Global Star Party 7

Transcript:

um
um
for those of you are watching right now i'm uh i've got some tardy grades under the
microscope and this one is uh going for a swim
in a drop of water
is this some something we drink maybe sometimes oh my
yeah they may be tr he may be trying to come out of his shell you know i mean some people need to come
out of their shells too but and we do that here at the global star party
it doesn't look like there's much to eat there though like the other night oh yeah he was they were gobbling the
other night these this next series of uh images i i like to show art this is um
uh i had communicated with a lady she is a
she is a technical or uh scientific illustrator her name's
eleanor lutz and this uh this particular map
that she did of the night sky illustrates uh 30 different civilizations in their
animals and mythology or people different objects imagined in the sky
and it's um it's interesting how a lot of them repeat you know like the lycursa major
for example and then this one and then she did a
series of planets and this one is the map of mercury i
think it's just beautiful and she has a whole series of these she
regrets not being able to come onto the show herself but she had other commitments
and then this one right here this this one's really cool this is an orbit map of the solar system showing
you know eighteen thousand asteroids um uh you know and uh you know all the
details are there when you go on her website she actually gives you can download the data to try to recreate
this yourself so that's kind of cool that's kind of cool
but uh we're get getting officially started here for the uh global star party this is our seventh
one we'll do another one on friday that will run through europe and uh perhaps all the
way down to australia so and we'll make announcements about that later
but we're getting we're getting started
[Music]
wow
well here we are i wanted to thank everybody for getting started with us on the
global star party seven uh we have uh as usual um people watching from around the world
and uh we hope that uh this somehow gives you the opportunity to meet people you haven't met before
to hear the stories from the various astronomers that are joining us tonight uh and to um you know with uh your live
chat uh to uh you know give us uh questions or comments as we go along
so but as usual we're going to get started with david levy as you all know
if you've been watching and following this the global star parties you know that david is a dear friend of mine and a
dear friend of many of the people here that are on our program tonight he's touched so many lives it's it's really hard to
imagine the effect that david levy has had on people over this last 50 or so years that uh
one of one of the people that are on today was recounting a story how he met david 50 years ago so
you know just a huge um uh influence uh a very kind uh person if you ever got
a chance to meet him uh and uh you know uh when i think of david levy i just think of inspiration
and and star-filled nights so um so david i'm going to put the
stage on you well thank you scott scotty and uh this is now our seventh
global star party and it's become quite a tradition i'm getting to see a lot of old friends
friends that i haven't seen in quite some time and some new friends but i'm actually enjoying meeting very
well and friends that you will all get to see later on this evening
um in particular libby libby and the stars is uh only 10 years old but her
generation is going to be leading us into the future
what telescope should you get and i'm going to give you a very simple answer to that and that is you
don't need a telescope at all and most of you know that i enjoy more than anything else
searching for comment searching for comments but that's not really true that's my
second most enjoyable thing under the sky but the single thing i enjoy more than anything
else is watching for meteors shooting stars because you don't need a telescope you
don't need anything but a comfortable chair a lawn chair to sit up look up at the
night sky and see what there is and if you go through centuries past you get
to see so much in the sense of what other people saw under the night sky and most of the
literature that i've studied over the years was written before the telescope was even made
so really all they could see was were meteors that was the most important
thing they could see we go all the way back to uh cervantes and don quixote
with this the night darkened and lights and more lights began to flit about the wood
much as the gaseous exhalations of the earth fled about the sky and look to us like
shooting stars we go to john milton who starts
in the first couple of lines of paradise lost him the almighty power whole headlong flaming from the ethereal
sky and later on the imperial ensign whose full high advanced
shone like a meteor streaming to the wind with gems and golden luster rich and blazed seraphic arms and
trophies shone like a meteor streaming to the wind one of the things that i first saw when
i was a little kid about six years old even younger than libby is now looking over the night sky was a
shooting star and it reminded me of perry como that had a very popular he had a very
popular song at the time catch a falling star and put it in your pocket save it for a
rainy day uh i never got to meet barry como
although my mother did i know she met him at a grocery store in florida one day
and that must have been a really exciting thing to do i wish i had had a chance to meet him
and i would have had a chance to ask him if he'd actually managed to catch a falling star at some point
and then one of the most intelligent presidents we've ever had in the united states thomas jefferson
who was wrong about meteors where he claimed i would more easily believed that two yankee professors would lie
than that stones would fall from heaven but i think my favorite when i look up
at the sky and think about meteors is john dunn
go and catch a falling star get with child a mandrake root tell me where all past years are or who
cleft the devil's foot teach me to hear mermaids singing or to keep off envy's singing
and find what wind serves to advance an honest mind and tonight we have a sky
so fine that we all can enjoy the stars online thank you very much oh that was
wonderful david thank you very much that was great um well
our our next uh in our next segment here we have uh jay kelly beatty uh the the beaming
uh uh smiling face of sky and telescope magazine and um i think that
uh anyone that's met kelly before i mean you just uh you get um
i don't know i just get a great uh feel from from this guy because he is someone
that is always enthusiastic he's always inspiring people to
learn more about astronomy he has given countless lectures written countless articles uh i've said
it before but uh for me he's the voice and face of sky and telescope
and uh so kelly thanks again for joining us this is uh i believe the third segment of this
seven-part series on the past present and future of amateur astronomy
and you've got the stage kelly thank you thank you so much scott thank you for those kind words and david thank you
again for just getting us all in the right frame of mind for this um
you know i got started in astronomy as many of you did many many many years
ago and um we're going to talk about that period of time uh starting roughly in the 1970s and and
working forward if for those who weren't here for the first couple of times i spoke first about the origins of amateur
telescope making in the 1920s and then how that gradually slowly grew
because there were no really inexpensive telescopes that you could buy commercially
and then during the 50s and 60s propelled by the space race
uh we all were sort of enamored of what's out there and and i
think that was the in some ways the golden age of amateur astronomy because
there were telescopes started to become commercially available and there were lots of clubs
forming some of the amateur clubs in the united states go back to that time and even before some of the
biggest ones so we're going to take up that story about uh about the 19
mid 1950s early 60s just about the time the space race was starting to heat up something else was happening
in the united states especially and that is that power companies led by general electric and westinghouse had
built these power plants that ran 24 7. but the demand for electricity at night
wasn't nearly as great as it was during the daytime and they couldn't exactly throttle back these power plants so they
looked for ways to use electricity at night and it was during that period the 50s and 60s
that these companies essentially gave away tens of millions of streetlights to towns and cities across the country
across the u.s so that they would have they would have a means of
of using up this excess electricity so many of the street lights that you see
today got their start during that period now the first electric street lights
dated from the 1880s thomas edison himself uh rolled out the
first street lights and a power plant to uh to to power them in new york city
today there are more than 300 million street lights worldwide
and that is a problem for astronomy in that it has created gradually over
time an increasing pawl of light pollution in our skies virtually all of our skies there are not
many of us who can claim to be a pla in places where there are there's none
and and so the lighting not only did the street lights get
rolled out in that period of time but a dramatically more powerful kind of light
called high intensity discharge came about and and instead of having a
simple incandescent bulb lighting your street corner
there these were brilliant new sources of light and i want to tell you about a book that
sort of chronicles this whole thing it's called brilliant it's by a woman
named jane brock's it came out about 10 years ago it's the story of the evolution of
electric lighting or lighting in general uh throughout the ages and with a lot of emphasis
on this period that i'm talking about so you know we we amateur astronomers
got pushed out uh into ever farther corners from our homes our backyards are
no longer suitable for looking at the the dimmest objects and so we found ourselves at
dark sky sites that our clubs might have had or had a special hideaway at a special lake
outside the town and you know the thing about progress is that often we as individuals
can't stop it and so you you might have a really great place and then some farmer sells his or her
land to a developer and suddenly there are 200 apartments where there used to be a field of wheat
and all the lights that go with those 200 departments and and so suddenly your your observing site
is is diminished now the interesting thing is that during
this early phase of high intensity discharge lighting there were there were two kinds three
kinds of lights in particular that that were the most common
one was mercury vapor which is essentially a fluorescent tube
one is something called high pressure sodium which is using sodium atoms as the
exciting light giver i'll get to that in a second and the third is something called metal halide
now the interesting thing about all three of these kinds of lights and and the most common turned out to be high
pressure sodium which is are the lights that have that kind of peachy color and they are rolled out all over our
landscape and you know they're annoying but they have one
saving grace if you will and that is that their light is is nearly monochromatic and it's pretty
easy to filter out so even if you're in a location with a lot of light pollution
uh the the light from high pressure sodium and metal uh mercury vapor tube
can be fairly easily filtered out with a with a light pollution filter and therein lies a tail right we all as
visual observers and maybe as as photographic observers uh started
using these light pollution filters so that we could see the sky that we lost to to the light
sources well the situation has gotten worse according to the international dark sky
association which was founded in 1988 in tucson uh in part to protect the the pristine
dark skies over kitt peak about 40 miles to the southwest outside of town
according to the ida the the increase in light pollution is about right now
about twice the rate of the growth in population and so we've
we've kind of grown accustomed to having this pall of light over us all the time which is really
unfortunate it makes it much more difficult to do visual observing uh and there are tricks that
photographers can use that we'll get into probably next week or the week after that to sort of uh to cheat uh cheat light
pollution and still get great views but but our our are are observing our visual
observing has taken a hit and for those of us who like
peering into the eyepiece and seeing light from the andromeda galaxy that's
traveled for two and a half million years to go through the entrance of our telescope
become focused and reach our eye through the eyepiece um that's that's really a heady thing and
we're able to experience less and less of that thanks to light pollution i want to conclude with talking a little
bit oh about about uh leds light emitting diodes
which like that clint eastwood movie can be good bad or downright ugly leds are great
you know right now we're undergoing a once in multi-generational change in the way we light the night
leds have totally transformed the night they are allowing us as never before to light the
night inefficiently i mean if it efficiently uh and compounding that with the fact
that we're now sort of a 24 7 society you know back in the 60s when i was
getting started observing there was no such thing as all-night diners or or
gas stations or cvs's or mcdonald's or all of those things and so when it when night came it got
pretty dark now we have to contend with all of those lights all the time and they're converting to leds
leds unlike high pressure sodium and these other former sources uh emit more blue light than their
predecessors did and blue light is the bane of amateur astronomy
most of you are familiar with the concept of rayleigh scattering why our daylight skies are blue
the underlying physics in that is that the scattering of photons of light increases as the
as the inverse fourth power of the wavelength and that means basically in in simpler
terms is that a photon of blue light scatters 16 times more readily than a
photon of red light and so it's the blue light in these leds that is is
exacerbating a lot of the light pollution issues that we have and um and and you know
we have satellites i'm sure every one of you has seen a photograph of the earth at night
taken by satellite many of those were from an earlier version of satellite called the dmsp satellites
that were fairly panchromatic they took in all wavelengths of light and the newer ones that have replaced it
are actually kind of blind at the blue end of the wavelength so they are not showing you the full impact
of light pollution i i want to scott i don't i'm not sure if i can share the screen here i think you can
let me try doing that this is a website
there we go yeah this is a website called light pollution in light pollution map dot info
and there is a there is a feature of this called light trends this is one of the
most useful sites if you want to check out light pollution in your area i happen to have put a push pin in
springdale arkansas oh uh home to explore scientific and i
want to show you a neat trick that you can do over here on the control panel there's a little uh polygon
you can click on that and i can draw a a box around springdale
i hope you can all see that yeah and then i can create a chart of the
growth in light pollution in springdale over the last decade
wow just like it's that easy and so for those of you who are trying to convince
your local officials that there is a problem with light pollution this would be an invaluable tool
um and and i'm happy to report scott that your your light pollution there in springdale
although you're hardly the best mortal class in terms of viewing right not increased dramatically in the
last decade and part of the reason for that is that uh
although the number of lights has gotten gotten a lot uh more numerous the control of them
has gotten better uh we now have lights that that that leds in particular that shine down
on the ground and unlike a high pressure sodium light that uses one of these doohickeys on top
to turn on at dusk and off at dawn leds can be troll can be controlled
infinitely finely all through the night and a lot of the new installations are actually computer addressable
each each street light has its own ip address and so it can be dimmed and brought up uh it can be
dimmed say from midnight to 5 a.m and so there is promise there and so i i want to close by
encouraging all of you to do two things first of all learn about light pollution and and what
its state is in your community and lean on the ida which is dark
sky.org is the website for the ida the second thing i want you to do is a fun project uh and
this is uh been promoted for at least a decade now called globe at night globe at night.org
