Transcript:
you you can see some snow falling but now here is very very rare uh you
have if you well i i saw a video close to the ocean
that did um a cowboy from here from gaucho
when we have really cold weather and he took with his hands and a snake
that was frozen oh you know oh poor for the snake but it was frozen
because it was really really cold and well
now that that was kind of and i remember in in those days i went with my friends to do some pictures in
the in the river place here so it was really cold
wow it was like nice cutting your face or your
hands now yeah are you getting ready to broadcast we're
doing it right now yeah yeah let's see
so david yeah i'm giving your book a plug tonight i
even have a picture of the cover in my talk well is that me david
yes you're a galaxy book oh thank you well how should i make out the check
lots of zebras okay thank you mike that is very nice
oh it's a great book all right thank you
i appreciate that
um
uh
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as 2022 is dawning the european space agency readies itself for another year
filled with exciting missions new milestones in human space flight and cutting-edge science
at the end of 2021 the long-anticipated james webb space telescope was launched from kuru on top of an ariane
this new space telescope is a partnership between esa nasa and csa
in 2022 during the first five months of the telescope's operational life the
data from the early release science initiative will be sent back to earth this data will be made available
immediately providing the entire scientific community with early access
another look at our universe will come from the full gaia data release 3 in the first half of 2022 adding to what is
already the richest star map of our galaxy and beyond closer to home solar orbiter will get
within a distance of 50 million kilometers to the sun for another close pass in march
this will offer a significant boost to the science that can be done and a plethora of new data is to be expected
in the future solar orbiter will also provide scientists with the first good look at the sun's polar region
for science the planned launch of esa's exomars 2022 mission will be another
milestone sending the european rover rosalind franklin and a russian surface platform
to the red planet looking for signs of past life the rover is the first mission to be able to roam
across the planet and drill down to a depth of two meters into the planet's surface
the launch and early orbit phase of the mission will be spearheaded from esa's main control room at esop in germany and
is bringing together expertise in mission control deep space communication interplanetary navigation and flight
dynamics in europe a combination unique to esa in human space flight german esa
astronaut matthias maura will return to earth after his six-month cosmic kiss mission on board the iss by then
matthias will have supported many experiments from orbit advancing our knowledge in areas ranging from human
health to material sciences the end of his mission might even have a bit of an overlap with the new mission of his
fellow esa astronaut samantha christoferetti samantha will launch to the iss in the
spring of 2022 for her second long duration mission on board the iss
her first mission called futura made her the first italian woman in space both
matthias and samantha can only be seen as a source of inspiration for the new class of astronauts issa will be
introducing in the autumn of 2022. these new astronauts will have been selected from a pool of over 23 000
candidates who applied in 2021 in addition esa is planning to select an
astronaut with a physical disability for the par astronaut feasibility project
the selected astronauts might even become the first europeans to set foot on the moon
a goal essa aims to achieve before the end of the decade to make this ambition a reality issa continues to work closely
with nasa on the artemis program by providing the european service modules
which are integrated with the orion capsules the uncrewed maiden flight of the new
spacecraft artemis 1 is scheduled for later this year while the preparations for the crude artemis 2 continue
another step closer towards the first european step on the moon europe's lightweight launcher vega c is
also poised to make its inaugural flight in 2022 launched from europe's spaceport in kuru
and taking over from the original vega vegas c will be more powerful and have a
larger and more versatile payload capacity meanwhile preparation for europe's new heavyweight launcher ariane
6 continue in anticipation of the made in flight both new launches are important for esa
and europe to maintain independent access to space whereas the exploration of space the
planets in our solar system and the moon are all important the exploration and
observation of earth is of equal if not of even greater importance in 2022 issa continues the development
of a new generation of earth explorers such as flex biomass and earth care
to better understand and monitor our planet esa also continues to collaborate with
the european union developing six new sentinel satellites for the copernicus expansion missions
adding to the largest earth observation program in the world another satellite soon to be observing
our earth from space is the first third generation meteosat that is to be
launched from europe's spaceport in 2022 this geostationary weather satellite has
been developed in cooperation with umetsat protecting our planet also means
scanning the heavens for potentially dangerous asteroids a task for esa's new fly eye telescope
which will be assembled and tested at the asi matera facility in italy during the year
in 2022 esa's directorate of telecommunications and integrated applications will continue to support
european industry to innovate and succeed in the highly competitive global
market for telecommunications satellites by offering its expertise experience
and its reputation for reliability it also develops space-enabled connectivity through next-generation 5g
connections esa remains ambitious as ever the intermediate ministerial meeting in
2021 was a milestone on the road to the european space summit to be held in
toulouse france in february 2022 ahead of esa's next council meeting at
ministerial level later in the year with the need to accelerate the use of
space and make space for europe esa has a responsibility towards all
citizens in europe to make them part of the future of space and to align this future with the
digital and green transitions
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well hello everybody this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and i'm very pleased to
present the 98th global star party to you uh the theme is exploration and
awareness and um one of the things that uh the aspect of
awareness is or awakening i'm sorry um
is that uh after watching uh a
documentary about the overview effect from astronauts that had experienced
uh the earth rising off of the horizon from the moon [Music]
you know they had a uh you know a shift a cognitive shift as they called it but
uh they saw the thin layer of the atmosphere
of the earth and experience how frail the earth looked from space
and of course you don't see any boundaries or any of these things you know no no
no separation you know it's just this glowing living uh orb that's out there
in the vastness of space and um uh it it changed these astronauts
forever but i'll argue that people that experience astronomy and see
amazing things like uh the rings of saturn a comet
blazing across the sky or in the case of uh where you see kind of
the dance of the solar system a total eclipse of the sun you can also have these kinds of
experiences right here on the spaceship earth and so um uh you know this uh this aspect had
captured my imagination and uh i know it's something that is often reflected
upon by the presenters here on the global star parties so very very happy
to present our 98th as we march towards our 100th global star party that will broadcast uh in july mid-july so
uh but uh to kick off this global star party we're gonna turn to david levy who
guides us through the beginning of each of our global star parties here and uh
david thank you so much for coming on for the 98th gold star party
well thank you so much scott and it's really such a pleasure to be here
this is an interesting theme today we're talking about not just the cosmos
but about the cosmos is relation to us and we all have relatives
and uh we all have brothers sisters parents grandparents grandchildren nephews and nieces
but one of the relatives that we should not forget is the cosmos itself
because as large as it is it is the biggest thing that there is it also is extremely personal and it's
very personal to me and especially how we view it how we see
it and so for my quotation today i'm going to quote from william blake's
uglies of innocence published in 1803 to see the world in a grain of sand
and a heaven and a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in
an hour thank you and back to you scott ah very appropriate uh
poet poem there david thank you so much um
let me find my little thing here here we go i'm back
and um uh that's great so you said that you were getting some rain here this is the
this is the the day of the equinox right uh or the solstice excuse me uh summer summer here
and it's it's winter down down under so
but um and we are getting some rain not much a little bit of rain as we start
the summer of 2022 today well we are having a classic summer day
here in arkansas so uh it's blazing hot outside is over 100 and
you know so i'm looking forward to cooling down a little bit as the evening wears on so
thanks again david okay all right so um
we always bring the astronomical league on to uh the global star party they have
been with us for most all the global star parties that we've done uh and um you know the astronomical league
is the world's largest federation of astronomy clubs they have over 300 clubs in under their umbrella
over 20 000 members uh that are that call themselves astronomical league
members and they have incredible uh observing programs an incredible and
amazing awards program uh and they are heading towards their uh next
astronomical league conference which will happen this july so
i'm very excited to be attending myself and um uh so we will be broadcasting uh live
some of the talks and lectures that will happen at or actually the topics of
those talks and lectures at the astronomical league to actually see them uh in their entirety you're going to
have to be there and so that's a great reason to go to the alcon event which will be in
albuquerque but uh uh for now i'm going to turn this over to don knabb don will
uh uh ask uh and uh he'll talk about the astronomical league questions that are
asked for the door prizes uh he'll talk about who the winners were and he'll ask
the new questions so don i'm gonna bring you on here
all right can you see and hear me okay absolutely all right let me share my screen then
that would be this one and i'll go to slideshow
okay we always start with a warning about proper
observation technique for seeing the sun i wonder a terrible way to go blind
would be to look straight at the sun and uh you may remember last month i was on
i mentioned and held up the issue of astronomy from the spring where bob burma wrote about solar safety
so it's important that you never leave a telescope unattended in the daytime
you have to use the right filter at the top of the telescope not in the ice piece because it would melt
right through the eyepiece filter and uh always consult with a
knowledgeable observed before you attempt to observe the sun and in fact in this
current the quarterly issue of the reflector the astronomical league
magazine there is a full article about how to observe the sun safely
so uh you know we take it really seriously we don't want anyone to go blind uh they're much safer ways to see the
sun than uh than doing anything that you shouldn't be doing so always do it the right way but this is a great article by
the way about uh about solar observing so so from uh
june 14 answers what space mission was on so if you were
looking at this you could see the apollo lander and the surveyor spacecraft surveyor 3
and that was apollo 12 okay from 1969 they landed only 600 feet away so the
astronauts could walk to a good samples and interestingly samples of bacteria from surveyors cameras prior to launch
were detected had lived on the moon or it survived on the moon for 31 months
first person to apply for a patent on telescope hans lippershay okay he is generally
accredited with uh inventing the telescope in 1608 and
apply for a patent he applied we didn't say he got it so uh
he uh was denied because of another spectacle maker zacharias johnson
invented the telescope first no one really knows but uh either way uh lip reshade did get
compensated for uh binocular telescopes he made for the government so uh the
answer was a hans lipperche and third and this one took me some
digging to figure out uh structure was discovered in 2020 the nearest coherent
gaseous structure in the milky way uh responsible for the current breaking the bright band i'm looking away in the
direction of perseus it is called the radcliffe wave that was a new one to me
so uh 8 800 light year long interconnected bed of molecular clouds which are stellar nurseries
named after the radical cliff institute in uh cambridge mass
so the people with the right answers were cameron gillis john williams israel monterosu
and your corporal and i got him right too so there
okay now the questions i came up with for this week we'll go through them
okay here we see a picture of a satellite from nasa
so scientists have begun to announce the first results of analysis of the material from
asteroid ragu so the question is what spacecraft
brought this material to earth okay what spacecraft from nasa traveled to
picked up samples and wrote it back was it the judo spacecraft was it sentinel 6
or hayabusa 2 and as always send answers to secretary
astrology.org and i think we'd like to have them in within the next couple of days
okay so juno sentinel 6 or hayabusa 2.
