the best people you're
gonna walk into on public nights you're gonna walk up to the big big blue you
know the dome itself and she's the first person normally that you're gonna meet and she's gonna give you a ticket to get
in but she tells you about what we're looking through for big blue she tells you about a little bit about the club
very pleasant person to talk to you know you got eric he's also a board member and also the chairman um very
smart and very fun to talk with outreach programs uh we got dan wade he will he
sets up all of our video and and voice and all that stuff and runs boards for that
richard curling you guys probably all seen him on every single one of these uh
star parties that are held by by this this site and uh he just won a one thing on astronomical
league as well just a little bit ago i saw him winning door prize uh raymond he's our treasurer
we got bruce he probably has his masters already for astronomical league uh he's probably one of the people you
can talk to and he can point about anything you want in the sky and give you a conversation about the first time you've seen this stuff he's
probably seen more than i've seen in a lifetime so it's a great guy to talk to as you go down then lastly you got me at
the bottom you know great team absolutely great this is our
yeah this is our big blues this is what we're known for in in ohio where the
largest yeah the largest privately owned club telescope that i'm aware of um that you
can in ohio anyways that you can physically look through the scope and
visually see things by the public you know so the public doesn't actually touch this telescope we raise them up in
that scissor lift that you see in the back up to 16 almost 20 feet high up in the air because the eyepiece is actually
up here on their side you know so it's a great thing to look through um i was actually looking in
last year i was like i was looking at global star clusters in andromeda is what i was doing when i was doing one
astro league 50 gobbler stars projects so it's a great telescope to see things in you
know it isn't is on the touring mount which you can see here it is uh 36 inches automated tracking we
use a kind of an older program i know a lot of people on here maybe know of it it's a megastar 5 is what we're
currently using we love that program on here because it operates really very well so system we
just never changed it focal length is a 6.3 so it's not considered a fast or a long
exposure scope so it's kind of right then the middle you know great for a little bit of everything
excellent yeah and then a little bit about our outreach here too we we post everything on night
sky network and you can see the picture right over here there's one of our planetariums i haven't got a chance to
do a planetarium and the last couple of years due to kovic you know it's kind of depressing
you know i i enjoyed going in there and doing a year i would have a video showing that would that kind of go
through everything and then i'd go see some some different objects like uh maybe
in the indian uh constellations and telling the stories behind those of something a little different than the
traditional and then you know people kids and people love that we attend a lot of schools and do that as well and i was actually first
introduced to play entertainment by by uh dan eveley he's been a very big mentor
to me about doing a lot of outreach so appreciate him he's been in business for over 50 something years in outreach
uh so anyways where i talked about the first saturday of every month the club meets and we have outreach right there
we can get a chance to look through big blue or have a uh in the in the actual education room
we do a talk one of the two will occur um every fourth and fifth saturday we're
actually at lobo park which is another public outreach event um we do public schools i'll just just mention a few
there are many others galleon mansfield ontario euro quest line galleon oh i don't want to listen guardian twice
apologize guys shelby and we do do many others uh parks we have crawford's park
richmond park morrow county and many others there as well uh camps and wildlife reserve we have
hidden hollow mahigan mount gilead campgrounds local park nature center and others there's as well
that we we actually go to and then we do a lot of private events so a lot of people go out to night sky
network and they actually actually post a request for an event and we actually will ninety percent of time
we try our best to go to support that event and get people go to it because it's all volunteer and you see here this
is some of our calendars that we posted you know march was pretty much getting filled up april is just now starting to
fill up and we're going to go over a very big uh outreach thing we're doing in doing in april 2 here in just a
little bit um let's go a little bit about outreach
here it's your sky or no sky at all you know we are going to do something to
keep you interested and make sure you have a good time when you're up there you know inside right here we actually
have raymond he's actually showing you one of the soft telescope sleuth telescopes you know i can't remember
what galaxy we're looking at there to be honest with you it's been a while since we've been in it being cell is all
indoor because it was all cloudy outside you just couldn't see anything so it's neat to go to see through some of those
telescopes you know in around that area um and then over here i kind of lightened the
picture up but it was taken at night time so it's a little bit granuated because i lit flight in the picture up
but this is at night time we're all pointing things we're starting to align scopes and things like that it's a very
good event and what i like about this real quick story for you how it works
is you come in and you park anywhere in this area or clear over here on this side
and you walk up these steps when you get to the top of the steps you're usually going to meet 99 at a time a guy named
mike ryman and mike he will he will have two scopes setting up here
we have the c8 and his manual dive his 12-inch stop will be setting up here and then he's gonna start talking to you
because he wants to be the first person to grab you as soon as you walk up the steps and show you here's what's in my manual scope which is normally a
brighter object you can see um at night time and then his c8 normally has his computer set up and he has some actual
photography going on he's showing what the what the scope can see there he's telling you about them and then you'll walk run into me usually
i'm about right here in this area with mike with my scope and when you walk
into me usually i'm gonna i'm pointing at something that's gonna be pretty bright in the sky because i want you
your first time to be that wow factor i know like like uh you know we just heard a little bit ago
you know that first time you look at the scope yeah sometimes you get depressed what you see you know so i'm gonna pull
up something for example like uh m13 but i'm not going to say toward m13 i
want to tell the story behind it you know here we are we're looking up at the the hercules constellation and then in
here there's a little hidden gem that back in 1714 imran um haley actually said you
can see it with your naked eye today you can't because of all the light pollution especially in ohio you know but through
the scope you're gonna you're still gonna get the chance to discover this gym and when you look through here you're
gonna see a hundred to almost a million stars all in one spot we call this the hercules cluster
you know and and i like to give them the name versus m13 because when they go home
people aren't going to remember things like ngc 6205 but they're going to remember the name of hercules because
they watched all the cool shows they're going to say hey i saw the cluster and they might say 100 million stars for all
i know but the excitement is what i want to build in them and usually they do come back and they enjoy
the stories and the information about what we're looking to just go as they move down the trail they're
they're gonna run into either it could be my wife you know what's her emanuel dobb and she's teaching them how to use a dob
or you could run into terry and terry is another one of those people that
amazes you when you talk to the guy because he hand draws star maps
and yeah there's actually uh pictures and a guy there's a guy who came from california one time to
actually see the star match that he drew that we actually have hanging in the in our education room wow and it's
something it's some one he drew yeah and you got to see if you have a chance you have to come and see us
because he drew of the whole entire basically the universe the nearby universe you know that you can see
and he hand drew it all and different colors represent how far away it is and the distance he could go into a lot
better than i could and he's currently working on one that is 13 foot by i believe 20 feet
okay jason a challenge here you need to bring him on the show yes yes and i want to do that he's an
amazing guy okay yeah so like i said and then when you
get the big blue you're walking up here to give me a ticket to tell you what's going on in big blue and what we're
looking at and then you get raised up in the lift and you get to look up and see whatever we're seeing that at that time
it's a great thing to do okay so i'll keep on going down this little bit here
okay okay this is kind of what drives me to is the outreach part and these are my
grandchildren three of my grandchildren actually have five uh one is still uh just turning one this
month and the other one's still on the belly of one of my one of my daughters but you can see their excitement they
all love astronomy so far so i want to keep digging that in you know because let's spend that time
with my grandchildren um this is a little bit how if you ever have a request
go ahead okay if you ever have a chance and you
want to come to ohio and you want to request a an actual observing time with us this
week you can go to to request it you know to request a program you go to that nice guy network and of course the
website right down here below niceguy.jpg
slash club interquest you know you go through that
but that's what you can go to and you can just click on our club which is 644 is our actual id and you can
request a time and a place when you wish to have us do reserve or you can see our calendar that we current
our current times we will be there and you're more welcome to join us and have a good night with that because we
do charge nothing um we just love seeing new people arrive
and come to us and and spend time with you so if you get a chance please visit the site please come and
visit us one of our public knights you'll have a very good time
wonderful wonderful i did i did post a couple of uh links uh to warren rupp observatory and also
the night sky network uh link for um for joining okay uh i'd like to see some
people join the organization and help support uh warren rupp observatory you
know really one of the america's great uh observatories dedicated to amateur
astronomy so you know you look at something through a 36-inch telescope and it will blow your
mind so um yes absolutely uh
the the remark i wanted to make jason is that are uh you're so lucky to have so
much of your family involved in astronomy you know so uh you don't see it very often uh but uh
it is wonderful to see and it must make for uh you know a great experience for you
in particular uh so see your grandkids and your wife interested in astronomy
like that yeah that's one of the wonderful things i love about it because when my daughter
came to me on her 16th birthday and said dad i want a telescope
for my 16th birthday and you know that just blew my mind at that moment you know sure so the first scope i bought her was a 10
inch top you know and and of course we tucked asco together as a team and and uh we started looking at
stars and it was a great experience and from there the whole family caught on board so
that's why i really enjoyed that yeah absolutely well jason thank you so much for uh
sharing um uh what's going on with your group with your uh your experience in astronomy and uh
looks like you have another slide here for the mohican under the stars event yeah i just got like
two more i believe yes because this is our big outreach that's going on this month it's april 22nd to 24th it's called the
mohegan wildlife weekend and we'll be actually at nine different locations during this this event timing
and terry mann the president of dark sky association she likes to be the keynote speaker who will be speaking at our
observatory during this time period so definitely want to put a thing out for this so if you're in ohio you know
anywhere around the columbus area mansfield area this is about kind of like to the north eastern side middle
central uh come down and visit check out this website right here it's going to tell
you all about all the events going on day time and night time and he said we'll be spread pretty thin but our plan is to try to be as many of
these nine locations as we can and of course you can come to observatory as well
so we have that there great thing great people and then this is our hidden hollow
astronomy conference coming up september 23rd to 25th
um just kind of go over it really quickly because i know we are short on time so i apologize
uh we actually have our on september 23rd our camp opens up and we'll have
vendors displays raffle tickets going on our education we'll have refreshments going on this
1700 which is five o'clock we'll have dinner basically this is on your own which will be a food truck and many new
restaurants all about five minutes away so lots of food availability and normally we have plenty of leftover food
from the night before when when we're up there as well we'll have mufon speaking v tom
uh camp law to close september 24th we're starting to get into more of our speakers so we have bob marrow he about
bob knobs he'll be talking about how to accommodate scope we have madeleine wade undercovering the
invisible observing the universe with gravitational waves we have some lunch going on
then we come right back with gary cater and he'll be talking about the russell
diagram the rosetta stone and the stellar astronomy and less weight exploring neutron stars
and exteriors of interiors with gravity terry mann will be talking my wife was
talking to her a little bit a couple days ago she was still in alaska so she's going to give us her idea what
she's going to talk to um of course then at the end of the day we got the raffles you know normally we
have several raffle prizes those be given out and then 25th is this talk chitchat and we all leave around noon
you know so we can't wait to see some more people invite it and come into it
um this is a few pictures of the last hidden hollow we had you know from the past here we all know molly she's been
on this one several times just a couple pictures of a few people going through the yard
this of course we had a planetarium at one time um by seeing dinner together
just sitting around having a good time during daytime have seen some people do some talks and
nighttime we're all setting up our scopes i think yes at every star party
absolutely and then very lastly we have of course on here
yeah it's just how to contact us you know if you go to our actual website well if you
go to nice guy network you can get to our website from there but if you just type in wro.org that'll take you to our
website and you can register or you can just see more of it more about who we are
and what we do and of course our address is there as well and our very last item is of course one
of these days we're going to convince and get you scott up there to our back to our
star party i want to go i want to go i want to look to that big telescope this year uh you know uh i um
i recommend that you guys get in touch with uh with either myself directly or with kent martz and uh make sure you