it's a citizen science project that allows you without any any equipment at all to
gauge the darkness of your sky just by sort of crudely determining the the limiting magnitude of how paint are
the stars that you can see and you enter that data into a uh that observation into a
global database and you would think well that's kind of simplistic and crude but
realistically uh there are a few light pollution scientists people who actually studied the growth
of blight pollution versus population or lighting trends they use that globe at night database
uh as the ground truth for all of these satellite images so i encourage you to all participate in
globe at night.org um tell your friends it was originally designed as a kind of educational
activity and it's become really a sort of backbone of our efforts to at least assess
light pollution worldwide so we might not be able to see as many faint things in the sky as we used
to but they are still there waiting for us so you need to find those dark spikes
dark sides to to appreciate them as as we used to be able to just anywhere now
we need to work a little harder so that's it for tonight scott back to you thank you thank you kelly there is a question from
the audience uh ron craig uh i'm not sure where he's watching from but he
asks are we reaching a precipice where ground-based astronomy is coming to an end
unless something is done ah very good question ron um i think the answer is
is no there are still plenty of dark enough places uh earlier i asked
gary palmer where he was in in the uk and he says he's in wales at skying telescope we we saw this
amazing photo and and we've all seen these uh that happen to be taken from downtown
london this glorious nebula uh and and so we might not be able to to use our eyes
as well as we used to but our cameras are pretty clever and the camera operators are pretty clever and we can kind of peel
back the light pollution uh to see to see what is still there i don't think we're the precipice yet
the the re one of the real dangers actually is the advent of uh these global satellite
networks like starlink uh that are threatening to just completely choke
our skies with satellites so that we won't be able to really enjoy or photograph
a deep sky object without their interference they'll photobomb every every shot we take and i suspect a
lot of the astrophotographers who are here with us tonight have already had that experience so i
that that's the greater worry i think in my mind the just the proliferation of satellites in orbit there are certainly
plenty of them there now light pollution is certainly a problem problem no no question about it
uh but as dave crawford the the the founder co-founder of the ida once told me you know it took
decades for light pollution to get this bad and it's going to take decades for us to get
our our arms around it and and uh and defeated so it's it's really we have to be in this for the long haul
right yeah if i could just interrupt for a second here uh listening to kelly talk about uh
light pollution was one thing but when he started talking about sky and telescope the magazine of record for astronomy
brought me back so beautifully back in the 1950s
in a way the golden era of sky and telescope was when some of the major
discoveries in cosmology were first announced in that on the pages of that magazine for example the
discovery of spiral structure in the milky way was not first announced in a professional journal but
on the pages of sky and telescope i just wanted to share that with you kelly
thank you david i i confess i was not writing for it yet and i wasn't quite old enough to be
reading it yet but you're absolutely right uh i've i've been with sky telescope for something like 45 years and i have
seen a lot in those 45 years and it continues it's uh coming up on
its 80th anniversary fantastic fantastic okay well this is
this has been a great start uh to uh this whole star party i'm
i'm uh you know if i at any star party anywhere in the world
that you might go to to have this kind of warm-up was uh is a great way to get started i hope you're uh feeling it at this
point um our next uh speaker is our youngest
speaker and we call her libby and the stars her name is libby she's 10 years old and
her presentation today is going to be about mercury and when i first met
libby i believe i met her possibly at a star party a stargazing
event and she and her parents came into the
store looking for a way to upgrade her telescope and
you know i felt uh i really felt that libby was special
and that she that she had was someone one of the youngest people i've met that
has completely wrapped herself around uh the her love for space exploration
uh her love for astronomy uh she started with a small telescope to begin with
uh taught i think she's teaching her mom and her friends on how to use it but uh
she is it's fabulous to have her with us tonight um and so i'm gonna libby i'm gonna turn
the stage over to you here you are so
mercury formed over four billion years ago when the solar system first set up
and gravity pulled swirling black gas and regular gas together to create a
planet and that was the closest to the sun and it's not hot
and it isn't cold but in the day it is extremely hot and at night it doesn't have an
atmosphere to retain the heat so all the hot just spills out into space
so it is extremely cold at night and now the at the it has an
exosphere instead of an atmosphere because atoms were pushed off the surface by
solar winds and the surface is just like our moon
it has craters and nasa names them after uh artisan
artists authors and musicians and mercury is almost completely
upright on its axis it's only upright by two degrees
and so it does not experience seasons and it spins on its axis very slowly but
it goes around the sun at 1 29 miles per second
and mercury has a metallic core and the mantle is only
250 miles long so the core is the biggest part and then the outside
is only 250 miles long so
and it completes one rotation around the sun every 59 earth days
and it completes one day night cycle every 176 days because of its axis
and i've never found mercury in my telescope before because i just got into
telescope business this year but i have seen pictures and it's about to
come into it uh
i forgot the name but it's about to go into some seasonal thing i for
did forget the name but um i think some other planets are going into it to some cool thing
i forgot the name it's okay mercury instead of an atmosphere has an
exosphere like i said adams and that's it i didn't have a lot of
time and i couldn't find a lot because
it's just kind of like our moon it's just any bit bigger than our moon but there's one more ray it mercury has a
radius of 1560 miles and the radius is
from the begin the core of the planet all the way out to the surface
did you mean it was stuck at the greatest demolition from the sun is that what you were
i forgot approaching there i was looking at it and i was looking at
some mercury pages
well libby thank you thank you for sorry you don't have a lot i couldn't find too much on mercury well we learned i
think we learned a lot already so that's great thank you thank you thank you
excellent thank you okay um well i think that at this point we're
going to take a uh a question we we do do our prices
at the um uh you know during the uh global star party and uh
terry mann was kind enough to come in and um and be with us from the
astronomical league and they are conducting the questions they are uh confirming the winners and uh they're
deciding what the door prices are going to be so that's that's great so terry you've got the spotlight at
this point thank you scott libby you did a great job we need you in the astronomical league
so okay so for the question you're going to need to find the answer on our facebook page so the question is
what is the name of the astronomical league observe program created for kids 10 years
and under yep now remember you have to send in your answer
to kent at explorescientific.com and those answers uh will be
emailed over to the astronomical league officers and uh here let me just type it into the
chat right here and then they will select the uh they'll select the winners and
they'll actually announce it in email back to the winners themselves we'll announce those winners
again at the next star party um but um anyways i really appreciate the
league joining up with us and you know partnering with our programs and um you know uh
the league is uh how many clubs now it's 304 i believe
304 clubs and so you must have nearly 20 000 members is that right right at 18 000 members right now okay
all right that's great so um yeah and you want to be a part of this whether you're in the
states and belong to one of the clubs uh that are league clubs or you can become a member at large from anywhere in the
world so correct yeah yep definitely can so we're working on clubs for the
um global to be international uh we are beginning working on that so
we hopefully get some clubs from all over the world that's awesome terry thank you very much
thank you all right all right so next up will be uh mr mr norman fulham
and normand uh is someone a lot of us have known for a long time uh norman is a
master uh telescope maker if you went to a shop today you would see these giant huge dobsonians
that he builds um i think you might call them dobsonians anyways they're in giant uh alt azimuth mounts and uh
they're the biggest amateur telescopes i think you can buy today and um but what i did not know i knew i
knew that norman was this uh incredible craftsman and uh you know an
another guy in this hobby i mean if you get a chance to meet this guy you're going to find out that uh you
know he's uh he's kind he has uh uh the best um
uh you know he just exudes the character of uh the best of what this amateur
community has to offer and uh i didn't know that the guy is this musician and so uh norman decided to
join us today and um and play a piece for us so norman you got the stage
well thank you a lot scott and for the kind words i mean it means a lot to me
to uh to be uh remembered uh among the astronomers around the world and um
just to set the table here when i started to make telescope and
i was a musician all my life since i'm about 10 years old and guitar players and i'm a singer and
when i started to do astronomy uh observing and star bodies with friends
and i noticed that music and astronomy
were went so well together i mean when you observed the night sky and the
galaxies and planets and you hear some music in the background shooting music
it goes so well together so i never everywhere i go in star body i
always have a guitar with me to surprise people sometimes just in the dark you know you hear music coming out from
somewhere and then oh that's nice that's it it it it feels the mood and then uh
it's lovely to observe with the nice music in the back and of course
i had to build my guitar everyone knows me as a woodworker
a few years back it was always been a dream of mine to to build my own acoustic guitar so
uh i bought some plans read some books and then every day
that's my my homemade guitar that i made it's a beautiful like i was telling scott and thank you i
don't have much time on for me to to stay with you for very long because i have a big day for tomorrow
and um but the next time i will join i will make you a tour of the shop put them on
my phone and then show you what whatever the project i'm working on right now it's pretty pretty wild
i like the 48 inch replacement mirror for the great metal bone telescope in australia
it's in the making right now uh i've got about three 40 inches mirror on machines and so
it's very interesting now so for tonight um i'm going to play a song just to put you
in the mood of friendship because astronomy i think is a it's a best way to make friends and to uh to gather with
people and then enjoy the night sky and friendship
is built on astronomy i think so it's an old song from james taylor
actually carol king composed the song but james stiller promoted much a lot more
[Music] when you're down in trouble
and you need a helping hand
and nothing oh nothing is going live
close your eyes and think of me and soon i will be there
[Music]
and you know [Music]
the winter spring summer fall [Music] all you've got to do is i
you've will a friend [Music]
in the sky above you
should turn dark and
[Music] to full
keep your head together and call my name out loud now
[Music]
and you know [Music]
a winter spring summer fall all you've got to do is
that you've got a friend when people can be so cold they'll hurt you
and desert you and they'll take your soul
[Music]
and you know [Music]
my winter springs summer fall now all you've got to do is i will
[Music]
wow i have the biggest knot in my throat
that was beautiful that was beautiful norman thank you so much we really
looking forward really looking forward to um visiting you again um and uh hopefully it's in the next in
the next week or the weeks coming up whenever you have the opportunity always on a tuesday night yeah we're
keeping them on tuesday nights um we this time we also have a friday night
star party which will be uh going from europe maybe all the way down to australia so
if you want to make it sooner we could probably do that too so would that be friday that would be in the uh here central
time uh would start at about 4 p.m so about 5 p.m your time that'd be bad better for me yeah okay
yeah okay so you're very happy to make uh give you a tour of the shop on friday
yeah that's great you showed me a long time ago you know i know blown away by it so
that's great um hello everybody and i hope to see you very soon thanks
norman thanks for that great song thank you okay well i wanted to give everyone kind
of a in a group introduction here uh as you see it on the screen up here
on our top left is richard grace also known as astro beard astro beard is
a uh as a astrophotographer very dedicated uh still relatively fresh
into the hobby of astrophotography but he's doing a great job of course myself you know don davies
from austin texas is with us and the austin astronomical society of course kelly beatty who just gave us
a great talk gary palmer who's going to uh show us some image processing a little
bit later steve malia from ontario telescope is with us
david ing uh out there in los angeles hopefully not too much smoke uh but i i fear that
maybe they'll they'll be that way ajay you're in uh canada i think is that right
no not in canada anymore okay oh no i'm not currently in canada because uh the border is closed and i can't get to the
observatory oh geez okay i'm in seattle right now you're in seattle okay all right terry
mann who uh joined us a little bit earlier to read off our first door prize question from the
astronomical league jerry hubbell vice president of engineering for explore scientific
and one of the directors of the mark slade remote observatory ron delvo ron gave us uh
a very uh comprehensive uh overview of all the things that he's
been involved with in astronomy over the years that was great uh you're out in arizona tyler bowman uh
tyler's one of our customer service reps dedicated astrophotographer um
uh he's been busy since he joined explore scientific he's been busy upgrading his equipment so
we hope he doesn't go broke in the meantime bob denny uh uh bob's an old friend and
an old friend uh to many of us in in uh amateur astronomy and and his wife i'm so sorry i've
forgotten your name this is definitely evie stevie is uh with me here so
great so what did you think of uh norman fulham's uh it was fantastic yeah i
i should mention that i met scott in like 2000 i think or 2001 when he was in mead
and we had a meeting at meade in the bordering and scott was there and actually set that up
for me so we go back a ways yeah yeah you flew out with your dc3 i think at that time
so with the baby dc3 the baron all right well very cool abigail
bolenbach who is now with astronomy magazine and uh doing uh her program uh is that weekly
now abby you're you're muted abby
yeah you can talk i can hear you okay i better i better hush better be careful no um it's every other
week every other week okay all right hopefully one day we will get caught up but kovat has put a huge setback on
everyone's schedule so it is still every other week every other week okay well no problem but you do i know
you're doing a great job libby and the stars who gave us uh you
know some insight into the planet mercury so now this is not all the people that are
going to be on our show tonight we're going to have people that are going to come on later that would include cesar brollo from
argentina from optica sirocco we have
also uh space science center with uh richard choser
and mckee garrett mckeeg i think is his name and
uh so they may have that up and live um but at this point we're going to take a little ten minute break
okay and we are going to come back with don davies uh and then abigail bolenbach i think is
going to read some poetry to us but we'll find out about astronomy in texas from dawn and
um and what that's all about and so we'll get be back in 10.