messi 18 messier 18. a uh nebula nicknamed the pillars of creation
and there's a photo from nasa i think this is taking an infrared if i remember right
another name for uh for this nebula okay we call the pillars creation what else is the call is it the eagle nebula
trifid nebula or the lagoon nebula okay messier 18
the pillars of creation an amazing site
lastly historical astronomy here johannes kepler a german astronomer
mathematician astrologer and natural philosopher
best known for his laws of what universal gravitation
planetary motion or chemistry johannes kepler and this is a historic image i found and
go to wikipedia so we'll see the guy for universal gravitation planetary motion or
chemistry and uh again send uh
send your answer to the secretary at astroleague.org and here is the uh
another reminder of the astronomical league live in august this will be after alcon i'll comes july 28
to 30 and then friday august 12th will be the next astronomical league live
uh i think that is all i've got scott that's all you got huh
well um i i found uh some of the answers they're
pretty uh pretty incredible especially the the one about bacteria on yeah amazing
unbelievable unbelievable song survive in the moon yeah yeah
fantastic i think there's some tardigrades up there too right so they probably are
[Music] we just can't stop messing with things
can we nope nope anyhow thank you so much uh don it's
great it's great and you will be at the alcon event yourself i cannot make it to
outcome unfortunately you cannot okay all right next year for sure okay well great well i hope uh that some of the
live stuff that we share from elkon that you're able to tune into so i'll be watching yep great okay
so um uh up next is uh you know we live
on this spaceship earth and it's got some pretty amazing stuff here uh we we have discovered that there
is life in the universe it's right here for sure and uh it's got some pretty interesting uh
materials on it like minerals and crystals and that has been the uh
ongoing uh series from david eicher from astronomy magazine so
i always find his uh talk about uh his minerals and crystals fascinating
they're beautiful and uh you know if you are at all inclined to collect uh these things
you're definitely going to want to listen to david talk about them because he knows a lot david so i'm going to turn it over to
you well thank you scott and i will share my screen once again we'll see if we can
get a powerpoint up here and we'll see if we can start a slideshow
and then we will look at even more minerals we're almost starting to run
out of things and i apologize again because i photograph these in groups on shelves so we're getting into less
organized groups there are some things that are kind of unrelated but they're all i hope somewhat interesting and
we're looking at planetary geology here we're looking at the way the universe likes to make
planets it's a universe of order as we've discovered more and more about the cosmos we understand that it follows the
rules and laws of science um and that we're not in the center of everything
i hope that's not a shock to anyone and um we're less special than we believe but
there's chemistry and and uh matter throughout the entire universe
and it follows the same principles everywhere we go we know that through spectroscopy
we only know of one place in the universe where there's life but uh you know the the odds are pretty
good that we're not uh the be all end all for that so going back in time we have thomas
jefferson saying i believe in a divinely ordered universe isaac newton even before that time said
truth is ever to be found in the simplicity and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things
the universe is ordered not by supernatural design but by the principles of physics and of science
minerals demonstrate that we don't need magic to explain things we need to
actually understand what's going on these are atoms that assemble in precise ways by their electrochemical
attractions inherent properties of the atoms that make them up and guide them
into assembling in what mineralogists call a specific crystal lattice so here
are some more examples of other kinds of minerals and and today
we're looking at things that involve nickel and carbon and some other stuff that's about as
specific as we could get today because of the way that the things are grouped here so i chose one nickel often colors
minerals a vivid green color where it's a chromophore as mineralogists call it a
coloring agent one interesting such example is called anabergite which is nickel arsenic
hydrate it was named by henry brooke and william miller in 1852 after one of the type
localities for this mineral annaberg saxony germany which
hosts a huge number of species of minerals including a lot of
silver minerals the colors of this mineral anna burghyde are usually green and usually a fairly
vivid or apple green can be light gray to bright green white or even pale rose
it's a member of the vivianite group and it's often found as a greek green
alteration coating on other kinds of nickel minerals so these are somewhat
unusual minerals the nickel stuff and reasonably usual in in the case of
carbon which is pretty common so here's a crystallographic diagram of
anna burghyt showing nickel arsenic oxygen and hydrogen atoms
sticking together there it's in a monoclinic crystal system and we'll just look at
some examples of things here is a specimen of anabergide and you can see it's the
very vividly bright green stuff here that forms sort of tufts of crystals
here this is a greek specimen from a fairly well-known uh mine for nickel minerals in in greece
near near attica back you know the birthplace of that concept that we all
used to follow in the old days democracy
here's another uh sorry what scott it's fine it's good
okay i'm trying to limit my uh remark here towards science for the most part okay
um here here's another uh example of anna burghy you can see the little little
spheres uh that are bright vivid crystal green as well with some with some lead
and other minerals uh mimetite a lead mineral and other from the same uh mine
the the three kilometer mine in in lavrion near
and near athens uh relatively near athens
this is another unusual nickel mineral nickel carbonate called gaspite it comes
from australia and again you can see this same kind of vivid green color from the nickel atoms
here here's yet another one this is nickel magnesium silicate hydroxide napoite
from of all places new caledonia here's if you have to swim out and get these
specimens they're really valuable but fortunately in the modern times here you can get them at mineral shows
but this is a very unusual nickel mineral as well but you can see this sort of general similarity of some of
the nickel minerals in their coloration here's nickel carbonate hydroxide
hydrate zeratite which is another australian specimen here with that same similar
kind of greenish color this is sort of a little tiny aggregates
of micro crystals here not so fantastic in terms of the
crystallography here that is an unusual mineral then we get into something that comes
from the old lincoln country in kentucky here millerite which is a simple nickel
mineral nickel sulfide and it forms along this us-27 is a very famous
uh highway that goes north and south it goes through my old hometown in fact of
oxford ohio right down through kentucky and toward florida
in the old days it was an important road before the interstate system was constructed and you can see this
millerite which is a fairly unusual thing even though it's simple uh chemically
forms these little hair-like silvery needles and those are the things that are in this quartz geode here that you
can see then we can move on to carbon simply because they seem they were happen to be
on the same shelf with groups of photos here's a diamond and we all essentially all of us have
diamonds in our lives mostly with uh ladies we're associated
with um this is a one a little bit more than a carrot a yellow octahedral crystal
most diamond crystals or octahedrons naturally and this is from a famous mine
the premier mine uh in south africa um and it's it's a fairly common thing to
have yellow colored diamonds as well there's a much more famous diamond the largest diamond in
the world um that was split into several pieces you can see it in the tower of
london um from the same mine that includes the cullinan one and and other diamonds
they're a little larger than my specimen though now i don't know if you can see a little
uh whitish uh oval um crystal that is just to the right of
the center of this image in the rock here this rock is a very
very high temperature volcanic explosive rock that shoots up um and forms these
uh pillars underground and it's called kimberlite a very rare
kind of volcanic explosive rock and it's the matrix that holds most diamonds
that form on earth diamond remember as we talked about a year or two ago now at
this point sorry for beleaguering you with this much mineralogy but diamonds were actually
one of the first dozen or so mineral species to be known in the solar system
they're very very old they're simple they're simply carbon uh chemically
but it's rare to have diamonds that are in a chunk of a little chunk of kimberlite this is a somewhat rare thing
it's a chinese specimen mainly because um diamond companies mostly de beers in
south southern africa have monopolized the diamond market for so long
and they don't want natural diamond specimens to get out of there they want to find all the diamonds crush them
process them and sell them to everyone who wants to get married in the history
of the universe so it's hard to get a diamond that's in its natural matrix but
this is an example here and here also if you see a a rock
quote-unquote a little pebble also right of center here but that's uh light
colored uh and sort of angular in the way it's oriented toward us here
um this is a rock from brazil from another famous diamond and other minerals rich area
called diamantina in the state of minas gerais
in brazil and this is a diamond in conglomerate that is found this way uh in river beds and eroded out of
ancient kimberlite pipes that are very very old so those are a couple of examples of diamonds that are in their
matrix rock still that are somewhat unusual here
this is another unusual mineral it's a native element you want to be careful
around this of course this is about uh five and a half centimeters across here
this piece and that's probably enough arsenic to take out the town of waukesha that i'm
sitting in here so so you got to be careful with this because some minerals as we know some of which are actually
inside our bodies in very small quantities including arsenic are very
very toxic if if we take more than we should have in our bodies
uh within and so it's some of these things you have to be very careful with arsenic is extremely poisonous of course
but it is an important native element this is an old old german specimen that came with labels uh going
back from a promoter of mineral specimens and mineral collecting the freiberg academy that goes back to the
18th century here
here's another arsenic mineral a fairly common one but not quite so common
in nice crystals this is the you know sort of um
rust colored gemmy crystals here called orpament that's arsenic sulfide and this
is from a peruvian locality here a fairly common arsenic mineral
but nice pretty crystals of it here
here's another oddball thing this is hard to even call this a mineral practically it's it's manganese
carbonate with a little bit of other contamination but this is an unusual oddball one too from this weirdo shelf
because it's a pharaoh manganese nodule that is from the ocean floor
from a position south of hawaii and the ocean floor
of course is littered with trillions of these things this is a fairly small one
but to recover them and have one in your collection is kind of cool because it uh came from a long way down
now here are just some other unusual things that happen to be in the same group here senexcite named after a
famous mineral collector and mineralogist is a copper uh mineral the green here comes not from
nickel but from copper and this is a somewhat rare mineral from chile
here that is a uh copper and molybdenum uh in this mineral that is a molybdenum
is a fairly unusual elemental component of minerals
rhodonite here the gemmy uh reddish crystals here manganese iron magnesium
calcium silicate the red color here coming from manganese the element
this is a very good locality for finding rhodonite crystals in australia here
called a region called broken hill and there's this silvery galena which is
lead sulfide along with it as the matrix there
now if you don't believe that nature can do some pretty cool things born a night
uh named after a french mineralogist is lead copper antimony sulfide antimony is
another somewhat cautious element in terms of safety and that it's pretty poisonous
but this is pretty neat because bornonite from these bolivian and other localities forms these crystals that
look like little gear teeth here you can see the shape of this crystal and you
can imagine this turning in an engine and operating as a gear which is pretty cool here
here's another oddball one these are all practically unrelated to each other these last ones here cobalt kerytnagite
is cobalt arsenate hydrate and and the cobalt gives you this very strong and uh
attractive purple and pink colors here from this from a moroccan locality
stim night here's another fairly uh toxic uh mineral here this is antimony
sulfide and there have been recent finds in china of stibnite crystals this this is a sort
of a hand size specimen here pretty good size but there are blades of this stid
knight that forms these long silvery looking blades that are you know as long
as an end table here that that chinese dealers have so this is a pretty
attractive mineral stim night mostly from recent fines the last 20 years or so coming out
of china i mentioned molybdenum here's a common
molybdenum mineral molybdenum sulfide uh from a very well-known mine that's also
uh a gold and silver mine among other things the henderson mine in colorado of
clear creek county colorado is old gold and silver mining country there
and so that's it it's sort of it was a grab bag of stuff tonight and probably will be another few times and then i'll
get back to astronomy and scott i'll mention one more time that we're going this fall to starmus uh in armenia and
we announced uh last week the full program of the starmus festival we're
going to have many exciting speakers there uh astronauts nobel prize winners uh
scientists who are at the top of their game our theme will be 50 years of mars explanati
exploration uh since mars 3 and mariner 9 a little more than 50 years ago now
thanks to code um and we will have lots of people talking about mars science of course
among the speakers we'll also have some rock and roll and we expect to have lots of
well-known rock stars who were involved in this festival uh here at the festival performing as well so scott we're going
to have a good time scott you're putting on the star party as well yeah yeah we we definitely are i know that uh you
you're uh you're playing a large role in this yourself with the uh astronomy magazine editors who have come
up with uh you know the um uh story that will
follow along with as as people observe through the telescope so it's gonna be i'm gonna i'm loving that okay because i
think uh that is a good step forward for anybody that is involved in educational outreach and
astronomy where you've got a group large group of people you've got lots of astronomers and so you should think
about having a theme or a story so that when people leave that observing experience they take the
story with them too so and we're going to have a really rich
region of targets in the evening sky this fall we're going to have everything from the moon
uh at a quarter of a million miles all the way out to galaxies we're going to take
people out to m81 and m82 about 12 or 13 million light years away and everything
in between we'll have jupiter and saturn and neptune and double stars and star clusters and
nebulae like you wouldn't believe so it's going to be a good time yeah i can hardly wait i think it's
going to be great so thanks so much david um and uh
uh you know i get pumped every time that we talk about this this is awesome um
we uh will we are now moving on in our 98th global star party our next speaker
is bob make a comment of course david
yes david excuse me
let's let's try this again with feeling david i wanted to notice that you pointed out
in your lecture on minerals that one of the first minerals you showed
would have been one that abraham lincoln might have seen in his youth
lincoln's mind would have been open to studying the minerals that you now offer
i know for a fact that he would he loved astronomy because of the famous story of when he
uh knocked on the door of the naval observatory all by himself one night and
spent a couple of hours with a softball that's right yes i just wanted to thank you for
comparing you i'm bringing your real love of minerals and connecting it
to your just as serious love of abraham lincoln thank you thank you i'll always
remember that that night by the way david when we watched the movie lincoln with me and my father there with with
you um and that that was very great fun and yeah i mean lincoln was one of these
guys who was interested in in everything um and he you know there's such stories
of compassion of abraham lincoln all the time that we forget that this guy was a
very highly highly intelligent uh man even though he had all of uh two to
three years of formal schooling um which shows you you can learn a hell of a lot if you keep reading and learning
throughout your whole life um but yeah i mean uh sometime we'll
have to tell that whole story david because when you go not to the naval observatory where the vice president
lives which is a great and fun experience as well but when you go to the old naval observatory down at what
they used to call foggy bottom down in the in the town uh
that's where lincoln visited asap hall and you can climb up that ladder you have to have you have to you know it's
not generally open all the time but but if you know people you know we can connect you to them um you can visit
there by special appointment and climbing up that little uh hatch up the ladder that lincoln climbed
into you know there are places where you can really really feel history even though it's very distant and that's
one of them that's a great great story and asap hall had the surprise of his life
when he didn't expect anything but to be doing his own research and the president of the united states climbed up that
ladder and said hello how are you doing it wasn't just the president of the united states it was a man abraham
lincoln who in addition to being brilliant was also very prone to depression oh yeah absolutely yep very
easily talked about it and when he first introduced himself at the um
to a softball he said that i've had a terrible day the war is not going well and i gotta
tell you i'm pretty depressed about it and i'd like to take some time off and contemplate the night sky
absolutely right david what a great story of the power of stargazing you know to
reframe your whole view of what's going on and to put you all your problems in
perspective you know and i can imagine i can only imagine the the how heavily uh
uh the the war weighed on lincoln uh during those days so yeah
you know very uncertain times wow okay i we should probably have a whole
lincoln thing sometime
i know that you that you both know a lot about him was he do you feel that he was uh
particularly in support of science as a as a leader a political leader he
absolutely was in support of science and not only was he he was mostly in support
of science uh because he admired those supporters of science in congress who preceded him
one of whom was john quincy adams who was an enormous proponent of science
dedicated the cincinnati observatory himself there where our friend dean
regas is uh now and um was the chief proponent in
congress when he was there of initiating what became the smithsonian institution
but lincoln during the civil war was mostly focused on his science by going
and handling and testing new technologies and