request that door prize and we'll make sure that we uh repeat uh what we did uh
before so yeah we appreciate it and i think the last time that you were there
we only had 31 in scope now it's a 36. um and
we basically got it because we had an accident with samir so oh
yeah yeah so that was bigger it wasn't a it wasn't on purpose it was a complete
accident you know but it was uh it did allow us to go to a bigger telescope
wonderful yeah fall accidents could turn out that way that would be great
jason thanks again man thank you so much and uh uh you know of course um
you know if you guys have any updates you want to come back and talk about warren rupp or any of your events
you're absolutely welcome to come back on global star party so thanks very much thank you very much and we look forward
to coming back and i will try to get some more people to do some talks for you i appreciate it thank you jason
thank you okay well up next uh we have um
uh the uh daniel higgins and uh scott is it scott
watson is that right
scott cole excuse me here we go let's get you guys on
let's get you guys on here we are there we go yeah are we good
there we go let's see no one not good almost good
okay there we are thank you guys for coming on again
you're becoming regulars on global star party and uh i've been uh listening in i
i put on just just almost like as background music okay
uh the astroworld tv uh youtube channel so it was fun to listen to you guys and
uh your banter back and forth i loved it and um so you know you guys have one of
the best shows on uh on the internet as far as i'm concerned and i'm really
honored that you guys come on with us here on global star party so thanks thanks guy we love coming here i
love coming here you know we're just gonna keep waiting to keep on coming and hanging out absolutely
absolutely we'll rotate around stalling the virtues of astroworld absolutely you know
unfortunately i'm not as lucky as our our friend jason who is just i'm talking about his uh astronomy club i have i
have a niece uh her middle name is star s-t-a-r-r and uh you know so what what did i do
the first thing i did was uh you know i asked her first before i made the decision i said you know would you like
a telescope for your birthday she's like what are you what are you kidding me my middle name's star right
so yeah i'd love a telescope so what did i do i said all right cool she's into it i buy her a a 6se i spend like 700 on a
telescope that was about six years ago it's been in the closet ever since so uh
you know that that that's been uh has not been uh my luck getting other parts of family into most people
yeah most people think i'm nuts you know going out in the cold and and freezing or getting eaten by mosquitoes and stuff
like that but um but yeah so so scott i mean this is your first time on uh explore alliance hey
scott are you hello hello yeah scott scott is another one of our uh one
of our hosts we do the shows twice a week uh scott uh tell uh tell everybody a little bit about yourself and what you
do and and uh all that well i'm uh uh
i'm a professional photographer by uh by trade and uh i do i i did a lot of landscape
and uh terrestrial work uh for many years and of course you know headshots
portraits stuff like that um and uh i i had developed you know a pretty
extensive uh business in that and i got to a point where i i was looking
for a new challenge um you know and uh astronomy is is something that has
always been very interesting to me and i've never been one to be uh accused of of
dabbling uh when it comes to you know getting into a hobby and so i
i jumped in with both feet um getting into this uh into this hobby
and my my very my very first scope as an adult i had a very small scope as a kid
but it was a toy you know um my first scope as an adult was a c14
um and uh i i went i'm sorry i first i i i
said c14
yeah scott is a constant butt of uh so many jokes right now on the show and
has been so since he purchased the scope and for someone like when he says he
jumped in with both feet no he jumped in the whole body yeah yeah
this this is my this was my attempt at getting at least uh one inch
closer to the c14 is my first telescope so you know that's right
yeah i i think i think my favorite is like a finder scope on your uh c14 i think my first scope was a kaleidoscope
i think if i remember right well and i i uh i very quickly realized
that i was in the deep end of the pool and uh i was i was tumbling down that rabbit
hole that we uh that we joke about you know in our on our show you know about that that deep rabbit hole that
astronomy and astrophotography is um and so i i very quickly started to
develop relationships with other astrophotographers um and men
and women that that were in the field um and that led me to um uh camera concepts and uh
um pointed me towards dan and you know that that that just i mean dan
and i clicked right away you know and uh uh we've been friends ever since um and
it led to other people like uh tegan grable um yeah uh of course our our uh
our wonderful host uh pete myers pete helped me a great deal early on and one
of the things that i found uh and and dan and i both share i i uh
we talked about this numerous times is developing a community of people
that um you know were passionate about imaging and wanted to learn as much as they
could so that's the whole backbone behind what astro astroworld is all about
uh is you know putting together a group of of individuals sharing ideas open
ideas you know and talking about you know what it is that we're doing and helping
each other and new people that come on board because one of the biggest problems that you see
is is people they they jump in and they buy these scopes and all sudden
they realize they're in waters that they're way over their head and the scope goes into the
closet and it doesn't get touched again um and it's it's sad you know it that
things like that happen so we wanted to to develop a group of of people that were passionate about it that could help
people to as our friend pete says by wants cry once right that yeah you're gonna spend
some money in this hobby but you know if you do it the right way
you probably won't have to do it multiple times and that that can be a real problem you
know at least expensive way to get into uh astrophotography is to do it right
the first time you know exactly yeah that's our hope that's our whole point yeah and i think one of the things that
i'll all and this is something that i talk not only in in the story camera concepts but um but on the show quite a
bit as well is that you know you really need to be very very honest about what your final
goal is what do you really want to take a picture of do you want
a picture like this behind me or do you want a picture like adrian has behind him you know there are two different
types of compositions so you know max has got a wonderful picture just like adrian of the milky way behind him
or do you want m42 like cameron has you really there there's a right tool for the right
job right and we can help you get there it's just that you really need to be
dreadfully honest on what you really want what your expectations are or else you're going to be really really in a
world of pain you know i like what you say about passion now do you find folks coming on
the show that you can tell are looking to get these great images
and it's mainly for posting online and seeing how many likes they can get do
you run into anything like that where you temper it down to
well what is it that you really want to do and are you passionate about the night sky
i mean you're always going to get those those people that that are looking to do it the least expensive way that they can
you know and there's nothing wrong with that you know i mean i i personally i can certainly understand not wanting to
throw ten thousand dollars at something that you don't have any experience with you know and a lot of people think
spending a thousand dollars you know to do this is a lot of money um you know so
yes you do get people like that but the most of the people that we see
they are they're passionate about you know perfecting their craft and understanding
that this is this is something that is you're not gonna you're not gonna get at a master's level at it in a month
you know this this is something that if you want a challenge you found it um this this will definitely challenge
you you know and as a professional photographer i can tell you that astrophotography is a whole different
animal you know um it it requires a it an understanding that there's a
steep learning curve you know um so a lot of people
you know the ones that the ones that want to cheese out they don't they don't stick around very long you know the ones
that want to perfect their craft they're the ones that come back um and they come back regularly and
dan's right you know i get the i'm the you know i hit the butt of jokes you know i i moved actually from new york
down here to florida and that move damn near killed me um it it was rough it was
really rough you know so i i i i gotta say just just
to that point i mean yeah you know what there are some people that are throwing out pictures uh for
clickbait or whatever you want to call it they just want the likes and stuff like that on facebook and i get your point on the agent but i i i look at it
from another point of view i guess a little bit that this no matter how long they're doing it they're still pointing their telescope
up and they're still taking a picture of something and that's true you know what i mean they're still forwarding
something of their vision of it no matter whether that's for a month a day or an hour it
really doesn't matter it matters that that they're forwarding the the passion of astronomy even if they put it out
just once you know even if they just do that once and and that's it you know what i mean
and and you know what we we don't wish that on people we don't wish we wish people to stick around you know what i
mean and get better and and throw out wonderful pictures like like like everybody has behind them you know you
know you know that's what that's what we all want we want everything to get better because you know what sooner or
later like somebody just took a picture of a supernova supernova um you know
missed it by two weeks you know for discovering a supernova but you know what that's the type of stuff that you kind
of like you dream about you know what i mean yeah it drives you and that yeah it you
know i asked the question largely because part of my imaging you know i went
through that where at first it was cool to get people liking photos that i took but things
didn't really snap into shape until just what you guys were talking about figuring out what your goals
really are when it comes to doing it and as i started getting some goals even if
they were small goals or you know larger goals then all of a sudden that started to melt
away from me and i was no longer trying to chase that i now i'm taking the pictures there's
something that i'm looking for excuse me inside it so i was really glad to hear you guys mention
you know with what you're doing helping folks to like nail down what is it that
you want to do and what is it you're getting out of when you're doing astrophotography and i thought that was
you know a really cool point well one thing has happened isn't it good i
never never in time before that we have such a large variety
of uh equipment available uh at all different levels uh very advanced capabilities and you
can really make it your own you know it's it's really nice to be able to instead of having to go straight
to the top you can you can do incremental and customize and gradually grow it
and and then make your own and there's also a huge uh guidance
from this community uh and and the meet the capability to do that
which is uh which is wonderful yeah and you know what if you haven't seen it you haven't seen the movie what
about bob baby steps take your baby steps and you know it you
know and that's it you know what you know what now that's not to say like to what scott said these are buy one's crime ones you know you may just do your
due diligence about what your goals are and figure out some realistic costs of what your budget
is and get that balance between budget and expectation because that
is where you got to have that balance so so you know you know you got you got to have okay i want this but my wife will divorce me if i do that
so it's got to be somewhere in the middle yeah you know so it's got to be there and and even even
if you don't have that uh uh you know situation uh where you know maybe you
can buy what you'd like to buy and there's not gonna be a problem with that uh you know you will go through you know
we're on a journey and so you will you will have certain types of gear i mean think of yourself as going
on you're an explorer you you're outfitting yourself for the exploration so to an astronomer
that is going to be gear those are our tools and as you
you know as you learn more you're going to want and need more tools okay
so that's that's the big guns yeah what do you got here daniel
that i just finished putting this together this is the uh 127 carbon 527
right with the uh 268 and the seven position
filter wheel and i'm getting a little heavy here so i'm gonna put this down
but i i just finished putting that together today so that's the other thing
with it with imaging uh you know what you start you start realizing
is uh you know in the early days you just bought a whole bunch of telescopes because you wanted to try different
things but now you can actually use all those telescopes um because you're gonna want to keep the
imaging train uh fixed you know keep your flats calibrated so you start building an arsenal of
of uh of of scopes starting with the basics you start with this small refractor you know get the basics down
and then you start to expand and maybe you want a longer focal length you know a telescope
you get the bigger mount so you can grow more than ever before and continue to
use it's not like your old equipment becomes obsolete you actually just enhance
the experience and broaden it yeah absolutely
but um if i could real quick we do i i before we go if i know i know it's getting super late it's 11 o'clock uh but um
i'd like to talk a little bit we do have a bunch of guest uh guest appearances coming up uh on astroworld that i'd like
to go over real quick um and if i could just do this yeah we've got bob denny
bob denny's tomorrow yeah bob denny's going to be coming on it's on the screen right now bob denny uh tomorrow night
and we also have a a raffle giveaway that we're doing tomorrow night as well
and then we have april 13th we got charles bracken um for those of you that know charles he's done plenty of books
including the deep sky imaging primer which is one of my table top books that i love
then on may 4th we have richard wright from starstone software formerly of
software bisque and may 13th we have eric coles who's an
astrophotographer and also one of the uh the main people over at the astro imaging channel um so we so that's what
we got going on uh so far uh we guess we have a lot coming up and uh that's just
the next uh that's the next five weeks um
uh one other thing and if i could show this real quick um
and one thing we do at uh at astroworld is
um image of the week uh we've been we've been doing this for about a month now
and it's becoming really really um an interesting uh aspect of what we do um
and basically you could just put an image in here um we have this week this so this is
this week's entries here so we got a couple of people here that have entered um for this week's and then you could
vote for whichever image you think is the the winner and
then if it's a uh a tie we kind of go to a a wheel spin uh thank you sean nielsen
for the for the real spin um and then we have picture of the month nominees so these are the for the for the weeks from
the month before the four winners and then this is who's winning so far so we got