okay if you guys want to get something to wet your whistle this would be a good
time so can we talk now without it being broadcast no but you can talk with me
[Laughter] were you going to say a bunch of controversial stuff yeah i was going to
get on a soapbox maybe and start ranting and raving maybe no that's not true all right that's cool yep
now we get we put people in a state of hypnosis now by having them look at the hubble deep field again and again for 10
minutes so but i'll be right back guys
is
[Music]
so
so
um
uh
hey scott do you mind if i say one little thing go ahead i just uh found out probably everybody
here knows who richard berry is he's the guy who kind of came up with ccd imaging with the cookbook ccd way
years ago and probably well known to all of us unfortunately his house is barn
and everything got burned today oh my god yeah and uh he has alpacas
and you guys probably know about my thing well the thing uh of the alpaca protocol and that's
named after his alpacas and they're okay the alpacas survived but unfortunately
his house and his barn did not so what a it's all just kind of yeah think about
richard yeah yeah richard has done so much for this for all his community you know so
yeah he really has right one of the pioneers of uh i think one of the first popular uh
uh ccd processing uh programs and uh you know aj ajay segal it's here with us
too you know he took uh he took image processing to a quantum leap with med uh processing
software so you know and rick richard was is a very very old friend we
collaborated in the early days i mean i think richard gets full credit for decr democratizing
uh what was the purview of the very few with ccd astronomy right yep i would agree
say so yep well goodness
that's sort of sad news i just saw that today so occasionally one of our friends runs
into hardships like this and you know i have seen the amateur astronomy
community really come together too to help people out you know and maybe maybe there's something we can do
together to make that happen
and sadly i haven't talked to richard in a while is so
okay
okay we just have a few seconds left here of our break um up next will be don davies
uh you know i'm seeing uh posts here in our live chat uh with condolences for
you know
richard and and his family during this hard times so but the good thing is is that he's okay
so
okay someone here wanted to know what that animated star background is and to be very honest with you uh i
i don't know but i found it on i found it on a nasa site and uh and you can find it too
so but um also joining us
is dustin gibson and we have steve malia but right now we're going to go to don
davies i'm going to give you the stage don and uh tell us a little bit about what's going on in
austin and astronomy absolutely i'd be happy to do so um well first off i'm very excited to
announce that this month the austin astronomical society is going to be going live with our general meetings so that is
available and can be viewable on youtube and that link can be found on the website
austinastro.org um even more exciting is our guest presenter this month is kirk batty who's going to be talking
about the anticlera mechanism the device so that should be a really fascinating talk
lately a new group has formed called the travis county friends of the night sky so we have more activism and more feet
on the ground trying to do things to preserve our night skies to educate about light pollution
and hopefully allow astronomers and people in general to be able to observe the night sky from
a relatively urban city area um otherwise we are also looking forward to
a collaboration with the hill country alliance for october night sky month so pay attention to
some of the the websites both the austin astro org website uh our facebook page for travis county
friends of the night sky as we're gonna have a lot of talks virtual star parties uh presentations activities just a whole
lot of things going on in the month of october to help bring awareness to our bright
skies and how everyone can do their part in lessening that and making our stars more
visible awesome awesome that's great uh
we will um try i'll try to tune in for sure and uh you know if don if you'd like to
give me more information about it and i'll spread it on social media and get it out get the word out because
you guys have a great community going down there and you know it is the
it's the homeless stardate isn't it yes it is yeah as well through their university yes
many many of us have listened to it on npr and stuff uh up next is abigail bolenbach
abigail wanted to join us for a little while she had some poetry she wanted to read so i think
that's fantastic and uh so you've got the stage now abigail hi everyone um i would like to first
start out with i'm in the middle of a thunderstorm so my connection might get lost or i
might get a little scratchy so bear with that today i kind of wanted to venture into
the more artistic side and romantic side of astronomy and i kind of wanted to start off with a
humorous poem at least it humored me one of my biggest thrills in astronomy
are quasars and pulsars the extreme of space right and so whenever i was doing some
research i ran across this poem and i actually included it in one of my presentations that i've given many times
and it's by uh george gamow and he actually wrote this during his
research the breaking um uh advances that they made with quasars
and basically radio astronomy it was in 1964 and at that time i can't imagine how
frustrating it could have been to see something that was a quasar but try to interpret it
and so this was his uh kind of interpretation of it he said twinkle twinkle quasi-star biggest
puzzle from afar how unlike the other ones brighter than a billion suns twinkle
twinkle quasi-star how i wonder what you are and it's just
a short little poem but i will definitely be teaching my children that instead of the
general twinkle twinkle star poem they will know the quasar one for sure but i just i i love that to me
it's uh it brings a little bit of levity to the extreme nature of quasars and i
thought it'd be kind of a nice light uplifting poem the other ones are a little more serious
uh the next one i'll read is by john keats it was uh in like
early 18 maybe like 1810 he wrote this and it's called bright star and
this poem basically represents uh his he was trying to show and express
how he wanted to be constant with uh his fiancee and his inspiration was uh what we
believe to be as polaris actually and so the poem goes
bright star would i were steadfast as thou art not in lone splendor hung
aloft the night and watching with eternal lids apart like nature's patient sleepless eramite
the moving waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution at their human shores
gazing on the new soft fallen mask of snow upon the mountains or the moors no yet
still stood fast still unchangeable to feel forever its soft fall and swell
awake forever at a sweet unrest still to hear the tinder taken breath
and so live ever or else swoon to death and to me it's very romantic in
the sense of one that would be wonderful if uh someone wrote a poem like that for me but in the sense
of comparing it to polaris stars fluctuate in the night sky and we see them
change in brightness and if one in that time saw a star and were
inspired for their fiance and to imagine the different pulses and and automatically compare it to how
their lover you know breathed whenever they watched them sleep i just to me that's so
tender and beautiful the next one is none other than a by longfellow
and um it's not a super long complex poem like some of his
but this one i think was his interpretation of it um kind of just
represents the significant aspect of
being selfless and kind of i think his interpretation of
understanding his position in the universe but just being absorbed by the night sky and just
it being like a dark night sky um however uh some different
turns and loops happen throughout the poem so uh here it goes the night is to come
but not too soon the sign silently sinking all silently the little moon drops down
behind the sky there is no light in earth or heaven but the cold light of stars and the first watch of
the night is given to the red planet mars is it the tender love of stars or the
star of love and dreams oh no from that blue tint above a hero's armor gleams
and earnest thoughts within me rise when i behold afar suspended in the
evening skies the shield of that red star o star of strength i see these stand
and smile upon my pain thou beckonest with thy male hand
and i am strong again within my breast there is no light but the cold light of stars
i give the first watch of the night to the red planet mars the star of the unconquered will he
rises in my breast serene and absolute and still and calm and self-possessed
and thou too who say or thou art that radius this brief psalm as one by one thy hopes depart
be resolute and calm oh fear not in a world like this and now shall not your long
know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong and i think there's many
meanings attached to this poem uh he was going through a very rough time
in his life and when he wrote this but in a sense it shows uh another level of
being steadfast if you must if you were to dream like he was when he wrote
this uh and and imagine yourself in a very dark spot
and one you know little bright light that might have been cold but just just
warm enough to to give that inspiration to keep going uh with mars and
you know they didn't have perseverance then so i don't know if if uh i mean we'll find out soon
enough if mars is tinder or if it could have love or if it does
smile upon our pain i'm sure perseverance will let us know that but he didn't have
rovers back then they just had you know their uh their own
interpretation of it and uh and his was through poetry i think uh these poems represent
beautiful different aspects of uh astronomy that's uh related to back to the arts so
i that's it scott wow okay that was great thank you fantastic i uh you know it is
so um inspiring to listen to such poetry and uh you know and your your your
interpretation of them is uh amazing and thank you it's fun to read the the
live chat coming through here i don't know if you can see some of those but um people are enthralled and enraptured by
uh by your poetry thank you thank you very much i can't read it i'm not actually that
technologically savvy yet i may seem that i am because i'm working with the world of
uh and the constraints of covet and and um this online persona but
not not as savvy as it may seem so no i'm not seeing the live chat
we're all still learning we're still learning and we're trying to share this experience so abby thank you very
much thank you so much scott by chance i would like to interject just lightly is libby still here
uh who libby yes she is yes she is i'm here hi livy i just wanted to say
i so appreciate your enthusiasm and you're doing a fantastic job right now i
am nervous talking so i know that for the first presentation for you to give on here you
must be a little nervous and you did wonderful absolutely wonderful and at such a young age
don't let anything get in your way of the passion whether it changes from astronomy to
uh maybe something oceanic or if it is as a specific
like planetary science uh just just keep going you're doing a great job and it was absolutely wonderful getting to hear you
thank you yeah i agree i agree well that's wonderful uh before you go um abby i mean
certainly i hope that you hang out with us for the rest of the evening if you can but if not um you know you're free to come
and go to the you know as we go through the program but i did want to uh give you um a chance to talk about uh
your program and um and what what you got coming up next sure uh so i am
working with astronomy magazine with our new video series it's an educational
video series where we cover uh different astronomy topics whether it's latest research
or just more in-depth facts and what i'm really hoping and what i'm really pushing for is
the series is called infinity and beyond it's actually rocket science and what i would like to push for is an
infinity beyond extreme so what our original goal was is to kind of give as much
knowledge and accessibility to people that are kind of in my age range so from early
teens to maybe 30s and apparently their attention span is like 20 seconds
that's tick tock and you can't really give that much really uh good information where they'll be
able to retain it in 20 seconds so what kind of compromise that like five minute range
well for me some certain topics i want to delve into more and just kind of nerd out on and so
hopefully sometime later there will be an extreme episode series where it'll be like 10
15 minutes and we'll just like crunch on the hard science but anyway um infinity and beyond is uh
just starting we've got six episodes out maybe seven uh you know i've i'm working on many
ahead of those so i can maybe give you guys a little bit of a sneak peek the next
one is going to actually be talking about a conspiracy so there will be new grounds and hopefully we will
have a a conspiracy topic revolving in queue um because i mean i love
conspiracies and who doesn't right right i will also give like one other snippet it's uh it has to do with
something involving the physics of earth so there's there's all you need to know
um if you are a true like astro believer maybe you'll know what i'm talking about maybe not
just stay tuned and watched but it's basically just a quick little video
segment on a particular topic it's random selection so i'm surprised
every week oh my god honestly well great okay well thanks thank you
abby thanks again all right so we have dustin gibson
from opt and gibson picks joining us uh yeah dustin has
uh really uh been a sensation on social media uh
both you know and his his program he's done in person uh the stuff he's done on uh he has a
program called i think it's podcast called astra junk uh he has gibson picks which uh
started out on twitch and they opt is uh
a company that he and jenny lawrence now own and manage and they're both
passionate about outreach and astrophotography and uh dustin's become a great friend
and i'm going to give you the stage here at dustin hey thanks i don't know that i need the stage i'm not sure i'm deserving of that
look at this group you bring this group together i swear scott i've known scott a long time now
and he's like this magnet for just hyper intellectuals and then i pop into this group and i look
like how how does scott pull this off every single week the guy is a juggernaut you know it's amazing and then libby is
here i was listening to that actually i was working before this and it's just like i i want to be like
libby when i grow up now right now i still want to be like libby
one day i want to graduate to that level it's so impressive and it's so refreshing
to see because it just what it means is that the industry as a whole is doing something right right and i
know that we we talk about it all the time scott we carry the weight of that let's make sure that we drive this forward and
you know i mentioned this in a post but let's pass the baton not like not just to prove that it's
been heavy but instead to say drive this forward and here's everything we've learned and everything that you can push
forward to really take this to the next level and seeing that and seeing william on
the channel and then you know seeing uh aurelius comes on here and it's just
all of that stuff is so inspiring and i don't even think you know i think that they look up to
the older generation and the truth is every time i come on i'm more inspired i go to work the next day i really got to do this because
these kids oh yeah taking it to the next level you know right right amazing yep so
we were talking earlier today uh dustin and i were talking about uh you know the the work that um
uh that it takes to uh be in this industry and to work with
uh the community and you know i always i've always said that um you know it's important it's
important for us uh in in the community uh uh to support those that support us
you know i mean it's it's uh there are there are people that go to work in our industry uh
they can't wait for the day to be over uh when they go home they don't want to think about telescopes they don't want to think about star parties they don't
want to think about astronomers or astronomy or anything they want to go home
and return back to what they call their uh regular lives and uh you know what you're seeing here
this community right here okay is this is these are people who are
it is their lifestyle it is their passion they all everyone here has done
incredible work and educational outreach it's awesome to see libby come in
and start at such a young age you know so uh but um maybe you can tell us
a little bit more about uh what's happening with uh opt gibson picks
and also clear skies network which we're streaming on right now thank you very much uh no happy to do it happy to do it and
um yeah it's it's really so my role is meant to be a support role obviously and so we're trying to just
build the infrastructure to make things happen and you know we've actually got uh one of our team here i just saw in the facebook
chat ron sparkman is here and i feel like we definitely have to tip the hat to ron in the last month of her live streams
for all of us ron had neil degrasse tyson on live um elon musk
bill nye um i mean countless ceos the guy is just uh he's a he's a scott roberts
right so he's he's pulling this stuff together and making it happen for people
that is awesome yeah and i mean that stuff should exist in having people that are this passionate i mean looking at the group i
know most of the people here and so um you know i'm very honored and it's a privilege to be
a part of but i think that the infrastructure still it's still a little underdeveloped
and it's time to really put a lot of effort the resources whatever it takes
to drive that forward because you know we can talk about things like like stem we everybody cares about stem
education right but yeah we recognize the problems there the infrastructure doesn't exist i mean
in the states we have a problem um you know with with sam especially you
know i grew up in alabama i can tell you i didn't i didn't i don't think i ever heard the word telescope until i was in college
um you know and we've got to make these things accessible we've got to create pathways for
interest in and you know once somebody does have that spark we've got to have the next step you know people like us that can reach
people instead of you know we can't be dependent on a star party out in the middle of the desert that you have to drive three
hours to and you know people don't trust these situations as new newcomers you know it's got to be stuff
like this these digital ways to reach a ton of people and reach people
for free and openly open the door to interest just interest right because that's the spark and then we start trying to get
telescopes in people's hands and all of a sudden you know you've got the next generation talking about
important things and carrying like you said the baton forward and so that's the mission those are the things we're trying to do and i
can tell you that you know as far as the social media stuff like my personal stuff is mostly dedicated to
the observatory project i use the observatories that we've built so far so these are free observatories
to use for the public that we're building around the world we're building a network of 62 observatories around the
world to just let people log into for free and to do projects with
people around the world so that like we use one to have five people that didn't know each other from around the world take
one photo so they all had to log in take one filter on one target but they had to agree on the
target then we combine it and then you get a global collaboration on an image and
you're teaching people those people are sharing it and it becomes this big positive feedback loop of astronomy interest and conversation
but that's what the observatory network is about and that's what most of my time there is dedicated to is
sharing images and um i'm i'm a philosophy nerd so philosophical perspectives attached to those
and just hoping that it's enough to spark a question just spark that that first hint of hey what is that
like that's that's all it takes it's all it took for me i changed my entire life path to be part of this you know so that's the goal that's what
we're doing that's what we're trying and that's why we are building you know the networks that we're building wow congratulations on all that work and uh
you know i'm waiting for uh many more exciting things to come uh from from you and from all the people
you're working with you know it's it's really um i would say that um
it it i can see you taking every opportunity to get the word out and to inspire people
from around the world and thanks for coming on our show again so no i'm happy to and you're doing this
where where are you right now scott i'm here in arkansas here but you're you're in your office
aren't you you're not even at home and what time is it it's 11 30 at night you know
so that is his home dustin don't you know that's his home this is my there's my uh my roommates
over here and and uh you know and i'm working on this telescope back here so pretty soon i'll get it up and
running and uh we'll show you some live stuff but uh thanks dustin um uh
so up next is ajay segall and ajay is an amazing individual
um when i think of uh some of you know near genius level um
intellect uh definitely ajay comes to mind he has uh you know
he's a technologist uh he's been hired by some of the most amazing tech companies in the world
and he's taking those companies to the next level he's been featured in forbes magazine
as an amateur astronomer he is so cool this is a guy you can come up to and
meet and he's just uh you know as friendly as anyone else that that you might need at a star party
but if you could look under the hood of what's going on uh in ajay's mind about what's going to take
imaging image processing astronomy to the next level
you would be certainly amazed and you know so ajay has a a close group of friends
that uh you know all sing the praises of this guy
and it's been my privilege to get to know him over the years uh i i wish that i had been able to
spend more time under the stars to learn more from him but uh uh ajay
thanks for joining us on our uh global star party so it's great to
have you here and everyone knows scott exaggerates right [Laughter]
his lips are moving but that everything is absolutely true it's absolutely true well well thank you