uh new new uh henry repeating rifles he saw gatling guns demonstrated right on
what is now the national mall he went over to the washington navy yard and saw
new types of cannon demonstrated pushed ahead the technology that went into
becoming the monitor that fi that transformed naval uh warfare because it was the
first iron clad that could uh uh stand up to the ironclad css virginia the the
battle of the ironclads you know in 1862. so he was a huge proponent of
science but mostly because of the pressures of the war turning it toward technologies that
would help not only to allow the union to be preserved but to
transform the american civil war into a war for the freedom of all americans
as as the declaration of independence intended right
and i think if if lincoln were to be here now at our global star party he would have
been most interested in what you just said [Laughter] well thank you dude i believe that's
true okay gentlemen uh we are going to turn to bob fugate
bob's program tonight is the pale red dot and we've all heard of the
pale blue dot carl sagan's famous um uh you know uh
commentary on the uh the image of earth from uh the uh voyager spacecraft
but uh bob what is the what uh tell us more about the red pale dot
okay um let's see i'm i'm looking for my
presentation which i don't see at the moment it's gone missing uh
hang on just a second here um we did learn that there are wandering
black holes in in our galaxy okay uh this is really oh here it is i think
here it is okay let me share my screen and um i'm on it i'm on a different computer
tonight and and uh so things are a little unfamiliar unfamiliar right
by the way thanks for coming on global star party again okay
um oh my gosh now i've got to do something else hang on
um oh dear this is
okay i'm going to have to disconnect for just a second i'll be right back sure
sure so sometimes we have a a little bit of a
technical difficulty but but it will be okay here so
uh let me read some comments here guys
caesar brolo says in david's facebook post about historical places i fall like
a flight of honey they are fabulous um norm hughes says i enjoy any
presentation by david eicher they're always very very well presented
it looks like bob's back okay am i back you are back
okay let me try again and see if i can
find my briefing again we see that your zoom application
okay so what happened to my presentation in the meantime ah
if you stop sharing and then you go back in and just highlight the you'll find your presentation and then
you click on that and then share it's always brutal when you're on a
different computer
i think i've found it okay sorry for this
it's okay i'm i'm usually much better prepared one time i had to cancel a whole global
star party because the problems i was having so okay so let's
see if i can get this started okay it's perfect how's that perfect okay sorry for all
the confusion everybody um so let's see um
it's it's great that david mentioned dim81 and m82 because my story starts in that region
um this was um a picture i took
actually down in magdalena in new mexico at john briggs place
i was down there to actually observe an occultation of mars by the moon
and that occurred in the early morning hours and before that this was in february of 2020
just before the pandemic started so um it was kind of my last trip to do
any observing in magdalena and i haven't been able to get back since but any rate
i had a borrowed takahashi epsilon 180 ed
a great telescope and i had my nikon d850 attached
i did not have an astronomical camera at the time that i could use
so i took pictures of m81 and m82 i took 24
no it took 26 4-minute exposures and when i processed them i got this image
and as you know the this region is very famous for
something called integrated phlox nebula which is the cloudy looking material you
see um in the background of the image
so this is this is dust and um
clouds is basically illuminated by the total um
light from the galaxy not from a particular star or a few stars and so
it's the integrated light from the galaxy that illuminates this dusty region and allows us to see it it
is quite faint but it's also um you know quite popular uh to photograph
now just above m81 in the center of the image and for some reason i don't have my cursor
either so uh let's zoom in a little bit on m81
and if we look just above it and and by the way this is just a really
gorgeous region there's lots of galaxies there's an irregular galaxy just next to
m81 there and they seem to be mostly everywhere so i'm going to zoom in again
and then i'm going to zoom one more time this is now at 800 percent
and right in the middle um right in the middle of the image
there's a what i call a pale red dot
and so i got to looking at this image uh you know in the in the weeks or in the
week or so that followed and i wondered what the limiting magnitude was and so i tried to start
looking up some of these stars and catalogs to figure out
you know how deep i had gotten into the image
for instance the star at the top uh the little binary star at the top there
is about 14th magnitude the one to the right of it is about 15th
so i wondered how how faint these others were and so i i have this
program called sky safari and i tried to match
so i this is this is an overlay on the image of a crop out of sky safari
whose opacity has been reduced so i can see through the
i can see through the catalog the star map into my image and the bright spots are
in the catalog and you can see the images of the stars behind them and how they line
up and for some reason that pale red dot was identified in
in a galactic catalog pgc5204082
and so in sky safari when i look for the information about that particular galaxy
i see this it's 7.7 billion light years away wow
and it's traveling at 44 the speed of light wow i i i just thought to myself this is
not possible i'm how can i be seeing a galaxy that's that far away
with a seven inch telescope you know on a plot of land somewhere in
new mexico so i
i discussed this with john briggs and he has a friend at the university of chicago who is a principal
at the sloan digital sky survey and i noticed in the listing here
that it has an sdss uh designation and so i got in touch with him it's
professor richard krohn at the university of chicago and he verified that in fact the object
in my image was was that galaxy and that it has a magnitude of 20.84
it is very rad shifted galaxy whose spectrum has actually been measured at sdss
and observed by wise and spitzer space telescope wow um and he notes that the spectrum is
red-shifted with the value of z equals 0.44 this is you know measured with a spectrometer
and unrelated to any cosmological model it's just you know a physical measurement of its
of its redshift so now i i don't know anything about cosmology um
but i got to looking into it and this is kind of this is kind of the exploration you know in addition to
exploring my image i started getting into understanding a little bit about
cosmology and that was the awakening part for me
and basically what i learned was that you know the cosmologists use these formulas that look simple
that the velocity is the hubble constant times something called the distance now
and which is based on some proper time frame like the time since the big bang for instance
and and the velocity is related to the red shift by that relatively simple formula one plus
z equals e to the v over c where c is the speed of light
and so when we plug these numbers into these equations we get a little bit different answer
than what's listed in sky safari but it's still they're still just mind-boggling numbers uh
the velocity is .36 light speed and the distance is 5.11
billion light years still so if this is right and i really
you know encourage members of the star party to check this out and tell me where i'm
making a big mistake here with only a seven inch telescope i was able to detect photons and i measured
the signal and it's it's a few tens of photons in that pale red dot
over a hundred and four minutes of integration so they're not arriving every second
they're arriving you know occasionally um and those photons left a galaxy that
is um they left that galaxy nearly a billion years
before the solar system and the sun even existed wow so
that was quite an awakening for me now what i did was um
through uh i got an image uh made by the two and a half meter sloan telescope
which is in southern new mexico that does the sky survey i got it off of their server
and i scaled it and overlaid it on my image and i made this little animated gif that
shows you the two images compared uh and i put some marks on there to show
you where the where my pale red dot is um so you can see which one is the sloan image
it has a marker at the bottom called science server
and um i think this is pretty remarkable i mean
yeah i think the sloan images is deeper it's
you know uh has better resolution probably because the scene may be better there
as i told you earlier my seven inch telescope probably doesn't have
or or the two and a half meter telescope doesn't really have any better resolution than my seven inch telescope
because of the atmosphere um but the big difference of course is
the sloan image exposure was only 54 seconds my image was 104 minutes
and when i tried to compare that in terms of realism i looked at the
aperture size the f numbers the plate scales you know the possible differences in
seeing the f numbers all of that stuff and it in the wash it turned out that in
theory the salon telescope should have been about 60 times more sensitive
so that would mean that the sloan exposure of 54 seconds
is roughly equivalent to my exposure of 54 minutes
my actual exposure was 104 minutes double that so you know within
any time you can get within a factor of two in this kind of work i think you're doing pretty well
so anyway that's um i hope this shows up fairly well on
on the video but um this is um this is kind of the
what i was doing now this was in 2020 a year later
i got my own telescope a a four inch uh it's the takahashi
fsq-106 and
i tried this same image from my backyard here in albuquerque
and as i've mentioned before if you know the sky brightness
that kind of gives you a leg up on how much additional exposure you need if you're in a brighter sky
and so the sky difference between magdalena and my backyard is
um about two magnitudes per square arc second
and if i so 2.51 to the two power
or in this case 2.2 power gives 7.57 as a as the factor
so that that means that if i expose 7.57 times longer
in albuquerque in the bright light pollution i should get about the same signal to noise that i got in magdalena
so i didn't get the 7.57 i only got 6.63 because the image on the
right is from my backyard through the takakahashi
and it's 689 minutes of exposure
so it's over 11 hours but i was able to see
my pale red dot in that image probably not as high a signal to noise
and also um there was a lot more light pollution that i didn't get out of the picture but
you can see vestiges of the integrated flux nebula in both images
[Music] and they kind of correspond
so i also made a little animated gif here that shows
the three images one after the other magdalena
um albuquerque and sds s
just just as the comparison and then this year uh in the
late winter i tried again but i didn't have as much time i only had 54 minutes
and here is my pale red dot from 2022
a lot more light pollution in this image just because i haven't gotten enough exposure and
this is over a factor of 10 less than what i did in 2021
so um but it's interesting that maybe it's just noise but
it actually in this image looks like it has some shape other than that what you would get from a star
and i also did a plate solve and look and identified magnitudes
and you know this cropped part of the image and it looks like
um comparing it with with known stars in the image
it looks like it might be around 19 and a half in magnitude
so you know for 54 minutes in my backyard uh having a limiting magnitude of 19 and
a half isn't too bad so this is the answer term that i use to take that last picture and the one in
2021 and um so that's my story and i'm sticking to
it that is amazing that is amazing there we
go here we go uh bob that uh i love
i love seeing stuff like that because this that is like i mean that's like totally
breaking the boundaries of what uh you know
amateur astronomers are thought to be able to do you know so um
it's uh you know i i think that uh you know if you compare that against
what professional astronomers have done um and you know and you're going up against some of the the best uh sky surveys in
the world uh it is spectacular to know that you can look that far back into time to detect
that and you know what else is really cool too is that in the astronomy community
that amateurs and professionals actually really do interact with each other quite a bit and
that is uh not something you see in a lot of other fields of science and so it's i think it's a a really fascinating
aspect of our lifestyle yeah it's it's really true that um
you know what what you can do with a small telescope even in some light pollution is
is quite awakening and and uh and so it's really fun i think to
just i mean this i you know this was the first time i'd really done any kind of in-depth exploring of an image like that
and i'm sure that others have done this before and this is maybe a so what but um
it's um it was it was quite a revelation to me
to think that um you know we're seeing photons coming from an object
um that left there before the sun exists
yeah yeah i mean it's everything that we know is created pretty pretty mind-blowing for me
for i think for all of us thank you so much thanks bob uh
fascinating uh presentation it was great so up next um
it will be uh professor kareem jaffer kareem uh
could not be with us live today so he uh undaunted uh he uh recorded his
presentation and had me download it for uh to show today so i we're going to
start with that but uh uh he has given uh presentations on a number of global star parties and um
you know he's a fascinating guy really involved in educational outreach
in astronomy not only through his teachings at john abbott college but through the royal astronomical society
of the montreal center so without further ado i will bring up his
uh his program uh which i hope that you enjoy
hi scott hi everyone uh it's great to be part of global star party 98 even if
it's a recorded offering i'm sorry i can't be with you live tonight but i didn't want to miss out on this
wonderful global star party that's occurring on the summer solstice i even dressed for the occasion with something a little bit more summery than my usual
sweaters and uh long-sleeve outfits uh i thought with the topic of exploration
and awakening it's a great time to go back to some two-eyed seeing and look at the global view
from history of the summer solstice and specifically the idea of the way in
which it allows us to see commonalities in different cultures but before i do i wanted to do a brief check in on some of
the topics that we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks when i do my intros to my segments here at the
global star parties yesterday we had a live offering of space oddities weekly it
now we have some wonderful weekly content we have lou mayo giving us an
exoplanet series and andy briggs is talking about different types of neutron stars start out with paul stars we went
to magnetars and i know dr varus was talking magnet jars yesterday as well i've mentioned to you that this saturday
we have an amazing helen sawyer hog lecture uh which is one of the keynotes
for our rask general assembly that's happening this weekend natalie willette who's a
local montrealer she's the communications coordinator for our outreach scientist
for the james up space telescope and the coordinator of the institute for research on exoplanets and she's going
to be giving our annual keynote if you're interested in the general assembly overall there are tickets still
available please just visit raskga2022.ca for more information and
to purchase tickets and i also mentioned to you that creation station is open for
any content from youth ages 5 to 17. we want to share a little bit of their imagination in the way in which they see
space and astronomy and the cosmos their awakening to an understanding of
their place in the cosmos is incredibly important in their education and giving them a space to express their creativity
you know that's where steam education really starts to take hold speaking of youth
our cosmic generation the uh astronomy organization for youth by youth
supported by the rasc by the astronomical league and of course by the explore alliance they have their next
workshop this sunday it's happening at 2 p.m pacific 3 p.m mountain 5 pm eastern
4 p.m central time whatever time zone you're in but they're going to be talking about black holes how they're
made what they're made of and there will be an artistic element as well if you're interested in signing up you
have to be a youth up to age 18 and go to bit.lee cg june 2022
and we will put that address in the chat and then of course any youth that want to present to the cosmic generation are
welcome to email the cosmic janet gmail.com with your ideas now i want to
talk to i'd seen and so i find the best way to do this is to start off with the land and sky
acknowledgement and we talked last month about or last week about the fact that this is the full strawberry moon for
most settlers and a lot of the uh indigenous peoples refer to it as the strawberry moon because the strawberries
are in full blossom i'm going to talk about that in a few moments but i want to thank harold locke for getting up early this morning and getting that
picture there of the last quarter moon a beautiful picture i had nothing but clouds here so i wasn't able to get the
planet party or the moon so thank you very much harold and i mentioned that in canada it's national indigenous history
month in june well today is national indigenous people's day and it's the 25th 25th such day and it really is a
chance for us to reflect a little on the importance of acknowledging indigenous culture but also the wonderful things
that the indigenous people had set up already within this land that is an unclaimed land that we have now
settled on as settlers coming from different parts of the world so we do hope to move forward in a
process of reconciliation and a respect for all the different perspectives on
the way in which for us the night sky matches our observations and our tradition so i want to talk a little bit
more about that but i think with this being the summer solstice it's important to recognize what the summer solstice means so we know that the earth has a
tilt of about 23 degrees and as it orbits around the sun this is what causes the seasons so our june 21st 22nd
the summer solstice and it's really is you know around the 21st 22nd depending on what part of the country you were or
what part of the world you were in our northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun so right near the north
pole the sun doesn't set at all for the rest of the northern hemisphere this is the longest day of the year
winter solstice on the other hand for us which is in december that's when we have the shortest day of the year because
it's the southern hemisphere that's tilted towards the sun so if we look more closely at that summer solstice
where we are right now what we see is that the sun's rays are coming in directly towards that 23
and a half latitude that we have which we note as the tropic of cancer and then in the wintertime is coming directly at
the tropic of capricorn so you can see there that above the arctic circle there's no night time to be had there's
no night that comes during this day of summer solstice now eratosthenes back in 240 bc
recognized that there was this town south of where he lived in alexandria where on the summer solstice there was
no shadow to be seen anywhere and the sun shone directly down
a very very nice vertical well now cyen or aswan as it's known
that lies directly on that tropic the tropic of cancer now at the time what
eratosthenes knew was that in alexandria there was always a shadow there was no day of the year where there was no
shadow but in saying there was this one day just on the summer solstice around june