uh we have about eight days left of voting uh before this up to the 15th so right
now chris is in uh in the lead with four votes um for the rosette nebula which is
that guy right there so um actually that guy and and it also has
all the previous winners as you go across and some rules but that's really one of the things uh that we've been
doing that's becoming a real big uh real big um part of kind of what we do
so um yeah and then uh the the long-term goal there is is to take uh all of the
pictures of the month you know and um uh turn them into
a uh an astroworld calendar uh that we can then present uh back to people um
and uh my wife and i will probably be instrumental in in in developing that but we need the raw data first so get
we'll get that we'll get the year into it or you know or so into this project and and we'll see because we've already
got some absolutely amazing pictures from people some of these some of these astrophotographers are they're they're
giving us stuff that's just really impressive it's very impressive they're very talented
so that's a lot of fun so that's what we're doing and basically you saw the banter that we had with you know the
conversation that banter but the conversation we had with adrian cameron scott all that that's exactly how the
format of the show is um it's unscripted it's having fun and sometimes
we end up talking about stuff that has nothing to do with that photography
we go off the rails regularly you know last time we were talking about how many
academy awards dune got i mean you know it's so so uh you know
it's it's it's really interesting on how things go at the end well that's that's how they go at real star parties too so
right and speaking of which i'm very looking forward to this i'm so excited
i'm so excited thank god i'm finally going to a star party i'm finally going to the star point after three years of
not going to anything or two and a half years i'm not going to i was a staunch guy i went to
i went to you know i drove all the way down to storton river for the star party about three years ago okay
it's on youtube it's on facebook you can look it under my name there's a video of it me and charlie walsh was the the one
of the one of the old hosts from for the show um drove down to starting river in
his suburban truck he busted a hole in his gas tank
oh we're dripping gas all the way down we were in the middle all the way down
don't let it match five although i mean you could see it it's going you had to stop every 150 miles to get gas
it was bad it's like and we're sitting there with dr dripping gasoline you know what we get there we
get we're about we're about 50 miles away let's say my buddy and my buddy dennis uh um
dennis who runs a tdo observatory down in in uh in charlotte
he goes dan i hope you're not coming down here i said why what's going on he said yeah you know that hurricane that rolled through
yeah well they closed the entire park so you may as well turn back i said dude i'm literally like 45 minutes i've just
drove eight and a half miles and eight and a half hours of driving i smell like a gas station oh my god it was just so
bad but i'm so i'm so excited i booked my hotel i'll be staying up in cherry springs for you know
about three days but i booked for five so we'll see uh it's those little experiences that add
character to your life you know that's a nice way of putting it yeah
what kind of idiot would continue to drive i-95 when you know you got a hole in the gas tank i don't know but uh
someone who loves astronomy that's who i i just wanted i was meeting like five
ten people there and then the only one that called me was the person that lives a half an hour away from the place
but whatever anyway so i have a uh i have a picture of that rig if you want to see it
let's see it yeah hold on share
oh nice so this is your beginner telescope yeah
yep that's a beautiful dinner first television it's not just any old c14 it's an edge
oh yeah it's an edge yeah it's an edge yeah and he's got a six wheeler look at this thing
yeah everybody says that um down at the bottom it's it's got the the goal zero um uh battery pack that's
the gold zero 1000 to power everything nice and dry um
farpoint actually built this when they built this jmi wheelie bar for me they um they they custom built the
the battery tray to accept that big battery the other thing that they did that you can't really see it but down on
the on the bottom of those those straps that hold the tripod to the jmi wheelie bar
uh they innovated some uh some clips to mount uh down there and i was the very first person um to get a
jmi wheelie bar that had these these clips and this this custom this this thing was pete myers put help put this
thing together for me um and they they work tirelessly to to get this uh to
where it's at i mean that whole thing is is bolted together i can literally lift without the scope on it i can lift that
tripod and that wheelie bar it's a it's like a portable pier it's like 150 pounds right of gear but
150 pounds uh no it's more than that it's closer to 250 yeah
250 wow yeah i mean i just said you could lift it yeah that's without the scope without
the scope on it just the tripod just the tripod you know but you know scott's also a brunt of
another bad you know joke when his first light
yeah man we're still waiting for a decent photo from it you know he's only had it for a year and a half
getting ready you know takes time life happened that's for sure yeah that it did that is good
first light on the 100 inch for in only a year so you know yeah we've given
scott a little bit of leniency
but uh now he's been there and he actually you know he looks alive at 11 o'clock or 11 15 at night so now uh now
there's no excuse scott oh no first lights are coming actually i i finally got the gaskets from uh from
far point for the the monster moag for all of the uh you know the uh because i'm running mono at the back of
the scope and color at the front and then uh um you know the moag has got the filter sliders and i went through a
debacle with you know getting the right size gaskets to hold the 36 millimeter filters i finally got that all done and
uh so it's it's it's ready to start imaging you know at the back of the scope and
we just need to get it out and get it set up so plenty of galaxies and virgo to give it
some uh give it some first looks full-frame camera there
say again full-frame camera uh no i'm i i have two uh of the 20 the
zwo 2600s i've got the monolith nice that's that's what i'm looking at well
that would be it's just the right sizes you don't you have just enough uh extra breathing room to put an oag
and yeah and and so it's it's it's a sweet spot yeah it's a good one yeah yeah yeah an aps-c but it's cooled yeah
i did i did get first lights on the scope when i was up in new york um and i
i i got a fairly decent set of images of um uh
m81 um and and it it turned out great and i'll never forget when uh tegan tegan
grebel i don't know if you guys you folks some people know who teagan is he works for explore um he works for high
point scientific and uh but tegan tegan's a great guy and a good
friend and uh he was he was on with me for several hours and we were we were getting this and all sudden
you know we we pulled this image up and he just about lost it he's like i can't believe that's a five minute sub you
know the dust lanes that were in this it was incredible it was it was truly a uh
it was one of those ones where you know you get that first that first exposure with a scope and it just blows your mind
you're just getting a little photon density and just hitting it really hard with that signal to noise with that 14
inch aperture is beautiful yeah yeah it's going to be fun it's going to be out of control too bad
too bad the whole virgo cluster is right behind scott's house [Laughter]
no just kidding i'm kidding scott's got a good view donna from what it what they see so yeah portal four down here
uh yeah so now now unacceptable yeah well now we move we so every once in a while we say we
hate somebody on the show it happens to whoever has the lowest portal number now that scott has the lowest portal number
not though not only do we hit him because of his telescope we hit him because he's guys so uh it's okay
just smearing me with that love
yeah scott you mentioned your background in professional photography and i came off of a job having to shoot
in a fairly dark theater um so i actually look forward to maybe
crawling into your mind a bit about some of the jobs that you've been on in terrestrial and people shooting i could
i'm sure there may be some things for me to learn there yeah you know feel free to feel free to
get my my contact information from any of the guys that are there i i i'm more
than happy to share any of my contact information give me a call that's not a problem at all
all right look forward to it you you and it if you don't i don't know i don't know
where all the connections are at there but i can certainly get that dan's got my stuff if you if you've got dan's
information um you know you know it's not a problem you know it's easy to push that your way
all right excellent adrian if you want to email me whatever go right ahead and all the kids i'll shoot an email yeah
yep so come on down and hang out with us over at asheville we do shows on
on wednesdays and friday nights wednesdays at nine eastern and uh fridays at eight eastern and plus we're
we're here for a half an hour or so every tuesday night so so thank you scott for having us on we appreciate it oh it's great oh yeah great we'll great
hopefully we see you next week and um we will uh learn more about astroworld you know
thank you so much we appreciate it thank you so much we are going to quickly transition to maxi fellaries uh he's
he's got more live views and then we'll be switching over to adrian bradley for
some nightscapes maxie well here i'm here again and now i'm
sharing my screen i'm pointing and taking pictures of a place a
practically a galaxy is in the center of constellation nearby the omera centauri
cluster and centaurus a it is the ngc 4945
or c83 in the caldwell catalog and here's a
sub of three minutes a guiding and let me stretch the histogram
[Music] and here we go wow
oh yeah a couple weeks ago this was a
a an apod from nasa of course not not the this one
but this is a a a really good a galaxy that you have a
lot of uh clouds and dust to to get
too much info and [Music] if you take pictures of 30 seconds only
you can they also get information here love those foreground stars it's really
nice i love that rich star field and that's picking that up behind this star
there's a galaxy i think is this one uh no sorry
it's a bgc pgc now ngc 4c94
a is behind this star but
in my field of view to get center i could not get this galaxy
but it's a my regular galaxy small one and
writing but i was focusing in this place so right now i'm almost 25 pictures
of three minutes sometimes the gsp is passing by uh so for now this is what i'm taking
now these are just the lights right you're not doing the live stacking no no this is only lights uh this is a
single light of three minutes so maybe you know
yeah what one thing uh max that i've learned is a good hybrid approach is you can do the live stacking put in your
master uh darks flats and bias into the live stacking to get a preview
and then you save the lights it will save each light sub and so that way if there's a you know
an asteroid or a satellite or something that comes through um through the frame or an airplane
uh you can always pick that out when you do your post processing afterwards but at least you have a preview of the stacked image that looks pretty
darn good um that's that's that's a good approach
we have a question what is the software you're using maxie right now i am in my pc
using the blue stacks this is a free software
that emulates the android system of the cell phones and i
for example put my bluestacks okay yeah my gmail
account to get the s here uh software
and [Music] well hey i connect to my wi-fi through my pc
and connect this the scr plus to my wi-fi so in that case i
i can be a online but also i use my cell phone to be outside a a to do the the polar
alignment and the focus yeah what i do sorry maxie just to add um and i'll be
showing that later as well is uh the beautiful part of both bluestacks that max is showing
is anything that works on your android including sky safari uh sky separate pro
you can run in that bluestacks and and in fact what maxi is doing is really cool because the asi air either
runs on an android phone or a tablet but he's running it in an emulator on his pc and that way
you can be on the network uh on the internet as he's doing now and sharing and at the
same time access all the uh those those apps so asi pro
what is is embedded in there which is cool it works the same way okay so he's using bluestacks to to transfer the uh
yeah i i i my pc like a table or cell phone to
use this app to get connect to the to the software what i can do there's another way of
doing this as well by the way um if you have uh what i do also max and i've done this recently
is uh i have my tablet or my phone uh on uh asi air pro running natively on the
android system and then you can run uh uh what do you call it teamviewer
yes teamviewer and then the advantage of this a remote desktop and the advantage of
that is you're now using the processing of the of the device uh locally uh it depends you know you
you can do it either way it depends what you want to do yes i
like that i was when it was the lunar eclipse in november i was in the field
almost 15 kilometers and i was using my cell phone through
in software to to connect to my notebook to you and
move my equipment here in my backyard but i was a 15 kilometer from here so
it's really cool awesome that is cool so well scott hey let's continue let's
transition over to adrian and uh yes adrian thank you for hanging in there with us and um yep
well past my bedtime but that's okay because um
let's see i'm gonna go ahead and quickly share my screen i'll go through
a few images and what i'm going to use is sort of the theme of my talk
um presentation will be these bortle zones and shooting in completely different
ways and how if you are doing landscape astrophotography or
nightscapes as i always call them um clouds don't have to dissuade you
neither does the quality of the sky neither even does the sun coming up or going
down so as always i usually end with a bird picture scott but
that's incredible the uh bald eagle in detroit michigan not far from where i am
here in the states for those of you hanging on from other countries um the bald eagle is making a big comeback and
it's easier and easier to see these majestic raptors but uh
they
so we'll start with this picture here now we're looking at space and we're looking at me setting up an explorer
scientific uh mount over here it's my truck and i'm shooting back at a sky that's
clouded out except here in the northern hemisphere you can see the uh the plow the big dipper what we
call it the little plow the little dipper and yes this is all cloud cover
and all of this star light comes through this is with a non-modified camera so
the full-frame sensor is pulling in light so this may not be
something you might enter in some sort of contest or or anything like that but what this
shows you is that starlight is brighter than we think and that um
you could there's actually a lot more up there when you put the camera to it
the starlight still shows through so if there's wispy clouds you can still do
um nightscape um astrophotography or nightscapes
uh it's amazing what the census can do nowadays eh yeah and here's another
you get an idea of how dark a region is depending on what the starlight looks
like as you're peeking through clouds this is a portal 3 zone
that's just getting away from it's getting away from astronomical
twilight um there's a glow here that these glows are from nearby cities
there's a glow here that could be aurora might not be
um compared to dark of night at a portal 3 zone and a