scott i i think you're exaggerating just a little bit but um so i i just wanted to to
reflect a little bit on star parties in this time of covet and
you know scott as you know i'm i'm a a prolific star party uh attendee i've i've been to most of
them across the united states and canada at least once and many that i attend on a regular
basis and and uh since this virus has hit us this is
pandemic at us i've been in star party withdrawal
and myself and a group of friends got together i wanted to talk a little bit about what what what you out there could do to have a
star party and you know we talked a little bit about led lighting uh kelly was talking about
and how in the cities our skies have disappeared where i am right now i'm by the the
shore in seattle and in a little town north of seattle called shoreline
and i can't see the milky way here about the only thing i could really
observe from my backyard are the planets unfortunately they're in a pretty good position to view so
a group of us got together and said what could we do to safely hold a star party during the
time of capovic and the keys are keep it to a very tight
group of friends who know each other well um make sure that you quarantine
yourselves for two weeks prior to this this star party because
maintaining social distance around the telescope is is is really hard because you all know
how it goes right you look at something and you it looks really cool you go you gotta see this
mars is so rock steady you gotta see this and then everyone crowds around the telescope that's part of what a star
party is so so what we all did is we we there there were a group of four of us who are regular attendees of the table
mountain star party which is held in eastern washington and we said okay we we we've got to take
a week and we got to still celebrate that star party and go and observe
so we picked the new moon august week which was promising to be pretty decent from a
weather perspective mars is getting really big in the sky the planets were shining
and the skies were absolutely gorgeous so where do you go to hold a star party where you can be
reasonably secure and safe well there's this really neat concept that many of you may have
already heard of called hip caps and what hip caps are are people
renting out their land for people to camp much in the same style as airbnb and hip
camps during cobit have gotten really popular because they tend to be very tiny they they have uh a very few campsites they
must provide water as part of being a hip camp so you yet we have the most amazing fresh spring water and
they have to provide uh bathroom facilities so well toilet facilities so we had we had our little porta potty and my
friend glenn wallace had his rv so they gave us a little bit of shade and and stuff and and my friend matt woodward uh had a
had a camper trailer so he they brought those out uh i'm hardcore i stayed in this tent that you see behind me it's it's a
kindred tent and this is actually a an image that was taken one of the evenings out at the hip
camp well we we we rented this hip camp and um they're not very expensive
they're they they typically cost 50 a night and we had the whole place to ourselves
so we picked the darkest spot in in washington just um
east of uh west of spokane and east of ephrata unfortunately that whole
area is on fire right now which is which is pretty darn sad and we were we were kept
out amongst these rolling plains of wheat fields with the wheat about
two feet high and just moving in the wind and there was nothing out there except the four of us
the coyotes and the landowner who was a wonderful uh retired air force veteran
who who was all by herself she was she's a widow and uh just absolutely loved the company she
was very hospitable a place called the stage line ranch and we were able to hold
our star party for the four of us and capture you know the good food that you cook the
um and we tend to go to extremes with with cooking uh gourmet food at star parties that's
part part of our signature at the table mountain so we had a lot of fun and we had uh an
18-inch job um we had two high-end contraptions like one behind me
and we had a 13-inch job and then a a bunch of other telescopes that we
could do planetary stuff with and we were able to pull this off safely
all of us got tested before going uh we quarantined and then we quarantined ourselves from our families when we got
home and nobody got sick and we were able to hold a star party so it is possible to get out under a dark
sky during these terrible times um it is possible to have a
a measured social gathering as long as you don't keep too big and
it's possible to do it safely and still enjoy this passion that we we all share
and it was an absolutely wonderful time that's great that's great yeah and there there are
i can't tell you how many times that i've had uh astronomy club presidents uh organizers
of various star parties and stuff asked how can they get this done so um
but uh it looks like that is certainly um certainly one way and uh you know
thanks for sharing that aj that's great um we uh we have a lot more people to go
through here and uh so we are going to uh bring up
dave ing from los angeles you wanted to uh share some of the images that you had
taken so let me see if i'm going to do this right because
sometimes i get carried away and uh and forget to spotlight or pin the wrong person so i think i
i think i did it correctly this time does that look okay to you
just a little bit of a lag
i don't see any change scott i see any change either let's see let's see let me
spotlight him let's see if that works oh hey there i am okay very good well thank you for having
me on again scott i really love these virtual store parties um
as i probably told you before i just got into astronomy maybe a couple years ago
i moved out here to so you know temecula in southern california went to my first star party and that was
the first time that i looked through a telescope and i was just blown away since then i've joined the temecula
valley astronomers club and i really like
uh you know the images the astrophotography the science behind it that's all
wonderful but what really gets me is the outreach the star parties um i've been
lucky enough to participate in a few for my club and i got to tell you the first time in
elementary school kid looks through my telescope and goes wow that's cool that just really gets me
so that that's uh what i really love about this hobby anyway um last week
i was uh trying to image with a new camera and let me see if i can share my screen
here here we go share
all right hopefully you can see that
so last week i was trying to image with the new camera um you could barely see a little bit of the
structure in there and i was able to capture about two hours worth of data
and i ended up with uh this image oh wow so this is uh i see 1396 the elephant's
trunk nebula and used in a uh optelong
l enhanced filter it's hydrogen alpha hydrogen beta and oxygen 3. wow
and this is from my light polluted backyard in temecula
now i think it did a little bit better than my previous ones which are just the dslr
and uh from seeing your uh setup live dave uh he does indeed have an extremely
light polluted backyard um so to pull this off is uh nothing short of a miracle it's fantastic
thank you yeah hopefully they'll get a little bit better i actually can still see some of the
dust motes that are were in there so um just a note to self next time i put a
new camera on there i gotta dust it off a little clean it up right i did use some flats
uh but for some reason i just i couldn't get it out but anyway that that's what i ended up with
from uh from last week unfortunately this week i'm not doing any imaging the skies are all gray
from the fires i'm not near any of them i think the closest one is about 30 or 40 miles away but still
the skies are just completely gray
well that's the only image that i had to share today all right dave well thank you very much
for sharing that it is uh very impressive and uh you know i know that if i made an image like that i
would be um i would be very uh i'd be proud of it for sure
so so i i think it's fantastic and and i'm it's really cool uh to see
someone progress as quickly as you are so thank you yeah okay so the next up here will be
uh gary palmer gary is uh all the way in the uk um and um he
is uh um he is uh it's it's pretty late there at this
point uh gary what time is it there uh it's 4 40 in the morning scott
4 40 in the morning you are you are officially the astro viking
here you know although i don't think the uk had any vikings
but uh you are it is uh it's great to have you on you've been on
many of our programs uh i don't think you sleep much
um very limited um i've had even less sleep i've been uh coaching tyler over the weekend so
um the weekend's been uh quite long so far so yeah thanks for uh inviting me back
on um we did some image in uh the european style
party yes um and that was um it was a little bit
uh rushed on everything there because i was sort of part presenting with you um and trying to image and trying to do
101 other things so it it all went into a bit of a rush but we did manage to get some image in for a change
which is um quite a result on one of these star parties because they seem to be quite a lot of them clouded out at the moment
um so what i'll do is i'll share the screen over and have a look at what we actually got
um i'll bring up a piece inside let's just drop this down
um what i thought i would look at is this area here seems to be one of the main problems at the moment
everybody seems to be suffering with the batch processing and actually calibrating the
dial frames and flat frames and other calibration uh areas the other
problem that people are having is that they've changed the um really what they're saying now is to
use the weighted batch but the issue with that is it takes a real long time
and on these sort of shows we've never really had enough time to run through this so i've pre-loaded this up
and we're just going to open it up it's going to give me the warnings as
usual but really for basic imaging there's no reason why we can't use this area
and still uh the weighted batch just takes a lot longer it might be more precise but it's just taking a lot
longer so these are all the light frames that we got of m33
um we also took some flat frames which i've put into masters some darts
and some biases the darts on this are exactly the same time and temperature as the light frames
and there's just under 60 i think there were 55 light frames in here one of the key
things on the light frames is in this area here um
is not to optimize the darts this causes all sorts of problems for the calibration
um it's a one-shot color camera so we need to deburr it so we need to have the cfo
selected and we also need a little bit of information on what way the software
writes because this is where we we seem to get a problem if we use software like sharpcat
it writes in traditional fit format where it writes from the bottom up so that means on the actual image
here it's writing the file from the bottom up and that changes this deburr area
if we were using an asia probably for instance that would right from the top down
so the d by it would be rggb but if we were using sharp cap we would
have to swap that to geology and if these are not correct then we can get all sorts of problems
with the styles not aligning we can get errors coming up all the time but if we are reversed and we're writing
from the bottom up we need to make sure that the up bottom fits box is unchecked
then we just select a folder here where we want them to go out and a reference frame so normally either
one from the beginning or one from in the middle if you've had a little bit of drift on the mount it's often an idea to do one in the middle as
a reference frame once that all runs if everything runs
correctly yeah then we go into um
let me just come out that image integration yeah and then we uh stack the images together
basically um once we've got the image integration up let me just find it obviously some of
these windows i can't keep open at the same time so if they're dynamic processes or
whatever then i have to close them so we load this in and this is really where we get rid of the satellite trails this is
the area that we wipe all of the trailing things aeroplanes different other bits out of
the image um so once we loaded them in we then want to go for
winter when's our eye sigma clip in and then on the next parameter
we want to look at the sigma higher low the sigma logo generally run up about 9.1 and the sigma high
about 5.2 and that will take out anything out of these images once it goes together and then
once you've finished with that you end up with this image here this is like so just under an hour
on this so then we would start the processing on through the software in different things
and what i'd probably do is cover different steps as we're working through but the idea is is to
end up with something like that out of an hour yeah or just under an hour
um and then we do some different uh topics uh throughout the week uh or throughout the next few star
parties um on the processing um other images this week not really
that much um did have a small saturn that was just for a
102 mil telescope so not bad for its size and the same conditions in the uk at the moment we've
not really had a lot of clear weather so apart from that there's not really been much going on
and we also had an andromeda that was another hour out of the european style party as well
that's great there were no filters on this um it was quite like moonlight as well
so on both images it was quite bright moonlight so they're just basic processing and
basic imaging very impressive that's awesome well gary i'm excited
about um about uh coming up to the next european star party we will have uh
joining us i don't know if you're aware of it or not but mike simmons uh who is the founder of astronomers
without borders uh will be joining us as well he is uh calling in uh friends and favors to
have people appear from uh all over europe and uh maybe in the middle east and uh you know
we're we're working our way down to possibly even some people in australia
uh to be included in this so that's a big swath of the planet
so it's gonna be fun it'd be really interesting to get a different variety of people on and
that's one of the the good things on the tuesday night shows you're getting such a variety of people
on um and they're all interested they've all got their own stories and their own
uh images and their own paths through astronomy and that's really what it's all about
right right okay well having joined us um uh i'll just take a moment to recognize
uh richard ozer and uh gerald mckeeg is that right
yep mckeegan mckeegan sorry but these guys are from chabot space and
science center and the east bay astronomical society out there we have a
guest here john curie is joining us that's great we have some people that i have not
gotten to yet which will include ron delbo um of course cesar bralo's down there in in
argentina so that's that's going to be good and i don't know it looks like he's working on
something so he may have a live image for us i'm not sure how does it look down there caesar
hi scott how are you we're good we're good today today tonight we have a clear night gravel
maybe it's a it's a jar passed between the clouds and i have a hoop eater if you'd like to
see okay we will come back to you we will come back to you but oh yes i'm sorry i'm sorry you you asked
me when okay okay that's all right don't go the cooper is it's in the image all right that's
awesome okay all right so uh let's let's go thank you uh uh cesar and gary
um uh i wanted to bring in uh bob denny uh to talk a little bit more um about
uh his experience in uh our community um some of the things he's
been involved with things he's doing now um bob thank you for joining us
thank you for having me scott i really appreciate it um i am not an astronomer that will be my
first thing i'm an engineer software engineer so i try to understand
the best way i can describe myself is i'm the guy who designs and builds the race cars
then i give the car to the drivers and tell them go out and win races so that's my thing right um scott and i
uh started in 2000 as i said at the beginning of the program
and i should mention that among other things i showed up at the rtmc star party
in big bear with a telescope a computer and some software and demonstrated automatic
image acquisition and then plate solving and detection of asteroids in 2001
and um who was that from opt i forgot his name i'm very
sorry but he had a shirt on that said asteroid hunting on it and that's where
scott and i started way back when and we also had a huge windstorm that night which was quite interesting with
elder cumulus standing lenticulars over the mountain yeah it was quite a thing so here we are
20 years later two things that i do one i have a
commercial um suite of software that you can put on your observatory and at
its highest level it runs your observatory 24 7 hands off
uh and it does it starts up shuts down you put your requests in it figures out
what to do and when and you get data so you just get data delivered in your dropbox or
whatever google drive wherever and that's even better in a remote situation
the great basin observatory being probably my favorite example of that and actually i should
well i should have had that ready um i didn't expect to be up right now or
i would have had a picture of that look up great basin observatory and you'll see it's the first
science observatory in a national park and it is run for the benefit of four
colleges around the uh western us it was done by
it was put in by a combination of the colleges themselves and another
group of people who pulled together and donated for that and it's it is in the great basin
national park in eastern nevada in a very dark sky site not accessible to the public no one goes
into it it is a 27-inch plane wave inside of a clamshell dome and it just
runs automated all night again hands off for the benefit of college students
in nevada utah and southern california and it's quite the
thing and that that's what i do for one side the other side that i've done all through the 20 years that i've been
doing this 20 plus years is promoting the idea of universal connectivity between
astronomical devices i could see coming into this wanting to do software uh that it was a
wild wild west and people were plugging different things together with different protocols and
pound sign xyzy and all this stuff it wasn't going to go anywhere and in computing for probably 20 years
before that we had a driver client architecture where the driver is responsible for the differences between
disk drives printers and things like that and then the program's right to a common interface
so i kind of took that idea and brought it into astronomy it was a rough go for five or six years
more than a rough go but i stuck with it it came to fruition and now the ascom
universal ascom standards are accepted and over the last
two years a little bit more we've taken that away outside of windows and instead of
running through the windows process to process or program to program communications it now runs over
a network connection using very common typical standards that
everybody uses not just astronomers to communicate between programs and devices
including a device that can sit all by itself with a wi-fi connection and then be
usable on all the platforms linux mac and uh windows right so that's the alpaca
system that's my thing that i've done more recently to help promote open and inter
interconnect ability in astronomy and um so that's kind of what i've been doing i wish i could answer questions but um
anyway that that kind of in in a short period of time tells you what
i've been up to and scott was in on the be saw me in the beginning of all of this and got my little lecture back in 2000
you know what you're going to make this thing interchange you're going to be able to connect things the hell with the mess so what i do want
to do since i again i was a little bit unsure that i was going to get pulled up
but i want to pull one thing up here for you to show you
where to go next and this video will change shortly but let's see share
screen i'm gonna have a choice here i think of sharing that to share
and you should see now the ascom website which is at
oops i just switched it sorry about that click is that showing now are you able
to see this uh web browser with i've got a chat yeah is that it looks like it's showing yeah it is it
is okay good i see myself in the picture but if this is showing so this is where everything you ever
wanted to know about these interchange uh formats is and then the alpaca part of it
here and other places i should mention i said something during the break about um
a person we all know richard berry who kind of started the whole ccd revolution and has done so much for
astronomy unfortunately he lives in eugene oregon his house and barn got burned
and uh he does have pet well not pet they're actual farm animals alpacas they survived which
is good but the alpaca concept here is that the name alpaca came from
richard berry's alpacas because i was sort of enchanted by the fact that he had these things
and um they're kind of cool animals so uh anyway this is the other half of
my life besides my commercial um life which is here and i'm not gonna
spend any time on that other than to just say dc3.com is the way in
you can find out what you want to know about that whenever and that's this stuff here so
um i wish i could show you
can i get there from here this is the probably the coolest thing
uh there it is okay learn more about the great basin observatory if you want to learn more about this
there we go now that's this that's the facility that runs our software and uh you can learn all about the
cooperative the different um well there's the the ribbon cutting ceremony i should be
in there i have a picture of me in there but these are but these are the people uh i was at
that ceremony stevie and i were both there when this was opened and it was just fantastic here are the colleges at the bottom of
the screen and uh it is a real amazing thing a guy
named paul gardner and another guy from pasadena put this together it was
five weeks from groundbreaking to first light which is just amazing that's a beautiful
piece of engineering and uh we were there for the for the
for the first light and it was really something so this is just one of probably a hundred
plus shared observatories remotely that run autonomously 24 7.
