Transcript:
hey so David ier did you watch any leonids come down I did not no things have been
so crazy in the weather variable as well oh yeah I did not nope I also have a a
controlled demolition going on I recently we got a new roof and now it's the time to redo the bathroom so it's
been a little bit like being on the edge of the Battle of Gettysburg for 12 hours
last few days jeez have you been to Arkansas and the
Civil War battlefields out here I have yeah with my father years ago okay Ridge
and Prairie Grove and and others as well and written into some books and so on
that I worked on with my Dad yep have you been to I'm sure you've been to fredicksburg where I'm at oh yes
I live uh about five miles from Wilderness is that right well well of course that's where the observatory is
located in Wilderness I did not know that well I've been all over there Fredericksburg the the Wilderness
Chancellor's Ville and spot of course as well as Guinea station and and all sorts
of smaller Associated sites are crucially important of course to that graduated from Spotsylvania High School
is that right pania that that's what a small world wow
yeah well that you know I'm sure you probably know being from the area that one of the place places where astronomy
and the Civil War meet American Civil War is the story of the incredible
auroral show that followed the Battle of Fredericksburg oh yeah in the winter
time and was taken as an omen of course by either side for various things you
know forward and backwards but now it's it's kind of funny you live
in a historic area and you kind of take it for granted in some respects although we we love going downtown we go to fburg
downtown quite a bit and it's it's uh but again you still kind of take it for granted sure there's history everywhere
it's a beautiful little town and and the Washington sites in the area as well as
as the Civil War area stuff George yeah Ferry Farms is right across the river yeah and George R bikes down the uh down
the trail of the uh the fields where they did war and stuff it's it's really pretty
it's only about like two miles long it's really pretty mhm Pidge is that's where
it is we'll write we'll take our back center it's really nice and peaceful oh yeah is that right wow what a small
world Samuel Curtis and Sterling price and friends down in that area causing
trouble back and
forth so I wonder who's seeing Fireballs from
the leonids right
now I was speaking to Andreas last week in Sweden he say there the big fireball
out there oh yeah yeah it's um that's cool you sent me some details on it
today as it happens now they've done the uh the science work on it it was a fair size
yeah there some people logging on
now that work out around 10 metric
tons what's that they worked out at around 10 metric
tons the fireball images on it it look pretty impressive oh
goodness this is a live image of Earth that
you're seeing here uh shot by the uh explor scientific Cube set that's out
there guys wave fcking my lights on and off that's
the way that's the way life seems to be passing by that quick every day sometimes that's
rights passing by yes James belag BGA from Washington State
Jame James um I you know he's uh someone that's been in amateur astronomy for a
long time sold telescopes good astronomer good Observer
he's a Facebook pal I recognize see yeah
yeah
Martin eastburn says here I am and my Globes are
starting Jeff wise I can't wait to to find out what Mr Iker has to bring us
tonight uh oh yeah now you're you're on the
spot you probably I mean David well probably everyone that comes
on the show but but uh you probably have so much content David on
uh you know galaxies and planets and just about any topic you could probably
do it on the Fly I would think well you work on this stuff the subjects that are associated with the magazine and the
book projects and so on for so many years it's kind of like being condemned to a life
sentence you can't get it out of your mind yeah that's right
yeah one might know that David has been with astronomy magazine since the days of Richard Barry decades and decades
yeah yeah that's true huge amount of experience Rich was the the sort of you
know older brother F father figure who brought me to the magazine yeah yeah
that was so long ago DAV didn't he didn't his House burn down or something like that recently in in the terrible
Oregon fires and and God he and Ellie were were okay weren't injured but but I
guess they lost a substantial amount of material and and astronomical equipment
and so on from what I heard yeah yeah but that's very sad thank goodness they
weren't injured though right yeah well they're uh they just um
they made an offer at another house it was accepted and the llamas are safe
so they're starting to put things back together good right James BGA says good good analogy
David just wing it that's what I do at Club talks or talks with
school with school what is it with school groups well that's one thing about being
people get nervous speaking but I found that the more you know about something the easier it is to speak in front of an audience because it's just you know it's
natural to just talk about you're not nervous about your material you know it already you're very comfortable with it
and so you can just talk and talk and talk that's what that's what I've found anyway after a while I was used to be
nervous giving presentations when I was in my 20s and yeah once you learn
something and you really know it really deep then then it's easy to talk for hours on stuff I still get nervous about
presentations I have to research like all on my own um because my school
mostly the stuff that they teach me is just like basic facts like we have some plans on our social system like they
don't tell us nothing about space I mean it's it's terrible so I mean I have to do all the research on my own you know
uh Libby once I went to um I went to a trade show that was for um it was for
school superintendence okay and I went there with the Astronomical Society of the
Pacific and uh um Vivian white who uh
came on to the show when you first came on she was with me and so I was working the booth with her and I stood in the
aisle and asked every school superintendent there were there were a lot of them okay do
you have a science program in your school
just roughly I would say about only 60% of them said
yes and then I asked them do you have an astronomy program in your science program and very
very few said yes but some of them did some had observatories some of them had
some pretty amazing stuff but it was amazing how few um had actual formal astronomy
courses and stuff in in their school system in public schools uh that explains a lot we don't
have a a science our science stuff more we focus like where I live we focus more
on plants and Science and um that's I mean I'm more interested in the
space and rocket science than the then the plant science I have to do a lot of
the uh researching on my my own I I have all of my knowledge it's
only been from me researching by myself and just picking up things and
like going to Space Museums if you ever get stuck on anything and you need um resources you
know uh I think you got some friends here that will help
you absolutely absolutely was I the only one that got
knocked out a a couple of minutes ago or did did everyone get paused for a second
I okay no yeah okay I had to reboot my Sy but I'm back talking yeah I saw that
you blinked out there for a second Cosmic race strike
yes
okay I could correct myself um Richard Barry doesn't have llamas they're
actually alpacas so I didn't want that to go un corrected
I think I last saw richardt at a uh at a Astronomical Society of the Pacific
meeting so we got molly with us that's great hi yes unfortunately it's raining here so
uh I won't have any live views to but um show or talk or whatever whatever You'
like to do sure
yeah Martin eurn says I gave a talk to 600 high school students and was weak
about it gave lectures to the worldwide Intel design team members and never
shook a bit yeah watch you a bunch of high school kids watch you is sometimes
intimidating I'll tell you you know what the longest year of my life was in terms of just shuttering
Terror giving an hourong talk was Stephen Hawking front and center with
his nurses God yeah oh that's amazing there was nothing that was ever going to Rattle me again after that I
think what an honor that Wason awesome
yeah I gave a talk I used to my career was in the nuclear industry
and I later on in my career I've worked with a lot of Engineers and so my biggest thing I had to defend some of
the work I was doing in front of a group of about 50 engineers and uh I was I don't know if
anybody knows what a Sigma Black Belt is but it's a process Improvement program and I was I had to talk about
um basically improving a process that I was not the expert on so I had to defend
that in front of these 50 Engineers so that was pretty intimidating once you've taken a hot
lava ler mic to the bathroom and come out to a stand Innovation presentations get uh they go uphill from
there that that that's lesle neelon and inspired was
that it was an accident I assure [Music]
you it's hard to decide how history will view my accomplishments people generally aren't
terribly interested in what gets things started and so I'm not sure they're
going to have much of an idea of my role Nancy Grace Roman served as the
first chief of astronomy in NASA's office of Space Science the first woman
to hold an executive position within the agency she was instrumental in the early
planning of NASA's first great space Observatory the Hubble Space Telescope earning her the nickname the mother of
Hubble to honor her NASA has given her name to one of its most powerful upcoming space
observatories W first the wide field infrared survey telescope is now the
Nancy n Grace Roman Space Telescope Nancy Grace was born in 1925
and developed an interest in astronomy at an early age I just was fascinated
when between fifth and sixth grade I organized my friends into an astronomy
club to study the constellations I certainly did not receive any encouragement I was told
from the beginning that women could not be scientists
Nancy Grace persevered and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1949 with a doctorate in astronomy despite
continuing to encounter discrimination my thesis Professor there was a period in which he went for 6
months without speaking to me even when I said hello to him in the hall he he didn't want to have anything to do with
me after several years of research NASA Came Calling I started in NASA in
1959 with was 6 months old being the first executive woman at Ness it turned
out not to be terribly uh eventful I I was accepted very readily as a scientist
and in my job during her 21 years at Nasa Dr Roman was involved in the
development and launch of many space-based observatories which studied the sun deep space and the Earth's
atmosphere her most enduring Legacy at Nasa was the planning of Hubble and its science program she did much of the
early advocacy and established the program structure which laid the foundation for other large NASA missions
that followed and helped convince the astronomical Community to support astronomy from space after retiring from
NASA Dr Roman stayed involved in the space community and received numerous awards for her pioneering work over her
career she inspired generations of young astronomers now with the Nancy Grace
Roman Space Telescope her Legacy can continue to inspire Generations
[Music]
more well hello everybody uh this is Scott Roberts with explore scientific and welcome to the global Star Party
number 20 2 um we um have our some
regulars on with us and we have some new people with us as well um uh including
uh Molly Wakeling is joining us Joe buron uh space artist and amateur
astronomers join joining us um but uh uh you'll see some familiar faces here as
well with Jerry Hubble Richard Grace David ier um deept gon from Nepal uh Gary
Palmer in the UK um and uh David Levy and of course John Goss from the
astronomical League um uh we always start our Global star parties with David
Levy uh today is the uh peak of the Leonid meteor shower which is uh due to
uh the uh U particles and uh uh from Comet uh uh Temple Tuttle and um you
know it's nice to know that we have uh pieces of comet raining down on the
earth uh tonight and uh you know people like David Levy who has been intimately
connected with uh comets and searching for comets and um uh has uh taken each
one of our star parties and has added a poetic touch to it um sending us off to
uh dream and think about uh our place in the cosmos so I will introduce uh David
and give him the stage um and um David thanks again for being on the global
Star Party well thank you Scotty and uh it's so good to see all of my friends here
again from the zoom portion of our um star party and then all of the virtual
friends that we have all over the world tonight I think it was appropriate that
Scotty began this star party with a video about one of the great woman woman
astronomers uh it's been it's been really really special at least in my life to know the
to witness the rise of well-known women astronomers when I was growing up the
only I only knew two and one I didn't know in person one was Isabelle Williamson in mtre all who helped get me
started and incidentally was also uh partly responsible for me being
very nearly expelled from the society a few years later but we then became very close friends as time went
on um the other one was Cecilia pain koskin and I remember she was in
Montreal to give a uh lecture to the Montreal center of the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada and um Miss Williamson Saidi understand
you are the greatest woman astronomer and she looked at Isabelle and said well I'm certainly not the greatest but you I
can certainly can say that I am the tallest of all of them these were the days when my parents
were still insisting that I go to summer camp and I hated summer camp I just hated going there the camp they sent me
to was in Vermont Twin Lake Camp and it was there that I saw my first shooting
star and it was also there that they asked me to sing a a
little song at one of the socials that they often had at that camp and the
first of two songs that I have to offer you tonight is an old wel Chim and I think
that a lot of you will know it and you're welcome to sort of hum along with me with
it sleep my child and peace attend thee
all through the night guardian angels God will send thee
all through the night while the moon her watch is
keeping Hill and veil in Slumber sleeping I my loving viil keeping all
through the night and as I'm thinking about this lovely hym that I still enjoy going back to it
from time to time thinking about what happened a couple of nights ago when I was outside
observing I beat the leonids this year by two nights because I wanted to go out and see Comet
orasmus it is in Orion now it no it's not comet orasmus is in um corvis right
now and uh it's certainly very easy to see I had no trouble finding it it was a
lovely lovely Comet and seeing it was almost like meeting a new friend and the
next day I got up to see another morning Comet uh it was the latest Comet neowise
and that one even though it was just a magnitude finter than uh than the first comet was virtually impossible for me to
see was eight almost ninth magnitude but so diffuse that I think I got two
possible glimpses of it and to honor those two comets and to honor someone
that I never did know but I feel as though I did was Leonard Cohen and I've
done this before but I'd like to do it again
tonight and uh it's a sort of a little rewrite that I did of his one of his
most famous songs and just contains one verse it's time to go Outdoors tonight
the SK is dark some stars are bright the Milky Way shines overhead now
see a comet rises in the East with end to Strife it brings us peace and calls
us to a cosmic hallelujah
hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah
hallelujah and as you go out tonight to look at the leonids just remember as Scotty was
telling us they do come from Comet Temple Tuttle a fairly famous 19th
century Comet and now back to you Scotty thank you thank you David that's
great I love that our next speaker uh is uh none
other than astronomy magazines David ier David Iker is uh a great friend to so
many people in the astronomical Community both professional and amateur
uh we were I was asking him uh you know if he could just wing it uh for you know
any subject about astronomy and um uh the fact remains that uh that he could
uh he is always totally immersed in the latest news and astronomy but he's he
loves the history of astronomy as well so he he's a great one for uh capturing
uh uh you know if if there was a cannon of knowledge okay about uh almost any
topic on astronomy David Aker is going to have something to say about it and um
uh you know it's it's great that uh he comes on to our show uh he comes on as a
friend uh and shares his view of the universe with us uh with all the latest
findings so David um I'm going to give the stage to you uh thank you for coming
on to the 22 Global Star Party thanks so much Scott you're always very very nice
and it's a pleasure to be here and thank you David for inspiring us every time
yeah with with a magnificent performance so I'm going to change gears
a little bit now because I'm talking about some sort of big subjects from week to week and what we think about
them now where where our knowledge base is and we've gone through such pleasantries as to you know what's going
to happen to the sun eventually and the end of life on Earth and other you know happy subjects and now I'm going out a
little bit farther to Mars to our favorite planet in the solar system for many people the red planet and it's had
a unique grip on us as a civilization for a long long time for for well over
going on a Century and a half now really the the red planet since the days of HG
Wells and the sort of Genesis of Science Fiction um since persal LOL was a young
kid reading about Mars and grew up of course to found an observatory and pose
an idea that maybe there were canals on Mars which of course we know wasn't the case um but there's a big question with
regard to Mars being a major focus of Planetary Exploration because in a solar
system filled with planets unlike Earth that are une earthlike it's really the
most earthlike and so there's always been a great deal of imagination and longing to understand Mars One critical
key question here for us is we now know that Mars has been wet in the past with
lots of flowing water on its surface um and it's not it's it's cold and it's dry
now so where is all the water gone you know with apologies to Peter Paul and Mary perhaps um you know that's sort of
a big question when it comes to Mars and there's a little bit of History to that now
too of course when Mariner four flew past Mars in
1965 the first uh spacecraft flyby of the red planet uh we were greatly many people
were greatly disappointed because the whole dream of Mars hosting complex life Came Crashing Down in about
10 minutes um but numerous missions of course since then have produced a vast
array of of evidence and we now know of course since the last generation of
Rovers and of orbiters as well some of them operating for a long long time there that uh there was a lot of
abundant surface water and other fluids uh flowing on the surface of Mars and
it's been gone for a long long time so what happened uh uh to our our planetary neighbor that's
been a big question for us the answer really isn't exactly clear
uh thus far even though people have been working on this question for for a generation now but there are some
tantalizing clues that we should be aware of Mars had a much denser
atmosphere early in its history um so that helped to keep it warmer and
probably uh well certainly to keep water from evaporating uh as easily as it does
now um we know that ample water now exists uh of course at the poles in the
in the form of ice and a lot of subsurface uh um water as well locked up
in ice and we now know that there's there's essentially very convincing evidence that there's a substantial
network of subsurface aquafers so you know could there be life on Mars maybe
yes of course it would be microbial now um wouldn't be anything that's exotic and waving back at us or you know
appearing on the Twilight Zone going to a diner um but it could be there and