21st june 22nd that you could actually see that there was no shadow the sun was
directly overhead at local noon so what he realized is that if he took
the distance between alexandria and cyen he could measure an angle of a shadow in alexandria
and if he extended that to the curvature of the earth he could actually get an approximation for the circumference of
the earth so the incoming sunlight was perpendicular to the surface at saying
which is why there was no shadow but in alexandria because the earth had already started to curve even though they're
very very close together they're only a few hundred miles apart that curvature would create a small
amount of shadow so he measured that shadow on the summer solstice on the summer solstice and he got a shadow of
about seven degrees it was actually seven point seven degrees and twelve arc seconds so
seven and one fifth roughly that works out to 1 50th of a circle
where a circle is 360 degrees now the distance from alexandria to cyen was measured in greek units of 5000
stadia a stadia is around 155 meters so that gives you about 800 kilometers
difference between alexandria and cyan so when you convert that to the size of
an entire circle the circumference of the earth you get to within one percent
of the current known value you get to right around 40 000 kilometers that's incredible
now at the time there was an italian unit also called stadia which was different by a fair amount so that if
you use the italian units you would be off by 16 and a lot of academics would
argue that oh eratosthenes wasn't really that close but we know that he was greek so it's likely the greek stadia that he
was using now my students as many of you will remember i've talked about this before
we work with the eratosthenes experiment not on the solstice because well we're not in school but on the equinox because
on the vernal and autumnal equinox the sun shines directly perpendicular at the
equator which means your latitude is the angle of the shadow that you
measure and so we participate in this global experiment which is fantastic and we
share our data with schools from other countries including colombia brazil
we include i believe there was one inch in uh in florida and a couple in northern quebec
that we shared with this past couple of years so it's a fantastic way to participate in a citizen science
experiment to really confirm the circumference of the earth now that's not the only thing that egypt
does at the summer solstice if you go near the sphinx and you look towards the great pyramids you find that on the
summer solstice the sun sets directly between those two pyramids and in fact
if you go to the temple of karnik which is amanra's temple the sun shines through the western gate and illuminates
this inner sanctum only on that one day which is known as the holiest of holies
we also know that other cultures identify the importance of the
location of the sun throughout the year so changio in peru is one of these archaeoastronomical complexes where
there's no people left to tell us what they observed but if you go to one of these beautiful solar observatories and
you look out towards the mountainsides you see this range of tea and across those teeth what you find is
that from one end to the other is the entire expanse of the rising point of
the sun throughout the year when for peru since it's in the southern hemisphere december is your longest day
and june is your shortest day and the equinox happens when you have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of sunlight
now this idea that the sun rises at different locations and also to different altitudes in the sky is
something that you can take a picture of yourself and we did this at john abbott i've shared this picture with the audience before this is a solography
picture from the roof of my science building seeing the path of the sun from winter
solstice 2020 to summer solstice 2021 and yeah that what happened when we had
very few people on campus because that's when covet began recently the mikmaw parks actually set
up the sky pillar which is aligned directly north south so at local noon
you have the north south meridian the length of the shadow tells you what time of year you're in
because you'll have the shortest shadow in the summer time when the sun is the highest and the longest shadow in the winter time when the sun is the lowest
and you can see behind dave here behind these two pillars you have
separated stones in steps just like those steps that we saw in genkiyo
in chapel canyon in new mexico we have an observation section where chuckle canyon i mean it's known for having a
petroglyph of the observation of the crab nebula of halley's comet passing through but we also see this beautiful
sun dagger that occurs directly through this incredible spiral right at summer
solstice and so at summer solstice you get this dagger that comes right through the middle of this spiral now this sun
dagger that comes through at summer solstice in one position comes through at a different position during the equinoxes and has a second
dagger that occurs in what's now been identified as a smaller spiral and in winter solstice those two daggers are
actually separated around this larger spiral now this is a actual natural
phenomena these two gaps but when identifying where the sunlight fell
the people of chapel canyon the anasazi the enemy people as they were called by the other tribes there they actually
went and inscribed these spirals that show not just where the sun is but also where the full moon was over the span of
the 18-year surest cycle here in montreal we have what's called
montreal north which actually doesn't point north it points at 303 degrees as a muthal angle and so that is exactly
where on summer solstice sunset happens and my friend trevor in plato astro put
together this beautiful video talking about this as well as a similar type of orientation that doesn't happen at the
summer solstice but happens in may in manhattan called manhattan and it's named after stonehenge which is
where this morning there were likely a ton of people getting up early to see
the sun rise through the stones there in every we also have in wyoming the bighorn
medicine wheel the bighorn medicine wheel is one of those indigenous structures that really does align with
the sun's positions as well as the positions of certain stars throughout the year
now the age of this medicine wheel is one thing that i've not been able to find
any clear-cut answer but it's it's not the only one there are actually six of these different types of medicine wheels all
across the rockies coming up into canada and in fact in majorville in alberta the
medicine wheel there was aged to 4 500 years old so this actually predates
stonehenge this observation of where the sun is at different times now the celebration of this summer
festival by most of the indigenous peoples is a multi-day celebration it's a celebration of life and death a cycle
of renewal and continuity and the sun dance by the ojibwe people is one of the
ways in which they cherish and they they mark this and in fact it's based on the idea that
mother earth offers her first fruits at the start of summer so remember the strawberry moon
that's the first fruits that the indigenous peoples would start to harvest while the other fruits were
still too young here in ottawa the capital of canada we have this weekend a incredible festival
held by the algonquin tribes and it's a summer solstice festival it's a
multi-day festival with powwows with workshops with talks with story time it's it's an incredible event and if
anybody is in ottawa watching please go and participate learn a little bit about the
indigenous cultures there i'm going to leave you with this image this is an image of a early morning set
of prayers dances and songs on hawaiian land with mauna kea out in the distance and
it's identifying this this connection to nature on the summer solstice
and i'm using this to kind of connect our explorations and awakening because we do a lot of our cosmic explorations
from the top of mauna kea and we have to do so in a respectful fashion because that's also the seed of the gods for a
lot of the stories of the hawaiian people so when they do these wonderful gatherings
to celebrate the summer solstice we should respect their observations and
their connection to nature and make sure that when we do our explorations and our second eye seeing
with the modern world's knowledge that we are not forgetting to keep both eyes open
that's it from here in the montreal center thank you scott and now back to you
and i think i'm muted thank you kareem for for making that presentation hopefully you were back uh
and able to watch that from wherever you are um we are we're running a little bit ahead
uh so if you're watching the schedule uh you'll see that but uh cesar brolo from
buenos aires argentina is with us now and uh cezanne how are you
fine scott how are you hello to everyone
can you hear me good yeah yeah loud and clear thank you i'm clear
what did you what did you think of bob fugate's uh image of that red pill dot
i i was totally astonishing because uh every time
it's i i write it because i i started watching
like uh be being part of the audience uh in
youtube and i enjoy it the bob fugate presentation they match are incredible
um really well the last the last week
about uh adaptative optics and oh yeah i know that that's especially eventually yeah
yes is it is impression for for me is that it is one of the developers and as
a optician i really um really um [Music]
totally amazed it because this is great this is i think
that is a part of the history because exist the image uh before and after uh
about adaptative optics um oh yeah this is something really real that
because okay you you not ever have your scope in the space like the hubble or today the web
telescope um if you if you have a huge
mirror but you don't have this kind of techniques you
lost so quantity of information and um
i remember that the first time that i i wrote about the the the
like fingers moving a piece of glass as for me was totally
come on it's possible no it's it's really on and listen to above that ball
and say come on is the man that work and develop this i think i think that that
technology probably is as important as the invention of the telescope itself i
really do it i mean it was a giant shift in what we were able to
detect and um but uh you know again the
uh you know the the spirit and the uh the techniques and the
uh efforts and everything as it drills down to the realm of amateur astronomy
you know as again as shown by bob and and you know occasionally i'm showing this by other
amateur astronomers who do these super long deep exposures uh you know
they're they're pulling back the veil of mystery and we're able to see the universe uh
in ways that uh no one would expect amateur astronomers to present so yes
yes it's absolutely uh fantastic the the time that we are in
we are living because uh we have a convention of works between
amateurs and professionals um that never we've seen in uh in the
past because the the the possibilities of of the
the instrumental that the the people have in their observatory
homes are totally different [Music]
every time are more sensitive more sometimes bigger bigger diameters
[Music] this is why maybe you have optic full room let's say okay
we started from the 70 centimeters sometimes but
but i think that i think that is maybe a a real future where
their big telescope came more affordable to the people because technology you know
for example we never expect that uh today
the kind of telescope that are affordable to the material astronomers uh
in in 30 years that they work working in
selling telescopes are totally
different the possibilities for for amateurs especially where cameras and you know
everything about about the staff gears you know
this changed totally the totally the the game um
something that that was happy for me today because
do you remember the next the that the lax last sorry my english
that the last week i was scaling in the end of my presentation i
made something easy that is uh take with different focal lengths
the this eta carina nebula that is typical it's a it's a huge nebula very
easy to to watch in the south hemisphere of course that
uh com um where where i i live in the middle of
the city where i made astronomy from my balcony or from
from the rooftop of my welding i have
less possibilities of take pictures but this nebula is is bright
and something that the today was happy
uh made me happy uh was that when i post the picture of i took last saturday with
a rc telescope because i had uh with this
only the picture of with my camera in different in different uh
objectives but i expected to take a picture of eta
carina with with a telescope of 8 inches with a f9
focal razor um of course that is a picture that is now
so good but let me share the screen
if i have
i don't know if i can see
okay there you go okay okay this is something that i'll show you
later because it's very interesting and this is the thing that
that they had in my facebook page this is i i explained
a little minutes ago ahead sorry
um ah here okay
well
okay you can see the presentation
now okay well
sorry that yes but i need
it's because uh you know it's the uh no yes it's because winter is today so that's
why yes yes it's it's made a shift okay now it's okay
and in summer yes yes i took something yes it's only five slides no more but i
put everyone together okay okay sculling like like uh
the first was the last thing of the last week of course i have a um
the first picture it's with a with a an angular
uh objective where do you have here do you have here eta carina nebula here
do you have the southern crust the cold sock
alpha centauri beta centauri and here of course that in the city you
can see only the southern cross only alpha and beta
centauri beta centauri stars and no more than that but this
and of course that this picture have have a process very different to the reality
but it's a real picture but it's only for scale only for for talk about
the scale of the things in the city mix it with the mixer with the weldings
here i took eta carina nebula
and this open cluster very big near to the carina i put a mask only in the in the side of
the building this is from my balcony
it's it's sometimes it's have is it's really fun make the scale
of a window at no more than 20 meters with a
tele objective the normal tilapic of
200 millimeters and the nebula for to make the the idea of size
yeah of angular size but here you played solve for for the
area it's not the name of my neighbor that i
say last week [Laughter]
and here here with a 30 millimeters telochetti
and in this area here you have the eta carinae star
that is coming to to be bright every every
year is writing more it's a it's a start that the
uh make a a a an eruption a very particular eruption
in uh 1853 i think
in the 19th century and here is the last picture
of of uh in the rough two with a reaching greater telescope of uh
18 8 inches and here you have
here do you have the star at a career that actually is near to
magnitude four i remember that i i
i knew uh this star one magnitude uh around
five or or six maybe but five i'm sure that i
remember in uh that i knew i took pictures on i and
i see uh this star um this star in magnitude uh
five actually is near to four is going to explode again
it's something that that is of course that not now
all these in terms of of uh astronomy times maybe i don't know
when when the people tell me and i say okay ask to the astronomer not to me
but uh when i asked to uh my friends astronomers professional astronomers to
say come on or people tell me to me when it can explode of course that i
don't know now 100 years 1 000 years is nothing in astronomy
terms but it is interesting that this start it's only
at 7 000 years later sorry
and it will be a little
for example for for an explosion of uh this type of nova
in our own neighbor hood or in the galaxy
it will be just a little interesting uh for radiation i
of course that i started to to to make the same that
all people all people when um is going to
[Music] to to make when you
took a picture you in amateur astronomy is very interesting
not only watch the picture if not comparing with all pictures if all is
okay or if the things are um
for example uh in this case of itakarina you know we know that is a star that is
going to break every time more and take the time to read about
the star it's it's really great and something that
that i have let me see if i can show you another picture more that they
have from 20 2011
um if i have another picture
maybe
yes look this i i found this picture from 20
if you of course that is different the picture but you can see this picture is from rafael mundo san rafael mendoza
where do you have a portly two or three maybe in my home is
is 9.5 but if you compare between the stars the
break of the stars of course that you understand me that is different the
the mask of the stars the processing the telescope both telescopes are
of eight inches but come on the bride
when you see this the comparing uh the eta caribbean star with their
neighbor stars are not so different
like if you see let me return here
that i i couldn't put together the pictures i don't have time
but you can see it's very easy to to understand
with the same the camera is the same the camera is exactly the same the the focus
the focal it's uh nine here the focal ratio here
is nine and another picture is 6.3 with a focal reducer but
if you compare in another picture do you have a star
more similar more similar with the the neighbor stars
now do you have a a a real difference in only
uh 20 uh 12 years um something that makes make me happy is
that a professional astronomer today when i posted this picture in facebook
uh he give me he'll give me the the link
of uh his his own work
his name is eduardo fernandez he worked in the complete astronomical
leoncito and university of la plata in the same
work is the astronomical variable star observers of course
and look look the the change of brides
for example this is totally from 2003
to now here i took the picture where i had
magnitude 5.20 and now you are
going to uh 4.6 this is in blue yes it's very
interesting the the change of of the of the bride in this
and the and the behavior of of this star is really
it's really interesting here in the south hemisphere um
where we are going to have i don't know when uh
a massive nova or i don't know if a supernova but
i think that that sure that uh type of of nova
uh well here are the the indifference components of
the magnitude
and if you let me show you
if uh ah here here let me show you
the historical here here historical look that in
in 1850 xc50
is is the is historical uh it's explosion and like a nova
um is of course the time where do you have
a astronomical observation because in this year
is we can talk about some something more science
um and here is very interesting how do you have
the the brightest uh the braggers uh one one there was uh
this star was uh one of the brightest star in in the sky
in the in the 8050 and
actually of course that that is going every time to to
to go more brighter and there sorry no more brighter um
well this is something that when we talk pictures and especially people that
start with telescope um they can pay attention and something
that is uh really um what do you say really uh
um is something that is information easy to understand it's not not a paper very
complicated but do you have a lot of information for example of this star
and you can enjoy something that is very
interesting to to to to know in the sky for a city from
your small telescope of course that i took the picture with a little bigger telescope but not a
professional telescope a telescope normal with a reflex camera and
of course that i i don't make a estimation of photometry but
something very simple like uh see pictures of amateur pictures where
you can you can compare something like it with the two pictures that i have
you can say yes it's really brighter it really is something that you you
uh can learn only with a picture that you take
for your backyard your rooftop or your bike
okay it's i i not intended to make a scientific uh
scientific uh work but of course that fernand eduardo fernandez that is astronomer i