so lord that kind of pretty much i probably chewed up enough time now on this and uh
let me see if i can unshare my screen where is that ah okay stop share there
we go okay great thank you wow that's awesome bob and you know so many of us
uh that uh have used ascom uh and now probably progressing to use the
alpaca platform owe you a great deal of uh gratitude so
hard work astronomers don't see it the the ideal situation is this is plumbing
that enables things and you don't it it's not something that you should see
or even have to worry about right so to make it all just universal connectivity is is the key
that's right i want to i want to thank bob personally i've known bob for a while now uh probably almost 10 years yeah and uh
he's helped me a lot i you know i wrote i'm i've helped or developed the pmc8 system and
and wrote the ascom driver for it and uh it's a it's a very nice api i mean it really
does a lot and there's additions to it even today i think uh the latest thing i saw um
what was the latest not the switch interface it was something that came later oh the weather uh the weather api to go
out and get external weather i just ran across that recently that's pretty cool i think the
thing that really was probably our uh and i i have to say
i do not write any software for azcom that's peter simpson and daniel from uh op tech
are the two lead guys and rick burke is also someone who helps people unbelievably a lot so daniel and peter
are the key people it's all open source it's a project that but i don't do any programming on azcom
i did it for 10 years and in 2010 i kind of stepped
aside and these guys are doing it now but i'm a flag waver you know and what else whatever the
thing that is is probably worth some time to this group of people is to discuss the
technology of cmos cameras and where those things are going it has been quite an interesting
adventure it's early technology and scott if you have an opportunity to
get a couple of people who are in that business together i will only tell you what my i'm a i'm
kind of a futurist yeah i recently the standards
were revved from camera version 2 to camera version 3 to permit
the the the camera to do the stacking internally so you don't have to come you don't have
to download 50 humongous frames to get and then stack them on your computer to get
one 35 minute or 30 minute image because the optimum exposure for the
cmos is very short so what do you do so i
there were a lot of people who pushed back they said ah that'll never happen they'll never stack the things here's
all the reasons they can't do it well now we have two cameras out there that stack on board which is great so you you you tell it
the sub-exposure interval and the final exposure interval that change was made to the to the
spec to permit that so those are the kind of things we look at and it's on a
very term time frame because you don't want to change
things quickly for that it's a standard interface you don't want people to go just change that thing again and nothing
is ever made backwards incompatible we never do breaking changes so right right that's a big thing that's uh
yep yeah backwards compatibility is a huge thing yep stuff from way back when we'll still
run okay that's awesome that is awesome thank you scott for having me i really
appreciate it i'll stick around though but this is really cool i have to tell you i didn't know what to
expect but i'm more than pleasantly surprised we've had we've had music we've had art we've had
yeah you really experienced people people showing
us how to uh manage covet at star parties even the people here you know you know we got to
john
a secret nebraska star party which happened and uh so um if there's a will there's a way
you can never tell amateur astronomers they can't do something because they'll darn it they'll go out and do it
and thank you jerry i appreciate that oh great thank you yeah scott and i have talked about that
a lot that the amateurs are the the pioneers in a lot of technology development
that's right that's right and and they always have been and i think they always will be uh so
um you know it's about 11 o'clock here i'm gonna have richard grace share some
of his images and then we're going to take a uh a break a question break with terry mann
at the astronomical league she's going to ask question number two she's holding herself up with
how you doing terry is everything okay yep everything's fine doing great all
right okay hopefully everybody's sufficiently caffeinated for this uh for the duration here uh but we will get
to everybody uh that's that's on with us and and our and our guest here john curie as well so
um but uh richard what do you got to show
us energy drink
see here ah sharing the screen sharing the screen well
that should be sharing whoops richard's been on with us for many shows
uh and we've watched him progress as he's gone along not only uh and he's impressive too with
some of the system integrations that he's done and uh so it's it's excellent uh to uh
to watch him go thank you scott see uh here we have the uh the other
night mars very close to the moon
oh yeah and uh i figured uh while i was out there while the moon was ruining the rest of the deep
sky objects that i would uh take this while i was there and uh it's it's kind of underexposed
but uh that was mainly so i could actually get mars to look that good um and it was that's just one shot um
no stacking or anything and uh i was very happy with that and let's see
here i gotta move this uh
you guys saw
uh i did the witch's broom uh but there was a small
why is it not working there we go check it out uh so i saw something uh down in this
area and another image that i took with the ed80 so i went back with the comment hunter um just to get up in there with a little
more uh resolution and uh it didn't turn out to be what i
originally thought it was thought i might have made a discovery or something here uh anyway uh so did that and uh
very happy with the way that turned out here and i also have been working on a a budget project
it's um well that's right it's it's behind me i'll show you after the
picture um but i uh got a hold of one of the first light series uh explore scientific uh 130
um millimeter newtonians that's uh they're i think they're only 150
um and i figured i would see what i could do with that and honestly all of everything
went wrong for me uh last night but uh i managed to get uh up in andromeda with some pretty decent
resolution um considering everything that went the way that it did i got a little dark
corner here uh some things need to be done when i got the scope
i laser collimated it but uh then i found out that the threads on the focuser were uh
not the correct size for uh attaching my camera so i got some jb weld and an m42 thread
thing and i jb welded it on there and uh i took the whole scope apart and i cut the back half of the focuser out
of it to decrease some vignetting and some other things i don't think you want it back anymore
we'll talk about that anyway but uh aim it though i might put it up
in our hall of fame here so oh yeah yeah so um i also had uh
let's see this is the only picture but i had so much trouble last night because i just installed ascom for the first
time so i was remote controlling my mount separately for the first time
with a new scope that had a slight cone error so while i was trying to do this before
the moon came up i ended up shooting m110 for about two hours while i was watching the clear skies network not
paying attention uh so i only ended up getting a little bit of data after the moon was up and
bright and some stuff and uh the scope's a little powerful for andromeda anyway but uh it's it's what i got for the moment and
i wanted to show that and uh let's see here let me stop sharing
where is it there it is okay so we stopped sharing what okay
probably don't end up seeing something like that wow on a first
lightscape with a filtered drawer with the filter and if they cost more than the scope and
you know but uh it did a nice job but i plan to use it some more
please do please you're coming soon we'll we'll get some much better shots out of it than that so
some of the backstory on this i think you were a little bit inspired by cesar brallo who was uh
talking about optimizing some less expensive newtonians um uh for uh
yeah what do you have like the little uh um you have a little logo on your on your uh
very cool very awesome asteroid hunters logo we've been
sneaking that in there uh everywhere we can that's very cool well hey scott the uh the power the price
point on that telescope's 150 150 and that's what that's what uh richard grace said
so yeah yeah so yeah there's uh there's adapters that cost 150
okay so to get a whole telescope to do some imaging with that's fantastic and
caesar thanks for also being part of the inspiration for that i'll have a much better night originally
it came the inspiration came from um gosh i can't remember the guy's name but he's in uh
in the uk as well uh astro biscuit yeah there you go astro biscuit yeah i
saw one of his uh a couple of his actually one he got like two different newtonians and cut one down
because the old ones are longer and you couldn't put a camera on him and get the back focus and blah blah blah and
yeah this is really cool so i kind of wanted to do something like that and a small new so much easier on the budget especially
if you're doing stuff with the color cam you know yeah it just makes sense and
you know amount is so much more important than the telescope i mean to get in there i mean i can't emphasize
that enough to anybody who's starting out that you know i i started out and i was like
you know we'll we'll get a few hundred dollar scope and a you know a few hundred dollar mountain you know that that was not the way to do
it you know spending a few more dollars on the on the mountain you can get away with a lot less scope and as long as your mount
can point it in the right place yep that's right that's right that's
awesome richard thank you um uh we're going to uh we're going to go back to terry mann
in the astronomical league she's going to ask question number two now we um
uh we did not uh say what the door prize was going to be
um but uh we had offered uh some door prizes which would have included
the choice of a 52 degree eyepiece um a galileo scope and uh
and then also an ar 102 explore scientific acromat okay so what is this
what was the terry what was the first door prize going to be um and then what will the second door
prize be uh scott take your choice go ahead
i if i had like a bottle i could spend or something we'll do it in order okay we uh last time we did
the ip so that'll be for question number one which you which you read off and then question
number two will be for the world famous galileo scope which gary palmer can attest is an excellent
astrograph for imaging the moon okay so he stuck a i don't know fifteen hundred dollars
uh cmos camera on it and made a beautiful image of the moon an image processed it for us as well
on the air so that was really cool um the galileo you'll have to show that again scott because we didn't see it
oh yeah well uh gary wants to uh come back on with tyler here in a moment um which we'll do
but we still have to get through to the chabot space and science center with
richard and and gerald to
show what that 36 inch is all about and then we're going to go over to caesar in argentina because i know it's
getting late okay and he's got a live image of jupiter that he wants to show us
and so what is question number two all right question number two and again you'll need to look on the astronomical league
facebook page what city and state will the next astronomical league
conference which is called alcon take place whoa okay so remember send your
questions don't answer in the chat send your questions your answers to your questions to kent
explore scientific dot com
there you go and kent will take those answers and ship them off to the astronomical
league officers and they will verify who is the first to answer that correctly
and then they will notify you so you'll get this beautiful uh i think it's on astronomical league
letterhead and email no it's just an email i suppose but an official email from the astronomical
league and they will announce that you are the lucky winner and um and then uh send that information
back over to us and we'll ship you that door prize wherever you are anywhere in the world so um
but that's great uh thank you terry we are going to jump to our second break you get 10 minutes uh
grab a sandwich a coke an energy drink a cup of coffee or maybe something stronger if you need
it and we'll be back in in a few minutes here
[Music] well i think it's going to be sooner than 10 minutes here
somehow i've messed this up how can i mess it up i don't know i see no idea terry man on
the there we go that'll give us a 10 minute break and let me share my screen
and there we go there we go we got 10 minutes folks okay
thank you scott you're welcome i need some uh something to whip my whistle here
so scott i don't know if you saw in the chat that john curry is with us so he's not a lurker he's not a zoom
bomber oh he's not okay yeah all right you don't have to worry then we go well
actually you might have to worry but we'll try to keep them under control okay yeah i know
astronomers are so wild yeah yeah
and people are anxious to hear who are the last door prize winners so we'll all the
light of i'll get kent to get us those answers
well for all of you folks who are not on the west coast count your blessings
how's it going over there richard it is horrible today
we couldn't even see the sun through the smoke it was just smoke
so that's why we can't open our dome tonight because ash and optics don't mix well
yeah that's what i hear unless you really gotta scour something
and you might wanna i mean if you're gonna clean it you might as well [Laughter]
use a rotary sander to clean it oh god
how is your your sky there no there's no sky all there is is
smoke there's smoke and fire the entire state is on fire here we have a fire
uh in the area of delta at maybe 300 kilometers and we had the entire
winter a lot of uh dry time and dr weather sorry and we have a huge huge
fire and every night we had small in the sky was terrible
and i don't know why i am looking today because the the quantity of smoke
is uh um acceptable the level is well i had no
idea you were suffering through the same thing and no no yes unfortunately
for sorry fortunately now uh the the fires in in this area uh
are finished finishing so good i think ours are i think ours
are just getting going usually our fire season hits its peak
in uh um in september october and this has been
going since uh late july yes yes i i see news that
was terrible you are in california yes yes yes you're
oh yes yes horrible yeah i'm getting some of it down here in
southern california oh no yeah in the morning there's ash all over my backyard that's why i didn't set up
today and well that's anything anyway the sky's all smoky well we just we just took a peek outside
and we're able to see a few things but you know opening the dome under these conditions or opening the uh
the roof under these conditions it's just a bad idea yeah yeah jupiter looks like mars
if you like i can show you i think looks like mars
with jupiter if you like scotland yes let me show
ah no no i'm sorry not not because the we are scott are sharing the screen
to see to watch there oh we gotta we gotta wait no no no no don't touch anything don't touch
anything yeah don't mess him up no yes
it won't be the first time i've been mastered
[Music]
but it's fun i love it uh
but i have i have a look there they can hear us
break here uh it's nice person that goes by self
celtic rav rava benia okay uh
celtic or i don't know how to pronounce that actually i'm very new to all this millions
actually okay i bought a mead alex 90 in february
uh then went on lockdown so skyview parties have been canceled since insert sad face here but i'm still
trying to learn but we also have had such bad weather here nothing like the fires and smoke though
well uh that's why we have have these global star parties so you can join in
and uh get that star party experience we have a lot of people just listen to it
if they have clear skies they'll listen to it while they're out observing so it does it does bring the star party to your
backyard uh
yes thank you i couldn't pronounce it right uh maxie
says hi everyone greetings from argentina hola cesar
all that to you too who's talking about argentina
yes yes all right we gotta cut i have the
the exos 100 working here yeah i'm
you're working working i took pictures yes yes i i took some