it's probably going to take a human Mission to Mars when we finally make that happen to investigate this to drill
down into aquifers to sample ises on the surface and see if Mars has any
microbial life or once had microbial life in the
past it also lost much of its magnetic field field this planet early on
possibly due to impacts or a large impact um and that allowed some of its
atmosphere to be Stripped Away by the solar wind uh more uh effectively than
it may have been asteroid impacts also could have blown water molecules into space reducing the amount of water
that's was on the Martian surface well as Mars grew colder of
course the remaining water was absorbed into the surface and froze uh so you
have these subsurface ice deposits and it was kind of a once it got started it
was kind of a process that couldn't really reverse and there was an
inevitability that changed Martian climate significantly over time some
planetary scientists focus a great deal on the so-called noachian era that's on
Mars that's 4.1 roughly 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago that was a key period
on Mars they posed that fluctuations in Martian climate produce temporary Lakes
possibly even an ocean or oceans on the surface of or at least on parts of the
planet um it must have been a what a much much warmer world then with a thick
atmosphere it probably had a greenhouse gas cycle as well and could that teach
us something about what is happening or likely to happen in the future on Earth
is a a significant question of course as well there may have been episodes it may have been episodic on Mars there may
have been episodes where the planet turned warmer and wetter and when it
turned then conversely to a colder and drier climate well the ice that's now mostly
underneath the Martian surface it holds the key to understanding Martian history
maybe it contains microbial life we don't know we know that life is much more tenacious um as we look at it on
Earth in extreme environments than we ever would have believed a generation ago and we know that organic chemistry
the stuff of organic chemistry at least to the tune of amino acids uh which is a
long jump from RNA and DNA but the basics of organic chemistry uh exists
throughout the solar system and beyond so future astronauts we hope will get
going soon here on a dangerous uh risky and and uh challenging mission that
would take months of course to get to Mars and would be very difficult um
because of radiation exposure among many other things to go on such a mission even though we know that potatoes
apparently can grow on Mars now um but uh that's really key to developing our
understanding of of what has happened on Mars why it turned from this wet planet
that was clearly warmer had warmer episodes to a cold and dry and pretty
inhospitable world and whether that has any lessons for us or perhaps a Eureka
moment of finding life albeit primitive uh in one other place than right here so
a few thoughts on Mars thank you Scott bless you it's nice to be here again of
course with everyone and that was just kind of what was on my mind thinking about the red planet tonight
that's awesome David there's a question here um this is from a gentleman named Schmid
or SMI uh SC um uh he asks is there any chances of contamination done by humans
by sending Rovers and all which might have accidentally sent microbes on Martian soil and later it proliferates
well there there is a chance we can't say that there's a zero chance now incredibly detailed and
complex uh um precautions have been taken though in creating these
spacecraft in launching them in analyzing them in in delivering them um
to the red planet and of course that was a concern also with Apollo missions to the moon and and especially with living
biological beings um going to our closest Celestial neighbor so there's a
chance we think it's very very minimal and that it's basically zero but I don't
think you can rule that out entirely and one way that you could sort of test that
it would be a heck of a coincidence if microbes existed um on Mars and they
were exactly in some respects with chirality and other properties won't go
into all that now but the handedness of organic molecules and so on exactly like
microbes on Earth that would be a a pretty tremendous coincidence and raise some eyebrows with a contamination
problem right well very interesting thank you very much David thank you always
interesting um our next speaker is uh our youngest astronomer in this show
it's uh Libby Libby in the Stars she's uh I think you are still 10 years old
Libby is that right yes I'm tur1 yeah and uh so um and today
uh Libby's gone through most of the solar system and uh what is your talk
tonight well I de TR to do constellations and I made a PowerPoint
to that I'm G to share okay all right I'm GNA go ahead and try to
sh your screen
okay oh
[Music] okay I have it right here pull up
okay right here and then we'll go into there we go yeah I'm going to try and
get into present mode so you can see that the slides show
better there is a present mode
we can go okay it's loading because internet's
bad reload okay now I should be able to get on
present mode so you guys can see that looks pretty good yeah um I I was really
into Tech when I was in second grade so I made bunch of Google Slides so I have some experience of this um
um so first I want to start with Orion so the constellation Orion um I actually
learned a lot about at space camp um it was a lot I was really interested in
learning about it um and I was also very interested and learning about the
characters of Orion because it's so cool on how back then in the Roman ages how
they could create characters out of stars you know that's that's some pretty good imagination um down here you could
see my little mouse um I have it on Orion's Belt and that's my favorite part
of shami one of my favorite parts of the whole entire Sky that's what I love looking at without a telescope it's one
of my favorite things to look at because there is definitely a lot of important stuff about this constellation that
makes me wonder a lot about it um so
when I was at space camp we would have these little presentations every night and mostly they were always going to be
about um they're always going to be about Orion or living in living in space
and I enjoyed Orion most of the time because there's just so more there's
just so much more than you would think um I was mainly interested um it has a
black hole that is 200 times the mass of our sun so it is humongous and
um I I'm kind of interested in black holes I mean I don't like the idea of
being sucked up by one but I do think it's school got something out there um
is this like out of Mythology something out there is just like that that I think
that's really cool um my favorite nebula is called the horse head nebula which is also
inion and um there's a lot in Aion and it's my one of my favorite
constellations um I asked the I asked a question to one
of the space camp um counselors I asked what happens if you get sucked up by a
black hole um he said spaghettification I dare
you guys to go look that up appar apparently you like stretch out until long Noodle and gets sucked
up that would be uncomfortable yeah it like stretches your bone bones and
everything and it was kind of it's it's kind of hard to think of it in your
brain as like getting sucked up I mean it's a hard thing to process but I
thought it was pretty cool that um there's something real like that and um
my mom she's been wanting to see the star Beetle Juice in my telescope for very long time and recently there's been
a lot of news about be too so it's definitely uh it's definitely one of my
favorite constellations um here is Ursa Major and
um it is a like basically its character is a bear and um b um I always go to my
friend's house during quarantine we would have a socially distance outside movie feater and we would watch movies
and I always point out to the sky and see right over me I would see Earth a major and I'd be like there's the
dipping pot um so basically you could see like in between here you can uh see
the little pot and that's one of the things that'll help you find it really easily for um for me if I look at where
I live it's just around there and it it's really easy to find a little pot
little handle and stuff but then if you want to look at it more you can start to
find other parts of the constellation kind and put it together
um and uh
um M 82 is a pair of galaxies located in Eartha major and I'm mostly Amazed by
constellations because people just think of them as like oh some characters the Roman gods created just like a couple
like million years ago or something but I think it is very interesting because
people don't think about out what like what is actually in a constellation
because there's way more there's galaxies Stars there's way more than you can
imagine in a constellation when people in a normal day life just think of oh
it's just some silly old character they made up in the sky um it is so the um Yi
sdss 11133 is L at least two
1,600 light years away um and I'm very interested in Lighty years right now
because um I also like researching about it so basically if my neighbor down all
the way down my street turns on the light I may see it in a couple milliseconds which would be called like
a couple light years basically um and um there's a dwarf
Galaxy named Mark Mark Ry meryan um 177 umaran yeah and it's
always hard Mar caran okay yes um get
it um it is um o it's not in the star pattern of Ursa Major but it is located
near it and um I think it's um really cool because I mean I when I was little
I used to be able to find a dipping pot but now I can find the whole entire constellation very easily um it's kind
of it's kind of original constellation you know for like everyone in life it's
easy just for everyone to find it which I think was a really nice starting point
point in finding stars and astronomy for me oh so I was wanting to talk about
characters a lot because like each character had a story and I I would
always go to these planetarians before coron virus and everything and they would tell amazing stories
about the sky and the characters from Greek mythology and all that and I
thought that was amazing because I mean this sky is basically a book now you
know since those characters are created you can be like oh yeah that's the Hunter and he's hunting that's the
hunter Orion and he's hunting for urer major a bear like I can look up into the
sky and get a full-blown TV episode Pack full of stories I mean it's amazing to
me that the people back then had lots of creativity to where they can do all of
that and create characters and now I think I don't think the stories of the
constellations don't get appreciated enough but I do think um the characters
are amazingly cool that they create and then here we have the
constellation Hydra which wasn't is not a very popular
constellation but um I have lots of star Sim simulations on my eyad and I will
enjoy all my time looking at the Hydra Hydra stars because it'll give you
closeup view them as a simulation and I think these stars are gorgeous they're
they're kind of like an off-white color and kind of a little Pinky and Bluey they're kind of pastel colors so I
thought these stars are gorgeous you know our sun is a bright flaming red but
they have like little nice pastel colors and I thought I thought that was really pretty um this is located in the
southern Sky um it's a little bit hard to see because you know it's just the line and then it's kind of a little bit
all over the place because here we have some random
star that's now randomly included into the constellation um and I was wondering
about the um how they like how they saw this
Galaxy and because a lot of the g a lot of what was discovered in the sky was
back in the like Roman times and people making up stories and everything but
this is discovered in the late 1900s which is is pretty surprising for me and
I'm starting to learn more that I research about constellations in planets
is that the farther out they are it'll take more time to discover them and I'm
starting to get like less impressed now on how long it's taking people to um
people to discover things but I'm extremely happy that it's still going on and people are still interested in
discovering new stuff a lot of the time every day um th this constellation is
one of the 12 constellations from observations of the Southern Sky by petus fan I hope I am um um I hope I am
saying these names um titer dirt soon um
he soon in Frederick the hoop man um so
they discovered this constellation so probably disc they discovered 12 and this is one of them which I'm kind of a
little bit wondering about why is there's just some random star off to the side and that which is now included in
the constellation good questions yeah um IC
171717 is a Galaxy named White Rose Galaxy because it looks like it's it
looks like it is a flower in the little petals um and you know people still have that
creativity today that they did when they were making the characters back then in the Roman times but it's a little bit
more based off of things because back then they didn't know what anything
was now you can name it off of things so this is the white rose Galaxy and um it
was a deep Sky object so the later it was the more
it was going to be um it's going to be later to discover
um and this constellation isn't very popular but definitely when I learned
about it um I I have more fun you know there's 88 of constellations and I
probably chose one of the most unpopular ones but I'm happy that I did because not a lot of people know about it and
now I'm just teaching them um I 17 1717 I should say it formly um was
discovered by John Lewis Dreer I hope I'm not pronouncing that wrong but
um this constellation I have lots of more questions about it I definitely
love the story of how it got discover and everything but I still have this
question about this one random star so um it's just off to the side it's not
even a part of it so I hope you enjoyed okay I definitely enjoyed the
constellation Hydra I mean I definitely have some questions
about where the random star came off to the side and I also enjoyed telling my
experience about space camp and Orion because I definitely had a lot of uh
lessons about ory so I hope you enjoyed thank you very much Libby that was uh
your presentations get better with every Global Star Party um and I think our audience uh recognizes that so thank you
thank you very much uh I know that David Levy had um a
comment that he wanted to add here thanks Scotty and thanks Libby I was as
I was listening to your talk just now my mind kind of wandered a little bit and I
uh wondered what what the astronomy world is going to look like in 10 20 30
years from now will you for example be the head of the astronomy department at
Harvard or will you perhaps not be interested in astronomy at all the thing
about life is that you really can't tell where it's going to take you liby I have a feeling listening to your talk that
you will be somewhere in astronomy I know I wanted to be a professional
astronomer never succeeded in that because I was terrible at math I think
you are probably a lot better at math than I am but thinking about other women
and young girls who became interested in the night sky brought me back again to
um Cecilia Payne who when she was about your age looked up at the sky one night
and saw two meteors that seemed to intersect each other and when I talked
to her about it she still insisted they collided I mean I don't believe that happened but you never can tell she got
into Harvard at a time when women were not considered to be able to be
astronomers but she did so well that the head of the department
then who was uh harlo shapley the great harlo shapley brought her into his
office one day and said I want you to become a I want you to do a doctoral disch ation get your doctor at here and
she panicked she absolutely panicked she ran out of shapley's office and went directly to Bart Box's office and she
walked in shaking and Bart said Cecilia what's wrong and she
said Dr shapley said I he wants me to go on and get a doctorate in
astronomy and Bart looked around from one part of the room to the other and then looked back at Cecilia and said if
God tells you to get a doctorate you get a doctorate and that's what happens
sometimes Libby you're going to go far in whatever field you decide to go in and good luck yeah great that's
great okay all right so um our next speaker uh is another young lady uh
deept gam uh from Nepal uh we've been very impressed with her too I you know I
think it's having this um uh video with uh Nancy Grace Roman uh is
just really I I was so happy to find that video and we've had we have a number of um of uh young women on our
program today so including Molly Wakeling who's uh joining us uh Abigail
bmach will be on with us in a little while is also um uh very inspiring but
uh deept uh uh gave a nice presentation on the last Global Star Party about
satellites uh she has a follow on presentation uh today uh DT thank you
for joining us all the way from Nepal thank you everyone and hello I am
VI goam and yes um at last series uh last so I have talked about the
satellite and introduction and about the importance of the satellite as I have discuss that um um our life is totally
linked with the satellite and we meet in this Zoom is somehow due to the satellite and um satellite helps in a
different field like weather forecasting and that's all all about weather
forecasting telecommunication imag that Imaging and all the everything but uh
talking about this all is the artificial aspect but we can imagine uh our life is
possible due to the our natural satellite Moon if it will not inspect or it not look us and it will not keep the
this control on the our the 23 degrees that um our tilt and to the Earth then
our life will not be possible the all this um distraction in the climate or
will make the existence exist of the human beings and all the animals and
today I have uh taken the taken here some of the satellite artificial
satellite which has U given this uh make which is the last start point a step for
this um Thousand Miles and this all this um Wonder wonders world with are here
okay I have some presentation
here okay talking about the satellite today I have uh taken over the
artificial satellite and how we start our journey to dou more satellite and I
have I frequently said that that more than 8,900 satellite from for more uh
more than 8,900 satellite have been launched up to now due to the this small step and as we
know this uh Sputnik first was the first satellite first satellite launched in
October 4 1957 first the purpose of launching this satellite um it has a big
issue between the Russia and the us too but beside this all it's work is um for
the launching the this launch to place a radio transmitter into the orbit around the Earth and it was the beginning of
the um of this um the satellite of the uh launching the
more and more satellite from different country for different purpose first of all um launching the first artificial
satellite people's as we can realize that first of all people realize how
what's the important of satellite they um this uh the um analyze the importance
of natural satellite and they create okay and they have the imagination how if we created the artificial satellite
then it will help us and so Russia sputnic force was the first satellite um
of this and which was launched in October 4 1957 here is the rocket In
from which the Sputnik first was launched and this is Sputnik first
and as we know the Explorer one is the first satellite from the USA the
successful satellite from the USA and uh Explorer one was the first launch by the United States and it responded to microm
meteroid um impact on thecraft skin in such a way which is impact um okay
wait which is in fact um on the spacecraft skin it's also a way that
impact will be fun of mass and velocity and it was launched on January 31
1958 and um as we know this um NASA is NASA is fam all over the world and its
first satellite was pioner
one and here and here is the C be this light
which is first launched under the ban of under the banner of the newly cured
created European Space Agency on August um 9 August 1975 and Cosby was the first
European mission to stud gamar R source and to be dedicated to a signal