no doubter that's aurora but this was taken last year i tried to get it again
this year um these colors are a part of
what i was seeing and notice the color the kind of the bluish grayish blue
of the dark of night you start getting this uh when you're in a portal 3 zone
um and yes this prints available i put the signature i don't sign a lot of images
um i considered this image really beautiful a lot of times i shoot for the astronomical value this is one of those
photos that i framed because i wanted the whole picture to be
nice but you can still if you notice the uh darkness here
now milky way photography this is this would be
um this would be nautical twilight
and this is as the sun is rising you can still get this is one of those shots where you can still get details
depending on how dark it is you can still get milky way detail and it's a bit of a challenge because
most milky way shooting happens just like this this is your typical you look for the
core in the northern hemisphere you look for the core this is astronomical twilight the very first vestiges of
astronomical twilight so notice there's a different lighter shade of blue
that's in the sky because of the blue color already being scattered out
and um what does that look like when you go all the way to portal one there's a little bit of blue in
astronomical twilight as the sun's setting and the milky way is already
this bright and detailed notice over here you start to get that grayish
charcoal color at a portal one site the darkness goes
it's not blueish gray it's gray and i will
show that um in a couple other pictures um let's look at moonrise which is
similar to um say nautical twilight
you can still get some milky way detail but as the moon rises off fraying and
you see the light coming up it gives this bluish look to the sky
and it there's a moment in there that i've been attempting to capture with all these photos the moment where the
starlight is still present but the sky's color has changed
and as the moon rises all of that starlight begins to wash out
the milky way goes away everything anything that i'm picking up here
those things begin to wash out you even got the sunrise there uh you know hitting the tops of those trees
that's amazing that was actually moon rise impressive yeah that was moonrise
so that's a nice christmas card yeah here's moonrise at a portal one site
with the moon in the zodiacal light this is i guess the first vestiges of
astronomical twilight and i took this photo to
make it look the way that it looks to your eyes you can't tell the sun's coming up here
you can see the this was this was purposely done as a shorter exposure and
a composite with the moon to show this is what that scene looks like you
really can't tell with the naked eye when you're an astronomical twilight i thought you could
but looking back at some of the images it's clear that you can't quite
see it but the camera can adrian so it almost looks like a
lunar zodiacal zodiacal knight light it was it absolutely what the loot the
moon rose within the zodiacal light last shot that's awesome yeah it was
that was one of the more awesome things i had seen here i'm back in michigan and we're
transitioning from um nautical to astronomical twilight
and clouds are coming so this is a similar angle to where i had
the aurora earlier and um you know that the
best thing to see about this is kind of how the sky changes as it's getting dark
last couple of them yeah last couple of images here we'll we'll let our eagle friend go let's look
at this one um full dark of night everyone's uh
pointing cameras and telescopes and more cameras at the sky this is a 30 second
image the image that's in the back of me was a minute to contain most of this detail and one
thing i like to do with milky way photos is for little easter eggs to be able to
show up in them like the cat's paw down here and the lobster i've got a couple
of cleaner versions of the image but
in milky way photography you can do a couple of things you can smooth this out and you can put it in front of a
beautiful foreground and you know create a an image you know a total image
this was more of a i'm shooting at the milky way and that's what i'm gonna do and let's see what you know these were
among the first shots i saw at a border one site adrian go back here please please adrian
go back i just want to say we don't have much time oh sorry okay yeah i'll go back in
a second um portal 3 you begin to see the river the milky way and here come
the clouds this to me is still uh well this is where i was looking at this image here
and barely seeing some of the knight detail portal bortle 3 portal
2 and bortle one um naked eye there isn't much
to me there isn't as much difference to your eyes but what the camera can get and how bright
the objects in space are even if you're shooting wide angle
there is a pretty big difference and nothing highlights that this is taken
with a sony camera this is again portal one look at all the detail that i'm able to
get in a 30 second exposure half scenario on a tracker
um and there was some there was a little bit i think of haze
in the sky where i'm getting kind of brighter um guitars here the stars here are
bright but i'm making photo again yeah this to me shows you
what's capable in you know the darkest of skies
this is the sort of image without needing to get other special um equipment you just have your regular
dslr and if as long as it's a nice fast lens at f28r
you know or faster and you go for 30 seconds um i think i shot all the way up iso
6400 with this actually let's let's get the real let's get the real numbers
my iphone was 8 000. 25 seconds f2 8. this is this is these are numbers
here and that was the result so
that is that's where i was prepared to end the presentation
um cameron i think you wanted to go back to one of those images oh yeah no just that one where
you had the milky way uh i wanted to highlight uh in the
there's three images that are really amazing well there's a lot they're all amazing but um and yeah we'll just go to
the
yeah this one was a little cleaner i just shot i did a pin or i stitched together
um four shots when you zoom in right at the milky way when you zoom in on the horizon that
that's what blows me away look at that i mean you go right to the you can see the stars and the milky way and the
structure you know as if the earth is just in the way you know we're we're going through
space all that stuff is there and you're seeing it this is nice and clean
that's amazing i'm sure this is this is this got an ngc number you know this is the cat's paw on the lobster which are
two things i normally don't see this has probably got a these things have probably got designations to them
you know this reminds you this image here
may remind you of a lot of the deep sky images that you see where you see detail
the wispy detail in the dust lanes of nebula emission nebula this is
the this is the galactic core right here the lagoon gets in the way
i never forget when i when i first learned that the milky way
was our galaxy you know and and and you're actually yeah that's a shock to some people
wait a minute you're we're in a galaxy you know and you can see it you know so you can see it
you can see right to the core of it and when i when i got to that
knowledge you know when when as a kid of course you're looking at pictures of galaxies
and that when you're first starting out and then and then you realize whoa we're right in one of those yeah you're seeing
it real quick really close up and it's like that is so cool i just love it i
love it yeah the star cloud was around here somewhere sagittarius star cloud
m 17 i believe and 16. you know the the precision starts to
go away a little bit so i continue to work on you know getting rounder stars and
different parts that's the top of the image that i took and
and that's to me there's i shoot the images partly for
scientific value or you know citizen science value or just discovery
here's something here to me when i shot this and i looked down
and i saw that you know i realized okay saw this too
because of the process that i use to make sure that the stars are sharp
it pulls out things that i may not expect to see that um
that just it just enhances learning about what it is and it's like when you
shoot for me shooting the night sky it's not just about um
[Music] you know just uh i'm shooting at something it looks beautiful it's a
great start to go there but learning about the subject learning about i mean there's more nebulosity
here and dust lanes here that can be learned about there's
the self same image that you take could be an image that teaches you more
about what's there you may capture enough data to be able to look into it and go okay
what does this really we all know an m17 m16 when you aim closer
we know what those how beautiful those really are it doesn't translate as much
in this image except to say it's here and the light from it shines
as brightly as the rest of this light that i've captured and it's like you said adrian there's
like two levels of beauty one one is it's the beauty of the
the whole picture it's like kind of looking at a satellite image of of the planet earth and then you see the
beauty of our planet and then and then you start orientating yourself and then relating yourself where you know
different parts of the planet when you zoom in and oh yeah this is that country and there's no borders but you can see
the cities you can see the rivers and the mountains and the clouds and stuff it that gives
you a new level of connection and and you you can really see start to see your your place in the
universe uh and it that familiarity yet the vastness it's it's
looking at both the big big picture and also you know your relation to it it's it's
fascinating all right there's an object there that i need to look up and it sits here
um yeah and and since we're low on time i'll go
ahead and i'll go ahead and shut down the image but um but yeah that's
whenever going out there's a number of things now the image behind me you're seeing some of the same detail but it
took a minute in a portal 2 zone to get kind of that level of detail it takes 30 seconds
to get there portal 1. so so the bottom is line is no matter what
portal zone you're in the lighter the border zone the more
time it takes to start to see some of the structures that you're looking at and visually
visually it's all appealing the brighter things you'll see you'll see more detail
in those brighter things if you're able to make the trek down to some place that has a darker portal zone
and i highly recommend it um if you are able to travel if not
um you can live vicariously through us because my goal is also to do some more
traveling um this year and get down and get a few more images
and come up with a few more goals to uh see what sort of things i can com that i
can create out there well you know and that's the thing adrian there's different apertures different
sizes the telescopes different sizes of lenses our own naked eye binoculars at every level of magnification you're
able to see similar objects like for example you know the virgo cluster looks looks
like deep field in a four-inch let's say right um you know uh and and then but if you
want to see stefan's quintet you know you need an 18-inch or you know a 16-inch so you but you could see
a lot of those details at every level depending on their brightness and you're taking the wide field and look at all
the detail you can pick out as you start zooming in right
uh it's exactly beautiful all right guys we need to uh trans
transition over to uh to nico maxie i'm going to let you introduce uh nico
thank you adrian thank you excited you're welcome
now i introduced my my dear friend that he was he wasn't here a couple
weeks with us but tonight he's going to show us a lot of things that that he'd been
doing so nico it's all yours hey nico all right hey thank you maxie hi scott cameron
hello good to see you again nico yes it's really nice to be here again
there was a few weeks off because another compromise is but
i'm really happy to be here you are a musician and uh yeah
you're with a new band i think is that right no it's the same band
i i play drums and this these months we are
making our practice on tuesdays and sometimes the it's
it comes late and i need to go to bed yeah of course but okay
tonight i i'm here i'm with a little flu a little sick but everything is okay
and um i want to to show you a few things that i was
making these days let me share my screen
okay are you 3d yes okay uh well
as you know uh i i have a an equipment with a with an
equatorial mount but i really enjoy and really love
to use my dots and not shut for observing
but to doing some double stars some quick photograph and in this new chapter
of dobsonian law as i call it uh this
weeks ago i was thinking and trying to to get okay
can we do asteroids astrometry and photography and photometry a
with a standard dobsonian with no tracking and no motors
and i found that it's gonna take a lot of work but yes we can do it and i will
show you and we need to to sort a few more steps like compensate the the short exposure
because we are working with adoption and with no motors and
you cannot expose more than maybe half a second
or less and as the objects are moving you need to be
sure about the the field of view with the asteroid or any object that you are
chasing and you need to be quick because the object move away
and this is really important that you need to uh to find a way to know
the the position angle of the camera at
every second because uh the the absolute works in the symmetral mount
so the north is never in the same place you wait a minute and the camera is not
pointing not no more you need to choose the magnitude that
you you can use and that is about the the upper tour of
the dobsonian visitor 10 inch dub the big aperture helps with the
magnitude and as always the more important is to enjoy to persevere and never be disappointed
if you can get the result uh weekly
and the first thing is always a planning i was uh
finding with the cartesian a few asteroids and magnitude between 12 or 30
to be no
uh i i think a tiny bright asteroid to make it easier
and i do a several shot
test shot trying different configurations and i found that sometimes
the livestock in shark up works really great uh at this capture i
was shooting a 21 game and only a 150
mile second exposure and i was doing a live start by about
seven or eight seconds and with this configuration i get an amazing
results i have a good signal good hours and the magnitude was
precisely the magnitude i was expecting but
this method not it doesn't work every night and in every asteroid
because you need the shark up a need to livestack a a lot
of stars to do the enlightenment of the images because when you look in the tops and you see
the stars moving and the lifestyle needs at least eight stars
in the field to try and but if you try different night and different
asteroids you can find one tool to work with
so that night i took these three images with uh the first two it was a two minute
difference and the the third one i wait uh more like 20 minutes or
something like that and [Music]
i i was using the the maxim dl because i for astro medica to do the
the masterometry you need to to to put the exactly coordinated and the position
angle of the camera and that was i was talking before but the maxim dl if you put an
approximate coordinated it was start testing different coordinates
and position angles and you can know at the end of the process
exactly location in the of the center of the image and the position angle of the camera and
this is the secret to a great work with the astrometrica
so we go to astro astrometrica and [Music] put these parameters
and there you go i was working and
i can do the the successful the astronomer of the asteroid this is the
702 and i have the a good photometry with a
good the expected magnitude and the the positions
as well as you can see this is the the positions that the npc
was awaiting in the story in the
fm areas and i have a a little bit different