invited uh to talk about the star and of course that in
next week's nets global star party i yeah he he told me yes i can go okay
perfect because if i start to talk about the stars because no you need i need to
to explain something about you know astrophysics that is not my area but
only only that something that i i can say is that you can compare your
pictures and you can found a lot of information of something that
you can you might can you
how do you say something that uh
well maybe the word is amazing you can be amazing and you can be open
to to to feel amazing by astronomy absolutely
well but caesar that's great thank you thank you thank you
today um we are um as i mentioned we're running a little
bit ahead but uh it's okay um we are going to take a 10-minute break
and then we're gonna come right back with deepti got tom from nepal and uh
we're glad to have her back on uh it's been it's been a little while since she's been with us so
anyways um hope you're enjoying the 98th global star party um
and uh we'll be right back
one
so
so
foreign
you
c
hello everyone it's bob fugate from albuquerque new mexico congratulations to the global star party
on achieving 100 exciting episodes please keep up the great work thank you
howdy scott explore alliance astronomical league and esteemed global star party friends this
is cameron from camp astronomy wishing you all a hearty congratulations on our 100th global star party
keep looking up and enjoy the journey cheers
hey folks sean here from visible dark on youtube invisibledark.ca on the web just want to send a big congratulations to
scott and explore scientific on the 100th episode of the global star party
fantastic stuff keep up the great work here's to 100 more this is karine jaffer explorer alliance
ambassador and rasc montreal center public events coordinator i'm coming to you under a strawberry full moon and i'm
looking forward to a couple of weeks of waning moon and dark skies i'm looking even more forward to the 100th global
star party coming soon to a screen near you [Music]
well we're back i hope that you had enough time to stretch your legs and
get a drink and get a sandwich we are
truly this is a global star party we've got a global audience here uh we just went down to buenos aires argentina and
now we're going to nepal uh to meet up with deepti ga tom
dt um thank you for coming on to global star party once again
hello scott hello everyone it's great to see you it's good to see you i've been following you on facebook
uh you know and i know that you've been very busy at school um so uh what is uh what has been going on
in your life lately uh just now i have completed my examination of high school and we have a
long vacations for the preparation of uh college application university application and so as i already
mentioned that i am applying for the exam international students and i have to apply
for the usa and for my further study so my college application is going on and i'm writing the essays and others
preparation set preparations and examinations and further that uh i was
just uh now a few week ago i conducted one programs in my own school
uh to the junior uh i took with the telescope and a small session with them
where i mentioned about the opportunities of astronomy not only in nepal but entire world and the one
question was arised by the student that says uh did you or did uh like like you
are coming here to give us knowledge about this tsunami and like uh and he asked me that
even in america and other developed country people supposed to uh go with the peoples and go with the public and
share about the tsunami and i said yes of course because um astronomy uh is all
about not only about the uh rocket launching and all of our space exploration but it's about
giving the knowledge and giving the awareness about astronomy because astronomy is the vast subject and uh as
we know today's our theme is exploration awakening and there are more things to explore
till now and still now uh there's some explorations and i want to connect uh today's with the themes like exploration
is in investigations or travel experience or an example of the experience
exploration on a deep sea is a diving journey to find a new sea life right
and something new and something that begin addition and writing
and awakening experience our moment in which our awareness expand
and somehow the region of explorations leads uh today's area for example
exploration of small things are leading a past discovery and uh while seeing this story backstory
of the all the discoveries uh uh we can see the scientists are engaging in the small things but lead the habas
and very large discoveries so and for example uh
the modern era is also the result of the uh exploration and awakening
without exploration and overcoming uh the life doesn't go ahead and for example i want to connect with that and
uh i have some uh knowledge likes uh currently a nasa human explorations uh
planning its capability the drive on uh following a flexible path of emissions uh with increasing the capability uh
into the inner solar systems it includes multiple destinations where human
interference with it and explore the surface of moon mass and asteroid and as we know more we explore
more we get informations and this day i haven't
made a presentation uh sorry for that because i was uh busy till late night uh further
my uh programs uh other programs which we concluded in the uh one of the
university of nepal that is full of university which is the
engineering college and we conducted the solar observations plus orientation
programs and plus uh we give them a knowledge about the stellarium and other uh
sky maps up to the students and uh today uh i'm here with a small
point because i take a a large gap from the google i love your poems yeah okay
strings universe they do not know why people born and die even a child doesn't know why he does
cry why people walk and move here and there they do not know even why do do good
fear here they take of each other's do not why thinking more on this many break
inside sky fills with star cloud filled with raindrops land produce freely for food
more crops science searches for many galaxies and planets some sleep in a cold for places in cover blankets
some get food some do not at all and fall down one becomes liver another
wastes your crown saul does accents but doesn't able to
know snow falls on hill like attitude's soul does so so again goes away from the body enters
another he travels in between what and dead fathers staring planets are hung in space in dark matters never fall down
even moving a track it's look better force of gravitations controls
of us on the earth gardens all circuits of the strands universe and birth thank
you wow i love that i love that
dt that's great so dt i want you to know um you know uh if uh
before you were talking also i mean months ago maybe a year ago you were
talking about maybe studying in the united states and if you ever need a reference
i will be happy to give you a reference no problem you just approach me uh tell me when and uh i
will i will write a glowing letter of recommendation for you you know i think that you are uh
you know an inspiration and a powerhouse in um
astronomy education and you've done so well here so thank you so much thank you
yeah i'm just starting i'm just starting my college applications and writing issues and further further uh i'll be
taking a step back and some college research uh with scholars adventure for my further studies and for some
study and major course at minor course uh i'm doing our research about that and
furthermore uh i was i i i wrote a email uh just before
uh two days uh to you about some help and all and so i'm hoping that and uh i think i will be
connecting with you after the school booster party in this uh okay yeah i'm sure there's
many people here on uh the presenters on global star party that would also pitch in and help okay so
thank you very much deeptv that's great thank you take care bye-bye
thank you that's great love it love to see that dt was joining
in on our 98th global star party hopefully we can get her back for the 100th i did mention uh
that we are next week i'm heading out to california there's
this very special event that's happening at mount wilson and at caltech
george ellery hale who built the yerkes refractor the mount wilson 60 inch telescope the
mount wilson 100 inch and then the palomar 200 inch telescope he built in succession four of the world's largest
telescopes um his extended family you know of course george aller hale's long since
gone but his grandson has put together a family reunion
it may be one of the only family reunions that the hale family's ever had
at least in recent memory and so they are having a special
celebration of getting of this gathering at caltech uh at the amphinium and also at mount
wilson observatory so um for what i understand uh there's gonna be some amazing speakers there i
think wendy friedman will be there giving a talk as well as other people from the carnegie institute
so i'm very very excited about it i've been invited to
live simulcast um some of these talks and uh we hope to bring you some of the
experience of this historic gathering uh which will happen next weekend so i'm
i'm heading out there on tuesday so i will miss a a week of
global star party will come back with the 99th global star party on july 12th
and then the milestone 100th global star party on july 19th so um so
we i there's a lot of people who want to join in on that and uh you know if i
have to extend the schedule or whatever of global star party number 100 uh
then we'll do that you know we've done it before so i'm looking forward to it
well up next is um is daniel higgins from astroworld
tv uh daniel how are you how's it going scott how's it going everybody
i think i'm too loud yeah no you're good oh okay i'm blasting over here in the room
you're blasting i'll just turn it down i can't hear myself in my can so i don't know i don't know what's going on i i'm
just i'm just really shocked right now because it said 8 25 and it's 805. it's 805 yeah so
we're writing a we're running ahead here so that's partially my fault as i was juggling the schedule i didn't i didn't
uh do the sequencing exactly right so but thank you for coming on and uh hanging out with us
uh maybe you can catch us up a little bit of what's been going on with astroworld tv
yeah so um uh first of all let me say to dt um i just caught i just jumped in
like literally as you were doing your presentation and and i i gotta be honest with you it's it's people like yourself
and the younger generation like yourself that that makes me want to do what i do
uh and and it's it's it's you're the next generation of what we all do whatever position or field whatever you
decide to do and just do it enjoy it love it and and you're going to be great
so awesome presentation i can't say i'm i'm like long right now i'm like i got a big smile but uh it's it's it's really
great to see no awesome job man very nice but thank you so much no no problem
thank you um but what i do and i you know many people here have seen me on on on gsp or
other places um i do a bi-weekly um astrophotography i guess kind of a chat
twice a week uh so i do uh with me and a number of of people uh i have about nine
people that come in and out of the chat uh plus a lot of special guests that we have scott roberts has been one of them
um we've also had two other people from um gsp come on adrian bradley just last
week came on and gave us a nice presentation on on the nightscapes and and his uh his techniques and then a
couple weeks before that we had uh maxi valieres um came on as well so i mean uh we've had a
bunch of people come on uh this wednesday coming up we have actually wait no it's it's
tomorrow so tomorrow we have um for his third return astroworld tv we have uh astrodoc
uh ron breacher um from masters of pixinside coming on he's gonna be showing us some of his techniques and
it's really geared toward astrophotography uh but we really kind of talk about
pretty much everything a lot of people make fun of us because uh you know scott will tell you we go off the rails and
we'll just talk about whatever that's good it's all good yeah you guys are fun
and we like to keep it relaxed we like to keep it fun but we like to keep it informative and then
it's unscripted and it's nice to have uh so uh we got also coming up we have um
russell croman uh coming up on july 8th and he's going to be coming on uh
showing us all of his uh new scripts for pix insight which is a software program
that's turning out to be um pretty much the uh the uh the standard for
astrophotography pre post-processing and russell writes some really good scripts
that takes the stars out of pictures called star exterminator and another one
uh for pics insight called noise exterminator which if you know anything
about post-processing sometimes noise requires making masks and protecting things and
and all this kind to make it easy uh to understand his ai his is his um
intelligence that he use doesn't require mass for anything for star exterminator or noise exterminator
it doesn't require anything and it really brings out even some of the detail it's really really going to be
cool to see um and uh we also have coming up uh uh to be scheduled uh david gieson um from
um photonic cleaning solutions um so he that he's got a nice uh kind of thing to
it's like a gel to clean your optics it's pretty pretty cool so i'm interested to see that um but for right now um that's what we
got going on i was just on masses of pixin site as well but we've got a lot of stuff going on
over at asteroid come see us hang out with us uh wednesdays and friday nights
uh wednesdays are 9 p.m eastern fridays are 8 p.m eastern
and all the other stuff through the week plus look if i can show my screen real quick please do um and uh
let's see screen two and let me let me get it's gonna look you're gonna see my desktop for a second
but uh i'll get it off there for you what is that image behind you
um this is my image of the heart nebula okay um
we all know you have a big heart so yeah i appreciate that thanks well this
is actually a a a present for my wife um
and um it was supposed to be done in february and because of the nasty weather that
we've had in new york um it was really like uh i don't know like a memorial day
after i got done processing everything um but it was about 26 hours worth of data yeah on that from uh from new york
so um do you see uh the webpage yeah we see it
all right so this is our web page and you can come visit us at astroworldweb.com
um not a great name but that's what it was available um but um towards the bottom it will show you our
upcoming special guests so we got coming up we got ron breacher
like i said who's the fix inside ambassador followed by kurt lanes who is a diy-er
who made up his roll-off roof uh and he's going to show us how he went about doing that and then we got russell
crowman coming on july 8th so definitely come check us out if any of that interests you um and of course last week
we had adrian violently i just didn't take it down yet um we also do uh
pictures of the week um and we do pictures of the week contest and it's all done by
uh submissions of the membership we have about 1200 subscribers on youtube on the
live shows we have anywhere from 30 to 50 people and um on the discord server we have
almost 70 people on the discord server right now so so it's becoming a large larger community and um
every week we have a picture of the week followed by a picture of the month uh all the pictures of the month are
featured in the uh the upcoming astroworld calendar so we'll have a calendar given to you know
that could be purchased through the members um and it's like it's a lot of fun putting together plus we also have tons of giveaways we
have a bunch of great sponsors and this is just to become a member uh you just come on in and you can sign up
for these we got uh woodland hills ip for ap masses of fix insight
prima luje camera concepts optolong and charles bracken uh just
recently uh gave us three copies of his books uh signed um that are going to be
giving uh giving away as well so all you gotta do is enter any anyone you want
and um it costs you nothing so if you want to if you wanted to question
something you could also join us on your patreon account so but but all these people have been very
gracious with that so um that's pretty much all i got for for that that's what's coming up so i
don't wanna i don't wanna i don't wanna throw off the early schedule so you know
you know but um that's all i got but thank you for coming on and come join us on wednesdays and fridays absolutely
absolutely that's great thanks so much daniel um we are um you know i i really enjoy the
whole crew that you have and uh you guys do a great job and i think that you make um
you make the the the learning curve of astrophotography seem a lot straighter
than than what a lot of people might uh might otherwise experience so yeah you
know it could die it could definitely you know there's a lot of information on the on the lovely units youtube could be a
wonderful thing it could be a great thing but it could also be very detrimental to
your mental health so so so you've just got to be careful on what and who you
listen to i'll show you the first one too babe you don't want to listen to me all the time
you don't but but you know what you know what i have a bunch of people on the show that are
smarter than me that are on the show that's definitely in my situation too everybody's smarter
than me so it looks like we're gonna need a bigger boat scott because uh you know but but you know what it's not that
the other people are smarter than me but it is that we all have varying um
uh interests as far as astrophotography and difference of equipment so i am an
eagle guy i use eagle i am a prima luche guy i love my eagle um
we got two people that are asia air users we have one that's a william excuse me we got two people that are
explore scientific users we got you know and we've got all these different types of places that we can pull from that if
we don't if we don't have the answer we'll just call scott and he'll give us the answer so
i'll give you an answer all right it may not be the one i want but i'll give you the right answer but i will
give you one so anyways hey thank you so much for having me on i appreciate you so much and i'm
looking forward to the hundredth and congratulations on everybody and all the presenters here thanks a lot i've been
doing it for a hundred shows great job thank you so much dude thank you got it all right okay so up next um
uh we have dustin gibson uh from from opt but dustin also does
he's done so much more beyond oceanside photo and telescope he is a an incredible astrophotographer in his own
right uh he is on a mission uh to do to introduce people to the sky through
astrophotography through these amazing experiences that uh really you can only ex only have when
you're with the telescope and really making these really cool long exposures um you know i think that
uh dustin has done some things that few other people in our industry have ever
done and uh so he's going to explain a little bit about it i've asked him to share some of his images uh but opt is
near and dear to me because that's kind of where i got my start i started selling telescopes at a at a little
store a little camera shop called oceanside photographic center during the halley's comet area era we
were selling lots of telescopes by that time and decided to change the name from opc oceanside photographic center to opt
ocean side photo and telescope so that's kind of my story but dustin thanks so much for coming on
scott it's good to see you man good to see you too it's always good to see you 98 episodes
98 that's right i remember when you called me i was doing the twitch streaming every night and you were like you know
i'm gonna i'm gonna do this thing and i was like scott it's a lot man
and here you are 98 episodes later it's crazy man it's awesome though like every time i come in here i get so inspired by
the people that are talking to just keep charging forward i mean we have the best community on earth man i absolutely love
it but thanks for having me back on for what has to be the yeah i love your shirt that's cool you got your nasa hat