experiment and yeah we can realize the people started their Journey different
country had started their journey to develop the SAT more satellite and analyzing the importance
of Satellite by this communication mode and simple mode like studying research and communication and uh satellite has
been launching launched for different purpose in this day for research purpose
for communication for Imaging process it's attitude determination and art observation um everything and I want
just say Thousand Miles Journey begin with one step and I will say this one
step and one one step of the human beings has taken this A Thousand Miles
has make us the thousand miles away and created the Wonder World now and we as
we are living here U just and using the modern era using the modern technology
due to help of satellite and others and um yeah is been a thousand M
Journeys and Nepal has been successful to launch the first satellite on 17 April 2019 it's been going to be one
years very soon and Nepal set one was B and F is this um NEP low orbit resour
satellite and first satellite of Nepal uh it was launched on part of uh signus
ngz 91 by the United State on 17th April 2019 and it was launched for the four
main mission that is a Laura demonstration Mission and imaging Mission altitude determination and counter Mission software configurable
back plan Mission yeah and this was the journey we started from the Nepal and um
on this April again we are sending Nepal is sending one satellite of uh in the f
9 UM on the April April
2021 let and um recently talking about recently this on November 16 or November
16 or today November 16 November 17 in ar ar space Vega rocket was launched the
CET new Earth observation satellite and Teran scientific resarch satellite from The Gua Space Center in CA
uh it this it is laun to this for the observation Earth observation Earth
observation and for scientific resarch for the for the studing of the um over
the Wonder Over the space and um analyzing over um over this things heav
Heavenly Body outside the space and um it last I like to say this H dream to
TOS the sky so just have a big hope if the people who not started have the have
the hope and hasn't started then I think we can't imagine the life here and we be
like um in the same situation where our forefathers were living this uh mailing
from this writing in the paper and mail sending the mail and by the
post box and others and waiting for for day and month for the reply and this uh
playing outside and getting the knowledge by self-observation not by the using the internet and uh the
communication more and of the wether forecasting just um yeah our forefathers
our ancestor used to uh just guess the all the weathers and how how is this and
about the time but we are sure by the help of satellite and by the help of the
modern technology we can live very um C like we are living the Cozy life uh this
um technology has make our life very easier and the for the um boosting the
set technology satellite has a very big role thank
you well thank you thank you very much deept uh it's wonderful it's great to
have you on the program uh you know and and um you are a big inspiration in uh
to your classmates and uh you know we uh we were talking earlier about um you
know what will happen uh with your astronomy club uh you know you're you're 16 now you'll be graduating uh High
School in in a short time and I imagine going on to University uh and we were
talking about the sustainability of your astronomy club and you mentioned that you would be
mentoring uh the person that would take your spot so uh I think that's great uh
and I think if you keep that up uh that the program will go on for a very long time so that's
awesome uh we are going to bring on Molly Wakeling uh next uh but before we
do we're going to take a peek through Jerry Hubble's telescope uh for a minute
uh just to see what what's out there uh this is the global star party so we want to we want to get at least a minute of
uh of viewing time and then we will switch to uh astronom Al as she as she's
called and uh um she is an wonderful
astrophotographer um but uh let's see let's see what's going on with with your uh with your telescope Jerry sure so let
me uh I'm G to bring up the observatory now so can you see that
um yes so this first picture I took this was earlier tonight I took a picture and
I just like taking these pictures of the Milky Way and just to show you the sheer number of stars that are in one image
okay I did a plate solve and what what my uh plate Sol found with there was
over 10,000 stars in this image oh goodness so it's just this is 60 seconds
okay right this is just 60 seconds and you can see you can zoom up and still see you know a ton of stuff here so I
just I just like I just like seeing these pictures of the Milky Way they don't they don't even have to be a any
object per se in the image it's just you know just looking at the vast number of stars is kind of cool I do that with my
dobsoni and I'll just I won't even look at a star map I just kind of pointed at the thickest richest part of the Milky
Way and just kind of guide my scope through it you know right power I love it right so the other thing I'm going to
show you is a live view of Mars let the sky's been coming in and out of clouds
over the last hour or so but that's there it is oh wow so you can see the
seeing's not the best but again it's you can see quite a you know markings on the on the planet it's it's work looks
pretty well looks like it's partially lit too you can see gibbus the gibbus
phase of of the uh Mars right along this Edge right here I think
right uh so and this shows you the real time this is a real time
image it's not fake but uh and you can see our scope
over here you can see it peering up through the through the uh
slit right this is a very productive telescope you have here and oh yeah and see this is this is the diverse kind of
Imaging we can do with just this one camera right this is a deep Sky camera and I'm able to do this kind of quality
uh planetary stuff uh close up great great thanks Jerry all right
we'll come back to you after uh after a little while but let's bring on Molly Wakeling Molly thank you for uh coming
on to our program and um uh you know you you uh um uh you and I have talked uh
before and I got to know you a little bit um but uh you haven't been in uh
astrophotography for very long is that true yeah about about five years is uh is when I got started oh okay all right
and you started off doing U Widefield images of the Milky Way and uh would
think but uh uh my first telescope was a schmit Crain and which is probably the
hardest possible place to start it was a gift so all right right
well what do you what do you have for us today uh so um I wanted to uh run
through what my kind of astrophotography Journey has been like and uh show how to
um that persevering is really important in astrophotography absolutely
absolutely so I can get that going
here all right um yeah so I'm Molly wakling I'm currently a PhD student at
UC Berkeley getting my PhD in physics at the moment um I'm about to switch over to applied science and technology but
for the time being I'm still in the physics program um and I've been doing astrophotography for about the last five
years and it's been quite the journey for sure this is my first telescope it
was a gift uh from a ex-boyfriend it's a long story but uh this is an 8 inch mccrain
on an altaz Mount from Celestron which uh is a really nice observing platform
for for outreach and stuff like that very difficult place to start rasr photography but when when I first
pointed it at Saturn I looked at it and I called my friends over that I had with me I'm like you guys got to see this
this is insane and then the next thing I thought was I got to take a picture of this so I I figured out shortly
thereafter how to attach my DSLR to the telescope and I was just taking single
frames because I didn't know uh how to do planetary photography yet so this is a single blurry frame from my second
night out um of Saturn here and then I thought well I wonder if I put this on a
nebula if I could get more of the nebula and so I I'd let it run for about 30
seconds on the Lagoon nebula this is my first or sorry one minute this is my first uh deep Sky image a single frame
on my seventh night out of the Lagoon nebula that was just thank you it was so
thrilling to to be able to see color in it when my eyes couldn't see it I could see more detail than my eyes could see
and uh I was pretty much hooked at that point um this is my first attempt at the
andr a Galaxy through that through that setup I think it was a full moon that night you know there's a lot of stuff I didn't know
uhuh uh early early version of the dumbbell nebula I've got a a much nicer version of this at the end of the
presentation for comparison and uh of course everybody's favorite thing to image uh is is the
Orion Nebula and so it was one of the early places I started with my
DSLR and then uh after about six months of using that telescope my uncle who had
been who had done some asop photography uh back in the uh uh in the early digital days um he felt re-inspired to
get back into it and he upgraded his rig and uh gifted me his previous rig which
was a Celestron cge mount with an 11inch massagin so an equatorial Mount was a
big boost yeah up from an altaz Mount and I was able to start getting some
nicer pictures of some deep Sky targets um still not able to guide at this point
uh but starting get get some pictures that were really exciting for for getting started out so much more detail
and color than I could see with with my naked eye I I uh I I started keeping a
log on the very first night I went out super super happy I did that highly recommend doing that and uh it's really
fun to go back and look and see just how excited I was about these early
images uh another example of me being really excited about an image here the CRA filaments look at them
filaments I was really excited get detail on those that's awesome um yeah here we go
uh another later dumbbell image this is after I was able to guide so now I was able to take five minute exposures which
was really exciting I was able to get more detail um see this is yeah this is the
single this is the first time I stacked it but it actually like I didn't have a good process good way to process these yet just using deep Sky Stacker so this
is actually a single frame from from that that came out better than the stack uh before I had very good processing
skills um and some help from from uh some colleagues in the astronomy club that I joined um but that Celestron cgu
didn't rest didn't last real long it started having some problems and then I tried to do an upgrade on it and
something fried it and the mount is is dead at this point uh this was about uh
I think about a year into me using it so so that mount was dead and gone uh and I
got some help trying to fix it from a guy who does a lot of Mount upgrades aimed at uh Dr Clay sherid and he helped
me acquire a cge pro selon cge pro at a welld discounted price and so I was able
to get an even more powerful and newer Mount to use although it weighed almost more than
[Laughter] me uh that that thing was so hard to use I finally started using my club's t
scope which was a huge bonus because I didn't have to set up and tear down all the time anymore so I just used uh the
telescope at my astronomy club and that's when I was finally able to start taking some actually really good images
um this is my first one that I was really really pleased with I uh uh
managed to uh win second place in the astronomical leagues uh astroimaging competition in 2017 which was very
exciting uh John gos may or may not remember that but I got to meet him at Alcon that
year um and this is also when I started to really discover the um the real magic
of stacking because you can hardly see the rosette nebula in in this image and yet it it just popped right out after I
stacked it and did some processing in Photoshop uh then I got to go to several star parties with with that gear this is
me at the Texas Star Party much starer Skies got some much better images from those Dark Skies still using a DSLR at
this point uh whpo Galaxy uh and to compare how far I'd come in in those two
years um this is that legon nebula image I showed earlier and then this is one I was able to take uh just two years after
I got started so um perseverance is is key here and just lots and lots of
practice I got to go to the solar eclipse in Wyoming in 2017 uh with a little little Borg
refractor that had been gifted to me from another member of my astronomy club and pck I just I decided to image I set
up a a I set up Backyard Nikon to run an automated sequence for me and it worked
really well I got some killer uh uh images and it was just absolutely
jaw-dropping and I was able to put together this composite of images of the corona which got me a asbin image of the
Day in 2017 as well super exciting I finally got myself a monochrome camera
an astroo camera zwo ASI 1600 mm Pro and then was able to do a lot better with
color and detail uh from from there on out and then the Celestron cge Pro died uh the
uh uh well it didn't really die one of the motors started having issues it was still technically usable but I couldn't
guide in the declination axis um this is me trying to trying to fix it here I'm
going to jump ahead in time this is when uh I got to go to Chile last summer to image the solar eclipse down there it
was really weird polar lining in the South right and I got this uh image of
the solar eclipse this one was a lot lower altitude so not as good Clarity um and it was interesting to compare
because the sun was a lot less active um so the corona is a lot a lot less
intricate I I also got to spend some time when I was in Chile in the AMA desert and it was just absolutely
mind-blowing got to look through some enormous DOB Ians and got to do some really awesome Imaging with a borrowed
Sony a7s camera and a borrowed Rokinon lens uh here's um EA Karina and the
running chicken nebula and a whole bunch of other Southern Sky Delights beautiful and then I I moved
out to California in uh just last a little over a year ago and I finally have a backyard so I was able to set up
uh my telescope in the backyard it's a lot of light pollution here but been able to manage through it with uh um
good image processing and I'm now the proud owner of a Takahashi that I bought from my uncle on the family discount on
the Jeep same uncle and I since my cge Pro wasn't
working anymore I really needed amount that was more capable than my Celestron AVX so I made the enormous purchase of a
Paramount might te uh at last year's Advanced Imaging conference and that has
been a game Cher and now I have two rigs set up in the backyard perfect and then now I have
three I resurrected the cge pro I I I'm using it as a science rig for uh taking
variable star data for the a the American Association of variable star observers and uh I'm starting to take
some exop Planet data for NASA's uh J uh J NASA jpl's exop Planet Watch
program uh unfortunately the cge pro has fully died now uh and that the ra motor
doesn't work anymore now either so I I was gifted another Celestron AVX from
from an aavso member but it also died uh just just uh two weeks ago so um I now
only have two rigs set up back there as I'm working on purchasing another new Mount but despite all these troubles I'm
still been able to image well with Paramount and my other ABX uh so um this is from the backyard uh through all that
light pollution with some hydrogen Alpha to help uh Eskimo nebula some narrow band really helps with the sky as
well uh and here's that dumbbell for comparison with my much earlier image this is a narrow band by color image of
of the dumbbell and um yeah just spectacular yeah extremely excited about
this one yeah and then I bought a camper to so I could go out to dark skies and get some dark sky sight images perfect
so yeah that's where you can find all my stuff and I hope I didn't go too long there no that's great that's great I
loved I loved all the comments and and with your slides and everything I hope that uh you keep up that uh that
observing Diary of yours so that that's that's really fantastic yeah our next uh speaker is uh
uh is uh Ryan hanaho and Ryan hanaho is at the Montana Learning Center uh I meet
Ryan uh many years ago and um when of the astronomical League uh uh Alcon
events um and uh he was a you know bright young man uh doing some big
things in in astronomy and uh he has uh he's gone on to continue on with with
that and his educational Outreach programs and so um so we're going to
turn over the uh the stage to Ryan hi everyone uh it's always a
pleasure to to be on the show thanks for the invite Scott um I'm really glad to
to see that this is done um you know giving you know everything that's considered uh right now and so it's
great to be have having folks that are on all across the world um watching
people get excited about astronomy so it's a real Joy um I wanted to kind of
start out talking um by a program that I'm working on uh with NASA it's called
the uh roads roads on asteroid student Challenge and so um the Montana Learning
Center is one of two um NASA K12 um
education and Outreach Partners In the state and so we host the uh roads one
asteroid student challenge uh for Montana but the student challenge uh goes all over the United States and in
fact um we even have some teams around the world doing it and so right now registration is open um I'm putting the
link or I'm showing the link right now um on the web page and if you go to
nw.org that'll take you right to it and the first thing that you're going to see
is a little blurb on roads on asteroids and so what what we try to do is like um
this year's theme is asteroids and so um we pair it up with a Nessa Mission and
then we try to have uh the students recreate it and it starts the competition starts as early as third
grade and goes all the way through 12th grade and it's a lot of fun um the the
uh kids get to work in small teams you know we're even coming up with a lot of virtual Alternatives um around covid so
anyone can participate um you know we've been working a lot with uh deaf and blind
schools like I have one that I work at with in Montana and we use um little
Lego Mind storms for that and they have nice accessibility um so that that everyone
can really um be a part of the experience um but this year is themed
around asteroids and uh I'll show you kind of what happens is we have a like a
competition that like you know you would see this is from a couple years ago when we recreated the Apollo 11 Landing um
but what the kids do is um you know they they basically have uh a Lander in this
case for asteroids it's going to be a impactor of sorts and the the kids um
fly in uh to the asteroid and they've got a land and then once their impactor
lands what happens is they replace it with a robot that they built and so this
is a a Lego Mind Storm that we started to use early on this year we're
integrating make blocks and so here's the robot that I that I built um I have
a teacher Workshop coming up later this week and so uh what we did is um we
shipped 30 of these around um Montana to to teachers or Educators that serve
native communities and so right now um you know if you're interested I really
encourage you um to go to the website uh read up about it it's a great experience
for kids uh you know um back when we didn't have covid uh Award winners at
least for Montana um I took the NASA centers and you know it's an awesome
experience for the kids to spend a week at like Kennedy Space Center or JPL um you know what have you it's just
a really awesome experience for those kids and so check it out um if you have any questions or if you need any help
with it uh just let us know um right now we're kind of in the early registration
period And so as such we have some funding um to support teams Nationwide
with possible equipment grants um so definitely check that out uh you I know
our prizes this year before covid came uh were like the top scoring teams we
take to we were going to take to a launch at Kennedy um for one of the
asteroid missions coming out and so um you know with Co I'm not sure how that's
going to look um you know the the this past summer um the prize was take kids
to to see the Mars mission go off and so you know one thing came to another and
we had the impact of the pandemic so let me go ahead and minimize that and um