but this is more than i expected you can see this is my measured
and this is the fm areas of the npc web page so
there you go you can do even an astronomy view of an asteroid using your dobson and this is really
really great i really enjoy to to work with with my thoughts on and and
every time i am trying to make okay what else i can do is it's really
it's really fun and as a bonus track
a few weeks ago i was able to observe my second quasar
and in this time the hi 1029 14
01 is this is from my house with a portal 9 sky and this is a sketch i i make a
while i was observing this little point market there
is the is this equator and this is the information of the
equation yeah you can see it's really far away from us
and i really enjoy to to change this kind of objects
and and think how far uh how far away we can
not not just take a picture but observing with my eyes
is it's really nice to to see what that little dot in the eyepiece
is this monster and [Music] near the the start of the universes
is amazing and obviously i put my camera in that option and i get this picture
and i i do the same process that with the asteroid to get the the coordinates and the
magnitude of the of the quasar just to make it
not not it's not information that you can publish anywhere but it's really nice that you can do a lot
of different things even with your adoption in your house importantly in the sky and yes
no excuses guys no there's no excuse you can do everything you you want
to just need to start to proceeding and planning and [Music]
look how to make it but you can that's awesome nico
that's how it's that's how it starts yeah comments from the chat this barber comes from barbara harris she
she is uh she does uh research work and has discovered a supernova and she's
mentioning that she's very impressed with what you do so okay thanks yeah so this was my my little presentation
for tonight and i i hope you enjoy it great
awesome nicole thank you okay excellent
excellent thank you thank you so maxey you want to do one more transition and then we'll go
uh to cameron gillis yes yes i now point my scope to a particular area i
think maybe in the know their hemisphere you are able to watch it
but it's a a tremendous area and if i think of you going to like it
uh let me share my screen [Music]
let's reset this
okay okay
now here we go again right now i'm practically
er in the in the midway so i put pointed to the
dragons of ara oh that nebula is amazing no way you can
get a picture of that i want to see it and i did
a single picture of 300 seconds okay
that's a nice curve this is the the the this is what i get but that let's bring
it back yeah let's stretch it out wow here we go
yeah you know i just go with that i mean whenever i see this stuff like
jason gonsall type of stuff which is of course over the top right i mean uh but but the fact that
you can capture this you know this is just like what niko did just casually like this this is a very faint object
um and and be able to see some structure in it that's awesome this is a only a single
so how how how 300 seconds so that's five minutes exactly yeah
so hey but the i think the the the guiding was really good you can and
you don't have a nebula filter no narrow band filter this is just you know light white white band
no no no no nothing the comma corrector only and that's all
yeah nice so i think i'm going to still taking pictures from here
yeah to the rest of the night i think yeah yeah you just you just hit that in a couple hours and
boy you're gonna get some good stuff yeah look at that you're seeing you're seeing the nebulosity come out eek out
there and just give it a little more signal to noise stack it out and you'll you'll have something nice
so well so for those who want to see is this place
oh wow exactly you can see there of course it doesn't fit all the enabler
but because of my philosophy well that's why you need a whole bunch
of more scopes right maxi yeah i need a an 80
millimeters isn't that interesting yes this is this is interesting i find myself
wanting smaller and smaller telescopes because uh but but of course the trade-off is
is uh you you have to hit it with longer exposure so that's that's the tricky and dark skies
you can't replace dark skies but you saw you know you can get a supernova 15th
magnitude with a two inch right that's part of the fun beautiful i think
i'm the only one that i want a bigger scope now yes
the more you observe a more bigger opportunity
yeah but yeah you want both because you want you know we all love nebulas we all
love galaxies and that's two different types of scopes right off the bat right you you you want to dive right in
to the to the galaxy you got to have the long focal length big aperture
and if you want that's going to get you all the good juicy dust lanes and all that stuff uh and if you want the big nebula
oh you're going to have to go wide field yeah right yeah yeah
and then there's planetary level that's it's an old class oh i i make the
the planetary ghost of jupiter a few weeks ago with the dobson
it's beautiful you know yeah nico i mean max maxie i mean that
that casual picture that you took up trying to pin it nebula actually surprised me uh that was much better
than i i thought uh you know inside it was not in a favorable position for you it was low on the horizon you had some
obstruction close to obstruction and you were able to get some pretty good structure that was that's amazing i think about it that that thing that
galaxy or sorry that nebula is in another galaxy it's in it's in the large magellanic cloud it's like wow
i mean it's a huge monstrous nebula it's another neighbor
yeah yeah well the camera
it's all yours all right well thanks everyone um
yeah i'm a late night with cameron camp strong i'm here uh sorry for keeping you up you can all watch the replay but
i have a lot of things that i want to try to cover in a reasonable amount of time i don't want to tire everyone out
but i have several different things i have been doing a lot of things it's been very rainy in seattle for the last four months
but i haven't lost any time in perfecting and learning and
making the most of every single clear night that i do get up in the pacific northwest uh to continue my
sky survey so uh let me share my screen here yeah my whole screen
yeah okay and i just uh
there you go so this is a camera sky survey update uh
in global star party 89. so to pick up where we left off last year
uh in my uh thing i just wanted to kind of level set with sorry level set every with
everyone oh darn sorry about that got a little ahead of myself there um
i have done i started off with visual observations and i've done a lot of them uh mainly with my eight inch
uh uh schmidt cassegrain so over 3 000 observations down to magnitude
uh 12 to 13 magnitude galaxies and objects
and to kind of kind of categorize them to see are they you know which are the ones that are cool that i want to
you know do some more investigation on so it was kind of like a uh my own personal sky survey
uh and this was all made possible because of go-to technology i mean uh you know i was already in my earlier
career or earlier hobby of astronomy i had an 18-inch job i i knew this guy
really well doing a lot of star hopping galaxy hopping for that matter you know 15th magnitude galaxies and
stuff like that but there's no substitute especially when you have limited um
sky time uh than to have uh you know equipment that allows you to really
focus on the viewing visual aspects and still
you know get a lot of detail track the stars and and and and do proper logging
uh so anyhow i i went through all that and this was before i got into imaging
and then i uh then i categorized those and i i out of those
3000 objects i i got 842 now i finished aerodynamics
i got it one clear night where i where i was there was a bunch of galaxies that i picked up to finish my
kind of my full um sky survey and i got me up to 842 objects
and i started to say okay those are the ones i'm gonna do for um
doing my astro cam survey and last year if you recall i i did a started with thanks to scott
and and this great audience here uh you helped encourage me and i
was able to have a sky survey uh episode called cam astronomy i did 20 episodes
where we went through and this is a snapshot and i'll go to my my uh sky safari here
and this is actually the uh the objects that we actually looked through together
uh moving from uh eastern virgo uh to uh to all the way to um
uh to andromeda and pegasus that's where we ended up basically at zero hour so if i look at uh kind of how i did the
procession and you can see most of it i did cover the summer milky way uh extensively
and if i look at the go by hour by hour so this is the meridian now i have an equatorial mount
so i have i'm using the meridian line here instead of the alt azimuth view
and if i just continue to go through the hours you can see i was basically going from west to east
and i would basically go through and that's how i did my survey all up and down
until finally we ended up and that was where i ended uh for that
and then what happened of course uh i i you know got really busy with work and
and other things personal stuff and i just couldn't do that but i didn't stop and plus it
got rainy it was starting to get to fall it was around october time frame and um
and then i uh basically said well time to basically
get serious about automating this and upgrading my imaging gear because i started off with smartphone a lot of the
objects the earlier ones were smartphone photography which is great but then you start realizing
well i want to be able to repeat and have a standard setup i don't want to have to play around with the focus and
all that every time i like what maxi did you you kind of modified a a a smartphone and but you got to be
able to set it up and then also i was switching my my scope between visual
and uh uh imaging and i realized you don't want to play with that because of
you know getting standard flats and there's a lot of things but basically i started to work
on perfecting my rig my imaging system so if i go back
to the presentation so now i've been basically working on a dual imaging rig because i had my c8
that was my primary visual instrument and then i changed that into so it's the wrong way to start for imaging but
you know i just dove in and you know learned about high long focal length you need to have a good
equatorial mount you need to have some form of of
guiding so that you can you know compensate for the gear
periodic error all that kind of detail and uh but then i also
had an ed80 um that was on order that i finally got and i was basically
setting it up because i wanted to piggyback the the ed80 and have a dual imaging rig
so i can do both uh long focal length and short focal length of the same region the sky
simultaneously um and so that's basically was my goal and then i could start building my
catalog based on that so this is what i was doing
last year uh where a lot of these images uh you know familiar objects
these are the pictures that i i did last year and i was able to do this
with this imaging rig on on the right using a guide scope
and all these images were not processed in any way except
using asia air live stacking and and just taking a screenshot on my
tablet frankly so ironically a lot of the smoothness that you're seeing
you know and also the the reasonable quality uh was obtained
accidentally uh because of you know the binning the resolution on the tablet
is a lot less than uh so i didn't realize it at the time but i
do now i'm basically getting built in binning so i was essentially uh
by bypassing a lot of post processing and that but the negative part is you
don't have the raw image i wasn't saving the the fits files
and uh and i wasn't able to improve the image and stack it etc but this was fine
for the time it's all part of the learning process but to be able to get a lot of great shots anyways you know yeah
but i got a lot of great that's the whole point and that's that's that's the thing scott is it's about the
journey and and this the smartphone pictures that i took
helped motivate me to say okay i need to get an imaging camera because
you know now i can do reliable pictures right uh every time i can have my rig
set up and then and like you said then i but you still get good pictures so it's like
gets better then you start to do this and say okay asi air that solves a lot of the um
you know a lot of the figuring out of of all the different systems um ironically
now that i've done done the isi error and i'll get to that i am actually going to go probably to nina because um
the uh the i i'm actually with the duoscope setup you can
plug in uh the multiple cameras to the usb hub
one will be on usb 2. the other the main camera can be on a usb 3. so there's going to be a little slower download not
too badly though but you can only switch to one camera at a time now what a lot of people do is
they get multiple asi errors but the problem is if you have a piggyback system
is uh if you're dithering or anything you can't synchronize anyhow there's a lot of details and i i
would love there's many many shows that are required to cover all this but i just to give you a flavor
uh what i've discovered is what i'm doing now and i'll look into this is i'm let's go to the next slide actually
i went through many iterations so first of all this is the rig that i started with last year with with just the basic
uh uh tracking uh sorry um uh guide scope
that was just the one camera system with the asi air so that allowed me to do those pictures on the last page
then i got my rings and i was using my mac 102 as a proxy
until i finally get my eda because ultimately like i said i want to have my ed80 which i ended up doing as you can
see on the right here uh i i ended up putting the 8080 in there
and then i what happened is i wanted to test out the visual
of piggybacking the ed80 on my ex on my c8
and then i started wanting to get the sky survey automatic
sky survey so you can actually set up plans in asia where you can
where you can set up an imaging sequence and it will automatically play itself go to the next object
do as many lights as you want darks flats uh nut flats but you know darks and then
you can actually go to the next object and you'll actually save that image sequence and you can
repeatedly run that over multiple nights and then you know gradually build your database
of lights so i was using this intermediate mac 102 and a guide scope
system to kind of play with that as an intermediate step
then i got me ed80 i said okay well let me try that so as you can see you start with a lot
of cloudy nights uh you you play around with your gear to make sure that when you are
imaging you you get you know make the most out of you you learn something every time so after all that and all
this requires you know cabling balance uh you know you know new flats and all sorts of
stuff that you know looking at the different image scales uh there's so many things that you learn
so i had enough toys but ultimately i ended up with this thing on the right this was my prototype
but what happened is this is the heaviest it all got so this this uh all the stuff including the the
dew shield new shields and the imaging gear and an extra guide scope on top of it off the
boot uh all this stuff weighs uh 25 pounds okay which is uh pretty much
uh working really well actually with the exos 2. um you can see the counterweights are
almost fully extended it handles it quite nicely and and all
the stars are beautifully round and uh good system but i didn't the problem is this having this
uh guide scope offset really screws up the um the declination
balance it throws it off because it's off-center so i ended up
let me before i go there i ended up getting rid of that and going with an off-axis guider and i'll explain that
but what i also want to say on this is i was on the asi
with multiple cameras you could only do one or the other so what i did is i plugged in
the 294 which is on my ed80 to my laptop