pictures of uh 15 15 seconds explosion with a camera over the mount
and with a 135 millimeters
focus with a cannon and work it i i i was a little cowered to
say okay no more than 50 minutes because i don't i was guiding or i don't was
really sure about my my uh equatorial
action and really if if i left 30 seconds
i think that the the stars still be around very interesting really
right it is a small mount for for the balcony
it's it's excellent i love it
okay well i think everybody here is ready to get back on
so i'm going to stop sharing and we are going to go back to gallery
view here and um uh where did we leave off here
um i said after richard grace we would have
i've lost my way here a little bit wait you said you were going to
i was going to go to rondellbo okay yeah share some images right and and then to us at chabot yeah
both of you so ron what do you got for us you got the stage now
you have to admit yourself okay now you're in arizona
in some pretty dark skies out there right yeah we have um
uh i thought i unmuted myself there can you hear yep okay i live in uh fountain hills
arizona i have a whole bunch of scopes this little ramada i had i built the sides on it and
uh made it so i can store my scopes in there there are times when i can put my scopes out and have it up for
have them up for days you know because we have consecutive clear skies
and i'll have uh my lx 200 doing the work of uh taking data and then i can go observe
with my newtonians or whatever uh let's see
[Music] all of a sudden
you don't know what to do let's see um
hey ron that looks like a putt-putt green hazard yeah it's it's a golf green yeah
yeah you ever you ever shoot between the legs
i i have golf clubs but i don't even mess with it you know um we got it i thought well i'll put my
scopes on it and never thinking i'd do anything else with it now here's uh here's the smoke we have
currently over the area that's why i'm not observing tonight i'm in the blue dot
oh boy look at it all look at all the fires in arizona too yeah everywhere yep california's lit up
and then uh and we're getting some of that smoke all the way out here into arkansas as well
see that was the moon this morning at about 4 40 in the morning and it was still a
little bit dark but uh it was orange and uh opposition for mars is coming on
october 13th i put that little information there this is my uh
website also her my facebook uh observatory page
here's uh mars um i got some detail from my
eight inch cave and i take about i take about um
50 500 frames and of those 200 i stack in registax6
and sometimes i use auto stacker to um stack them and basically uh
there's another view i got some detail this is what it looked like uh when i
took the data okay not too bad you can see detail there
that's a cameron canon 40d i have a modded canon camera and
a regular everyday one that i got cheap and um
that's what i used to take my pictures with and uh i just go ahead and put this one came
out pretty good yeah uh took pictures of the moon i took
a lot of nature pictures that's my uh i this telescope i got free a guy on
craigslist said it was a 12 inch and he wanted to just sell it for 50
bucks because it had been in storage for 30 years oh my goodness and he said uh when i went there i had my 50 dollars
and it was an 8 inch i was a little saddened but it was in beautiful shape and uh he
said i don't want money for it do you take it if you're gonna fix it up and use it you
can have it so i was given that uh let's see what else uh oh i take you
know pictures of the planets moon um
i do a lot of uh outreach this is uh our neowise shot from the lx 200.
and this is uh an asteroid called delvo 1848. and
it's a stony asteroid the got this shape from uh you know
occultations many occultations and came up with the shape of it
i thought that was neat wow you know if you uh if you go in and
go on wiki um and look up your name for an asteroid you'll probably find it
because there's hundreds of thousands of them well scott can find his name for sure i can
guarantee you that i run across this which is pretty cool
it's a very expensive way to look at the night sky through a telescope it's an image
intensifier and it's the latest generation and it's like a 5
000 outfit yeah anyway um
the visual view that's for sure yeah um this is a raw image
um video and uh it's pretty steady
and not bad at all you can see there's actually two moons there but um i'll take like i say 500 you know i'm
just a regular guy i love astronomy a lot of times i'll have an uh a night
where i um i have a refractor night and i just do
refractors and i have people over sometimes and i show them how to find the north
star uh point out the planets do some observing
depending if the moon's out or not um it's mostly um star clusters a couple of
galaxies uh if um m42 is out they're flipped out about
that seeing the moon saturn is what gets people
excited and um i have the space we uh
the east valley astronomers meet uh downtown in fountain hills and we have a
um uh um uh gathering like a star party yeah
we go ahead and um have the public walk through between all the scopes and
we show them different things uh we'll find if there's uh one of the brighter
asteroids out if there's a comet out if there's and and uh our fountain hills
is a dark sky community by the way uh about two years old
and i did this one night it's a comet made from salt on the table
it's just sprinkle salt on a black table and it looks like a comet
that's about it guys this is this is my picture of uh when i first got my scope i took
this picture couldn't understand why i couldn't get the whole thing in the view and i understand now that um it's four
moons wide and uh you know why it feel the view is small
so that's it guys thank you very much i'll stop sharing i have uh i have
here's the groups i have i have a cava stroller group on facebook
i have amateur yeah that's that's a star charts i have
i wrote them down visual astronomy grayscale astrophotography single frame
astrophotography uh amateur astro
amateur astronomers telescope hardware and the scott uh the sky tonight
so i have all those different uh groups that i you know admit people in and try and
make sure that people don't go crazy posting bad things one
um hardware group has about 6 000 people in
it and and you know i just started the page thinking it'd be cool to have that you know
sure um you get to learn a lot of stuff people post things they have problems
you talk about it kind of like uh when we had our other star party i was involved with
um everybody kind of joined in and was uh you know given tips to each other and that's what's
really cool about having a bunch of guys that are um experienced
have done um you know astronomy for a long while and
know what they're doing it's always a cool thing so that's it guys all right well thank you very much thank
you very much ron appreciate it yep thanks okay well up next
uh we promised that we would have the uh the 36 inch telescope from chabot space
and science center uh showing up so richard i'm going to give you the stage here i think i'm right here
you're right there should i get this in grid mode or should i um so that we can see everyone you've got
um i've got gerald mckeegan here and i've got john curry here as well so um we could do grid mode we're going
to be doing a bunch of sharing so uh it really doesn't matter which format you choose
take over okay um hi everyone so i don't know how many people have heard of the chabot space
and science center uh we are an observatory and science center
in the oakland hills in the bay area of california right now i'm calling us the california nebula
because there is nothing but smoke and we unfortunately can't open
the roof of our observatory tonight because there's too much ash and we wouldn't see much uh
even if we could open it the conditions are absolutely horrendous here but uh we thought we can join in tell you a
little bit about our institution show you what we're trying to do um with kovid
we had the challenge of figuring out how to continue our outreach activities to the community
and uh and to the you know the region in general uh people come from a long ways
to see our telescopes we've got this 36 inch research uh reflecting
telescope that's behind me uh we have a 20 inch brashear refractor
built at the turn of the century not this century but the last century and we have an eight-inch alvin clark
instrument as well uh the alvin clark and the uh brashear uh are both uh
it's written into the charter that those have to be open to the public every every week uh as a public
observatory and uh our 36 inch here was built uh uh 20 years ago um and we follow the
same uh spirit of that uh with this telescope and it's used oh you know mostly as a
visual instrument and as a research instrument and uh with the inability to have the public
come to the center we had to figure out very quickly what we could do to continue using it and to continue uh keeping the
public engaged and so we decided to go with the one-shot
astrophotography method i'm actually going to change my screen here and
this is all i could use sharp cap for tonight folks is uh oh so you're actually happy
observatory oh yeah yeah yeah we're here live green screen type of thing right this is yeah no this
is the real thing i'll get up here and all they can actually uh wow touch it
so it's real green screen right there dude you can see gerald there in the very back corner
wave gerald there he is yeah and uh and there's john and you can see we're safely socially
distanced from one another um and what we do is every saturday night i take this
simple canon t1i dslr camera hook it up to the uh hook it up to the
focuser and we use backyard eos and we do single shot astrophotography and with
a 36 inch aperture it's amazing what you can get in you know either live view or at most 30 seconds of
exposure with that we don't have to spend any time with processing stacking technical
issues just aim the telescope and take a picture and tell somebody
to tell somebody tell the public what it is we're looking at and i'll show you some examples
of what we've been able to do um nowhere near as impressive of course as
the processed images that you guys have been showing which have been beautiful by the way uh
but you know when we do a tour of the moon this is the type of view we'll get we have the uh you can see that's our
field of view with the dslr uh it also you know we need a big
we need a big sensor for this telescope this is a long focal length and uh you know we're never able to see
the entirety of the moon of course uh but uh gerald here who has uh quite a bit of expertise on lunar
geology is able to give these really great tours of individual features on the moon
he knows every every single crater on the moon by heart
and so um you know so gerald is able to lead that activity um this was a quick shot we did
of the blue snowball a couple weeks ago cool this is m15 uh we teach people
about globular clusters um and this was m57 that we took uh
last week or the week before last and you can see we get a lot you know it's a 30-second image and i got the red
and the blue and the central star and it fills up you know so people are pretty excited about this even though it's a noisy image and it
would be nice to have you know three hours of data on the 36 inch that's not what our objective is so
that's kind of the mo here you know and you know saturn jupiter um and uh on a on a
decent night we can get pretty good views you can see the cassini division see the red spot you could overexpose it
and show the moons if we want to um and that's kind of what we do
and what i'll do is actually i'm going to turn it over to gerald who has uh if i could find my controls
here you were able to see me switch these photos right yep okay i gotta figure out how to get
back to the zoom here we go stop share okay yeah yeah i'm seeing ron though
yeah so you should be able to share your screen now uh gerald yeah okay well what i wanted to do is
just kind of give you a little tour of the telescope and kind of review some of the things that richard talked about and also talk about
one of the science projects that we do here so i'm going to share my screen here i think
scott can you take the yellow off of me yeah yeah hold on let's i mean you like
looking at me and everything but little spotlight we're entertained
[Laughter] i don't know you know there we go
all right so there we go okay so uh this is a night view of the chabot
space and science center this was actually taken not long after we opened uh in the year
2000 at this location the shabbos space and science center has actually been at
three different locations it was originally built as the oakland
observatory in what is now downtown oakland california
uh that was in 1883 oh wow and then in 1915 it moved
away from downtown oakland to what they thought at the time was a good location because it was away from the city lights
but that location turned out to be right on the hayward earthquake fault so
so after going round and round for literally decades they eventually moved
the chabot space and science center to the current location which is in uh
oakland in the hills above oakland so let me see if i get it there's a an aerial view of it you see
the center there in the foreground and off in the distance i don't know if you can see my cursor or not but this is
downtown oakland down here and we are now up in the hills on the eastern edge
of oakland in fact we are right at the city limit the the city limit literally runs right
along this line here uh so we are as high and as far as we
can get uh from the city of oakland and still be in the city of oakland
as you can tell from those photos we have no problem with light pollution whatsoever
right yeah we are in the middle of a park but believe me there's a lot of light pollution all around us so
it is quite a quite a problem so if that if that's oakland um that bridge going across is that the
one that collapsed when the earthquake this one right here yes that's that's the one that collapsed during the
1989 earthquake wow this this is the san francisco bay bridge this is treasure
actually this is yerba waena island and this is treasure island and then there's the rest of the bay bridge going across the san francisco
uh here's the golden gate bridge in the background um so a little tour of the bay area there
so if you look at the facility you see in this end of the facility uh this is where our observatory complex
is and we have three observatories
not sure how well you can see all three of them here the two domes house are antique uh classical
uh refracting telescopes the ones that richard was talking about the small dome is the eight inch alvin
clarke telescope which was built in 1883
and is instilled is still in operation we use it every weekend or we we're using it every
weekend for our public viewing programs and the big dome is the 20-inch
telescope uh built by warner swayze with optics by john beshear
bresciari and it was built in 1915. and then
over here in the corner is the one we want to talk about tonight it's kind of hard to see because it's a
different kind of building instead of a dome we have a roll-off roof
observatory and you see the telescope sticking up right there there's a couple shots of the telescope
in action this is a 36 inch cassette grain
reflector it is a true cast of grain and it is on a mount uh that was
built mostly by dfm engineering um but the telescope itself was designed
by an engineer here which some of you may know kevin medlock
and kevin designed the telescope and he did a lot of the fabrication of the telescope itself
and then he worked with dfm engineering to do the mount and then the control software for
controlling the telescope is all dfm engineering uh software uh you might
remember when uh you were at the big bear and i think you took the tour to the big bear solar
observatory dfm also did that mount yes they look very similar yeah so we have
two five inch dng refractors that we use as finder scopes
and if we're imaging or something like that we'll put an eyepiece on those so we can see where we're looking
and we use these telescopes primarily for public viewing back in the pre
pandemic days we opened every friday and saturday night to the public for free telescope viewing
all three telescopes will be open and we have a big observatory deck out in front and there
would usually be three or four amateurs with their smaller telescopes out there as well
and that was free we ran it from 7 30 to 10 30 every night
and it was not unusual for us to get 150 200 people or more coming up to chabot
every friday and saturday night to look through our telescopes so public observing and