open up and kind of transition to another opportunity I want to talk about
and uh Libby I just put this in here um right as you were talking on or um and
when I was a kid well Orion's still my fa my favorite constellation
uh the object that I love the image is the horse head nebula and this is
actually um one of my shots wow uh that was taken with a a 16inch arose and
that's actually a remote telescope um in uh New Mexico for the Learning Center
and when I say remote it's located elsewhere and so we're located in Montana but this telescope is located on
a Mountaintop at a a little place called Mexico skies and so I just love love the
horse head so liby I wanted to share that one for you um our astronomy
program is uh supported even though we're a NASA sponsor or a
NASA uh Center um of sort so to speak our astronomy program is supported
100% uh by private donors and our our largest supporters are Mike and lres of
New Mexico Skies and uh I just want to talk a little bit about our astronomy program and talk
about a special project um that I'm that we're getting involved in and kind of if
you're interested in supporting uh how to do that too and so this is the Montana Learning Center um I took this
well we took the photo uh with a drone this fall um so the lake level was low
but we're located on uh 10 acres of of uh land up above uh Montana's Capital at
on a lake and it's a really a beautiful place and so we've been doing um science
camps for kids and teacher trainings there since the mid1 1980s and in the last couple years um we've added
astronomy program uh since I've been able to transition away from the classroom and be a full-time um director
of The Learning Center so these are our two rolloff roofs and um you know
they're both uh roll off roofs meaning that the roof rolls off and they're motorized and uh the small building
houses a 14inch uh robotic telescope and that's a hyperstar and so it's really really fast
and the kids love that because you can get awesome photos quick um and then the
the big building houses a a 25 inch F4 do sodium and the kids love that because
you can look through it too um but uh the special project that I'm working on
and um is to build a third Observatory and that third Observatory will go right
over here on the peninsula it'll be the size of the small one but it's going to
H house our um most advanced telescope and so Mike and Lynn uh
were very generous and they they gifted The Learning Center a 24 inch
rcos um on a buyer series 3 and so that was that was in in storage
for about 10 years and now you know we've had it for the last two years but
it's a big project trying to bring a telescope like this together and um
fortunately I guess one of the benefits if you want to call that of covid is um
now that I'm not doing face-to-face programs it frees up my time to do like
fundraising or grant writing and whatnot and so I'm really focusing on bringing this uh project to light and so uh this
is the 24 in when it was installed at New Mexico Skies um and uh I believe
Mike had it installed between' 05 in 2010 before he replaced it with another
telescope that's the one thing about astronomy uh once you get into it you get hooked with telescopes and you know
you get a if you're like me you have a lot of telescopes and uh I remember growing up as a kid my
first telescope was a uh 6-inch star Hopper by Celestron and I I worked all
summer mowing lawns just to get that telescope and you know it's still at my parents house in
Pennsylvania um but yeah once you get hooked you don't go back that's for sure so anyway um you know we're we're trying
to bring this uh project together and the idea is to uh introduce and develop
astr tourist in Montana and so uh we're starting to collaborate um with a a few different
organizations astronomy magazine is one of them and um part of it is what we
want to do is bring tourists into Montana and literally show them Big Sky country and show them the Milky Way uh
from the lake and so we're really trying to do that and do that well and one aspect would be uh this would be the
largest and most advanced public telescope or public use telescope in the state
um you know I'm looking to equip that with a a CCD camera with filters and
whatnot um everything's coming together right now it's a it's a big work in progress like I got to take the entire
telescope apart and clean it because it's been in storage uh software bisque has the buyer Mount and they're going to
work on it so it's really really quite the undertaking and so um I wanted to
share a link with you uh before I wrap up and um with that link um if if
anyone's interested uh just go to Montana learning.org
um and and like I said our astronomy program is supported 100% um by um
donations and if you're ever interested you can go to our our donate Tab and um
you know make a contribution of Learning Center we are a nonprofit so if you live in the US um your donation is taxu
um and then in the comment section when you if you would make a donation um just
put that astronomy program and that'll get flagged I'll see it and then that'll go directly uh to support our astronomy
program and so um with that I I thought I'd open it up to the group if the group
has any questions before we transition over to another
speaker uh Hernandez says a very interesting program on exploring
asteroids um comment from Jim Norwood he says a couple of months ago he spent two weeks
in a very dark high Colorado got some photos of some moose but not a single shot of the sky due to Wildfire smoke
okay yeah that'll do it that's for sure that's the it's it's great to see your program there Ryan and um thank you very
much uh I think we're going to transition over to John Goss at this
point than you Scott was a pleasure thank you Ryan thank you so much man uh John uh is with the astronomical League
a former president of the league uh itself and um we um we have uh I think
you were on the uh during the last um um uh Global star party uh is that
that's correct right so you cycled right back through um one one week ago one week ago that's right so during this
part of it the way that the U the uh the program goes is uh John will read the
answers from the last Global Star Party okay uh and uh and then he will ask the
questions for This Global star party and the way that you that you participate you don't answer the questions in chat
you send your answers to this email address which I'm going to put in chat right now it's um uh Explorer Alliance
explor scientific.com okay uh the uh uh all the people that
get the answer right are then put into a pool and then we at random pick the the
winner out of that pool of people that have come up with the correct answer okay so that's that's the way it will go
um and with that I'll turn it over to uh John and um
um excellent let's start with the answers from the last Global Star Party
well actually I'd like to start with something else okay this will just take 30 seconds because I know I know some of
the people who are on on the screen here and I'd like to say hi to them uh Ryan
hanaho nice seeing you again right I I met Ryan in 2001 or so but I'm bringing
this up because Ryan was the winter what winter the winner of The astronomic League horer award for two years I think
maybe even three way way back in the early 2000s um we have uh Molly uh she already
said hello earlier but how how are you how have you been doing it's been three years since I've seen you and you your
astrophotography was great then and it has continued on on a good course and I also saw we have Abigail Bowen boach uh
someplace on on on line here there she is hi hi Abigail uh she was the winner I
believe of the horer award two years ago I guess I lose lose track of time maybe
three years ago it was it was in um 2018 yeah oh okay okay so it's been a
few years since I've seen you um it's it's wonderful seeing you well you know
we we're all still here so that's good and I do see your name online here or there especially connected with Peggy
Walker and I'm glad to see that you're still involved in all this that that that's really good definitely um okay
well I'd like to to move on do what Scott was saying about U some of the answers from uh last
week see if I can get on
here um nope this is not it wrong one it's all right we're
cool here we go um I hope you can all see this first
question is about the moon's formation and again as I said last week I I'm
appreciative to Dave ier for speaking on on the moon formation because he set set me straight in some of these years here
but uh today the moon lies about 240,000 miles from the earth when was the moon
when the moon was formed about 4.6 billion years ago how far was it thought to orbit our planet at that time well
the correct answer is C it's only about 12,000 to 20,000 miles over time the the
moon has progressed further out uh to its current 240,000 miles
okay next question question number two from last week was if you look on a star
map uh from a number of years ago uh describing the constellation Taurus you will find stars with the flam seed
numbers whole bunch of them including 30 31 32 33 35 36 why is 34 not found well
the correct answer is is that when flam seed was doing this he he was he observed Uranus without even realizing
it and assigned it number 34 so number 34 is long gone because it followed
Uranus as it went across the sky makes sense question number three uh what is
the name of the astronomical leagues quarterly magazine that all its members are eligible to receive well it's the
reflector and I think the reflector is about uh 60-ish years old something
around 60 years old something like that so it's been around for for for for quite a while now it's
a full color glossy magazine of I know 32 34 34 36 Pages something like that so
we're we're we're pretty proud of that okay one more thing let's go on to
this week's questions okay and now for for last week's questions you will be
notified an email if you haven't been already you will be uh you will be receiving an email uh notifying that you
are the winner okay let's go let's go to the questions for
tonight okay got put put on your thinking caps drum roll Dental drum
roll yeah yeah right okay here we go let's start out uh this isn't a
question we like to preface everything we say about observing the sun uh because we certainly don't want to have
any mishaps here when people observe the sun always use the solar filter the proper solar filter know what you're
doing uh if you don't know what you're doing ask somebody who does because we don't want any accidents when when when
you use a a telescope to look at the sun if you do it right it's completely safe and you get a lot out of it but just
keep this in mind first question has nothing to do with the sun okay observers on Earth enjoy metor
showers such as the the leonids which are going on right now uh to a hypothetical Observer on the moon could
Leonid meteors be seen streaking across the Blackness of the lunar Sky um you know if you're on the moon
right now and you look up in the sky would you able to see any any Leed
meteors yes or no question number one oh by the way I
do have the logo up on the screen for our 75th anniversary of the astronomical League uh two uh two days ago was the 74
4 anniversary so now we're in the year leading up to next year's 75th Mark
so now that's right it's a organization has grown quite a bit but we'll talk
about that in the coming weeks question number two uh okay when examining double Stars
through a telescope The Observer typically notes the magnitudes of the primary and secondary Stars their
angular separation and another value what is that value is it the position
angle B the altit their altitude above the horizon or C their combined Cassini
index so that's a for you double star observers you gota know this stuff
that's right okay our third question I'll jump into
here uh astronomical League uh gives a number of observing excuse me Youth
Awards every year uh we have the uh uh National Young astronom Award which is graciously
sponsored by explor scientific and we're very appreciative of that but today we're gonna not talk about that we're
going to talk about our other set of awards the horkheimer Youth Awards so one of the benefits of being an
astronomic League member is being able to submit an entry into the astronomical League War ker youth journalism
Awards a lot of words to say at one time competition uh available for uh uh uh
kids who are a aged uh 8 to 14 it requires a 300 to 400w essay deadline
March 31st um it's a pretty valuable award uh
in a number of ways um the question is is what is this competition's first place prize is it a a $25 gift
certificate that be handy to have B $100 or C even better
$1,000 so keep uh select one one of these three answers and keep in mind
this is the youth uh journalism award ages 8 to 14 all you have to do is three 300 to
500w essay on on some science related uh subjects such as the planets something
like that uh deadline for this coming year is March 31st 200 uh 21 uh to find
out more about this award just go on the astronomic league website and look under Awards and you'll see how to how to
enter this competition so on that unless anybody has has any comments especially about
the horam youth journalism award uh yeah please please speak up
that's right but anyway that's what you know anybody out there that uh is of in
the age range eight years old to 14 if you know anybody out there yeah they
should they should definitely apply for this so this is this is a good deal uh We're not gonna give away interested
in astronomy this is a great great thing to try that's right that's right so
would be uh definitely uh something that one thing I didn't say is that this is the first place prize we have a second
place and a third place as well which I can't say what they are but it's it's uh it's worth your time so sure sure okay
that's great that's that's what I have uh John thank you very much um also we
um uh we will we will be taking a 10-minute break uh right now uh uh so
you can take uh you go get a refreshment or whatever uh we'll be right back uh up
next will be Abigail bolbach and she'll be playing piano for us tonight so and
then after that we have uh Joe burer on a space artist and Kelsey poror is
supposed to be also joining us as well so um got some really great stuff for
you tonight uh and um uh you know as Jack cimer always said keep looking up
but we'll be back in
10 so um while we have a a 10 minute break um I thought I'd mention uh if the
the youth are still on um yeah we have a a remote telescope um that's located in
New Mexico and it's a equipped with uh it's a monochrome sensor but it's equipped
with um color filters and also uh bvri
uh bvr filters as well so it can do photometric research um but I've got
that on the Skynet robotic telescope Network and uh we're always looking at
um trying to give telescope time away to students and teachers and so um if
that's of interest um you know reach out to me my email address is Montana learning center@gmail.com
again it's Montana learning center@gmail.com and uh you know I'd love to to kind of
maybe give you guys some access or something like that
my
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well hello everybody we are back um after uh our little 10-minute break here
and we are uh uh coming to the part of our program where we have um artists who
are inspired by space and the cosmos and the universe and you know this is
something that uh has to go back through Antiquity I'm sure that uh uh people
looked up at the heavens and saw the Milky Way and and was just you know
filled with such uh personal feelings about uh the a inspiring part of of uh
of looking up at the stars that uh you know it it got the creative juices
flowing and so um tonight we've got Abigail bmach uh and Joe buron with
Kelsey poror uh from Nova uh Nova space Galleries and uh so uh we'll start with
Abigail first uh Abigail's got one or two pieces of music that she'd like to
play for us um she's a wonderful astronomer um a great lecturer uh a
really multi-talented person um but also very creative and uh and she is an
accomplished pianist so Abigail it's all yours Scott uh the
first piece that I will be playing is one of uh Chan's pieces it's a his C
minor nocturn and then I will play a WC piece his V romantic so
uh maybe about 10 minutes in total so yeah thank
you test in quality I have uh my music mic but I'll do a quick
scale it's good it's all good maybe a bit loud maybe a bit loud
oh loud it might be okay
then I suggest turning your volume down they're kind of loud that's
[Music]
right
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
that was the first one it was good it was great thank you
his phone was going off at the end there oh that was yours okay
good I was about ready to how is she
that okay so next one okay next one it was beautiful by the way Abigail it was
beautiful [Music]
for
[Music]
wow wow that was awesome Abigail thank you so much thank
you yeah Carlos Hernandez says Beautiful piano pieces by the multi-talented
Abigail bolbach she makes it look so easy very inspiring thank you Abby thank
you thank you I wanted to say hi to everybody I recognize so many faces on
here hi David hi Joe hi Kelsey it's great to see
everybody it's great to have you on Abigail thank you all of our audience is very happy uh they're clapping for you
and uh you know I think you just brightened everybody's uh night here so
thank you so much well thank you so much for letting me play for you all thank you thank you very much okay wow okay so
up next uh is Kelsey Po from novas space Galleries and noas
space.com and uh we are uh we're happy to have you on Kelsey
once again uh I know that you have your artist of the month Joe buron uh with us
he's he actually logged on at the very first part of this uh uh you know I
think he watches this all the time does he yeah I'm glad watch I I knew he once
I saw the telescope in the background I knew this guy was really into amateur astronomy um uh after after looking at
some of his images I was just you know really uh amazed uh he is uh not only
extremely accurate but uh the perspectives that he chooses are really
incredible um you know and it is a you know space artists can do that they can
take you to points in space and um show you perspectives that uh would probably
be impossible uh to get but um you know it's it's it's not only their job to
inspire but um uh to inform and uh and so I
I I don't know much about Joe uh you know him better than I do so please uh
uh why don't you make a the introduction here and also don't forget to um mention
where people can learn more about um uh your gallery and how to get some of this
fine art sure thing I wrote an introduction to Joe on my phone so I'm
going to read it for you first I want to say that everybody seems to be wearing long sleeve shirts and it's 90 degrees
in Tucson here today so I feel so
underdressed and I see Abigail is wearing a Nova space shirt let's talk
about space baby yeah I that's a shirt you can get at novas
space.com thank you so much all right here's my so much here's my
introduction for Joe Joe berson is an amateur astronomer
who has chased the stars in numerous road trips across the country an author
and Storyteller with 10 novels two novellas and a children's book and an
artist who specializes in space art he is the Nova space artist of the month
and we are selling some signed prints and Originals of his is I spend most of my time with Joe trying to convince him
to participate in whatever project I'm trying to do to exploit him so we are
very lucky to have him with us tonight yeah that's
great okay well I guess I should probably say something at this point um I'm going to attempt to use the
screen sharing to uh flip through some slides of my work so let's see how that
goes you see anything yeah
okay so I've been doing this since like 1976 um that was the first year I
actually sold any uh any artwork of any kind really I work digitally and also I
paint an acrylic and oil uh this is a digital piece it's obviously intended to be like the
primordial solar system Earth and Moon in an early stage of formation purely
digital this is a another digital piece it's a comet making a really really really close approach to the Earth and
if this ever happened it would be really spectacular and would sell tens of