on as well so you must have just got back from uh maybe talking about the observatory that
you're installing yeah yeah i have city council stuff going on but you know i'm i'm not i'm
not very good with those with those things but they're they're necessary part of it you know working
with with government on um making a lot of these things happen but i you know it's the mission man we got to get in
front of as many people as we possibly can and and show them why it is we've all gotten absolutely um obsessed with
it right right and why it's such a huge percep perspective shift so
uh yeah i think it's great man and there's a lot of positive momentum in helping more people access the night sky
and that's that's the mission that's that's what i live for and you know that's what opt does all day every day
so um you know but the audience doesn't know this but i
spent a few days with you uh in your community and uh you know i watched dustin in action uh inspiring uh this uh
this community that you know to get them uh you know full-on you know up to their next
involved in a uh public observatory program and so i
know that uh dustin and opt and uh you know other i'm sure there's other people
involved in this as well but uh they're installing a 24-inch telescope uh in
that in that park and uh so people in that area that have never had access to that
kind of equipment before are going to be really enjoying that and i think it will
really open up some minds and uh propel uh the educational
aspects uh in that community you know because all this stuff improves scientific literacy and uh
so it's it's uh it's a great thing you're doing so thank you from here as an industry as a whole and
just as a hobby we don't we don't rely on punchlines and slogans the way so many you know
industries do because everything we're doing it carries true substance and things that
go back to you know the earliest human development it's like this is something that's innate in our being we are
explorers and this is something we want to do and so getting it in front of people is you know is the mission and
and this one is for a very small town in alabama i doubt there's ever been a telescope here honestly but um
you know they're getting six telescopes the largest is a 40 inch so a one meter oh okay yeah it's a one meter 224 inch
and then you know some refractors including the one that you were nice enough to donate this is what i love about you scotty every time i'm ever i
have these like crazy ideas i call you you're always the first one that's like i'm in let's do it you know i love that
so yeah i do my best so yeah i do my best yeah yeah thank you man it's really good but i know that you know you get
this in front of kids you get this in front of adults and it's life-changing for people so um you know it's just it feels like a
very important mission right yeah so let's but your your passion also about
astrophotography yourself uh you have uh you have opened up uh i think a couple
of different websites uh to kind of show some of the work that you've been doing
uh how would you characterize your approach to astrophotography
um like a child is um getting carried away with finger paints
okay like everything is ultra saturated and
super colorful it's definitely not a realist approach but i love i love the color of it um and i like the artistic
expression you know cat machine is one of my best friends the painter and um i just like pushing
the limits on what you can bring out in the images so it's certainly not um not something that's going to get a pods and
those sort of things but it's just something that you know gets people excited and gets more people talking
about it but i can share a few here um please do is sharing on
always on yes okay perfect sorry i never use zoom anymore let me see if i can get
this going no is that is that there yeah it looks like you're a pro here yeah all
right so yeah this is this is one of my images this is the rosette nebula um from
landers california um i shot this with a 17-inch plane wave that i have out there i have three
observatories in the desert um out in landers and most of them anymore are not you know i don't i don't
use them myself as much i make them openly available to other people so a lot of times they're being used you know
by other people so i'm not getting images um but when i do this is the type of thing i shoot and this is one of my favorite
images i love the rosettes my favorite target in the night sky and this is obviously a narrow band so
hydrogen sulfur and oxygen three but um you know i just leave the colors
in instead of removing the magenta and the stars when you combine them with the hubble palette just leave it in you know
leave the color push it see what you can pull out of it but uh yeah this is the type of thing that i typically do
um you can go through a few more here this is the horse head um
yeah thanks i almost always pull the green out of the image because it's just so exaggerated when you do the hubble
palette hydrogen which is the most abundant element in the universe you know number
one on the periodic table is overwhelming in these images
all the time and so when you combine the hubble palette hydrogen is green and you see a lot of green in the images
typically and so there are many ways to balance it i almost always pull it out with something called sc r noise
reduction but instead on some of these i just leave it and really if anything i amplify it and say look like let's look
at this density of hydrogen and how much it blends across the image and where you actually find it i think it's really
interesting it's clearly not a realistic representation of the colors but i think it tells us something else
you know and i think it's um pretty special when you can see this stuff and what's actually represented there
you know the the question of color in astrophotography with some people they they tend to think of the in more purest
type of uh ideals but you know what they're the i mean light is
uh is all colors and so right right and so there's what you assign uh to an image uh if it could
bring out a certain detail then that's great you know so um you know but uh there's you know we look
at solar imaging and you know gary palmer is a guy that comes on to a global star party and talks about you
know assigning color to the sun and he said you could assign purple you could assign you know pink
any color you know because it's all colors and uh um but uh there is then
there's an aesthetic that uh some people really uh you know ascribe to um but uh i i see
what you're doing is exciting and uh it it makes you stand up and take notice
for sure and i think it's great yeah well well thank you you know and i get a little bit i get a few of the messages
every now and then from the people that are like you're not doing it right you're not giving us the right colors
and and that's the exact same thing is it's look i mean that's what photography is i'm not i'm not cataloging these for
you if you want that there's plenty of that out there you can go find a catalog and find the color you know this is in
photography in general is taking an everyday or at least what is an everyday experience for you and your lifestyle
and creating artistic expression from it that's what this should be and people should celebrate you know people doing
things differently trying to push the boundaries and you know i'm seeing kids now that are making every image i take
look terrible um and i think that that should be the goal we should be trying to push people forward and challenge each other to do
better and better work but but yeah here's another one this is uh another one of my favorites i know it's
probably the most uh photographed target in the night sky but this is m42
um the orion nebula and it looks like this open heart surgery
it's amazing that one has about 40 hours of integration time in it um
a lot a lot of time into it but it's just there's so much detail that every time i thought i was done i just kept
looking at him like we can pull more out of this let's do a little more time and see what we can get but
yeah yeah there's a lot there and um range it's really great
yeah it uh it turned out it turned out well i'm pretty happy with it and um you know i i was having some trouble
processing the core you know it's so hard because it takes such incredible dynamic range to get
that so i had to do it's a short exposure on the core long exposure for everything else
uh and then cat meechan helped me blend the two but it's um it's a lot of work that goes into some of those whereas this one was almost no
work at all this is row um and this was just literally a four inch refractor with a fujifilm camera
strapped on the back and two minute exposures you know out in the middle of the desert
wow there's a lot of color out there and this one actually is true color because i shot with a color camera off the shelf
no cooler no anything just point it up at the sky and let it let it sing
right yeah yeah it's beautiful thank you olds and blues and
this is this is my andromeda um this is the biggest print i've ever done
i have a print of this one i think it's 12 feet by 8 feet it's a really really
big print um but that one's actually gonna get auctioned off to
um to support the telescopes for kids here in the area and um you know it's it's that that sort of
thing but people love andromeda i do i'm still fascinated by it every time i see it so you know but that one is just um that
was actually shot from a light polluted sky um in san diego california so
you know you can do galaxies from light pollution although a lot of people don't think you can you can it's just
it's a lot harder you have to do a lot more imaging to get the signal up but it can be done
and this is the triffid wow that's beautiful
thank you yeah you know i i didn't shoot this one for the longest time because it's literally right next door to the
lagoon nebula yeah and the lagoon is such a powerful image when you every
time you see it it stands out in the night sky it's one of the jewels of the night sky it's kind of like saturn for planets you know sure yeah because this
one's right next door i ignored it for about three years and then finally it was my buddy travis
burke he was like hey shoot that man take it take some time and shoot i was like i don't want to invest 30 hours lagoon's right there
and uh i finally did it and now it's one of my favorite images i absolutely love it the color and the balance of the
reflection nebula with the blue with the emission nebula with the red it's just it's an unbelievable combinat
combination that's been produced naturally and it's just where else do you see it in such strong juxtaposition
you know it really is it really is an incredible nebula and then basic stuff i mean this is the moon with a single
image less than a second you know through a fujifilm camera um so people have done much much better imaging of
the moon but i just the moon never gets old for me man if it's out i'm staring at it you know right
it just agrees i agree i it's one of those i still just very
much love and then um in 51 galaxies are really challenging for me um
but this is one that i took a a time we did a live stream i think you were actually i know you were there for the
live stream with william the 12 year old that we love we let take his own image and he chose
the whirlpool galaxy and after he shot that and he just did so well i was like you know i need to put some
time into it too and try it and he put in 20 hours
as a 12 year old i put in 42 hours and his image still absolutely destroys
mine really yeah look at all the h2 regions you got in
there i mean it's uh you know the title uh forces that you can see going on
uh it is uh you know it's it's really one of the remarkable face on spirals that we can
observe and um you know uh but still very far away i mean it's what 20 30
million light years away something like that and um you know i have uh
and in my career as a kind of uh you know more serious amateur astronomer uh
i've been able to see two supernova in this galaxy you know so it's just
you know that knowing that a star exploded all those millions of years ago and we're just now getting the light and
it's real photons it's not yeah when you're looking at galaxies this is not a reflection or
you know a copy or anything like that the light that's hitting your eye is really
photons that were formed in the cores of those stars you know and it's just uh it's amazing especially at this distance
there are no accidents so when you see it it's what you're seeing and um
yeah i agree and if you're looking for a super supernovae it's look at m51 and look at m101 they never disappoint
but it is it is one of the most in my opinion it's one of the most just um exciting i mean you look at this two
galaxies that have collided and passed through each other and one has ripped the arms off the other it's just
it shows you know how both the organization of space and the chaos of it at the same
time this duality power of it right exactly yeah the scale if nothing else
right so it really is incredible um it's an incredible target and then all the little faint galaxies in the background
so far away when that light left there were dinosaurs on the earth it's like well you know this i mean it's going to throw
me into an existential crisis immediately you know no but that does that to all of us and
uh you know so you know these um you know thinking on about these things that creates that
what's you know i described it earlier this cognitive shift you know edgar mitchell uh you know astronaut uh really
focused on this and tried to express this as i think no other astronaut did
um you know from his experience of seeing the earth rise uh from the moon and uh you know the dude was changed
and he really felt uh that he needed to get the word out and i think that um you know
that was something that he was able to uh articulate very well and he was able to
inspire other astronauts to do the same you know and but amateur astronomers get
this too you know so uh it is um you know you can't experience this kind
of stuff and not be changed i agree i agree and um you know it's
it never gets old man you know i mean you and i have had literally countless conversations about it but um
you know i i appreciate so much what you're doing here a huge fan of all of it and um
you know congratulations on 100 it's it's a testament to not only the vision
for what this should be but also the fact that you are truly a juggernaut [Laughter]
so thank you man i'm very excited um i feel like let me get out of everybody's way you've got incredible
guests here let me get out of the way so everybody else can take this thing where it should go but thanks for having me man i really appreciate it thank you and
good night thanks all right yep okay all right so we are going to um
uh jump to um adrian bradley adrian bradley has been
inspiring us for many global star parties with his nightscape images his
landscapes his skyscapes and uh adrian do you want to come on and
and show us what you got yep can you all hear me okay let me hear you just fine let me all right good yeah
i will uh i just had a long night because my goal for
tonight and the morning was to um get back out and do some night sky photography i had been doing some
a couple of uh photography jobs recently and a number of other things
um things like playing baseball we're getting in the way of uh seeing
the night sky so i had a uh i had a clear night last night and you
have to do all the things you love so that's yeah and yep so
um i wanted to do these images in order
um it was my goal as i set out for tonight to
capture some form of the uh planetary parade that we were seeing so
this would be uh it would be a from your eyes type of
view seeing all of the planets so the goal was to do that but first
um first met up with the priest and said i'm gonna take a picture of your cabin
and got there and as it so happens found a couple of angles in which
um the rising milky way found out there was haze it's a cabin over the lake and
and i was able to image um some parts of the milky way now for my
priest i also created this image where i have
those of you that recognize north american nebula here in deneb know that this is the northern cross so
the cross over his house i figured i'd i'd give him a give him an image a uh
symbolic image so that from there i moved on to a beach
and went to do some imaging there um
and tried a couple panoramas i because i knew i'd be shooting panoramas
um if i wanted to get all of the planets in a row so i started to play around with doing
panoramas and once again um bob i know you're on
um some of the results i'm getting because of
lowering the iso to what i know the camera can handle and bringing up
exposure in post has resulted in somewhat crisper
images now from this you know from a wide field i used a lot of uh wide angle
imaging and i found that i could stitch together two wide angle images
and it made this panorama so you've got kind of a broken um
a curve here in the uh milky way oh yeah but everything but everything is there
and this is one of my favorite beaches to image from um no one's around i believe the rocks
are put here they're basically trying to keep the water when it gets high from eroding
this area here it gets um there used to be a bigger shelf and then
it's fallen off lately so um so they're trying to prevent it from
doing any more damage but it's a beautiful place to go an image and then
all of my uh friends in canada you're over here
um and port huron is back this way so after doing that
i then got up and went to [Music]
the top of um the top overlooking that area and
one of these panoramas here is when the moon rose oh that's cool
yeah this is uh that's actually not the sun we'll get to
the sun in a minute the differences in what moon rise and sunrise look like i ended up staying out all night
and catching the sun so it looks like sunrise but it's not um
you've got the milky way here still imageable and here's saturn who made who made its uh first
appearance there's jupiter coming up through clouds and through haze here now let's see i think i have
another here's the moon rise as it appears to the eye um
and there's you've got the shape of the crescent moon this was an attempt to get it to look
similar um looks like it's on uh
cardboard but it's a uh it was an it was an attempt to get it as
the eye sees it so there's um you know there'll be more work done
there here we have mars rising and so what i did is i highlighted the
planets a little bit in the image so you've got the bright moon looks like the sun and again we'll
we'll cover that we've got jupiter next to it and we have mars we have saturn
um i think neptune is in here somewhere i looked for it in the sky here but i wasn't sure i may
have um it may be washed out by the moon pluto may be washed out by now
but considering i can still get the lagoon and the light from the triffid here and here's the star cloud
um and actually m22 this is m22 where my
hand is in sagittarius so and the fog
this was this was close this was true to life what we see here the fog over the
lake that was an interesting effect and so i said well
it's got about an hour left time just kept going i had an hour left before venus
came up so i waited and then venus came up
and then i waited for mercury during the during the night as the moon was rising i pulled this shot
um where he had a boat that was coming in under the moonlight and
i think i missed it by a couple of inches as far as where i wanted it but i'm happy with
catching the moonlight and catching the bullet i thought that was a really interesting scene there um
[Music] but then we went from nautical to civil dawn
and this image became an image basically showing
the last vestiges of the planet as daytime is arising
so you had saturn over here still yes jupiter and again i
highlighted them so that they would show up a little more in a picture my attempt to composite the moon we'll
work on that some more there's mars there's venus
and then in the haze mercury appeared right here
just barely and it it would wash out maybe a minute later or yeah less and i
didn't see this naked eye this was after examining um
after examining the photos and put together this panorama so now
you have these visible visible um just missing uranus and neptune i was