here with a team viewer and asi studio and eventually nina
and that's kind of my prototype because what you can do with nina and even for asi studio for that matter
you can have multiple instances um running so you can have multiple cameras on
different usb ports and you can synchronize the dithering
of those and i i went for dithering and uh you know was that that's good
but with a two imaging system the only way to do it effectively is to use uh to use nina
um and so so i'm gonna get there but for now as this stands today
i have my asi air controlling my 183 cooled camera on my c8
and i have a laptop with with asi studio and nina running on
this and that way when i'm when i'm slewing and when i'm taking images automatically with my
main camera which is doing the main plate solve i can just real time
play around with my wide field camera to see what's going on
and then also have fun taking extra images in between
the main imaging scope and i'll explain that when we do our a little survey at the end um
and then i have uh i was saying so i'm using a wi-fi router
as well to help boost the asi pro and that that's giving me longer
range so i can be inside the house and then i have a tablet with esi air pro
and uh we're also i'm also the sir pro is controlling i have a new electronic focuser
that's another thing i learned is focusing focusing focusing it's the most important thing because you can't
even do polar alignment if you don't have focus so uh and you can't plate solve unless you
have focus so that i've spent sometimes too long i'm trying to focus and
finally i got pretty good and you don't want to touch the focus you're always going to have to do a little bit of
tweaking based on temperature but having a an electronic automatic focuser is extremely extremely
useful that's for my main scope and i'm using a bat enough mask that i
just got for my uh my ed80 that's that's how i'm going to focus my ed80
so this is my new rig it hasn't been uh field fully field tested but i am really
confident that i'm gonna get a really nice setup i got my focuser got my 183 going to the asi
i have an oag field flattener and and here is the cool part about this
one what i learned is i was playing i spent that mastering three nights
three different nights uh when it was cloudy of course partially cloudy so i was just taking advantage of those
being able to look at stars um to to use the oag on a long focal
length versus short focal length and all that why it's not so easy but what i've
learned is that i think i think i found the right solution for anyone who's out there who
wants to use oags you want to use off-axis guiders on wide field scopes only because
but you don't want to go because what you can do is you can put it off
you can put the pick off prism off the sensor the edge and it's wide enough field and it's
large enough uh you know uh view that you're going to be able to pick up a uh a star even in a
low you know a load star field area like you know in galaxy area um with my c8 even
though has larger aperture it has a heck of a time with the off axis guided too limited to field of view
not enough bright stars and i can here's the other bonus on this one
i originally had the guide camera on a guy's scope that was 242 millimeters
well the rule of thumb is you should be at least you know one-fifth to you know
one-quarter of the focal length of your main scope uh before because otherwise
you're going to start to see a little bit of oval you're not going to be able to compensate with the mount uh adjustments
fast enough to compensate for uh for your uh guiding or your periodic error
so this is nice because it's 480 millimeter focal length which
is one-third because i have a uh an f6 3d reducer on
the c8 so that's around 1 300 millimeters 1280
and so basically uh that gives me really good focal length for my guide gives me good
aperture as well because an 80 millimeter even though you're using a pick-off prism is going to give me much
more light plus i can plus i also have a wider field of view so
i think this is this is going to be the one i think i finally got my system
uh and it also helps with the counterweight you don't have any weird offset um so
so that's what i'm going with right now and and i have all the different back focuses and i just wanted to show you
guys this picture again where you can nicely see the sensor this is a 283 uh
sensor in in eda's 80 focus you can see the image circle is just before it clips
the corner so that's nice and then your pick off prism is nice and clear
and it's perpendicular to the axis so that when you're adjusting for
periodic error you're in line so i had to make sure this is rotated the right way there's a lot of details and then of
course when you do all this you're adjusting the balance you're looking where the cables are there's a
lot of things that i've been learning and you can do all this on a you know in
the daytime um so um so then then i just want to write a book
here yeah yeah well that's that's where i'm gonna i'm gonna get to that
so but now thanks uh thanks scott no that's that's exactly right i mean
this is my this is my uh condensed version uh scott because uh so i i hope you guys don't mind that
we're i'm just uh a little bit and then i wanted to also demonstrate that this
stuff is not easy if you try to take it all in at once it's impossible you have to do it in
increments that's the reason why you want to start off with smartphone you store it was a small scope
get the cheap stuff you know it's not even cheap it's all good stuff now uh you know it all works
you just ha you gain the knowledge and then you also realize ah that's why you want to spend the money on this thing
and ah this is why so you don't want to it's like anything i'm i'm all as an
engineer you want to look at the system as a balanced system so when you increment something you don't want to
have like something like super awesome and then everything else like it's like getting a really awesome scope and then
a crappy mouth you know what i mean you you want it or under under mounted it could be a good mount but it's it's it's
overweight and and so you try to optimize this gradually use what you
have and then you start building and building and then finally i feel that
what i've learned is you know i was originally thinking i'm gonna switch my scopes and go between visual and
imaging forget it i i i these guys this is it what you see that's why i got the
automatic focuser i'm like this is it it's going to be an imaging system now i have
my four inch mac as a visual i have uh you know i'm probably going to
get another job in the future uh for my visual uh 10 inch job or something like that
so i can have fun with that but um but i can tell you that uh so visual is
still there i love visual but when you're doing imaging like i said the few cloudy the clear
nights you get in in the pacific northwest or anywhere you capture those images and you have fun with analyzing
them later it's it's really nice so um so i wanted to show you this auto
focusing and also this gives you an idea of my scene condition so here is uh on
my c8 uh i by the way i'm using binning on the 183 because
it's it it's pointless uh going with high resolution uh native two
point something micron because uh the image scale is like half an arc second
and and it's like my seeing as you can see 5.21 arc second i mean
it's it's really bad uh so but this is showing you how the
autofocus works and it's really nice so i don't have to fiddle around with it goes back and forth it fires that finds
the v curve and it gets to the best and the best in this case on that night was 5.21
um i look better i've gotten down to 2.7 on other nights manually when it was
more stable air but this is an example so you don't have to worry adhere it you know you're getting the
best for the night and then and then you can adjust in the future then the other thing i thought is i had a beautiful
night i was like i'm gonna have a great time of injury imaging and then all of a sudden within an hour
i'm not kidding my corrector plate even with the dew shield uh on the seat on the on the ed80 and
the big due shield on my c8 it was all fogged up it was like whoa and it was
like that's it i have to get do heaters forget it so and at the end of your observing session you know
totally well it's it's there but it's it's kind of like yeah it teases you right because you
have this you see the details in the galaxy you see this stuff but it's all mushy on the on the outside and the
terrible and i'll show you a picture there's one of them coming up but you're right it kind of ruins it and then
you just don't want to leave stuff out in that condition so it's like okay time to take it in hair dryer and uh that's
that's the end of it uh i this is the book uh so i i want i this
is my cheat sheet uh this is just i don't want to make everyone tired but
basically i do want to this is i do want to cover some of the stuff like you know the rig config
you know i talked about the dual imaging system right we have i learned about oag
tandem piggybacking cool camera you know that's really important equatorial mode how to have
one um asi air pro great help crutch to start you out um
and with and then a pc with with asi studio which is off the shelf free comes
with the camera you can have multiple insta nina allows me to eventually
i'm gonna probably put everything over to uh to pc in in the future and go back
to ascom because uh it's a lot more complicated but you have total customization total
control um you know it's uh but but everything has its place asi air
pro love it it's great but i think uh where i'm going with the dual imaging system i'm gonna probably
go all uh all uh like open open source stuff um
and then then you learn about cable management you usb power ethernet you know
all that changes weight uh you know do i put the asi air on the
on the dovetail of my c8 or do i stick it on the leg you know and then run a
couple of the power and the signaling you know every time you play around with
the combination you you have to decide where the cable is going to go back focus
you know um i learned about off-axis guider not an easy thing to deal with but when you figure it out
it's awesome um because you focus that then you're you're automatically focused
in both the main image and also that image scale you know you learn about
framing uh guest scope i've already talked about that auto focusing due shield
workflow image processing that's a whole new thing as you saw i was kind of cheating
last year with those images they're good uh but basically there's literally screenshots of stacked images that were
done in asi air pro now you start to get serious you want to start to get better images and you start
to want to build database especially with the sky survey where initially it's eaa but if you play
your cards right as you can see what i end up doing is i am maybe i take i
don't know three five minutes exposures per object do my full survey on one night and maybe
a year from now i i do another set and eventually you build uh you know and this is what
people do you know even with you just start taking your different
lights you start layering them and then you start building better and better images with more detail based on consistent
data i'm learning you know i know i know the benefits of dithering i had some experiments with that but
as i was mentioning before i'm having issues with my synchronizing that right now so i'm
sticking with no dithering for the images that we're doing so far binning i learned about that
it's very good with a 183 on a long focal length uh it gives you some extra
well depth and i also learned filters i am a galaxy guy
for the most part all my most of my images are galaxies so filters are great
but they are pretty much restricted to nebula and so you know the good for city but i
want to do wideband and and get the whole galaxy so that's that's kind of something i've learned and i've made a
conscious choice that i still have a filter drawer on my wide field scope for nebula um
but but it's empty right now uh as i'm in galaxy season um
sensor cleaning ah of course when you're playing around with all this stuff as you can see uh it's like one day it's
like what happened to my flat it looks terrible i have all these dots all over the place small dots big dots donuts i
was freaking out i was like oh no but then i learned i did some research
uh there are special swabs out there that are used primarily for cameras
uh digital cameras and they're nice and they're you can get different sizes
and you use a cleaning solution and there's instructions and i actually took apart my two
183 camera and i actually cleaned it very carefully and got rid of those and
i was like ah phew that was a scary scary situation but but i learned about that so it's not the end
of the world because you can you could the flats will take it out but it will help it will help improve the dynamic
range and cause these issues uh when you're when you're doing it down the road so that was something
um imaging like i already mentioned uh makes the cloudy nights go by uh i i was
i had a lot of fun with my my rigs uh getting ready looking forward to the next clear night
um uh what else i talked about image imaging plan so nina allows you to you
know create imaging plans asir pro also does and i that's another each one of these things i'm talking
about is an episode um and and
uh you know and and i by the way i have been watching a lot of these and i've been doing a lot of this myself but i
just wanted to this is what you start to build as you start going down this path and a
journey and and i really look forward to you know when i have more time i don't have it
right now but i have pictures i have stuff and clearpoint scott eventually
i will write you know i will start talking yeah you need to yeah yeah because uh
i want to see it's very similar to uh i remember mike wiesener you know with
his book on the etx telescope and uh he just covered so many great
points in great detail you know and really led people by the hand and uh
for for many many people who wanted to get into amateur astronomy that you know they bought a etx telescope as a nice
small little telescope but uh there you know with any telescope
there's a learning curve and uh yeah it really helped out and i think that uh
by you writing a book uh going through this because you do things so
meticulously but at the same time you may you break it down you know so it's easy to
understand yeah i really want to make it digestible and and you know forgive me for this
slide but but that's that's that's my my intention is to show that all these things are built on
fundamental simple concepts and if we can you know present it in the right way
then ultimately that's that's my contribution i really want to help people
uh you know better budding astronomers and that say hey these are b these are good
little tips you know save a lot of pain and and keep the enjoyment and and show
that you know different paths of of getting to what they want and um
and it's very custom it is very much everyone has their own thing but as you go on a journey you start to discover
it's kind of like going to university you know first year and then you start to find out what you want to do type of
thing um and then anyhow uh the other thing i learned is uh
guys scope uh yeah so one little trick because you know we have a lot of clouds here in seattle um
you can see the clouds go by and then you start to see the the guide stars stars pop in and out so it's like oh
that's a good way to for cloud detection so when when it gives you a guide error and it's like oh okay what's going on
i start looking at the guide scope information you can start to see and then it's like oh okay all the stars
guys as far as came in boom try to take a a you know a kind of uh best effort image now i can guide so it's kind of
fun there trying to take it opportunistically in between the holes in the clouds
and like i said the double fun factor you can do the ea part where you kind of