telescopes I don't doubt that at all tens and it would also terrify billions of people I don't know which one which
outcome is better really that's really it's pretty
awesome and let's see this is a u conception of a space Garage in assembly
facility under construction so it's it's just a skeleton at this point but uh it
includes a an Orion uh Escape vehicle
and some habitat modules that you can see it's hooked up to and solar Dynamic power arrays which was a a power source
considered for orbital use uh uh under development at what what is now the
Glenn uh NASA facility but I don't know they decided they weren't practical so
they gave up on that idea even though it they look that cool which I think was a bad
choice oh this is the um California nebula um Kelsey has some signed prin of
this available in Nova space if anybody likes this piece uh California nebula it's not
based on the actual California nebula it's U it's actually more California e
than the real California nebula and it has Bright Stars corresponding to the major cities in California
so it's kind of a limited audience for this one I
guess I also do occasional science fiction stuff this is a digital piece
another digital you'll see some paintings later none of this is terribly well organized
I just threw it together cosmic cat okay this is my
children's book um the cover art for that is an oil
painting uh Kelsey has I think six copies of this signed copies for sale at
Nova space signed copies and the interior art for this book is All
Digital this is an example oh wow um also has sign prints of this available
Nova space this particular piece uh the the book has like a at least I don't
don't even remember I've U modified this book and expanded it so many times I don't remember how many pages it has
anymore but it's something like 26 or 30 pages or something like that that's
another example that's another digital piece they're all digital for this
book and there's another one featuring The heroine of the book Maria who is a
young girl that becomes interested in astronomy and sort of gets in over her head a little bit but she winds up okay
the black [Laughter] hole easily dealt
with that's great so that's a painting and that's an acrylic painting and uh
it's one of many paintings I did back way back in the 90s for uh Time Life
books for their book series Voyage Through the Universe Time Life books was an organization that existed back when
books were popular back in the 20th century I don't think they really do
anything anymore but u i don't sure they still exists but back then they were kind of a big deal
yeah and that's just another space show piece this is actually I think a mixture
of digital material and uh and painted stuff as I recall I mean it's hard to
remember exactly how I put some of these together because some of them were pretty
old uh this is purely digital it's just a bunch of uh hypothetical madeup Mars
Landing Hardware that I designed and I made 3D models um a lot of the digital
artwork I I do involves a lot of 3D modeling and rendering that looks like
the the Apollo command service module yeah what it's supposed to be is a
something more like the Orion capsule and it's kind of hard to see because it's so hazy but it's got like two solid
rocket boosters it's it's like the the vehicle they would use to return to to
Mars orbit to Rendevous with a bigger space crft or turn to
Earth uh this is uh half digital and half um
um it's the husa Japanese asteroid probe the first
one um I forget the name of the asteroid that visited it was the first one the
less successful one that had trouble um Gathering samples from the surface of the
asteroid this was actually this was the biggest by far the biggest digital space art I ever did because it was a intended
for use on a u big transportable panel for a whole um exhibit on asteroid
exploration and I think the the final size was like eight feet wide or something like
that so it was a really really big digital file it was as big as I could handle at that
time it's beautiful that is an acrylic painting it shows a Europa with the ice kind of
cracked open a little bit and you can see some of the so surface
water which is sort of boiling off and freezing at the same time that's
cool and this is digital this is a hypothetical um subsurface S Sub ice
Europa probe which I designed um it's designed to it's shaped
like a torpedo so it can go through a relatively small hole and then when it gets down into the water it unfolds the
and some other stuff and a similar idea it gets into
the science fiction realm Europa again a similar sort of probe encounters
a hypothetical Europa buggy alien this was actually a commission
from a guy who uh self-published some novels about these uh these Europa
aliens and he commissioned me to do his cover art
that is mostly digital or maybe entirely digital a lot of 3D modeling in there
too this is an oil painting it's called nebulous
Planet uh Kelsey has the original painting for sale at Nova space and she
also has a bunch of sign prints beautiful
uh that is called First on Europa it's an acrylic painting and kelse also has this
painting for sale in Nova um you'll note the flag it's sort
of modified it it kind of reflects my notion of how I
politically reorganized United States might look in a 100 years or so we'll
see oh Cassini this is for
Abby I made a really uh sweet Digital model of the Cassini orbiter and made a
number of renderings showing it in various phases of the exploration of Saturn I know
Cassini is a big big favorite of Abby and so is
Saturn Joe is Linda spilker also does she own some of your
works I'm not familiar with that name yeah she was the principal
investigator uh for the Cassini Mission and I know that she has a lot of uh
Saturn art so I think she would really like this well if you can um if you can hook
me up with u contact information I'm sure will all right
thanks and this is an acrylic painting seeing the rings of Saturn from a Viewpoint
just over the cloud tops of Saturn the main Cloud tops so really opaque
ones incredible this one's digital this one shows the uh the big Vortex deep storm
at the pole of Saturn which these kind of perspectives
that I'm talking about because you know this is something where you really get to dive into the details
of the planet and uh
uh you know I think that uh I think this is where space artist really um
transport people into uh you know aspects of of uh Celestial observation
that they couldn't otherwise experience you know so
right because we are not yet in a position to take actual photographs of this thing from this perspective
right uh let's see I'm going to show off my uh picity nature Now by referring to
this Moon of Saturn as Enceladus which would be the correct more the more correct Greek
pronunciation they didn't have any soft Seas back then all the Seas were hard
Seas so it's just like the Boston Celtics basketball
team and moving a little further out into the solar system we see some hypothetical spacecraft investigating
the planet Neptune that's an acrylic painting it's another one I did for U
Time Life books although uh the original version was kind of boring really because uh it did not have the planet
and um so like two-thirds of the painting was just black or Stars so I
just um I added the the planet later and changed it
substantially it's a digital piece just a random big old telescope looking at
this little of its Dome yeah I love
that this is an acrylic painting
still got that one lying around
somewhere digital again a hypothetical Alien Planet a couple of moons and a
really sparkly colorful Starfield yeah you need some really light
sensitive eyes to see a Starfield like
that uh the texture on the the moon there in the foreground um was a from the surface of a frozen
pond I just took a photograph of it and mapped it onto a sphere to make it weird looking H Moon I do things like
that oh this is a really old piece this is one of my earlier ones this is a
actually a gouache painting and it involves a lot of airbrush which I don't do
anymore it shows uh well you can see what it is but it's kind of an
outdated visualization of what a black hole would look like because uh it doesn't incorporate
any of the optical Distortion that you see in uh in movies and things now when
you uh when they when they show black holes so it's kind of simplified but it's pretty I
think and this is this is a digital piece it's a frame dragging black hole
so the the uh the the Twisted grid um is supposed to reflect the the
rotation of the Black Hole uh which uh drags the structure of SpaceTime around
with it as it as it spins uh this is a view of the Andromeda
galaxy as seen from like over its shoulder yeah not from our perspective
so actually you're looking at the Milky Way galaxy in the distance in the upper
left cool and uh in the foreground the very
foreground is one of the um globular clusters associated with
M31 and this one is this was a commission it's an acrylic painting
it's it's called the everything of astronomy or something like that it's just a it's supposed to be like a
Showcase of all the some of the interesting things in the universe and the way we go about looking at them and
the cultural background of our study of the stars and everything I could think of a good way to squeeze in
yeah it's awesome so that's all I have uh thanks
for watching Joe I I'm curious about a
couple of things one is who were the Great uh who are the
artists that inspired you uh um Ron Miller uh Rick
[Music] sternbach were the Contemporary space artists who I really liked a lot and who
I deliberately imitated a lot when I was first getting started and beyond that
you know usual Chesley bonestell would be the primary one but
uh really I was it was seeing the work of Ron Miller and Rick sternbach at science fiction art shows and my my
careful study of them am I careful careful ripping off of their techniques that that really got me
started right Jeff wise comments here he says thanks Joe thanks a lot that was a
great ride through space uh Carlos says Joe buron is an extremely talented
artist his paintings are beautiful accurate and inspirational his art inspires me thank you so and uh Abby was
just helping me toh promote some of my work too which I very much appreciate
one of my novels and she she has her own copy of the cosmic cat book which she actually paid for herself which
impresses me yes that's great um so thanks yeah I I I
love your sense of humor too Joe it's great I love it um and what what medium
do you find these days anyways uh I know that artists evolve and change uh what
medium do you like to work in most today well it depends on what the outcome is
supposed to be if if I'm doing like something commercial um where speed is often
involved then digital is fast yeah Rel is fast but if I want to have something
permanent a physical object that I can hang on a wall or potentially sell or something then it's got it should be a
painting and in that case uh acrylic painting is is
fast um but there's certain things that I find difficult to do uh that are
better done in oil but uh painting in oil is substantially more time consuming
process for me um I know there are people in the world who can pay really
fast with oils but I'm not one of them I just had to put down a layer and let it
sit for a few days to dry while I think about it so yeah that's that's a pretty
timec consuming task right that's great and and out of all your Works what is
what is uh what do you look at again and again that uh you still get great
enjoyment from well my apartment here has like 20 paintings hanging here and there uh yeah
and and uh I guess the more personal ones the ones that relate to my own projects like
cosmicat um are the ones I'm most pleased to have the cover the some of
the cover art that I've done for some of my novels I'm happy to have those around some of the things I did really a
long time ago like back in the 80s I'm actually kind of tired of them
and I'm prepared to get rid of them if anybody's interested um right yeah I understand and uh I I
noticed that you have a a looks like a little refractor behind you there um uh
do you draw inspiration for your artwork by looking at the sky oh to some extent
although very little of the artwork I do really looks like what you see through an eyepiece sure yeah like you're not
going to look at M31 and see anything like what I painted right
and if you look at the Lagoon nebula or something you're going to see a little greenish whsp and not some massively
colored turbulent massive gas yeah know it's a amateur is a whole
different thing really I guess I don't really Associated that much with my space art if I'm looking at the moon or
something like that then that's helpful because you know you can actually see that quite
well so it's helpful for uh figuring how to paint craters and stuff like
that excellent and the colors of the planets too the actual colors if you wanted if you want to pick them
accurately and not do them at Super saturation like you normally
see it's a good it's a good idea to eyeball them through a telescope I would agree I would agree
well that's great um Abigail posted uh a link to Nova
space to to your uh artwork uh which is great um she says Joe's books uh wait 10
books um uh and she put a link up for the Amazon uh link for that so that's
that's great um Joe it's wonderful that you spent some time with us today you're
you know of course always welcome to come back to uh to the global star party
uh Kelsey is there anything that you'd like to add here
I think that pretty much covers it thank you for coming on the show with me Joe it's nice to have you
on thank you so much for arranging this and uh thank you Scott for having me on
yeah thank you thank you it's great to see you yes Abby it's good to see
you actually see both of you wonderful okay
all right so uh the next part uh next segment here of our uh Global star party
is uh the astrophotographers the imagers the astronomers um had a little taste of
it earlier with Jerry Hubble Kelsey thank you so much for being on Joe thank you again and Abigail thank you uh so
much for bringing the artistic side of astronomy to us so it's awesome it's
awesome um Gary I uh would like are you
are you there Gary yeah there you are Gary uh at this point of the of the uh
Global star party why don't you take it from here uh I'll let you play host um
uh and uh uh we have Richard Grace that's with us um we have uh Rodrigo
zela with us we might have Caesar brol join us a little bit later uh we could do a little bit
of course Jerry Hubble with uh um his uh Ed 165 out there at the Mark Slade
remote Observatory I did want to mention a little bit about the people that are
um I want to recognize some of the prize partners that we have with the Explorer Alliance and that would be of course
Gary Palmer astronomy um uh who has uh uh offered door prizes up for you know
an hour of time with him to do some IM processing or advice on how to get your
uh astrophotography up to the level that you like to like it to be of course once
you have a taste of what he can do um you'll want to keep uh studying with him
we have uh the vacuum of space which makes uh space art gifts um t-shirts and
that kind of thing that uh uh which you can have customized so if you're a winner you can pick anything from their
selection and customize it uh to whatever you'd like like it to be um and
of course the mark Slade remote Observatory is offering sessions uh uh
at the uh at their Observatory there uh in Virginia uh where you can learn about
exoplanet Imaging uh uh you know you'll learn science um uh you know and they
can they can teach you spectroscopy or or how to do photometry um or you could just take uh
beautiful images through one through their telescope there um and of course
explore scientific that is also giving uh uh door prizes uh in in this uh uh
selection so uh but uh Gary I'll let you take it away okay oh thanks Scott nice to uh see
all of the stuff so far uh it's been very interesting this usual lots of uh different guests and quite a variety so
um I been on for a couple of weeks and we've not had any real clear weather couple of bits here and there um so I've
just been grabbing uh OD test shots on things uh so if I go
to that screen there um Andromeda that was a test shot from a couple of weeks
back about an hour's worth of data that was as good as we got on that
and uh California nebula so that was some of a alen hun filter and then just
adjusted colors around something again just an hour's worth of data um but on
the Deep Sky front there's not really been a lot going on and the same on the solar but I think the last time I was on
we did some processing on the solar on the sunspots so I thought we would shift over and do some processing on the
actual prominences yeah and show people how to join them up and and run them together
so we've got two parts to this I just set myself back up again there we go
um we've loaded it up into Auto stacker going to set it up as a surface and
improve tracking run with a noise robust of Bel uh five and then um Global for
the um the area on it and we're going to analyze it up now I've already selected
a good area here we've done some of this before so it's pretty much the same for the prominences as what it is for the
the surface and we're going to analyze that up that should race away fairly
fast now I've already set this up the top here we captured 1,7 frames on this
and we're going to um stack 250 frames on
it okay so once that's come through we're
going to place the alignment points on the 104 on the alignment points for this image Place those on and then stack them
and I've already got this set to run straight through into um reg stacks for the sharpman and the
wavelets so you need to do exactly the same thing for the uh the actual surface shot which is going to join in here as
well that's it that's one through so we open that register and then we go and have a
little bit of adjustment around but generally I will do initial layer two and then run the uh Layer Two up to
around 35 to 40% somewhere around there then click do
all and the other thing we want to do in here is just brighten it a little touch so just so that we can pick the detail
out of the top of the prominence here it's just going to run the histogram up a little fraction if you double click in
the area that you want to see yeah then you your highlight box will go into that area and then same again click do
all that will do I save that
out we go back in do exactly the same thing for the
for the surface
sorry that'll do that same process exactly the same
settings for this so don't really need to change
anything and at the moment the sun's getting quite active the last couple of weeks been lots of sunspots starting to
rotate into view um not that I'm seeing many of them here but I'm watching them on the satellites and other people's
images which are coming in quite nicely and I'm getting quite jealous
um always the way we've gone into deep winter here now um so uh seeing on the
sun is not the best even if it is a clear date um but hopefully we get Sumit up this
week okay so same thing in now got an area selected there which we
can move down and then looks pretty good at the setting that we had before so we're just going to use
that click the door button and then we're going to save the
image back out okay once we've done that we can go
to the folder that they're in and we can get these opened up in uh
Photoshop there we go so the first thing is is to
crop the stack lines off of the outside depending on the size of the
sensor you can get um you can get flat areas in this area here it really
depends on the size of the sensor and the size of the telescope you're using and we're going to do exactly the
same on the uh prominent shop
okay so back to the surface area and we need to take this surface area around here so just going to click on the area
there and then we're going to use the lasso tool and come in here nice and
gentle not too long of lines on this otherwise you'll start to get points right way through sometimes you
can use the magnetic one but quite often you find as you're clicking on it it disappears and messes around so I've
generally found this is the easiest one to
use okay we're just going to copy that
out and then back to the prominence and paste it
in and what you need to do is is really align this so that you get in
[Music] your you shot the same um so you get in
an even area with the chromosphere line here on both sides once you found the rough area for that then you can crop