ambitious to think that i could somehow get uranus and neptune in here but
it's just too bright and that's because the sun's coming up so
so we'll review here's here's what the moon rise looks like
and here is what a sunrise looks like
everything's gone except the dust on my sensor and camera which i cleared some
of that out and the sun comes up
just about everything in the sky disappears except today
um you could see the moon and image the moon in the sky at the same time as the
sun as it was coming up so that was interesting and this was i'd
hope to have a better panorama of that but i did capture some images where
the sun and the moon are there at the same time um
and let's see i think i've covered all the images that i had this is uh
my usual in nod to your on the wings scott there's i looked at this one and
realized that i somehow it was a fuzzy shot and i somehow caught some birds
yeah flying by i did so thank you so there you've got the moon you've got some birds and you've got the
rising sun over here perfect supposed to be part of a panorama but it ended up kind of being its own image
over the lake and of course the lake changes looks too
as we went from night to morning and the differences there so
and then here probably between this image and the other
panorama i did where some of the some of the planets are there that's this is what i was going for i
actually wanted to include the milky way in this lineup and i know it happens again
tonight but i started around 11 p.m and
over a span of eight hours took all of those shots so i've uh i've laid down and taken a
nap earlier before coming on so that i could share some of the images
it was just nice getting back out underneath the stars and um
and just enjoying my time taking the images looking around at the night sky seeing what i could see naked
eye yeah enjoying the fact that it's warm out
there was a high dew point if i remember fortunately i didn't
have any issues with the lenses and didn't get much sand i did have that dust on the uh
sensor that i'll have to it's either the lenses or the sensor so i'll have to do some cleaning there but
other than that it was um it was a wonderful night out and i enjoyed um
i enjoyed taking those photos and being back under the stars to take them so
absolutely let's go i'll turn it back over to you okay all right and um adrian
you uh thanks for bringing on all your amazing work and um
you know uh look forward to your uh future stuff uh you keep threatening to
go uh to the southern hemisphere maybe
you know if that's on the horizon for you maybe next year or the next
i'm going to be working with cesar brolo and to maybe conduct a star
party in patagonia so i think that would be a lot of fun and uh if we do that you have to go
all right i will go i will find a way yes i i am
ready ready [Music]
yes i probably could but um saving my pennies i'll save some more pennies yes
uh you know it sounds like a good time and definitely look
would look forward to that i'll um we'll see if we can get you a baseball
or what other what other things can have to go on hold because seeing southern skies is definitely
as i've said every star party i've been on seeing southern style right something that for you
where if you if you have uh the center of the
of the milky way all over your head in the sunny um this is you can make magic
but every time you make magic with the pictures are amazing
one of these i i'm writing the in our chat that i remember me
the the image of uh the movie contact
when do you remember in the end of the movie contact from the book of carol
sagan uh a picture of a beach with the milky way is amazing because i remember me
completely the the landscape of of the movie contact
that must be why i'm drawn i i love that movie that must be why i'm drawn to that beach
um i don't think i even i didn't make the connection but now i do so uh yeah that's
um part of the reason that i have to i keep going back to the beach
i just missed the milky way sitting above the water but it's uh close enough where you can still
catch it over the you know over the water and over the beach line which uh
makes for a nice serene image yeah yes
it sounds something that we when we go i i need to go to the north america
too because uh i i hope to to to see to watch to take pictures of of
this another side of the big keyway and you know oh you need to come here to the
santa remy fair um oh i hear that if you go i can show you the the the exploding star
yeah look forward to seeing that is in the path of the milky way
yes i hear that if you go to chile you can you can go
up to a high enough elevation to where you can see our ursa major
yes so that if if if making it to the northern hemisphere doesn't work just
heading to chile apparently is the uh way to go so um that's that's one place if i if i had
indiscriminate funds that'd be one place that i would visit just to see
how that works but argentina um
anywhere in the southern hemisphere is uh definitely on the list so yeah so yeah i look forward to that
yes but all right well gentlemen uh up next is uh uh
young connell richards uh his program vast frontiers is next and uh
connell it's great to have you on global star party thank you very much for having me scott i'm really happy to be here yes uh
for tonight the theme of exploration and awakening i've taken that pretty literally and cut my presentation in two
so to speak the first portion will be uh personal and observational um
exploration and the second component will be sort of the awakening to the scale of the universe that results from
those observations and you'll see what i mean by that i'll go into a little more detail but first i'll share my screen and
i have a powerpoint here for you share this
okay can you confirm that you're seeing that okay uh yes
okay wonderful the cover image here i have on my title slide
is one of my favorite nightscapes and star trails that i've taken uh my trusty reflector right in the middle uh some
trees in the back and then polaris just hovering above that tree line with some stars swirling around
i remember that night i was taking that image i'd taken some observations and i was actually getting really frustrated
because as we know astronomy can have its hiccups and i recall that the neighbors kept turning their lights on i mean it
was five or six houses all around me from where i was observing in the backyard there was dew there was noise it just
wasn't a great night for observing and eventually things settled down but by that point i thought all right i'll just
get my camera out and point it away from those lights and get some interesting images and it resulted in one of my
favorite nightscapes that really captures uh the beauty and inspiration of what we do
and speaking of capturing i'll go to my first slide here i understand it's a little bit bright
but it's these descriptions and sketches that i want you to see so when i first got my telescope i
remember looking around the night sky and everything was so new and exciting jupiter the moon the planets
uh different deep sky objects i'd read so much about but at that time when i first got the
telescope and was trying to share this experience with people i hadn't started recording things yet so a couple months
went by and i decided to start my own astronomy journal which ended up being
in this 99 cent little notebook like a like a notepad
and i just got down there with a pencil and i have a couple of simple sketches here you see the pleiades over to the left
neptune and uranus down in the bottom left corner when i first observed them with binoculars the first
time i'd ever observed those planets and this journal as
small as it was and simple as it was documented some of my first experiences in this hobby and enabled me to share
them with people that was until i got a little more involved in the photography side of things and could share things
through that medium but anyway you see i have the first observation up top is the double cluster
and perseus i have m45 uranus and neptune and binoculars again
and these were all very early in the morning they're my first kind of looks into what the night sky had to offer and
it was such this vast treasure trove of things to observe i didn't really know where to start but
a couple of books and magazines and some advice from others helped me focus my efforts on some brighter targets
you'll see another picture here this is from that same journal a little bit later in 2017
and i have some more observations the beehive cluster campbell's cascade asterism and ngc 752 which is part of
another asterism it's a small open cluster next to an asterism of stars that looks like a golf club and it looks
like this golf club is hitting this small ball in the sky and it's a really fun target through binoculars and i
wanted to see what that would look like to share it with others so here i have it sketched very crudely in the upper
right hand corner just above my written observation and later on i got a little more
involved in sketching and photography but i do like looking back on these observations because it shows how i got started and i
recorded some of my experiences and how i felt and what i saw and what it was like and again the night sky just seemed so
vast and of course it still does but here i thought i was getting some kind of a handle on things i thought
i've got my binoculars out my telescope and i'm getting a good view of what there is to offer in the night sky and
later i found out that you know i was only scratching the surface and to this day i still am and happy to be doing so
and a later iteration of my astronomy journaling i switched to a sturdier
notebook this is the one i currently use the the image that you're seeing now and this is an observation from 2019 i was
looking at some planetary nebulae during that month and i got more involved in in the things
i was recording so i have the same basic information the magnitude or excuse me the magnification the instrument i was
using but you can see in my description here i was noting that i used an o3 filter on
this planetary nebula and kind of trying to figure out what effect that had what effects inverted vision had
and comparing the earliest observations of mine to these in this journal in 2019
i can see how my observing skill had grown and i was able to look a little deeper into the night sky some of these
planetary nebulae may have eluded me first when i was just getting my my first steps in the
hobby and at this point i had a little bit better grasp of them and i thought now that i was stepping out of the
messier catalog some of the mgc and herschel objects i was really seeing what the night sky had to offer
and yet again i was still wrong another image from that uh notebook this
is from an astronomical league binocular program the binocular messier program and you can see in my notes here i
pointed my binoculars at the region of the sky in sagittarius the center of our galaxy and i was
looking at some of the bright nebulae there m16 it was the first time i'd observed that m17
some of these really beautiful bright reflection and emission nebulae that i thought were teaching me more
about uh the nature of our galaxy and the nature of others by extension and as much as they certainly did teach me i
was still only scratching the surface and it wasn't this lesson didn't occur to me until later which i'll explore in
just a little bit closer to home is planet mars i believe
i showed a slide much like this these same sketches last week talking about the upcoming observation of bars for
excuse me opposition cirdus major is here the southern polar cap there's some
clouds or some frost in the helles basin a little bit more south south is up in
this sketch and this sketch took me about two hours to make i was really trying to squeeze
every bit of detail out of that planet that i could and getting as in depth a look at the night sky
as as i had available to me with the instruments and experience i had and at this point i was certainly a more
experienced observer but there's always more to learn and always more equipment to to build
on your current collection as i'm sure you all know that's a familiar feeling and this going back to some very simple
naked eye observations this was for another astronomical league program for observing earth orbiting satellites
of course very close to home maybe three or four hundred miles uh just above the ground
and on the left here or yeah on the left i have a series of three satellites that
i observed for various requirements in the program at the bottom there is a requirement for a multinational
satellite series of observations you observe satellites from a number of different
countries there's another one for observing a satellite that passes over multiple times in one night
and again on the left here you can see the names of these satellites and the countries of origin and their norad
tracking numbers up on the top here entry number nine for that night is a chinese uh rocket booster the upper
stage of a long march rocket that was just orbiting the earth and sometimes you'll see they might leak a little bit
of propellant or when they detach from their payload they might have a spin exerted on them and you can see those
satellites brightening and dimming over a series of seconds as they pass overhead so it looks a lot like a normal
satellite but the first time i'd seen something like that i didn't know what to make of it uh because it's a really
rare phenomenon unless you start looking for it but it's it's something i'd certainly suggest to many observers even
though it's going back to naked eye you're kind of using your full range of instruments including your own eyeballs
all the way up to a telescope and then of course on the right here i have the observation log that the league provides
for that program it shows how the satellite went directly overhead and i have cassiopeia there
marked as a reference constellation for where i saw the satellite passing through and then a little time stamp as
well plus some notes and again this is close to home a little
bit farther out in fact i'm sure we've flown quite close to these places as the apollo astronauts could attest to this
is a different observing log that i keep my sketchbook in addition to my written descriptions and i started this during
the opposition of mars the same sketch you saw earlier and recently these were just in a couple of weeks ago back in
may i was looking at some different parts of the moon i looked at that over a couple
of different weeks and again this was for an astronomical league program that required me to sketch some certain
craters and features on the moon and you can see up in the left-hand corner is clavius there with its
craterlets and i'm sure many of us have seen and would recognize that crater it's one of the largest on the moon about 250 kilometers in diameter
but it was it was a simple sketch and even over the course of a couple days i got a little bit better
down at the bottom right is one of the most interesting features on the moon it's a crater called messier and there's
also a satellite crater called messier a you'll see over to the left here and it's over towards the eastern limb
of the moon and it has this really interesting kind of ray system extending
behind it but you can tell that whatever impacted the moon at that time came in at a really steep angle
because there's all this sediment built up between messier the parent crater and then its satellite crater messier a and
this ray system shooting out directly behind it several times the diameter of either of those craters and it does
stick out to you especially when it's close to the terminator and that ray that white material the ejecta on the
surface the moon is really steeply illuminated that really pops out at you and it's
certainly one of my favorite lunar features and i keep coming back to this i'd explored many aspects of the night sky
many different objects planetary nebulae globular clusters some of the bright nebulae and sagittarius
here i've observed satellites orbiting the earth and these interesting features on the moon and i keep pushing this
further and these were some much more recent observations at the end of may and some of them at the beginning of june
for a double star program i was working on sketching some double stars it was something i hadn't really been involved
in in my just over six years in the hobby and i thought that would be interesting
to check out an object i didn't know much about um there's only so many objects in the night sky it's certainly a vast array of
uh of uh categories but this was one of those categories i hadn't really gone into um
much detail with observing yet and this was one of those final categories of objects like i said that i
hadn't gone into much detail with and i was left thinking what else is there to observe in the night sky and
the obvious answer is there's quite a lot and i knew that intuitively but i didn't really understand how that would
really play out so i used a program called sky safari which is a really great program for
cataloging your observations and i like to keep a list an observing list that
the program lets you create of all the objects i've observed both planetary and deep sky
so i was looking at the planetary observations and it was really fun to see how some comets i'd observed
like comet neo wise comet leonard were already out in interplanetary space
some of them passed the orbits of saturn and uranus already when i'd observed them only maybe two years ago
and you can really get a feel for how fast those objects are moving especially when you know they're still in the
fastest portion of their orbit because they're so close to the sun and that they have much farther to go and that
some of those comets may never return to the inner solar system or at least won't in
this generation or for the next several thousand years and it's a very hard thing to comprehend
and and all of it is really quite hard to comprehend but as i said i also had a deep sky list and the program lets you
have this list and use a feature called galaxy view and it puts you in it sets
up two screens in in the program the top is a top down view of the milky way and
the second is a side view of the milky way or at least the sun and it shows you the locations of every
object in that observing list that was applied to the galaxy view feature
and this is kind of what it looks like this is the very immediate neighborhood of our solar system even at the vast
distance of a thousand light years and you can see on the left here i went up through the scale of distance of objects
i'd observed at this time the closest object i'd observed deep sky wise was epsilon
eridani which is one of the closest stars to earth it's about 10 light years away and because of that it's been the
focus of many science fiction stories and novels that really captivated my imagination and i thought i'd have a
look at something that was so often included in stories of spaceships and interstellar voyages and all those kind
of grand things and then on the other side of things the farthest object i'd observed as far as i
can tell was messier 109 which is a galaxy a spiral galaxy a little over 80
million light years from earth from our solar system and you'll see that represented a little
bit later in terms of scale but here i have divisions of scale over on the left and on the right i'll have images from
sky safari that indicate the objects i had observed you can see them indicated here the white circles are stars or
double stars from that recent program and then the yellow circles indicate open clusters
and you'll see some of the other familiar map key features that we see in so many star atlases
but it looks like there's so much and there really is of all these stars in our immediate neighborhood of a thousand light years but when we step up to 25
000 light years you get a much better sense for what the galaxy has to offer and what many other galaxies likely have
to offer to perhaps some extraterrestrial observers looking around their whereabouts over
there you can still see there's plenty of open clusters here there's a couple of planetary nebulae indicated by that blue
circle with a cross in it and these bright nebulae as they're called by the program they can include a mission or reflection that delay they are the green