take little snaps but then if you build it the way i'm trying to do
you can also take your lights at the same time and build yourself a database um that you can start stacking and and
and enjoying more detailed images and better quality images as you get that noise down
um and so that's how these people you know you hear like 20 hours or whatever like
well that's because they have consent exactly clear nights but when you're in a place like seattle you might have to
take that over a couple years but it doesn't matter it's it's all part of the fun you start to um
build it up and um and and and then finally you know i already talked about this last year about
calibration frames but i learned a whole bunch of more and i was always mentioned to to maxie earlier
one of the techniques i learned which is a really good technique for is you can enjoy the live stack
on your asi air pro or for that matter you can do it in nina or um in in the
asi studio where you can actually view the the image as is being stacked
as a as a kind of a pre-processed image but you're also saving the individual
lights uh so you you already take your master bias master darks master flats which
you're going to use when you post process but you can also use them in the live stacking mode so you actually have
a good idea with the screen transform function that is automatically stretching the image
you can already get an idea oh yeah those are pretty good you know it's going to be good and then all of a sudden you'll see a streak of a jumbo jet going by it's like okay well i can
take that frame out when i actually do my post processing so um you know it's uh it's it makes it
enjoyable the whole time okay now we get to
the end goal and and i wanted to have a little uh uh
little tour with everyone here um i i took uh with my dual imaging rig
i went through and i did a little uh i managed to have a successful night in seattle
uh where i was able to take uh simultaneous uh wide field and narrow field shots uh
of a number of popular galaxies that are happening in early galaxy season here so
um let me go to bluestacks and i'm going to switch this uh actually
this is a sorry this is sky safari and turn off the let me make it now
and let's go change this into
yeah global star party 89
and here we go let's move over here okay so this is these are the objects we're going to check out
oh okay got some sound effects okay so so we'll start off in uh in the big
dipper uh well my big different ursa major um and i always think a big dipper because
these two stars pointing to m81 and m82 and that's a great way to find it even
with a you know if you're doing scar hopping with a binoculars or or a small scope you can zoom in so
let's uh let's go in there and
i think i want to turn this off can you guys hear that weird uh special effects
no oh you can't okay good then i'll just ignore it okay
so what you can see here is um is uh i have both
uh both image scales this inner one is my c8 with f63 focal reduces with the
183 so if i look at my uh scope display
i have a number of different combinations the large one is a my 80 millimeter ed
my 8080 with a 294 sensor and you can see its field of view is 2.29 by 1.56
degrees and if i go to the ev the c8
63 reducer it's with 183 field of view 0.59 by 0.39 okay so that's that's what
we're seeing here and if we go to the to the first shot so you can see
now you know a couple of disclaimers these are not um
you know by any means uh professionally uh stacked or anything but
um you know there's moon there's there's a gradient if you pixel peep this doesn't have the field flattener on it
uh there's some stretching on the corners uh but um what you see what i wanted to
show you is oops sorry is that um you have m82 m81 and you have
this other galaxy down here uh ngc 3077 and um in a nice frame and i can
i really love in equatorial mode it doesn't matter what time any time
any day any season it will always be in this framing and this
one thing you will notice though it is it has nice brown stars let me just move this out of
the way give me a second more hide video panel
uh hide no hide
there's something that's blocking me give me a second
okay there we go so this is this image was made with 14 two-minute uh subs
stacked and i post processes uh offline the main thing i wanna you know you can see that
um all these images i i got pretty good flats so you can see the flat field is
relatively flat but it's a nice pleasing view with an 8080
and if we go you know m81 is a really bright galaxy 6.8
magnitude uh m82 8 magnitude 8. um
these guys are you know if i if i look at the uh
the distance they're pretty close by sorry about that
m81 is uh sorry 12 million light years away so
it's you know it's it's out there but um
it's not you know it's further obviously andromeda galaxy is around 2.5 million
light years but it's so it's close but it's not like a virgo cluster typically around 50 million light years
away so it's pretty close and as a result you can see in the image
this is the uh the c8 16 two minutes uh exposures wow you can
see you can start to see some spiral structure in nice you know um
you know like this was not the best of night you can see the moon on that on the on the ninth was actually
uh uh creating a a little bit of filter but what you can see here which is neat is
you see some fainter galaxies off to the side like right here
uh right here um and and basically even in the neighborhood of of uh
right you see this guy right here uh and actually if you look
if i zoom in it's actually right there this guy right here
is uh p pgc you know ending at three two six or whatever this guy what's what magnitude
he's a magnitude 59 galaxy and i was able to pick him out
in in in my image here right there so um
that's that was m81 m82 then we move on to
i'm a little rusty here's sorry here now we move on to
inside the big dipper bowl or right right beside it now we're going to go down here and we got
the owl nebula m97 and it's magnitude 9.8 of course it's
inside our galaxy so we're going to go here
so even though it's galaxy season i i always like to get the owl nebula and this is a wonderful uh planetary nebula
the image because it's quite large and it's not so intensely bright
to blow out the detail so it's only uh 1.7 million or so 1.7
kilolight years so it's within our galaxy and if we go
this is the nice wide field and then of course because it's a an ed80 with a larger field of view i
managed to pick out uh m108 in the in the corner here which is kind of nice and you can see
some of the the structure in the galaxy and some of its dust lanes which is nice
and even on the on m97 you can just start to make out the central star but then on the c8
we take the same um 12 times two minutes stacked and you can still see the double shell
the two eyes and and some stars uh these three stars all different colors including the blue central star
right there so very happy with this image of m97
um then we move down we go down here
zoom back out again now we're going to go down to leo
oh sorry about that
and there's two triplets uh you know there is the the original leo triplet but there's another one down here
m96 m95 and m105 and m105 has another trio of galaxies on the edge at the
field of view on the 8080 so if i move let me just move this out of the way so you can see these three
galaxies up here you can actually see some of the structure um
so that's uh you know ngc 3a 3384 105 and then you have 96 and what you can
see what i've done is my main imaging scope is the c8 with the long focal length so i'm
centering on m96 in this case so that's how it's stored in the
database but what uh and then i'm taking advantage of that
uh i guess you say plate solved location to uh get my wide field shot as well
and here's a zoom in on the m96 and we'll just
look at m96 stats magnitude 9.1
and it is at c32 we're getting a bit further away now so it's almost three times as far as m81
um kind of a neat uh neat structure with a bar
and um these are all really great visual um
very visually pleasing with a wide field and even high powered
scopes you start to see some some structure but really great great uh for small scopes
then we get to the famous original trio and here i centered in on uh m9
on uh m66 so in the wide field shot you get nicely
all three including ngc 3628 which is actually visually very
difficult because the dust lane really reduces the
surface area brightness that brightness is spread over a larger field but when you do get it in the right skies or with
a larger aperture scope it's very rewarding the other two m65
m66 these guys are nice and bright and oftentimes even in a in a higher power
you can get both of them in the same visual field of view but they have a really neat characteristics m66 which i
took on the c8 uh this is an example of you know what we were talking about earlier scott about the dew
what it did uh it creates it creates this total uh white out and so i have this tiny little
donut in here but i still was able to uh
you know with nine times two minutes so almost 20 minutes i was able to get uh still some nice
structure and this is a really nifty galaxy i like the way the arms come out uh so i you know i kind of
put on my filter and say yeah it's still good it's it's but i wanted to demonstrate obviously you know this is
something when i with my do heater all that i take this again it's going to be nice and clean
uh so um the stars are nice and round no issues there tracking is beautiful
uh everything is good um and now it's pretty focused so it's just
a matter of getting that do out of there and if you look at the m66
it's a magnitude 8.9 and let's see how far that guy is
in the same 37 million light years so it's in the same neighborhood yeah so these we're starting to get a little bit
further out um i never get jaded on hearing about
distances to galaxies or you know learning about you know
the you know the size aspects of things and the immensity
of it you know when you think about that little dash of light having i don't know how many billion uh stars
in its system you know um you know how many trillions of planets
might be there and that little dash of light it just oh yeah it just propels me it it sends me off
into you know this kind of uh mental state you know
of uh and that you're actually connected to it it's it's super far away
it is super big is immense beyond proportions that you could ever
really wrap your head around but you know it's part of you yes it's part of you you know and so
that is that is uh and it's just one of trillions you know just one of trillions
well you know and and and you know we were pixel peeping here but basically uh
you know it's easy to criticize the flaws but i looked i like to look at the
the positive things like first of all like you said you you're looking at this galaxy
32 million light years away and you're seeing you're seeing the structure you're seeing this structure you can't
see i remember when i first looked through a 17 and a half inch dob
back in uh when i was a kid uh probably 14 years old
and this is what got me hooked on galaxies i was like i remember i think it was the leo triple and i i remember
seeing you can actually see this type of structure visually uh these
on these brighter galaxies and i remember i was like oh yeah this is this is awesome this is awesome
that's right and this is and this is just with uh you know granted this is an eight inch uh you
know what let's go back to the previous picture um on the on the ed80 let's go back
you know this is not too bad either right uh with with a little more you know that's
a little more uh i mean this is just a beautiful to be able to have all that framed and the noise is there but the
fundamentals are there you have round stars i know with a flattener i'll get these edge stars good
the tracking is good all the building blocks are there and i just need a dark
sky no do and basically these are gonna start to look really
nice you know and and it will just get better i mean already i'm very happy right i mean i'm seeing
stuff that you can can't even see with an 18 inch uh visually on a dark in you
know maybe in a dark sky you can start to see the the the the structures but you can't see all
uh you know direct vision uh this type of detail so but
it makes the its enhancement it to me it complements the visual because now you're training your eye as well
so that when you do get that opportunity to see these visually in one of those
big monster scopes or or even in a smaller scope on it in a dark sky
you start looking for those details and you find them you actually you actually will see them
uh much easier than if you didn't know they were there and say hey i wonder if i can see that and it's such a
gratifying experience when you actually have that self-discovery when you know
what you're looking at right and that's part of the fun and that's why i'm building this
you know this is what drove me to to do this and i'm gonna you know people have made messier
catalogs and done lots of stuff and done amazing pictures but again my point
my goal is different it's different when you do it and also i i i'm looking at this as a visual
enhancement you know you're you're the only reason why i want to take better quality pictures over time
of the same objects is so that you can actually start to see the painter galaxies in behind so
because as we'll see in some of these upcoming ones you'll start to see some other neighboring galaxies
and you said it's like you're going even deeper right you're you're now taking your
visual and your exploration even deeper than you ever could before right uh it's really nice right
so now we go to a famous object that what everyone knows and loves this beautiful
grouping in virgo right in the smack in the middle and extremely pronounced uh
arc known as stefan's sorry stefan's known as uh mercanian's chain arcarian's chain
of galaxies going from bright and all the way out it's just a beautiful thing and of course virgo aid stuck in the
corner here but with the wide field ta-da you can get it all in
and you know it's uh this is a nice you know with a little more exposure this is
only made up of um this is only made up of uh two-minute subs but if i crank it up to
five-minute subs and then you know i uh i i do some more dithering and you know
do a longer many many more exposures this is going to start to look like a really nice mean
i'm extremely thrilled about this this is beautiful to be able to see this you know in a wide field like this it's
just makes me so happy seeing all these galaxies oh yeah and all different types you know nice
edge-ons you know it's the ellipticals you know oh it's so cool that's a deep you know it's a deep field
it is yeah yeah it's it's a beautiful and then of course with a long focal length this is all you get but
there's a little little uh little bonus all of a sudden you pick out some of these other galaxies so if we let's just
zoom into the eyes and see what those galaxies are so we'll go to here and we zoom into the eyes
see now you see how those galaxies start popping in okay so now we're in the c8 this is c8 view
and if we look at the eyes themselves this guy let me just move this out of the way
magnitude 10 a galaxy i have to move that out of the weekend and we'll take a look how far is this
guy this guy 37 see it's in the neighbor same as the leo it's around the same magnitude same size as you can see so
that's a good comparison so it's 37 million light years away however you look at these guys
that guy's a magnet at 14.9 and this guy's let's take the 15.5 so pcga
4041018 take a look at that guy move him out of the way
that guy is a whopping 51 million light years away so now he's
not quite it's like one and a half one 66 further so it's uh getting further away
but you know smaller galaxy and then the other thing is you when you do this and you can set your magnitude
limit in sky safari you can start to say oh okay hey there's another galaxy here
this guy here is magnitude 16 3. i wonder if i can see him let me go back to your image