the whole image up so just come in crop this up and remove any excess
off okay every everybody is different on how they want the surface um some people like it inverted
some people like it like this as it as it shot it really depends on whether you want it artistic or whether you want it
to be scientific is the easiest way of putting it if you want it to be artistic
and you want to inverse it you really need to lighten this area up here before inversing it otherwise you have a a too
harsh a line so you can use the shadows and highlights that's brighten that up if
you want to darken this bottom area a little bit just uh increase the highlights a little fraction it's up to
you on on what way you go here once you've done that you can invert the shop
for the surface and then we can just adjust that with the levels to blend
in okay and then we might want to add some coloring at this point this is the
point where we would add coloring so we need to turn the sh sh shot first and then we need to go
into grow scale done flatten the image because you want to do your two colors separate for
both halves and then we're going to go into duone I've already got the colors set in
here um but if you want to set the colors up I do it as a trone so we keep the black and then I set two colors in
you can use whatever colors you want the world dra there at this point um um as to what you use these are going to be
mine um you'll notice it does turn this quite dark but we'll grab this back as we we're moving through so I actually
start with the prominence first that's my main area that I'm interested in once I get the color set for that yeah now we
need to run this back for RGB so we can adjust the colors you can
use color balance from now on so going bring a little bit of red in
little bit
yellow something like that and then we can add a little bit of contrast use the legacy mode and it'll
pull the background back down then we can adjust a bit of brightness into this to start brighten
up okay so moves to the surface shop exactly the same thing color
balance okay well now what I normally do is is move the surface shot up so that
we start to remove that white line there otherwise it really it doesn't look nice
um so we're trying to remove that if we've got any overexposure here we can bring that back in in a little while um
so let's just crop that
out okay little bit of contrast on the surface as
well nice
and then we can blend these two lines in there's a couple of different ways of doing this um generally I will Den noise
this a little bit now the surface just looks a little bit more noisy than the prominence so you can just run in while
they're still separate yeah have run some noise Des speckle it on the
surface and then if you want it's down to you whether you sharpen either separately um you could also so darken
down the background of the prominence a little bit more and adjust the colors in that you could use something like
selected color go to the blacks and you can pull the black in a little bit more in the
background we could bring in a bit more yellow into it I don't
understand sorry guys that was uh my Google
whatever okay we're just going to do that as
well and then once we come to the blending in um just going to move that up a
little touch more on there it's coming in somewhere around
there I'm just going to go across a little bit so you notice there I just got a
little bit of a straight line because I was doing this quite fast so therefore it's going to affect that if you do get
that problem if you find that your images out you can let me just crop that off like
that if you're really really struggling with this line
um we can select that layer and then we can go into free
transform and then if we hit the little um box here this will give us different
alignment points and I can just pull in that area there if I need to so if I'm very slightly out I can readjust this
line around it was my mistake on the beginning of that so that's the key
thing is just being nice and careful when you you you're using any of the tools in here and don't run too fast and
once you've done that you've pulled the line in a lot closer now so now what we can do is is blend the two shots
together so if we flatten the image we can get something like the blur
tool where are we there and then we can just run down that
line and blur that back into the image so the two join
together you want to do this on quite gentle settings this isn't something that you race
at okay cop the last little bit up and then if you want to sharpen it you can
sharpen it or you can do really whatever you want
and actually is join
together that's it there you
go that's really cool it's um you can spend a bit more
time on it you can sharpen it you can do other things sometimes sharpen it will just bring in a little bit too much
noise um but yeah that that's the simplest way of doing that what
telescope is that uh that would be with a quark and I think it was on a one 115
mil telescope so 115 mil triplet the qu's quite powerful so it's got uh 4.2
telecentric B in it um and then uh it's just really matching out of a camera so
vary conditions sometimes they they'd be sharper than that sometimes they' be poorer than
that awesome cool over to whoever whoever really
wants to go next yeah all right
so we have uh Rodrigo we've got uh Richard Grace um uh mol's an
astrophotographer Jerry's an astrophotographer who would like to go
next all right I guess I'll speak up all right um let's see last night I uh was
out and I shot the uh the rosette for a couple hours and um let's see share
screen here this is not completed I need more data on
this for sure but this is what I got from a
couple hours with the uh the ed80 last night and uh it is a uh a bit windy
outside and got some rolling clouds and uh we had some technical difficulties here at the house I went to use to the
sink and I was like why are my feet getting wet so I uh didn't really have full setup time uh as a matter of fact
uh the computer was uh still stacking this uh five minutes before the show
started so I definitely didn't have any time to uh do any editing and I'm planning on collecting some more data
but uh that's the rosette from last night and uh not too much else uh here
to share at the moment honestly all
right nice shot
you know one of the things I really enjoy about the rosette is all the dark nebulosity that's going in towards the
center you know where there's so much star formation going on here it's uh
it's a really amazing object to look at it really is I I was blown away it was
the first time I ever imaged it and just the first time it popped up in sharp cap with the with the stretch on I was like
oh wow this is what have what have I been missing I should have shot this last year that's right but uh I I I knew
that uh I definitely need to to get some more data on it um before it'll stretch out without quite so much noise and
stuff that was coming through on that but uh I last night was my first
time the U little spacer job here uh in between my camera and my uh my field
flat flattener uh focal reducer um I finally got that kind of nailed in
uh because the specific rings that come to give you the 55 mm of back focal
distance uh then I added a filter drawer which was a different spacing and that
compensates for some things and then it came with a certain amount of shims but it didn't add up to enough for in
between the the differences I had you know an 8 millimeter one and a 10 millimeter one and all this stuff so I
ended up getting a an adjustable uh one after measuring so and I got a couple
extra spacers too but I managed to make the adjustable one work real good so for
the first time I've actually had my uh refractor with a semif flat
field oh I see I see yeah so I'm getting ready to actually like all all the shots
you've seen on Andromeda and stuff like that that I've been messing around with over the last month it basically all been one night test shots to try and get
my uh my back space perfect I see I see so that's always a that's a bit of a uh
job for everybody you know just to get that that last uh those last tweaks in
you know to get get everything dialed in for your your rig so yeah a lot of uh
field flatteners say 55 millimeters on them mine says 56 plus or minus
[Laughter] four well you know there every one of
them is going to be slightly different that's true you know because they're all kind of individual Optics and you are
trying to uh reach this perfect pinpoint focus and um you know so it's uh the the
variability in Optics from from uh you know unit to unit uh can can be there I
plus or minus four uh I think is kind of covering the manufacturers um adding some margin for
them but you know I imagine because even though most of them are made for one telescope
there still marketing is for people use all different kinds of instruments that's very true you know so that's
right that's right well thank you Richard for sharing that with us tonight you also you also talked Scott about how
these are really handmade instruments even in in the sales that we do they're not they're not they're
not that's right you know they're they're not made like uh well for instance like space Optics are you know
for example example uh uh you know where everything is U the consistency from one
optic to another has to be as tight tolerance as the kind of figure that you're going after um I remember talking
to uh Roland Christian at astrophysics about um uh the accuracy of Optics at
one point and he had mentioned that he works on an optic until he thinks it's
the best it can be okay uh yeah astrophysic astrophysics refractors are
really kind of the Rolls-Royce of refractors out there um uh everyone would like to own one you know um uh but
uh you know he takes his time with it uh it takes years to get one um uh but uh
uh you know once he has it once he gets it to the best he thinks it can possibly be he stops okay he's not going to
continue to um to work work on it um because he knows that it's going to be
superb uh and that that's what most Opticians are working for uh uh towards
um uh you know if they were building an instrument with with multiple Optics in
it like a a multi- you know refractor system for some sort of special
application uh getting consistency from you know making sure that that refractor
is 1,000 mm and this is not a,1 or 1,0 millim but 1,000 exactly okay that's
very difficult to do uh and W require specialized uh polishing equipment to
achieve it so that kind of spec though focal link
spec it's not that necessary to be exact on that it's the curvature and the
correction is really a lot more important than a FOC end up focal length I think that's right that's right right
so it's all after you know what whatever it is that you're trying to achieve you know so um but uh you know there's uh
astrophotographers know that this variability exists and uh will compensate for it there a lot of
difference on the cameras now that is you know we've said it before that the size cameras themselves the depth of the
chip exactly where is that CH there's so many variables in the equipment these
days um fill flaters and redu of the Bane in my life um you know right and
that's just not getting enough time you know the last clear night I had there
was sort of three units to get out there and test uh all in a couple of hours and then you're messing around with the
spicing you're messing around with all of the different things and you're putting filters in there to see what goes on then how it affects it and then
swapping the cameras around trying two three different cameras on that particular setup check that works uh and
so on so um they're not easy even when you know exactly what you're doing or supposedly know what you're doing right
you know uh they do take a bit of working out um and it's not an exact
science um you know and everything else that you got you know High Cloud running
through poor atmospherics jet streams all of these different things that all jump in there and they all play around
with this um so measurements are never exact when you've got all of this going
that's true you know as as manufacturers and not only us but as a manufacturer
but all telescope manufacturers get asked questions about their equipment like you know what's what's the periodic
error correction uh of your of the mount um they seem to only focus on periodic
error when there's you know many orders of error that you know no one ever asks
is there any tooth to Toth gear error on on the mounts you know which of course there there is right and so um uh you
know they uh questions about backspacing you know backspace distance uh uh what
is the um you know what what is the you know the uh you know correction level
what is the you know many of these things and and I think that many people
entering into the hobby think that every one of them is going to be nailed down to the exact millimeter uh but that but
that's not true that's not true they're as Jerry said they're handmade instruments every one of and you have to
balance you have to balance all the error terms also that's a big thing in engineering you don't want to focus on
one error and then you don't have then you leave something else that's really causing the bulk of your problem to just
leave it go you know beginners also don't understand how important focus is in terms of just as long as you're
tracking is your tracking can cause blurry images but so can you're focusing
if you don't have a precise focuser than your so basically right the only way I
got good at solar was the rule book out the window everybody was saying no you can't do this you can't do that this
won't work with this that won't work with that and it's just like ignore it ignore it and start working on your own
thing because nowadays there are a lot more variables in the equipment and you
know as Richard was saying they're you know putting in things and they got different space for this and a different
measurement for that and so on so that there's a lot more variables right the way through the Imaging train now but
yeah one of your key things is is a good focuser and if you haven't got a good focuser give up yeah because you're
really on a real um back step there and
the other thing is is bearing in mind checking your focus throughout your Imaging run you know there's nothing
worse than getting in in the morning and the temperatures changed you know by 10 degrees and put the focus out and it
doesn't take a that amount of focus is a fraction of a turn but in an image your
stars are all out you know you can see Halos around them you can see all sorts of other problems so your first set of
images when you first started the Run are very very good and I always say to people when you move to your next Target
recheck your focus yeah it's so important with this equipment now right certainly is here anyway we get anything
up to 15° temperature change of the night so um you need to be on top of the
focus really good all right let me let me uh share my screen real quick and I'll show you I've been on Mars because
the clouds have been coming in and out but I wanted to show you real quick what um what the sky does and the seeing's
getting worse and this is what the smearing you get with the the high clouds you can see in the shutter or
through the slit of the observatory you see those clouds coming in and out uh but but this is this is kind of what you
get that you have to deal with and um so there's the best equipment in the
world you still have to deal with what the reality of the image that you get based on the sky and this is what you
call seeing limited observing um this is what you get and so
it's good to have good equipment the best you can get and afford but you got to take into account your location also
and and you know you can spend a ton of money on equipment and it only be good
maybe one day out of the year to use the maximum performance of the equipment and you're limited otherwise by your
conditions so that's something always to keep in mind when you're buying equipment where are you going to locate that
equipment uh to observe it's one of the reasons why SATs
in the UK have certainly gone downhill because the weather over the last four or five years has gone downhill you see
Mars went away there because of the clouds there's a couple of comments here
in a question or a comment in a question Andrew corkill is saying uh he does he's
a visual astronomer he says focus is so important for close to double Stars also
the dampening time on the mount is important um Jim Norwood has a question
he says do any of you use the batoff mask for focusing or do you just eyeball it
y yeah use them all the time um it does depend
on the system and how lazy I am if I've got a filter wheel on there and I'm Imaging mono then I have a tendency to
do it on the screen um some of the software I use that has uh focusing AIDS
in it so I will use that um but if I my first initial setup I will normally run
off of a mask yeah and that's normally fine yeah right in the observatory I
just use the focusing tool with the camera and do measurements to do the
best focus with the autofocus system we have on Max and DL sure
okay all right so um uh who else do we have here
um what do you think about uh let's bring on
Rodrigo Rodrigo is in Las Arena Chile and um good yeah and he is where I went
for the solar eclipse yeah right he is the um he is the owner of North Optics
the only telescope retailer in that area so that's
tonight few minutes ago is clothing now is is it's CL Skype oh
great I take the picture for the mag clothes is another sector of the
mag cloes it's a a group of nebula and I share my screen oh so this is a
live image right this is
um do you see my screen now it's coming up okay it's coming
up did you see yes we see it this area is
um in the in the Maran cloth the the large
Maran cloth is a many nebula for a a
alpha wow this this this picture is with
the 4 in with focal reducer for my
for more F View and this
view so this this is an image you just made tonight correct tonight now now
live yes it's one live of 10 minutes okay so I will tell you rodrico
this is the first time we've seen the melanic cloud live uh uh from uh the
southern hemisphere so this is really cool thank you this is uh
um this another picture this is the danta
neula mhm with [Music] my Isn't that cool
yeah do you see the picture yeah when I was when I was down there uh it was
coming up like at 4 in the morning so I didn't get to image it um but I did get to look at it through a big giant
dobsonian and wow it was something else it's it's incredible nebula um it's it's
great is big and nebula I take this picture last
weekend with a a telescope for a more focal it's
beautiful and the last imag is
uh the a neula is a
oh yeah the classic photo for the neula
right with the Running Man and
I I I shck with you my my screen for the telescope
sure um this is the the software for a
capturing for Imagine do you see the P the the stream
yes yes this is the the the picture
in is a one L of 10 minutes with
the 294 camera nice
um do you have a light pollution filter on there or no yes I I put a
the pollution filter is a dual narrow band for oh
only the oxygen and H Alpha H one of
those like dual band um for color cameras one of those dual band
filters in HS yes is is is like to the L
extreme yeah yeah yeah I want one of those yeah with with the color camera
this filter is great yeah yeah I want one for my I have a 294 as well and San Francisco is
pretty light polluted so I would love to have one of those right yes the the band is l band
for seven narrow met is very very narrow band awesome okay this is my wow it
awesome it was awesome thank you it was great to to see some live images from
the southern hemisphere so thank you very much Rodrigo than SC yeah good night good
night thank you okay so uh let's um let's go back to
our group here oh we got Caesar brolo here Cesar I I know that you had a hit a
long day at the office um absolutely yes a busy a busy busy day
yes Zar runs the astronomy business at Optica sraco in Buenos Aries Argentina
and uh um so it's it's great to see you today um H how is your how is everything
down there today fine and we are preparing a lot of different things uh for the eclipse in
Argentina we are preparing the the trip preparing the equipment uh we are manufacturing solar
Shades and filters uh and we are Distributing um today we have the