squares that are on either side of our sun to the left and right and you can
see this is looking into sagittarius so this is probably m16 and m17 or maybe
the lagoon nebula uh probably some of those objects in the adjacent arm of our galaxy
and there's so much to see here but the next view kind of puts that into
perspective it adds a lot more globular clusters of which there are about 200 in
our night sky most of them in our milky way that we observe but you can see that cluster in the previous slide that
looked so broad and expansive is really tiny it's really only a portion of the milky way
which is about a hundred thousand light years across and i've really only observed around my
arm of the galaxy in six years of observing and this is what really hit me is that with all those observations you
saw earlier all of those logs those sketches those written descriptions that all applies to a very small
subset of objects in our night sky and it shows us that there is just so much more to observe
and there's so many vast frontiers out there that we have barely scratched the surface of and barely begun to
understand so even though like i said you can see so many globular clusters here and that cluster of closer objects like stars and
open clusters to us you can see a lot of the milky way is visible in this image or at least the
representation of it because i haven't observed anything in those parts of the galaxy and i probably never will just
because of the large distance and the limitations of our modern technology the next scale i have set here is five
million light years and it shows some of our nearest galaxies on the bottom on the bottom image in the
bottom left you can see m31 and its two satellite galaxies
its dwarf galaxy's m32 and m110 and those are very close to us about two and
a half million light years i believe and you can also see them represented in the upper image here
and there's just a couple of galaxies nearby to us similar to our own milky way roughly in terms of size and scale but
there's so much empty space between that and again even though there's not much there it puts more of the scale of the
universe into perspective and i'll zoom out even further to 50 million light years this shows most of
the galaxies that i have recorded in the logs you saw earlier down in the top image kind of towards
the bottom of that image you can see a huge cluster of galaxies there that would be the virgo cluster
looking straight up out of our milky way uh you can see in the side view down at the bottom it's quite far off
but of course the milky way itself obscures many of the galaxies outside where we live so it's easiest to look up
to big clusters like the virgo cluster if we want to get a better understanding of what lies beyond our own milky way
and beyond our local group so in this image in this scale it looks like there's this huge cluster of
galaxies there and of course it is but again there's so much open space and within each of those galaxies we see a
vast uh what used to be called an island universe of all those open clusters and globulars and double stars and perhaps
even people like us trying to look around and find out where their position in the cosmos is so
it puts both the scale of vast richness in our milky way and also some of the vast emptiness of the universe both into
perspective at the same time i found that really interesting and again the reason this this all hit so hard is i hadn't done an exercise
like this until several years in the hobby it was i think about five years into the hobby that i first looked at this feature
and i thought well i had you know a little bit of ego there thinking i'd seen all of this detail in our night sky
so many features on planets and satellites and moons globular clusters open clusters stars the milky way i
thought i'd seen it all but i was really only just seeing the beginning of what the universe had to offer
and at my final scale and again this is just of my own observations at 200 million light years
you can see just about every galaxy i've observed cataloged in here and you might think if if someone
without a knowledge of astronomy we're looking at this image it kind of looks like that might be all there is to see
but we certainly know that is not the case uh there are quasars like 3c273
that i believe are about a billion or 2 billion light years away several times the scale of this image
the width of this image or or this rendering at least uh the galaxies we
were looking at earlier the one bob fugate shared with us that was 5 billion light years away several times
200 million and we know that as you expand outward the the shell gets gets
bigger and what i mean by that if you look at a circle in the radius and diameter growth the circumference grows
even more and that kind of represents how much there is outside of our of our
knowledge in fact einstein used a very similar metaphor when he was talking about uh what what the
adventure of learning is like as you learn that would be like the radius of the circle growing you realize things that you don't know
and that would be the circumference of the circle and that's growing at an even faster rate and that's certainly the
case with astronomical observations uh both in the sense of personal understanding and also in the sense of
of cosmic scale so as i go forward into the future in my hobby i certainly hope to to learn from
others about what there is to see out there through professional telescopes and the experiences of others and i also
hope to to push my skills and equipment uh to their their very maximum and keep
seeing what the cosmos has to offer and keep expanding this list of red ovals of galaxies and yellow circles of open
clusters as i continue to uncover what the milky way has to offer and what our local group and large galaxy cluster has
to offer and in several lifetimes i could never cover all there is to see certainly none of us can
and i i certainly find that to be a humbling fact one of those uh humbling and character building experiences in
astronomy that carl sagan talked about but again i come back to this joy of observation and all those logs and
descriptions and sketches you saw earlier it does bring me a lot of pleasure to keep observing the night sky
and even though you know you're not going to see it all that certainly doesn't take away from the joy of understanding the scale of the universe
so i hope that's a lesson that many of us can share and enjoy and thank you very much for having me on i appreciate it wow thank you so much connell yeah
you're always very inspiring um and uh you know
we were all talking about uh your journal that you keep uh and uh michael carroll who's up next uh
was mentioning in our zoom chat he says your journal reminds me very much of
galileo's sketchbooks great way to record and remember special night sky experiences so
yeah that's great wonderful yeah thank you very much i hope that we see you also on the
100th global star party so i i appreciate it i'll be there and at all con as well so
hopefully our schedule's lined up and i'll see you at our site yeah wonderful wonderful thanks connell take care thank
you okay so uh last but not least is
space artist and science fiction author michael carroll michael thanks for
coming on to our program and uh um
what have you got in store for us tonight well um thanks for having me first
publicly i want to thank scott for his flexibility i had
impromptu visit to the dentist today and he we weren't sure when i would fit into
this whole thing but he's he's been great and uh was able to put me in this time slot and
i i appreciate that scott um so let me just do a little
screen sharing here oh because it's full screen
see if this will work here
okay can you all see that not yet
yeah okay what does this mean
share screen there may be one more button to pre push i think that's right you got to commit to it
there there we go okay let's see if this works it looks
like yep okay here we go good okay
there are we immersed yes we okay here we are
i love the theme tonight by the way exploration and awakening
um there when we look out into the cosmos and we
look down at our feet at this planet uh it is fascinating to see this
uh a strange and wonderful chain of things that have come together to make the
earth that we know uh today what's so great about this planet
besides philadelphia of course um it's uh it's a great place to live
obviously um it is absolutely and you shouldn't modify the word unique
but it is unique we have not found any planet vaguely like the earth uh even in exoplanets i'd
love to talk about earth-like exoplanets at some point but um but
let's look around on the cosmic scale first uh this is of course the uh max
planck map of the cosmic background radiation of the entire universe
but we can look at things on a universal scale even
small on the quantum level and we see some interesting
balances for example um the force of gravity
uh is balanced if it was a little bit stronger all the stars that we see would
be so large they burn quickly they burn inconsistently
um if it's weaker the stars would not be big enough for heavy elements to
make rocky planets um are our uh sun is just right for us because of
the the uh gravitational constant the strong nuclear force is another one of these that holds elements together and
if it were a little bit weaker only hydrogen would exist in the universe a little bit stronger and those life
essential elements like carbon would be rare and of course there are many many
other strange and wondrous things that uh
appear to be um tuned just to uh
to a critical um fine amount so that we can be here
but let's take a look at a little bit bigger scale the galaxy now of course the milky
way is more a barred spiral but you can imagine uh that we are out between um two arms
of the the galaxy and uh as they say in
real estate location location location is the most important thing we are
perched between these two arms further out
life critical heavy elements are thinly spread out and if we got in closer to
the hub or inside an arm the stars are packed together quite a
bit the radiation levels would be uh pretty high uh by the way a person who
would be great to speak more about this is dave iker who has a wonderful book
if you haven't picked up his galaxy's book i highly recommend it
so we can move on from galactic scales to the sun
just right star if it was the you know the big stars are like
big hollywood stars they are hot and bright and they die fast
um so uh we if if our sun was a bit bigger it would
burn quickly and um not be around very long if it was smaller it would be cool uh like a red
dwarf um our sun is very very stable it doesn't
uh blow out these big flares like uh small red dwarfs do
um it's been around in a stable condition for about four billion years after its tea towery phase
and it's gonna be around for another four billion so don't sell your stock uh just relax things are gonna be this way
for a while um and of course there's that all-important
goldilocks effect uh or the habitable zone we are right in the zone where
there could be liquid water around our star um if you're in a little bit further
perhaps a little further than venus it's going to be too hot for surface
water a little bit further out and you get conditions like mars it's too cold for water on the surface but we are in
just that right habitable zone every star has a habitable zone
uh where liquid water can form we just happen to be pretty much in the middle
which is nice another thing that contributes to the way our
earth is and how nice a place it is to live is the
company we keep our planetary companions um as you know outside of the orbit of
earth and in fact outside the orbit of mars there's a whole bunch of rocks
space rocks asteroids um and they want because of the sun's
gravitational pull to come in toward the inner solar system and of course we are right in the way
but there's a big gravity source disrupting their orbits
outside of mars and that is jupiter in fact isaac asimov once said something
to the effect of the solar system is made of the sun and jupiter and a few
miscellaneous things jupiter is by far the biggest heaviest
planet and its gravitational pull
preferentially tosses things toward the outer solar system rather than letting them come in so in effect it makes a uh
a force field around the inner solar system which is pretty handy
another thing that that helps us to be the way we are is the molten core that we have uh our core
consists of a solid core and a molten part the molten part sloshes around and
generates a magnetic fieldness bubble of course leads to aurora
uh as it funnels uh energy down to over the poles and this uh is
a protective shield for life on earth from solar radiation
another thing that the earth has that we just don't find anywhere else in the solar system except
really a pluto is we are essentially a uh double planet system the moon is so
big it uh keeps our axis stable if you put a top
on a child's top on a table and spin it it's going to kind of wobble this is
called precession um if we didn't have a moon we would precess the way mars does in 50 000
years mars is going to be rolling around on its side but uh and you can imagine what that
does to the seasons but but not us we have a stable spin because the heavy
moon uh keeps us from doing that the moon uh raises tides which mix the ocean
water oxygenates things purifies them and there's also some new work that
indicates that the moon may well have um pulled a lot of greenhouse gases away
from the early atmosphere the earth has had several atmospheres but its second
major one had a lot of greenhouse gas and the moon may be responsible for clearing some of
that out for us of course the earth is a jigsaw planet
and the plate tectonics are responsible for all kinds of wondrous recycling
we have the water cycle which recycles water but the plates recycle
not only minerals but atmosphere
out of volcanoes we get carbon dioxide water vapor nitrogen other things that
stuff floats around and it tends to chemically be locked into the rocks
so that you get for example carbonate rocks firm carbon dioxide if this stuff sat around long enough
the atmosphere would all get soaked up by the rocks or it would be blasted away
by solar energy but instead what happens is the plates move
melt the rocks free the gases and it comes back out
through volcanism and and other sources so if you're breathing today
thank a volcano to know what would happen without plate tectonics just look at
mars mars had volcanism active volcanism maybe for
as much as two billion years but it doesn't have plate tectonics at
least not now they may have in the past there's some evidence of that
but what happens now is that carbon dioxide uh while it initially kept things
warm it escaped to space or got locked in the rocks
as the oxygen did mars is a rusted planet so
um we can be thankful for the plate tectonics we've got and of
course the atmosphere gives us a shield against uh meteors and and some types of
radiation so uh just looking out around us at the
universe gives us an appreciation uh for
the way this place is um we have just the right star we're in a good place in
the galaxy we're in the habitable zone we've got that shield against asteroids
our moon is big we have tectonics and volcanoes and there are those forces
throughout the universe that seem to be balanced so hopefully this inspires us to
explore more i love exploration and what it does to us and and how it teaches us
not only about the universe but about ourselves hopefully it will inspire us to take
care of our unique planet and take care of each other
so thank you very much let's see that is a nice um
way to wrap this particular global star party up uh
you know i am uh uh you know i i've been really contemplating uh quite a bit
about um you know this gratitude i try to evoke a
sense of gratitude from the moment i wake up you know the first thing i do is i look out my window
uh to see the sun rise and um yeah i take a deep breath
realizing you know the complexity of the gases and stuff that we that we breathe and just to kind of feel
you know without uh without losing that moment of uh how special
uh life is uh you know and uh just
really the incredible miraculous uh confluence of all the things that are
going on you know that just allow us to wake up be conscious
and to uh take a moment to take it all in and then just move
forward you know to explore that day you know whether it's just a what would seemingly be a normal day
but our lives are anything but normal you know it is really amazing and special
and you know every at every moment you can see creation and destruction happening
and the whole recycling of life happening all around you and it is
magical and uh so that was the uh point of uh this
particular global star party but i think it's it's the point of uh every event that we try to put on and we try to add
some of these aspects and uh it's i i love that all of our presenters today really brought it on
and uh and made each presentation really special in that way so
thank you very much to the presenters thank you to the audience that's watching from around the
world and um you know as my friend jack horkheimer always used to say you know keep looking
up uh because uh you know at every moment's uh
you know another another day another moment of discovery and exploration
and um so we'll be back uh with the next global
star party our 99th on july 12th uh and then our hundredth which will be
on july 19th um and we'll continue to do more global star parties past that of course it's
not nowhere near the end because these things are very special
and if any of you who are watching would like to participate on global star party
you know please contact us at explore alliance at explorescientific.com or just call
customer service we're happy to get you on we have had several guests who have watched our
programs uh participate in global star party um you know so it's a it's a great
opportunity to brush up your presentation skills if it's been a while if you've never done it before it's it's
a lot of fun and um we always look forward to uh you know astronomers and
what they have to present so so that's it it's a wrap and uh thank
you very much and um here i'll bring everybody on that's uh
in our gallery right now we still have deep tea in nepal adrian's up there in michigan
uh caesar down buenos aires michael where is it that you live again
ah there i'm in colorado you're in colorado yeah and bob you're in new mexico correct
yes i'm in albuquerque albuquerque i may run into you at all kind oh i i hope so
i hope so i hear that uh apollo astronaut harrison schmidt is going to be there and so um
uh we're going to try to interview him uh at elkon uh as we do some of these
live presentations but love to have you uh spend a few minutes with us too bob
so and anyone that's attending alcon uh please come up and identify yourselves
and uh um it'll be great to talk to you and um so
that's all i have for tonight folks but thank you so much i should probably mention i'm from
michigan and most of my images are from there um yes it goes from the light polluted
cities the detroit metro area the further north you move in michigan is where you begin to see
some of the beaches and the the uh lakes the upper peninsula up there
yeah from the upper part of the lower peninsula or the thumb area all the way up to the upper peninsula it gets
beautiful and and almost as dark as uh as new mexico but not quite
out west in the united states is where some of our truly dark skies are
there in florida right right well you should come visit
we have a house so yeah the image behind me is from the uh from moki tex
um an image that i took that out there in oklahoma colorado arizona bob you and new mexico
those are all places that are on the list and the list keeps growing thanks to a global star party
thank you i gotta go make more money here [Laughter]
good enough all right all right take care and thank you very much thank you all right good night
everybody [Music]
all right good night everyone take care and get a good rest we'll see you next next actually next week as we
broadcast uh from caltech and mount wilson observatory
good night good night good night
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