education is our primary goal here uh we do some astrophotography uh
it's not a major emphasis here uh it's a really good scope for doing
astrophotography but because we're doing so much of our educational work up here
uh only a couple of people actually get on the telescope and do some serious astrophotography work
now in addition to the public observing and the education programs we do a little bit of science
here sounds like several of you are into asteroid hunting and so are we so we do asteroid
observation here near earth asteroid observation primarily conformation and follow-up on new uh
discoveries of near-earth objects and so we're looking for astrometry the
position data right ascension declination the timing of the the observations
and then the photometry and it sounds like most of you are probably familiar with this so i won't bore you with too
much with it but this is how we do it we take three or four images of the same part of
the sky uh our field of view for this telescope is pretty small uh with the camera on it it's only about
uh 12 arc minutes wide so we don't see a lot of the sky so our
pointing is pretty critical um and so we you know we get four images
like this same part of the sky for those of you who are sharp eyed asteroid hunters i'm
sure you've already found the asteroid right um but uh you know the typical
processing uh sequence is to uh uh plates all the the images
uh matching it to some standard catalog such as youcat4 recently we're using gaia
plate solvent uh which is as i think most of you know is a way of matching the pixel position
to the rna declination coordinates you come up with an equation for us it's a second order equation that
matches the pixels and the uh the the rn declination coordinates
once we do that then we just blink through the images and sure enough there's the asteroid
and you know although if you can't find it this way you can always look for the blue arrow in the sky and that way
you'll know where the asteroid is so gerald i got a question do you do you use astrometrica i've used astrometrica
for quite a long time yeah we use astrometrica to do this so so once once we've identified that there
actually is an asteroid in each of the images and we go back to the each individual frame uh we've identified
where the asteroid is in each frame and then we use astrometrico uh software
to get some data on it and you know the astrometrica not only uh
gives us the data we're looking for there you see it in the red box but it also gives us some sense of the quality
of the image uh the uh signal noise ratio and so forth
uh which helps us distinguish between real asteroids and cosmic ray strikes and hot pixels and so
forth so once we get all this data we put it into an email that is
uh sent to the international astronomical unions minor planet center
they combine our data with data from other observatories around the world and
uh calculate the orbit for the asteroid if it's a newly discovered asteroid eventually they will
assign a provisional designation to that asteroid and away we go so
what is your observatory code richard it's g-58
g-58 okay yeah g-58 is the arbitrary mark slade remote observatory our
observatory is whiskey 54. yeah so so jerry for those people who don't know what an observatory code is
why don't you just give it a little okay and it's gerald not jerry yeah i've been been known to kill people who
call me jerry so i think he was talking to me gerald [Laughter]
[Laughter] so anyway for those of you who are
interested in doing asteroid work or there's a few other science projects that you can
get them involved with the international astronomical union assigns you an uh observatory code that
code tells them your exact location your your geographic location and also
your altitude above sea level which is then used to make the calculations
of the orbit based on the data that you submit uh there is a process that you have to
go through in order to qualify for that observatory code you have to submit data and demonstrate
that you're able to produce data that's reasonably good quality
and once you do that then they will assign you an observatory code and there are actually probably
four or 500 observatories around the world that have observatory codes not all of
them do asteroid work some of those codes are actually pretty old and refer to
observatories that aren't functioning anymore but there's probably a good 300
observatories around the world that participate to some extent or another in the
asteroid observing program mr mckeegan yes sir
jared gerald is fine so they can just from that little streak
they can figure the orbit of the uh asteroid yeah you can actually figure uh an orbit
with just three data points uh that are roughly 10 arc seconds or
more apart you can compute an orbit now that orbit will not be a very accurate
orbit but it will be a good enough approximation that you can predict
an hour or even several hours from now where the asteroid will be uh but to get a good solid orbit that's
reliable you know years in advance you need many many nights of observations
so when we talk about confirmation and follow-up uh when it when an asteroid or a
potential asteroid is first spotted by one of the survey telescopes such as the ones that mount
lemon or pan stars it goes on to a website at the minor planet center
called the uh needle confirmation page uh and that's just it just says these guys spotted
something it's maybe an asteroid maybe not you then go and you observe where
they predict it will be and if you can confirm the existence that's a confirmation observation that
you then do follow-up observations over a few days until the minor planet
center gets enough data that they can make a reasonable
uh determination of the orbit and then they will assign a provisional designation to it
so when you hear about asteroid you know 2020 pl2 or something like that that's the
provisional designation that's assigned by the minor planet center
but they don't do that until they have enough data you then have to continue observing it
unfortunately you only get very short observing windows if you can observe it over a two week period
that's pretty good most of the time it's only a period of about five or six days and then you have to
wait years sometimes several years before you can observe it again
so uh it's a long process before you finally get to where you actually
get to name the asteroids so it can be years if ever there where they eventually name
the asteroid so anyway you know this is this is the science we do here at chabot
we are currently because of the pandemic unable to do public viewing uh so we're
just doing the virtual uh telescope program every saturday night that richard mentioned
uh for chabot members and and the public we open or put a camera on that
telescope and let people see what we would see but someday we hope to get finally get back to where we
have lines of people at the telescope and don't have to worry about social
distancing and all that get back to letting the public get up to the telescope because they really enjoy it that's
great that's great i'm going to interrupt here because we're about to lose jupiter in argentina oh yeah let's uh
switch over to caesar and uh he can show us what uh what he's got going on there yes
thanks cesar thank you for uh uh bringing us this live stream oh yes no
nothing yes you can see
you you can see scott and everyone oh yeah yes okay problem is that we have
something of a cloud a small layer of clouds and we are losing
behind a welding in many in maybe one minute and uh
with the layers uh of of clouds is really uh knowing the image
noisy and um and dark and i using the all all
the old game that i have my camera i'm using this uh four e in this telescope max
suit of design i'm using a three times barrow um
the barlow uh extender yeah you helped me it's got
exploring different products and a camera with a 2 megapixels but you know the problem is
that maybe i can take i can
today we have fortunately i took some some uh beats but
with a much better quality that now
i put a shorter poster and the the gain is it's
all totally because the problem is now the layer of of clouds that we have
we have now in the in the night but uh i have i i took uh
videos tonight whereas the qualities is it's really it's really
it's good it's maybe maybe not excellent uh you know between the
buildings you have a local scene conditions that have a problem that
maybe you can see how how is moving the planet now
because it's really really near to up to a welding maybe a few minutes
can be disappeared well after just to watch a a wonderful
observatory that gerald showed us of 36 inches this is
only four inches maybe okay but it's like you know
the red spot today was interested if if you like to i can i can watch you
the uh yes yes it's it's behind the wheel who who there is anymore
it's any longer more it is to unable to to to be watched because now
it's losed by by by the because it's behind the another tower
i say here yes but i have i have a very interesting video of today
while we was talking the first one
let me it's very interesting because here do
you have the the transit of uh i think that it was a
gummy nervous let me check
yes gaming this was maybe let me check if it's
if it's clear maybe in this area you can see this
you can see this oh it's still on the sharp cap yes it's
maybe with 14 minutes of difference between the the program
and and the real time of the capture all all uh of satellites of
uh jupiter uh are interesting to to talk to take the time
uh between the programs of terrarium programs and the real
capture because this whole all the light was uh
was a measure the velocity of the light it's very this
is very interesting and let me check but yes what's gaming is when we start
the subparty uh which is that we know not
yeah caesar we don't see any image coming over ah sorry let me check
sorry okay that's okay well yes i i don't know what here we go oh there's
some nice you can see now
no yes we see several images of jupiter
uh okay okay we can
let me know if [Music]
because i have some delay of time when yes when the the the videos start
here here maybe i hear this guy meaningless
is going out from from the occultation
and the time between the the the app of the cell phone
like the stellarium application uh was a 14
for him 14 minutes of delay
it's still very close yes
was it very interesting and another thing was that
i i yesterday i i tried to talk to tell sorry to to
i i try to not really try i i have a saxophone with this
i have to use this little amount to to to make a
a try to try so [Music]
sorry by my computer where i have yes here hey
sevens
for m8 i could uh take a picture
of 50 minutes without without guidance here the evolution is portal 9 maybe
but despite the quality of the objective that is not so good the stars
was that is really uh
really excellent for a balcony in the exos 100
work properly um i used no more that uh 15 minutes each each
picture but were really properly uh um in
in each uh picture and i found that if i if i was
i was chosen instead 15 minutes 30 minutes it was
worked properly too and this was very interesting i'm processing ielts processing for
tomorrow this picture and i'll i'll share in
in my facebook maybe okay this is all
from argentina well thank you bye-bye
yes well that's awesome you know there's a lot of balcony astronomy great astronomy done from
balconies from around the world you know i know that uh don parker who was an incredible uh
planetary imager worked from his balcony i think damien peach also has worked a lot from his balcony
as well i can think of a few others but you know the main point is
is that no matter where you are okay you should be getting that telescope out
and using it so uh caesar's in buenos aires uh you know it is a
um it is a big city lots of light pollution but uh he gets
some amazing images from there and he is always he's always doing astronomy and sharing
the astronomy experience down there in south america he also will be leading uh the eclipse
expedition um or one of the leaders of the eclipse expedition that will happen this
december total eclipse of the sun uh in patagonia so that's uh that's a
great thing and uh hopefully hopefully that comes off successful for you absolutely yes yes
yeah i hope that maybe a miracle that right we can do it maybe yes i think
that yeah i hope so i hope now it's it's a hard moment now actually it's maybe the hardest
the hardest time for for the pandemia here but maybe it will
be you know a peak where we can
see the light maybe in the end of the tunnel we say maybe
in two weeks more but december is every time more near to us and of course that
we are a little worried about this but no in
while we are we are enjoying astronomy from the balcony from the
backyards you know this is the time to to share pictures of the sky and turn
in in a virtual celebrities like like this like now it's a great
disappearance yeah this is the only way to do a global star party i really an honor to to share
a small image on this with an excellent group that i i learn a lot
tonight traveling people really thank you cesar thank you very much
okay welcome you're welcome scott thank you thanks for coming on you you've been i think on every one of our star parties
so i really appreciate that it's great to have a southern hemisphere view you know and
perspective of astronomy down there so uh we have also with us
tyler bowman tyler has been working closely with gary palmer uh learning some of the ropes of image
processing and trying to take his imaging to the next level um
so how's it going guys like you said scott me and gary been talking for at least this week
he he's like jerry he has a lot of vast knowledge within the astrophotography community
and it's a pleasure to actually get to speak with someone that that has that ability and i i bugged
jerry too much anyway because of work issues and so i figured i could bug gary on photography issues
but if i do have a mount question i go straight to jerry so don't don't get that
um but yeah it's it's great again to to be able to speak to those
guys and then to get a hold of what they know and so i can pass it down along
uh to other individuals who need help i got a couple images
yeah let's see what things are progressing now right now you've got you've got a g11 uh with the pmc8
right um and uh which scope are you using right now well with this the the particular image
that i'm going to show here was with the 127 fcd 100 okay
with the um fuel flattener focal producer of 0.7 so that brings my focal length of
952 to 671 672 which obviously i shot the bubble nebula
with which great to get m52 in there as well in the bottom right hand
bottom left-hand corner um gary helped me process i had a heck of a time to try
to get this thing to stack which i it's got to do something with either my lights or
other types of calibration frames which it's a process to figure that out
um in that and this other image was gary's as well you've already seen
tonight if you'll pull up this was my rendition and take on the processing
um he just gave me the stacked version and i went with it um so let's are we on the same image
are you no it should be andromeda's galaxy it should be up still we're still on the other one so
feeling the bubble okay hang on just a second
entering stopped hang on and there
how about now ah that's good that's that's very nice
yeah we did see this earlier yes you saw gary's recommendation which he brought out more details which i haven't
mastered pixen site which that's a program that's that's daunting
and a lot of information to try to gather in but this again is my rendition of uh this one
tonight i tried to shoot with an 80-80 i can't let me borrow one to
try for tonight then the clouds rolled in i couldn't get very much images um so that's where we're at right now
beautiful beautiful so how do you feel i mean uh you you're you're working with a new mount uh
you're you're working with really a master at uh image processing uh what's the
experience like for you the mount is it's overwhelming at some point because
it's something new that i have to mess with now um it's it's my third mount total in doing
this hobby all together started with an avx from celestron okay i went to an heq 6r pro
which i didn't spend much time with but every stream that you went on i kept seeing that g11 sitting behind you
so you're the enabler of this right cool
i've always been told that the better the amount the better the the actual images will be because the
stable it is and went with the g11 and it came with maybe hey hey tyler
that might work that might be right it could be wrong though you could make terrible images with the best mount in