typical trbl and um uh you know every day is is a a chall Cheng
uh when we prepare a lot of things and I I have
a um really a huge huge work a lot of work for the next week yeah uh we are
going with my family and a lot of people uh from buenus
to to province of Rio negro and we are going to the frutas we are uh working in
the place uh to have the place of is Veta finally and um
the we are working because a lot a lot in for repayment
transmission uh you know a lot of I am I I was working in give support to the
local TP in rro h preparing filters tomorrow I have
a a lot of work preparing filters and um
of course everything now next three weeks I are going talking about only
only eclipse and when the people every time know more about the eclipse because
in the media all people talk talking about the covid-19 you
know uh but in the media every hour is
is every hour is the people talk about exist an
eclipses when I said yes and where and this is this is exactly the things of uh
of of how um we need to prepare a lot of of work for this um well of course that
really we are happy to to to be be a part of this event un
fortunately really we we missed uh the possibility to to receive a lot of
friends like you from from everywhere it's it's really sad but well we we we
try to to share uh in the best way as
possible with everyone live image or something of
course right and well this
is this was my my day was really really busy this too busy for you today yeah
it's probably going to get crazier and crazier as you get closer to the eclipse yes absolutely yes yeah I I
remember yeah 2017 Eclipse up here and uh you know myself and uh of course of
course Jerry remembers all the Mayhem that was going on at that time and but
all Sol Shades from everyone yes I remember yes the craziness yes was crazy
thec glasses Fiasco the eclipse glass Fiasco yes yes yes you you dream with
with solar Jades in the night I I say solar Shades today or
solar Googles I don't know with the name you need but you know you dream in the night when you go to sleep you Contin to
see the solar shade filters yeah come on that's right just I I receive for the
manufacturer the part of you know the the part is made in C okay they need
some technical parts or you know or more film yes but here is a 1M I receive
calling from the people they say yes okay we need more film or we need more I
don't know yeah right crazy you're manufacturing eclipse glasses down there
yes yes we manufactured last year in San Juan Eclipse uh yes we import of uh from a
very very good quality uh fil manufacturer or distributor I don't know if really he's
a manufacturer but we try we we um made the same test because you know the the
iso um 12
312 um dot two is a number of of a s o
um uh spe specification because it's a it's a really safe film because do have
a very very good future for ultraviolet and infrared um
Lang wees Lang wees sorry and um in the
IR the er um part of the spectrum is safe for for the sensors of cameras and
for ER of course for ultraviolet is safe for your eyes and me like the the the
first thing that like we are a a we are an opticians
really um we need to offer something safe for the people and we are telling
all time about how how the people um
need to see in a safe need watch in a safe in a safe way uh to the sun with
the proper filters right right well you know it's
uh it's important that um uh you know they are getting their eclipse glasses
from a reputable supplier such as yourself and uh um you know because many
many people want to see the partial phases of the eclipse of course when you get to totality you can take the eclipse
glasses off because of course the Moon is completely covering the uh oh my go
the Sun so there's there's uh situations where people you know who are new to
this will go out to you with a group or whatever and leave the eclipse classes on the entire time and they miss yes oh
yes yes absolutely we have last year the in the in the yes in the observation
point that we we was more that uh 5,000 people only in this point and of course
that uh um a woman in a in a scenary with a microphone she she was very very
smart to talk with the people okay glaces out when the when the when the
totality was complete and the people say
wow but anybody yes tell them to take it off
then they just yes no no yes keep their yes what's very very fun is it keep keep
your glasses keep your glasses okay keep out uh yes it's okay okay it's safe now
but this was excellent because you can s 5,000 people making the same at the same
time yes this was amazing it was like
Pala rock festival or something because all right my God that's right yes but a
total CP will affect you in a way that really will change your life you know if
you absolutely incredible spectacle you know a partial fa a partial phase
eclipse is interesting uh yes anybody but uh uh when you see
totality uh yes after I'm before that goes all the way down you can feel it in
your heart your stomach your brain absolutely it's God absolutely I
remember last next last year was my first uh total eclipses
I took only two pictures with my cell phone because I was so Astin so
impressive with this right yes I of course I I I work at a lot in in the
organization you know that but when I start to to to see this watch
it's a craziness and you understand why the people kill yourself in the in the
Asian times and you say come on if you if you don't have an explanation of this you
think that you are watching a a hole in the sky yeah yeah you think it's the end of the world right of course come on yes
now I understand because I said no the people are Asing people to you know
Egyptian or say no they was crazy no right was a there was a a completely
reason about to think that was a a terrible event they don't have the the
information that we have today and they say okay it's the end okay we need to kill anybody everybody you kill everyone
yeah I mean it's so unreal it feels it would you know if you had no idea what it was it would seem like uh like the
world is ending the gods are coming down
yes the first time I saw one Molly I was on Mona um and I was filming it for
there's a science program called Nova television program and I was part of the Nova film group for that and so I had of
course seen thousands of pictures and and was you know I thought I was going
to be prepared for this you can't be prepared for this the
actual spectacle is so mindblowing uh professional astronomers are running out
of the observatories uh and their their jobs are just like dropped yes looking
looking at this and uh uh even myself I you know I I had three motion picture
cameras running I have a a camera behind my head and everything and I just it it
was all I could do just to maintain you know it was just uh it was absolutely amazing absolutely amazing I have my
personal video of the moment that's year where I told many very very very
explicit words you know explicit like well I can I can repeat this spish or no
no no I say come on how I tell this because I say you know because was so so
big The Sensation that is is more that that of course that we have the
information we explain to everyone oh yes it's the moon it's the totality you
know you can see the the crown but when you are in the the place it's
the same when the people watch the the light light noron leges or there are
this is the type of things that are amazing we feel really small in these
times yes I was like after after I had my whole sequence automated um when like
for the first one I went to in 2017 and I was kind of wandering around afterwards kind of unsure what to do
with my hands you know just unsure like what to do and I I
didn't put the solar cover back on my telescope for like a minute after totality but luckily my camera sensor
did not fry or anything it was a very small a very small telescope right
yeah so what Molly what was your feeling like when you saw was this your first eclipse or you've done the 2017 one was
my first one and then got to do the 2019 one in Chile as well right so how about your first one what what did you what
was your impression it was it was so unreal it was so like
alien uh and yet natural at the same time I remember writing down afterwards
um it was it was cold uh like the the air temperature dropped like 30 degrees
I was in Wyoming uh so uh you in Casper during that time I was in Casper yeah okay I was there too so yeah I
yeah I went out for uh for Alcon out there and kind of combined the trip um
but yeah it was it it was there were two totally different experiences because the the one in 2017 I was there for
Alcon and I was with a group of other astronomers and during the eclipse it
was silent everybody was just observing and like taking in the moment and or
clicking away their cameras and it was just silence but when I was at the one in in
Chile I I was with a group of people who had who were not astronomers never seen an eclipse before I was doing a lot of
Outreach in in Spanish like explaining what was gonna happen and stuff like that you know Googling Google
translate words like like Shadow and Umbra and words I didn't know off hand um but uh yeah and that in that
time you know I I was counting down for people um using the eclipse timer that I had on my phone I was saying it out loud
and the last last like 10 seconds I didn't even need I was trying to shout out the time but the whole crowd was
just yelling and shouting and going crazy like in the final 10 seconds and completely different experience and and
for the first one I because I had everything fully automated I I was just running running the one camera it felt
like it went on for a long time but this one I had my my rig was automated but I was doing some handheld shots as well
and as a result of that that one felt like it was only like 10 seconds long goes by like same
length yeah totally different experience and uh getting to share it with people who were who were not astronomers um was
actually amazing and um seeing people with like headphones and smoking kind of
zening or like people who are just like losing their minds like it was it was the whole range the whole range of
people it was so awesome that cool yeah we are a little czy in sou in South
America yeah yes normally in the beach when when in the set in the Set uh of the Sun the
said uh normally we we clap come on if you have an eclipse you you turn
completely crazy the people here and well Chile is the same
totally totally yes
e Thompson says the last eclipse that happened at my home uh I realized it too late and all
the glasses I could find were sold out or would not arrive in time so I
made a pinhole projector from a cereal box which totally works for looking at
Marshal faces right my parents did that for the uh the partial phases that they
were getting up in up in Washington state yeah Aaron observed he said even the
Birds went quiet you know which that that's that's the other thing that can happen I I had friends that were on a um
uh for for that that Eclipse that went over monaya and Baja California back in the 90s uh uh I had a friend that was on
a cruise ship and during totality what happened is Big schools of dolphins just
started bursting out of the water what like in celebration that's amazing isn't that
amazing you know that somehow know that so yeah yeah I don't know if it was just
the change in lighting or what they sensed but uh it's like uh you know
they're pretty smart animals so you know I'm I'm I'm very interested to uh to
know if they somehow knew you know but um on the on the topic of people knowing
uh Chile made extra sure that every single person in the entire country knew
that there was going to be a solar eclipse I mean it was it was all over the media it was all they talked about
uh there was signs like all the like this like the city banners and
everything was about the eclipse down to like like the trash cans had been
painted to advertise the eclipse the trash cans right
right trash can get all the way through the elky valley and like just
everywhere that's true when I was coming through uh through Customs um my bag
with all my Astro gear was just like an x-ray black hole so they had me open it up and I was like explaining his Spanish
like oh the eclipse and they're like oh yeah yeah yeah every everybody's coming in with
their equipment get out of here you know right Gary when was the first time you
saw a total eclipse I haven't you haven't oh oh my God I was gonna so
sorry yeah yeah yeah you have to you have I've done bent partials
um and some of those have been almost total um but I I was going to go out to
the US on the last one and it it just got all got too late and I looked at it
and it was all going too mad and I just went I do it another time oh my goodness
someone needs to sponsor you to go to an eclipse yeah yeah um so probably going
to be looking at the next big run in us um 2024 April 8th yeah hopefully an
anular in 2023 and then there's one in 2024 there's actually a place in Texas
both eclipses go across the same point so yeah yeah I'm plan on going to Texas
for 2024 I'm not gonna mess around with with skies in other states no no no no
yeah that's why I went to Wyoming because uh I was in I was in Ohio at the time and I was like I'm not going to mess around with clouds in Kentucky or
Tennessee Steve ebson is watching right now he says I've done two total eclipse
two total solar eclipses so far the first one in 1999 in the English Channel
I had tears in my eyes I blobbed like a
baby the second I took Images auto auto while I watched you know that would be
the best combination if you could have your camera running automatically while
you watch it because if you're like totally focused on your camera gear
you're going to really miss something very very special okay um U by the same
joken you don't want to just watch it and not image it you know so right SP
months perfecting my sequence in backyard and icon I practiced with the
with the eclipse timer I practiced with like different cables and seeing like what was going to affect what like I
spent months preparing for uh fully automating my rig and it went off like
perfectly it helped that there was there was sunspots on the Sun for 2017 so uh focusing was was much easier and then I
the the one in 2019 was almost the same length so I actually was able to reuse the same sequence with a few
modifications which was really nice I only had to spend like a week on that one now Rodrigo you saw the one in uh uh
uh last year correct and Los
Serena Rodrigo he's getting himself unmuted I think
yeah Imaging Ison yeah H how did you feel about the
total eclipse last year um was that your first Total Eclipse
experience was last year the first time you saw a
total eclipse think he's Frozen I think he's
Frozen too yes well when he comes back when he
comes back he'll say what it is yeah yeah I'd have to run mine rote because as soon as it went to totality everybody
be asking me questions on how to actually image it yeah their equipment
working right all of those sorts of things so I I'd either have to be in an area where there's yeah or run this
system remote right oh my goodness yeah that was a surprise to me Gary I thought
oh yeah I've seen five total eclipses or whatever um the the ones over here um
which were quite a few years back they were sort of clouded out and um there were areas that did see it and that
that's been pretty much the same with the Venus Transit uh the last Venus
Transit I traveled about 400 miles it was the one point that I worked out
where it would be clear and it cleared 20 minutes after it finished transi in the sun oh no was the first place to yeah um
but it was 20 minutes too late and and that's just life we're doing this you
know you take the chance and you know wherever you travel that that might
happen that's right that's right I did catch the uh the second half of the
Mercury Transit after Sunrise back in November last November oh my gosh that was a year ago I missed that one yeah I
got that that that was a real tight one that that was literally clouds right the
way through and there was just a five minute Gap um and actually left it running on video in the end yeah just to
see whether we would cash it and we did get it but the one before that couple of years back um that was brilliant had
that right the way through the day um but again had to travel for that you could tell there was going to be clouds
in for the day here traveled sort of a couple of hundred miles and yeah had a
fantastic day imagine right right Rodrigo uh we were
trying to ask you how you felt about the total eclipse last year what was it your
first time to see a total eclipse it's my first time in total eclipse uhhuh and
and what what was what was your feeling what was your impression amazing
iset amazing experience great experience and this in this occasion
I ER go to the cond condo in
the in the mountains with a a lot of friends for um a astronomer of Chile
about a 20 25 a astronomer for for five days
yes oh the camp in in the mountains between
the too El lasa and see the center sun
is is a great SP with the five five night ER observation after photography
and the end the the eclipse is very very
special and for the next eclipse in the United States I I will go to the this
Eclipse I I travel with the United States this eclipse in the SE in Chile
is very complicated for the for the co in the that's true that very
true by that time we should have um certainly have everything under control
you know so I think that uh you know I've been really paying attention to the vaccination uh uh possibilities and
stuff like that and that's looking ve very promising so far so I certainly hope by 2024 we've got it under control
oh my goodness maybe we'll just take the chance anyways and go so I don't know that point yeah screw it I'm going yeah
oh no right Richard did you see have you seen any of the eclipses have you did you see the 2017 eclipse for example no
no not yet okay well it's something you got it this is this is definitely you
know they say there a bucket list things that you got to do absolutely this is something you got to do you know it's
for sure it's for sure it will uh it it is just beyond amazing it's Indescribable when you see it um I think
it it affects everybody differently when when I saw my first Total eclips
literally I got this feeling of impending doom okay like really I could
understand how early humans could have thought this is it this is this is
something's very very wrong okay right now and and uh the feeling I got um
Molly I'm sure you've seen The Wizard of Oz you know uh when I was a child and I saw the Wizard of Oz and the Great Oz
came out and there was all these flames and stuff everywhere that was my feeling
okay it was it was scary actually uh because um in that uh I think it was a
1991 Eclipse um uh we had four minutes of totality from Mona Baja California
had 7 Minutes of totality which is incredible and it was during uh um solar
maximum and so there were these huge prominences coming off the sun you could see them naked eye it was incredible you
know and uh so um I'll never forget it I'll never forget it deep te if you
haven't seen a total eclipse make sure you do you know make sure you do you
know right well goodness um I don't know if there's
anything else anyone would like to share if you have Rodrigo do you have another image you'd like to share at this point
or no it's called now I know I take the picture for
the horse neula in the next party I see
speak thanks okay thank you thank you anything else you'd like like to share
Gary no I'm fine I didn't know whether Molly wanted to run through her processing that she put up that would be
quite interesting to see all right I can do that um you know not not an
exhaustive uh tutorial or anything but if if there's interest in kind of seeing
absolutely like absolutely sure uh so I just um like yester yesterday yeah I
finished it yesterday uh um finished processing CC 1333 which is a Dusty
reflection nebula with a couple of of hydrogen spots in it uh up in pereus so
um I can run through that and it's it's an interesting U one to show because it's not a uh it's a very difficult
Target to get from light pollution and I really wasn't sure what was going to come out of it because my Subs were pretty bad so I'll go ahead and uh share
my screen here this one all right so uh here's the completed
image um not not my favorite of the images I have but I think it makes it an