and say hmm can i see that galaxy let's do a visual play solve so
i just move over here and i s oops sorry let's go back here
so it's if i zoom in and there's this little stirring go like
that okay so it's possible that it's one of these
but again with more exposures and that you start to now there's another purpose to making it
nicer looking you get a better signal to noise and you start eking out these galaxies
like see that one yeah see that guy i pic there's this triangle of stars
here's the triangle stars there's another galaxy right there i don't know if you can see that and
if i you know take a longer exposure you can start to pick that out and start
continuing your galaxy hunter deeper this is 16.5 magnitude so 16.5 and it is
[Applause] look at this 110 million light years
away there you go now we're getting to another level isn't that cool so so you start to go deeper
and deeper and start to put the pieces and it just makes it such a fun puzzle so
you know beyond just the this is kind of the what you know adrian is talking about beyond the the visual
uh you know the appealing uh look of things uh it's it's that orientation and and
and seeing the depth and and the and then the relative connection uh you know distances
uh you know the spatial uh you know the geometry um it's really um yeah and i just love
the eyes because you have this you know this big wisp and you have the you know that if you
zoom in you can see a little more of uh dust here and there's a lot of noise in this
picture but again with enough uh exposures let me clean it up and
and i haven't done anything with pixin i'm not even eventually i will get probably picks and picks
because that's you know we'll be able to do some scripts and all that um but
for now the main thing is i want to get some good data reliably and then you know the
image processing will follow i'm just doing some basic processing right now using the existing tools stretching
basic stretch whoops let me go back here again so continue
continuing that was a little bit of a jumping ahead now this one here uh
we all going up is the needle galaxy which uh is the rest of them are actually all in
comer penicillius just now this one i only got with the c8
because i i
so this one is magnitude 9.1
and he is see 39 million light years away so he's
the leo galaxies the the mercarian chain all those galaxies around the same
distance in a in that sphere away from us and if i look at the
this is what i got with my c8 and you can see nice dust lane
and then you have this you can see my actually a dust mode
here this was not a calibrated flat and you know this is you know i'll get better at it but uh this is what i have
at the time there's a little galaxy here this was very pronounced galaxy let's take a look at what those guys are
so if we go
there here it is see it pops up iac3571
that's a magnitude whoa that was magnitude 17 and a half
that's and then uh let's take a look at that guy how far is he oh 64 million light years away so that's
that's interesting so about twice as far and this guy
ngc 4562 magnitude 14 4 and
let's go that guy 36 million light years away so what's
what you're seeing here this is what's fascinating is well you get a good um
a good sense that you know a magnitude magnitudes can be misleading
uh you because it doesn't necessarily translate into distance it also doesn't
translate into surface brightness and you can really with with imaging
it can also help you set expectation on what you can see visually you know sometimes a fainter galaxy
like i've seen when i was doing my survey of 3000 objects or whatever i was surprised to find that some of the 12th
magnitude galaxies that are much smaller actually are much more defined and easier to find and spot
either because of the star field or because of their surface brightness compared to brighter galaxies that might
be magnitude 10 but they're very diffuse so capturing that with with the images
here and also looking at these fainter galaxies the same law applies and you can really see and it also you
can see translates into distances as well uh you you can't make a a a general statement
um okay continuing right along next one ah yes
this is one i was so happy to discover i remember when i first came across this pair
with my 18-inch top it's kind of like it's like whoa how come nobody talk about these galaxies is because
they're really quite bright this whale galaxy
is uh let's go magnitude 8.9
this is a huge galaxy and uh if you look at the uh distance
see 24 million it's a it's a closer galaxy it's it's often overlooked because it's kind of in the middle of nowhere
and then it has this other one uh ngc four five four six five six
which is um which is quite a bit fainter 12 magnitude 12.4 oops sorry
that's the wrong one magnitude 9.5 and then
17 so it's even closer see here's an example where the painter galaxy is actually quite a bit closer
but let's go to the images so the wide field shot i was very happy
with this ed-80 i've never seen a wide-field image of these these two um it's not a very common
i want to do better at this but you can see i because of my ca being trained on the image the plate solve on the
whale galaxy uh it's centered on that i could do a better job framing this or could just crop it
later on uh but you know quite quite nice detail on the ed80
uh this is called either the crowbar galaxy or the hockey stick galaxy as a canadian i i like that um
and you have a little elbow here that's actually another galaxy on the tip
and you see the brightening this whale galaxy has another galaxy that's a dwarf galaxy that's
right beside it in fact just for fun let's see if it's actually a neighboring galaxy
so that guy is magnitude 12.4 and if he's around 20 million light
years he's probably in the same internet let's check it out 31 okay so he's about 10 million light
years away from the whale galaxy so he's still pretty far but um
but he's off in the distance so it's not actually companion galaxy um and then if we go
that's on the ed80 and then if we go to the zoom up this is i love this one this is my c8
and look at kind of detail you can get in this i just love this you know all the
the nice uh you know uh structure in in the in the
in the galactic plane uh and it's it's a little bit uh off-centered has a lot of modeling over
here and then it goes there nice bulge and then you can you visually see this
uh this companion galaxy it's a magnitude 12 point something with an eight inch you can you can capture that
then there's a little bonus galaxy here uh you can clearly see beside this star so let's see where that is let's zoom in
seer [Music]
interesting well i'm not going to claim that i discovered something new but uh you can
see these there's some fuzzies out there it might be uh you know it might be a comment uh or or if it's it's possible
it's a comment um there is a little bit of it you know you know i don't know because you can
see on the it's not there it should be between these two stars should be right there these two galaxies you can make out see
these two there's one there one there this is quite a bit brighter than those two i would not be surprised if i picked
you know i i should take another picture it's possible that that's a comment let's see i don't know
this is part of the fun of this too you know you you'll you'll find these
potentially well you'll clearly see if a jet goes in in the way or or the
satellite uh trail is going which by the way uh one thing that we should all consider
satellites uh of all types especially the ones that are near earth
uh or or low leo satellites including the starlink
because they're so close the nice part if there is any
benefit is if you image at the meridian at midnight
or anything that should be in the earth's shadow so you're not going to get any reflections on satellites
and i discovered that when i was taking a lot of pictures of orion
um early in in the in the in the dawn or sorry in
the uh as soon as sunset was was finished
i would right away start taking pictures of orion and then there's tons and tons of these geostationary satellites making star
trails all over the place and i was like what the heck and then you realize well if you just wait a little bit until the
sun sets on those satellites they won't be there anymore uh so so that's that's the ultimate
way around uh that type of uh photobombing but it does
restrict uh you know your your imaging window if you want to have no chance of them
hitting there uh so that's something i've discovered okay
now another favorite of mine oh yes yes i never forget when i first saw this
oh man in my in my 18 inch and this is the opposite you got
see this one's easy to remember because in this direction along the big dipper
you got m81a 82 but then the opposite direction you have m106
and this is a beauty i love this galaxy because this is one
of those just has really nice pronounced
spiral arms and this is the wide field and it also has some beautiful neighboring galaxies
that are bright enough to see in moderate size scopes in the in in the same field so here's a nice 8080
wide field view where you have a number of galaxies all around there and you also it's long
enough exposure i've actually got the outer halo of the spiral arms besides the core
arms so if i zoom in on the ed80 you can still start to see that it's noisy
but it's still there and let's take a look at m106 m106 magnitude 8.3
and 25 million light years away
you know uh so it's it's pretty close but it's neighboring one that we can barely see
that's magnitude 13 2 and that guy
36 you see so million light years away so actually that's interesting 36 and let's
do it again 25 okay so it's 20 11 million light years away from m16
and then you have all the other ones as well which we can go but that's okay then if we look at the c8
the the zoomed in picture look at that oh i just love this
you know just really nice and visually oh yeah i remember see i remember seeing like
the sci-fi version of a galaxy right there yeah yeah yeah i mean you know lots of noise and all but but
you can really still see just gorgeous structure i mean the i remember seeing this with my 18 inch i
was just blown away as soon as i saw i was like whoa like of course m51 gorgeous all that but when i saw
this guy i was like wow you know it's like on edge and you have these really nice and you can
actually see some modeling uh that's a that's a beauty so any if you're ever at a star party
check out m106 um and then and then it has this other galaxy right there too which is which is
nice um anyhow it's called ngc two four two four eight
okay oh sorry uh
yeah next one zoom back out here
okay we're almost finished yeah i think i think one more
yeah ah yes here's the last one i know we've been going for a long time thanks everyone
and for those of you watching the replay that's uh i hope you're enjoying it um
but here is everyone's favorite oh man m51
and this one i just want to say so this is 20 minutes okay
of stacks on an 8080 it's far enough away from the moon nice flat field relatively there's a
little bit of a gradient here because the moon what i've learned is that the gradient occurs opposite the
direction of the light because it reflects off of the cone of the blue shield
so for example the moon is to the right top right here and you can see that this glow comes
from even though you have baffling and dark and all it doesn't matter it still will
reflect and it will cause this gradient um and so but doesn't matter
hey look at this you can see the structure nicely you can see even some of the uh the dust
even in an 8080 and then nicely situated and then centered perfectly in the field
and then bang here's my c8 view and what i like about this one
is uh look at look at the detail right you have really nice structure you can see
all of the additional uh stars that are cast out uh thrown out from the uh the
interaction of these two galaxies you also see some uh nifty stuff like uh this one here
we go to the um zoom in now
and 51. so you see we'll just frame it
and we can zoom right in and you can see
this guy right here is that guy right there so let's zoom right in
i'm sorry it's a galaxy right there ic four three
four four two seven eight i'm just as interested in these very small smudges that are beside these
show objects as the big objects themselves they're galaxies too um right so if we
if we look at this guy he's look at that magnitude 17.8 here's a classic example where say okay 17.8 we
saw some other stuff that looked even fainter but because of its uh high concentration
if you look at the image you can see it's very pronounced
and uh so go back to the specs on it
so that's 250 million light years away okay 250 million light years away that's
getting out there and that's right beside m51 itself let's take a look at that guy
m51 itself is only 28 so almost 10 times
the distance 10 times the distance of that right beside each other and then if we look at
the image again there they are so very humble
that's my that's my uh my journey and then there's lots of other if we peek around there's other galaxies and stuff
but but basically uh bottom line
the end goal is to take images so you can continue to enjoy them on rainy nights
cloudy nights and and share them with all our friends here and and then make it make a way so that
you can build the journey and start to make it repeatable so that all your time under the stars is
maximized enjoyment and uh and uh and we can all share so thank you
thank you scott wow cameron thank you so much it's great to have you back on again and i certainly hope to have you
back that you don't have such a long uh stay away in the future so
um i had to run out uh during your talk there i mentioned in in
in chat with you that i had to uh go check something and uh it was it started
to rain outside and there was a door that was open so i had to take care of that but um
like you i love galaxies i love uh you know seeing how far you can see
and uh with with your with your camera set up even though
many people those of you on the audience i mean you've been seeing these people uh do this kind of imaging and exploring
the sky in bortles seven eight and nine skies okay
and doing amazing stuff so um you can do it too um
and uh so i'm glad you guys were watching tonight um cameron thank you
for for uh your presentation i see that john briggs is still there in the background
and cameron or you've got two cameron gillis's so you and john are the last holdouts there maybe some of the other
presenters are watching on youtube or facebook but
again thanks very much it's now about 12 15 here and
so we're going to call it a night but you know the main message here is to
keep looking up uh keep exploring you know find a way to
experience real true personal discovery of the universe uh you know you may not
be the first one to see these things or experience these things but uh it may be the very first time for you
and that's very important so um you know in this troubled world that we
have today uh you know with a war going on in the ukraine and
you know people divided astronomy brings people together it
is something that lowers your stress it can lower your blood pressure
uh you know and you can experience a state of flow and
you know cameron does that very very well with his cam cam astronomy
program his sky survey he exp i know he experiences flow when he's doing this and most of us that do
astronomy have those moments of peace and a a flow state that is uh really
really important uh that you can experience that in your life and you know so
uh we there's many ways to do it but astronomy is a good way that really only first requires that
you use your pair of eyes to experience this so
we want to wish you good night and wherever you are we hope that you have a good day or a good night wherever you're
watching in the world and we will be back next tuesday and um with the 90th global star party
so see you then and until that time keep looking up good night
good night
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