the world true this is true um he's making pretty good images and so
it's up to your skills and knowledge is what i would say i wouldn't i wouldn't put all the blame or all the
uh all the goodness on the mount sake i wouldn't say that at all
i think there's many things to learn um certainly with all new equipment there's
a hundred things in the pot there to to learn so to get um start getting any
images out of it you you're actually doing okay i would say the mount is a good mount is
necessary but not sufficient yeah leave it at that um
but you know in the process in so far i think what we've done is um probably about
five hours six hours here or there just dotted around and throwing images back and a little bit of processing
but that bubbles come out pretty well you know considering the um basic everest that were there you
know which is part of the learning process that is that is the key to all of this it really is part of the learning
process and we all do it you know either even me now i could get a new product coming in and
put something on and go for it as normal and then i look at it oh
you know i've got to do that something really basic what we call a scoreboard error
when you've been doing it quite a long time but we still do the mistakes and it's not the mistake it's how you get
around that mistake that's the few things so it's working out what you can salvage out of something and i think
they come out pretty well you know considering they're all short amount of data there really are short
amount of data right and for anyone out there listening if you're
wanting to know more about image processing and you know you've
you've uh started working with pix insight uh you could probably do no better than to take uh lessons from gary and
so his website is astro courses
dot u dot co dot uk and um uh you can uh
hook up with gary and and learn a lot more and uh you know he'll take he'll fast
track you uh through some of the more complex image processing techniques and uh get you to the point where you're
really proud of the images that you're making so that's great i just wanted to throw
up that image quickly um that jerry was all about because i've actually scrapped what we processed i
had to reprocess it while we were all talking very quickly
that was from the galileo telescope god galileo yeah it did have a two thousand
pound camera on it but he's from
can only get alive to see this today that shows you that that shows you the potential of those
optics really is what it comes down to right that's right i did have to use a lot of cable ties and tape to hold the camera
in place but it it produced the image that was the thing so that's right when we have a bit more time and some clear
skies we will probably do something like orion or something like that that's quite a
bright and easy target and just see what we can get out of it for a bit of fun
unbelievable wade says he means money
americans uh so anyways um we are uh getting towards the end of our
show kent has some door prize announcements to make from the last star party
from uh global star parties yes i do so i didn't write down the prizes so
scott you get to make up the prizes although it tends to be the same order yeah it's the same order
question number one i didn't write the question down but i know what the answer is how i know that i don't know but uh the
question was uh about an asteroid that's named after
somebody we know i think right jerry you know what you ask yeah i was asking what the asteroid
number was for the asteroid scott roberts so zack krueger was the first one it is
huh i said i don't think i yeah that's really bad scott that's like
memorizing your phone number come on so mine is so anyways zack krueger came
in with the first answer uh 1577 scott roberts that sounds familiar yes
is the answer and that's going to be a uh 52 degree
of choice of what we have in stock yep question number two
how many minor planets have been visited uh we had a range of people that went in
and it was the third or fourth person that finally got the correct answer sarah longcore uh with 16
and that's probably gonna be what an 82 degree of choice scott
inch and a quarter yes okay 82 degree inch and a quarter right
okay and then question number three what date does halley's comet pass
closest to the sun the answer was july 28 2061
and hundred hour away to wade prunty was the first one through the gate with that answer okay
and uh i can't remember who it was i meant to write this down and give him an honorable mention they looked up the ephemeris and got the
exact second uh of of when it would be as well on that date
so really yeah so uh you know just because of the you know how we all we're all curious about minutia like
that so looked it up sure so that going to win a galileo scope scott or
what an ar ar102 oh okay an ar102 not leoscope i may throw a galileo scope
in just for the fun of it once in a while so tell you what the honorable mention guy
we'll give a galileo scope too i'll look him up i'll look that one up
that's what i've got i guess is it time for terry's yeah last question last and final
question and this will be for an explore scientific ar airspace doublet ar102
and we're starting to see some great astrophotography done with the ar series people are doing narrowband
imaging with it solar imaging with it and so it's a it's a great scope it's an f 6.5
it comes with a two-speed focuser cradle rings uh eight by fifty finder and a star
diagonal so two inch star diagonal so everything you need to get started except for a mount
and an astronomer to make it all work so right and so what what's the final final
question going to be terry before terry asks yes do you have a scope terry
me yeah yeah yeah what do you have
14 inch cool yeah yeah awesome
thanks uh the last question again check the facebook page in the astronomical league
whose well-known name appears in the header of the astronomical league's
library telescope entry form okay once again whose
well-known name appears in the header of the astronomical league's library
telescope entry form okay all right so that's the question
you're going to want to send those answers to kent at explore explorescientific.com
and through the miracle of the internet we will send it over to the astronomical league where the officers
will study those answers and determine who was the first one to correctly answer that and
they will notify the winner and then they'll notify us and we will send the
explore scientific ar 102 telescope to that new owner so you know that's that's
great and terry i want to thank you again uh for uh participating tonight staying up with
us late at night i know that you're dying the wool astronomer yourself and uh are not uh you know uh
and stay up many long nights sometimes doing beautiful aurora shots like what's behind you right now so that's
that's a great shot where is this particular shot you i think you've had it before but uh
where did you make this this one that's fine this is up in the boundary waters towards
minnesota right off of lake superior down gunfit flint trail it's beautiful it's on the north shore
lake superior down gun flint trail but thank you scott for everything that you are doing and i
i enjoy these it's amazing what i learned the people you know i really enjoy it i my dog has
been distracting me wanting in and out she knows i'm up so she wants to go out but
beyond that i just follow the dog around but i'm having a great time you guys do a great
job and it's so interesting to see all this astrophotography and all of the information the learning
and the experience is just fantastic so thank you scott thank you thank you so much
okay so um we're about ready to wrap up the show
does anyone else have anything to share any final comments jerry we never we never put the spotlight on
you um yeah that's fine i get to get the spotlight every day with you in the afternoon
that's a pleasure for me not to have to you know talk at least half as half the time
we're on you know right yeah but i enjoy it i mean this is great it's uh
it's awesome to uh interact with everybody and learn and faces and names that's the biggest
thing is to see everybody's face that's that's really i like these kind of meetings better because you can look at
everybody's face at the same time oh yeah pretty much and instead of uh
you know not seeing everybody when you're talking to them you know yeah they're hiding behind their voice
or whatever well you can hear their voice too that's so much yeah i hear that sound
yeah and we had some i mean we had poetry tonight uh norman fulham wow he knocked it out
of the park with that uh that was awesome rendition i mean that was that was great
i really enjoyed that um i have an interesting thing to to say sure the other a few days ago
um you know i told you i go downtown to fountain hills and in the winter months
we have once a month we get together for a star party and have public comes in and um the one guy that runs that
his name is ted ted bank blank i think it is ted blank anyway one day i went over to
around the corner from my house to uh where my pastor is to visit him you know and we're in the backyard
and i'm looking out and uh there's an observatory and this is like real close to my house
yeah exactly the look on your face is what i did yeah hmm so i go who's this guy next door and he
goes i don't know i said you haven't met the guy next door nope it's okay so i said i'm going over there so i went
over there i knocked on the door and who comes out but this guy from
from the uh our meetings that we have oh you live here and he goes yeah i go
wow and he goes yeah you want to see my observatory i said sure he's got a 14 inch celestron in there
uh it's a nice building um and you could you could see my house from his observatory
you could see my my little observatory thing and i said this is incredible you know so we're
gonna do some work back and forth together he he actually uh works for nasa on occasion
he takes a crew of uh 10 people out to observe an occultation
with telescopes supplied by nasa to do measurements of um asteroids
yeah very interesting yeah he's an active guy it's doing
amateur work you know that's science it's cool right yeah that's right and
jerry jerry hubble's always trying to get people involved in science um you know certainly uh his first book
was all about scientific imaging and uh how to put together your you know
uh an imaging system you know and from reading the book you know really
you can tell that um uh jerry approaches it from like a critical thinking critical strategy type of exercise
and so that i found that very very interesting and certainly uh i think he articulated
that very very well for amateur astronomers so if you're looking to get
into astronomical imaging you definitely want to get one of his books um if you ask scott he'll sign it for
you yeah just email me if you're interested jrh at explorescientific.com
right um yeah i appreciate that scott that's the that's nice to hear yeah yeah so
well it's true so and angie all the stuff i said about you is true i i highly respect you dude and i i know
you're brilliant and um uh you know i also i some i did not know about ajay was that
uh you know he he um save
people's lives you were uh what did you you you were involved like
um um is either in firefighting or uh
i'm still a volunteer with the anarchist mountain fire department up in the okanagan and i work with king county search and rescue
here in seattle and rescue that's awesome i know that you did a lot
of work with law enforcement as well uh yeah i mean king county search rescue is a division
of the uh sheriff's department so right yeah very i know bob denney is also very
involved with the sheriff's department over there in mesa that's right i've spent 18 years
as a volunteer reserve deputy with maricopa county sheriff and uh
that added up to almost 15 000 hours of volunteer time oh i flew with their aviation division i
was an airboat pilot and it was quite an amazing way to
have a later in life volunteer community service and i've talked to aj and he's
he gets it i mean he it's it's search and rescue is tough i never got involved
in with that we flew the search and rescue people who were volunteers in our helicopter
and i was uh i went on a number of training exercises with them where we would put them out and bring them in on
their on one skids and so forth on the helicopter but those guys i'll tell you
aj aj it's an awesome thing and it takes a lot of training and a
continuous training to be competent as search and rescue so hats off sir and we're close by if
you're in mesa and it's been hot this year and a lot of guys go out there and rescue people that
have gotten lost on the mountain which is crazy yeah those are all my friends that have the aviation guys
that's what i did for the last five years of my reserve career so we'll have to have a coffee sometime for that close yeah
about 2 000 air hours with the sheriff's office wow it's a lot that's something to
really respect and all this uh um you know this dedication to
uh other people's lives and just trying to improve people's lives in one way or another
and um i i think it's amazing so a lot of respect my hat's off to you aj
they're really so and you too bob so well definitely i'd say that's good stuff yeah and thank you scott for
having me on i'm kind of an outsider in this group again because i'm not an astronomer so
but i really appreciate you um having me on and giving me at least a little bit of a chance to
tell you what i do i'd love to be back sometime you can come back any time you want you know you're you're one
more than one of us you you're you are very much the fabric of this so he has a
radio voice doesn't he he's awesome who me
he's got great sound he's got a great he's an engineer microphone an engineer
he knows how to make it work yeah well thank you everyone
uh terry thank you before we go what was what i mean for you guys that participated tonight what was your
favorite part of uh of global star party uh seven i could see a huge telescope
right 36 inches i probably never will see it see it but just to actually see it in a live
stream was pretty phenomenal pretty cool that's right we need to probably throw 100 degree eyepiece in it
just to see what we can see hey tyler i'll have to take you to show you my uh my
our 24-inch f-18 brochure that we have yeah that'd be nice
it's cool to see those single shots and think in your head hey my scope does just about that good
but you know that's staring at the object for quite a while this is just one shot amazing
amazing that's the way it works the more money you spend yeah more data you can get per unit time
my favorite was amy ballenbach what a beautiful speaker she is and how
she did it i i love communication i think well you know you guys said i have a radio
voice but i really am into communication voice communication and
and but it's not just that it's your your eyes your face everything you're i talk with my hands
anyway she was fabulous and what she did was also very very nice
and i let her know on my on the private chat yeah that's great marco marco pola
said my favorite part to the history of light pollution mercury lesson and then
poetry uh jeff wise said libby and all the poetry and then the music
that's cool that's cool um uh let's see
people are chatting in and they're saying thank you for your service aj and robert
and wade parente wants to know anyone in driving distance looking to buy a celestron cgx mount
and tripod with gps wi-fi and starsense auto-align you'll have to come on the
show and and show what you got wade you can come on tomorrow if you want to show it
okay well thank you everyone i think that's gonna be a night and uh
you know uh all of you that stayed for the duration uh thank you very much um you know it's it's not uh easy to be
on live for you know hours on end but it was awesome and i look forward to
having you back at the next global star party which actually happens friday um
it will happen during the daytime for us here in the states so we get started at 4 pm central
and if you are watching and you want to be part of it somehow
go to explorescientific.com forward slash events buy a free ticket we'll get you bro uh
the credentials for the broadcast and um we will um we'll have you uh join
us so um and thanks again and thanks to the astronomical league clear skies
network cloudy nights four on the broadcast our show on their homepage
and uh all of you in the audience so thanks and uh as jack horkheimer would always say keep
looking up and we'll see you next time
cheers scott thank you for arranging take care thank you like share and subscribe
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music] wow
all the hardcores are left yes