interesting one to to process because it is not really ideal data so I kind of have to do some do some stuff to it to
oh wow make it work um so let me start by showing what one of the subframes looked like for for reference and I'm um
I'm going to uh debayer it real quick because so this is done um with my zwo
294 MC Pro okay um so the so it's a color onot camera from zwo and this is
on my Takahashi refractor from my backyard in um the East Bay Area so
we're in bort 7 here and this is what a single five minute subframe looks like
with the light pollution filter in particular it's the astronomic CLS CCD
okay so as you can see I can kind of see some of the stars in there a little bit of nebulosity uh and not really much else
but uh process ing is is magical and out of that comes goodness so uh I'm not
going to show every single step because we'll be on here all night if I do that but basically the first thing I do well
the very first thing I do is I I use the blink script or sorry the blink process to uh flip through all of the images and
um and you delete the ones that had bad tracking or clouds rolled through or had
any other issues so I blink through all of those and then I uh I calibrate them using uh the image
calibration process uh and I I apply a dark and a flat now this image was taken
over time span of September 23rd to November 14th so I've got several sets
of flats that I have to apply because I've um I swapped cameras back and forth for doing uh virtual Star Party um
streaming and stuff like that I've uh had to move move things around and every time you have every time you even if I
thread it back on it's never going to thread back on in exactly the same spot there'll be a slight rotation so I got
to retake my flats every time I take the camera on and off oh wow so I have a different set of flats for um multiple
different dates uh you can see it's these ones here and then um
I've had to I've had to boost my flats um I take them at about where I have the
Instagram Peak about halfway up but it's overcorrecting so I actually used
pixelmath and bump up the uh just every pixel in
the image by 0.15 um is well 0.15 for my color camera 043 for my for my
monochrome is kind of the magic numbers I've settled on to get my flats to actually correct properly this is a
recent discovery uh I've I've been having issues with flats for months and glad to have finally figured out how to
fix it wow so so how did you was that a tip from another astrophotographer
or and came across a solution on one of the forums I can't remember which Forum
in particular but um somebody mentioned trying to um uh adding adding an offset to their to their image and that
actually worked for me and actually I happened to have the same exact offset value work for me as did the person on
the Forum oh that's interesting that yeah that was very interesting
uh yes so I calibrate all the lights with uh Master dark that matches their temperature and exposure time and the
flat uh for each set of dates uh after that I go into subframe
selector I should have opened the one that H um and this is what I used to
kind of further Co the list of images so I had like 165 after I went through and
blinked through them and then at this point is where I'm going to make an even even stiffer cut so I put in my subframe
scale and my gain which for this camera is 0.111 that's a manufacturer uh actually no I think I
measured that one there's a script in pix and site uh
called see it's under instrumentation no it's under uh I can't remember which one of
these it's under but there a there's a script in here that will measure your uh image statistics and tell you what your
gain and stuff is which is really helpful that's cool um yeah so uh so I put in those values I let it run and then I put
in a formula that I got on um light Vortex astronomy it's a really long
formula um for for waiting and basically what this long looking formula is doing
is it's um prioritizing images that have better full width half Maxes better
eccentricities and better signals and noise ratios uh so that the H have a waiting value so that when I go to stack
them the better images get higher priority in the stacking math than the lower images and then I um looking at
the eccentricity and the full width half Max I usually um put in some
Cuts like the one I used for this one was um an eccentricity of less than 0.6 and a full width half Max less than
eight and that cuts out all the frames that don't meet those criteria this is really kind of wishy-washy I I just kind
of um I have some ideas of what values tend to work well um at least for the
eccentricity the full width half Max changes based on your um your Imaging system but uh yes I made the cut and
that that left me with 88 frames at the end of the day then I debayer those
because uh so these are are um monochrome or sorry they're color images
but in their raw format they're still black and white so like you can see each the pixels here uh kind of the red green
green blue Bayer pattern and de bearing them turns this back into a color
image uh next I do registration which uh is the star alignment procedure back in
subframe selector I looked for which frame had the highest score and I used that as the reference image it's not uh
required but um it gives you a higher chance for success in registration when you have stars that are really good um
and uh your SNR signal to noise ratio is good um so I just always do that and a a
star alignment lines up all the frames make sure that they're all in the exact same spot because there's you know I
dither so that I I can shift the hot pixels around and uh there's little
rotations and there's just little movements because Mount doesn't track that great and this lines it all
up finally I stack using image integration and uh according to light
Vortex astronomy site they recommend using uh linear fit clipping if if you have more than 20 frames windsorized
Sigma clipping if you have between 10 and 20 and sigma clipping if you have fewer than 10 and what this is doing
this is a rejection algorithm so if you have satellites or airplane streaks or cosmic rays in your images which you
undoubtedly will then uh the rejection algorithm um basically uses statistics
to uh remove those signals from your image so if you have images with satellite streaks you can totally stack
those and just use a rejection algorithm um and they they won't show up in your image unless you only have a couple of
frames and just the statistics aren't good enough so I I stack it and I end up with
Sor I'm running two screens over here I end up with this
guy so this is the Stacked image um now it's when it first comes out it's going
to look more like this and then you have you have to apply a screen stretch so that you can actually see what's going on um until you actually stretch the
data later on in a later step so you can see like colors are definitely not right
uh ton of background light because the light pollution here is really bad uh so the first thing I do is I crop it I'm
going to use a crop that I already saved out using the dynamic crop
process um so I can cut out all the areas that don't line up get go on
that close that out now um there's a few processes in pix inside that make it
worth every dang Penny and it's it's $272 us right now with the exchange rate
on the Euro it's €230 Euro um and some
processes in here are worth every penny and one of those is dynamic background extraction I'm going to open up one that I already uh did just to save some time
oops I already had that open so um some people use automatic background
extraction and I have't haven't had as much success with that it tends to do like uh it tends to not work very well
for me so I do damate background extraction and uh these are the settings
I usually use as far as like the um radius of the sample points and how many
samples well the samples for row is going to change depending on how big the image is but some people use fewer some
people use more it it kind of depends on your on your Imaging conditions and your camera and your taste and stuff like
that the important thing is to go through and look at every single one of your test points to make sure none of them are sitting on top of stars or on
top of nebulosity um to make sure they're not on top of nebulosity you kind of have to
go look at other images and guess where it might be um or just do it anyway you can kind of see here like so the the
image in this little square is an inverted image of what is inside that sample point so that you can make sure
that you're not on a star so star looks like this G to move the point off of there once I've got all the points
adjusted um I go through and um I I tend to leave the tolerance and relaxation
and smoothing factor at their default settings the pixon site developers do a really good job of figuring out what
good default settings are and you oftentimes don't need to change them that much um and this uh now depending
on what you want to do you can change them for doing some specific things um like comment processing and stuff like
that but um sometimes I'll lower the tolerance um but the background is so
high in here that it ended up just making it a mess so I just left it at one and a half so I apply
that and it gives you well and also know I use subtraction there's a big debate
as to whether subtraction or division is better both work I haven't really noticed the difference between the two of them so I use subtraction pre-stretch
and if I have to do it again post stretch then I use division but everybody will tell you a different answer on that one so I stretched the
background here's what it looks like it's it's um sucked out a lot of that background light pollution
and here's what the background subtracted image looks like oh wow now as you can see I've it also does some
color correction in that step as a as a kind of happen stance of subtracting that background and you can see that
it's noisy and that's because we've subtracted enough of the background that we've hit the noise floor um on here
with with h as low as I can get with all the light pollution I have so but don't worry we're going to take care of that
um and you can see I didn't I didn't have a complete set of flats there was uh a couple of nights that I didn't have
a set for um so I still have some some dust spots in there I'm going to have to deal with later um but yeah so this is
the background attracted image I can close out my
others and close these all right so the next thing I do at this point is I I do
um you can denoise before stretching and denoise after stretching in this case I had to do some of both because it's a
very noisy image um but I always do the pre-stretch noising so for that I make a
luminance mask first to protect the bright areas because you can see in the bright areas it's not as noisy and you
want to be able to maintain that detail because anytime you Den noise you're really just blurring the image to kind
of cover up the noise and if you don't apply a a luminance or or like a brightness mask then you'll also blur
the areas of your of your image that you want to have so I use the um uh the
extract luminance button here and uh get the luminance now masks only work
if they're if they're stretched if they're nonlinear U pretty much in every instance that I can think of and there's
a quick and dirty way to stretch it is um if you open screen transfer function and you click the little radioactive
button to do the auto stretch you can click and drag a new instance of screen transfer function into the Bottom bar of
histogram transformation and that takes the stretch the screen transfer transfer
function estimat at and applies it to after I hit apply it will make it a
permanent stretch on the image so I'm going to um uh reset the the screen
stretch take that away and then hit apply on the on the histogram transformation which permanently
stretches it and then um I like to I reset that and then I like to clip the
the blacks for for my luminance frame because I want all the dark areas to be denoised um so I go ahead and just kind
of clip the black areas there using the the clip Black Point button here or clip
Shadows okay minimize that and uh I've made the mask menu a
little icon menu here um if if you haven't done that yet um it's under mask
select mask I'm going to select that extracted
luminance frame and I'm going to invert it so all the red areas are protected
and the less red areas are are what's going to be attacked by whatever process
I'm going to do next which is going to be the D noising I'm gonna I'm gonna turn I'm gonna um hide the The Mask so
that I can see what's going on here but you know that it has a mask on it when this bar is orange over here all right so uh the parameters I
put so multi multiscale linear transform is a really fascinating process that can both denoise and sharpen depending on
what you put into it if you've ever done any planetary processing and have done wavelet deconvolution in regist Stacks it's really a lot like that you've got
layers and you've got amounts that you're doing those layers and in this case we're we're blurring instead of
sharpening this particular set of values I pulled straight from Life Light Vortex astronomy tutorials recommendation it
works really well for me um so you can get these exact values on their website if you're having a hard time seeing them
here on the video um so I'm going to uh I'm just going to zoom in on this image so you
can see what happens after the D noising is
applied now I have a I have a homebuilt computer so processes run pretty quick on this Beefcake PC that I've got here
I've got 32 gigs of RAM I've got like a 16 core processor it's pretty awesome
so uh so it runs pretty quick so you can see here uh I'll I'll kind of blink back
and forth so oh big time or the yeah you can see the huge difference that the D
noising has made while not ing the the the actual nebula portion because we
protected it with the mask all right so I'm going to remove the mask now and not going to need that
particular one anymore see back out now my other
favorite algorithm in fix and sight is this incredible tool called photometric color
calibration now instead of just looking at the image and and estimating what the right color balance should be which
programs like Photoshop tend to get wrong for uh for astronomical images
photometric color calibration um plate solves the image and then looks for a
g2v or a sun type star in in the frame
and uses that as the white reference so that the colors are are natural um and it works every time so I'm going to put
in my focal length and my pixel size um so that it can plate solve it correctly
and you you can just do a catalog search for your Target and it will grab the coordinates for you you don't have to
type those in I never put in I don't really put in the observation date because this is a target that's not moving very fast in the sky uh I leave
everything else at it's defaults and I hit apply this one takes a little bit longer
depending on how easy your plate solve
is I should have just pulled up the finished one oh well
so this is the script running for all the processing yeah all right so now it's done it's showing you um the uh
these are basically like like the color plots that do a um SLO R minus v r minus
G B minus V B minus G these are like uh I can't what's the term for the it's a
specific type of of of graph of the stars in the image that show basically the colors of those Stars that
astronomers use all the time um I do have to reapply the screen transfer function um what I'm going to
do real quick actually is um I'm going so I in screen transfer
function I have the link buttonclicked uh because
um uh let's see well the the image the image coming
uh raw out of the St stack will will be very green usually um for color cameras
because there's two green pixels for every red and blue pixel I see um so if
I if I leave the channels linked you can see that this whole thing is green and you can't see anything right and part of
this a lot of this gets fixed in uh Dynamic background extraction um but if I unlink the
channels then it it kind of gives its best guess for what the white balance should be so that's why you don't really
see a lot of difference between uh applying uh the color correction and not
applying it is because um I've been showing it in an estimated color correction way um even though the data
wasn't actually corrected that way but now it is so now when you stretch your histogram your red green and blue will
be sitting right on top of each other and will look good of course as you can see it did uh um subtract out a little
more background and it's noisy again but we will deal with that during stretching
now like the background has been brought up super high um in in relation the auto
stretch is basically over stretching it um so the final image when you actually stretch it by hand is not going to be
this bad so you kind of have to have faith in that like don't try and make the image pretty too early in your
process because you're going to lose data it's okay for it to be ugly up until the very end it's important
important lesson in in astrophotography processing so it's ugly now
and getting there yeah all right um sometimes for some images I do apply
deconvolution I didn't for this one because looking at the noise level and looking at that the nebula here I didn't
think it was going to do much good I think I thought it was going to do more harm than good so I didn't deconvolve this one so I'm going to skip that it is
time to stretch so I recently learned a little bit how to use ARC cinch
stretch um but I don't use it to do the whole stretch I only use it a little bit let's see where did I actually I haven't even made a process icon for it that's
how that's how lately I've I've learned it um so my my friend Terry Robison who
was teaching me about this um he says he likes to put the stretch factor up at about three four fiveish um doesn't set
the Black Point and then protects the highlights and uses the RGB working space and just applies it a couple of
times this really helps to maintain star color when you stretch because I I was
losing a lot of star color when I was stretching previously and the um uh us
using a couple in I I hit the apply button three times here and a just a couple applications of arcent stretch
can uh help maintain that star color so after that I'm going to go into histogram
transformation and by the way all the processes are in alphabetical order under the all processes tab I just I
keep them over here on the side because I have all the particular settings I have all set up and then you can save out your whole workspace so that um I
use the same same set of icons every time that have all the settings I like so you can see our histogram is still
very narrow and uh we do have quite a bit of space between the the uh left and the foot of the histogram and the black
point of of the histogram scale so we have a lot of room to stretch here to work with so I'm going to move up the
Black Point not all the way yet I don't want to cut off data that might be lurking there and then move the gray
Point never move the white Point never move this guy because you're going to clip uh your stars and the other B price
image now this is best done in multiple steps as there's a lot of things in in processing so I um I applied
that I I'm going to do another adjustment here apply it you got to remember to reset every time in pixon
site because um changes are cumulative unlike the um unlike in
Photoshop so I'm just going to do this a bunch of times and you can see it's starting to
pop out there but the noise is still uh pretty buried which is what we want you
can see the histogram Peak is widening now taking up more of the available space which is why we can actually see
it
now yeah and I'm going to call that good and do the rest of it in curves transformation all right so now we have
a stretched image it's no longer linear it is now nonlinear um all right
so this point it's all prettification um depending on what the image looks like I'll do different things um let's
see what did I do next at this point when I was processing this originally um I went into curves I keep
a I keep a a um a text file with each image that has the
dates uh the gear I used how many frames what I used to process and then uh kind
of a list of all the process processing steps I did to it so that when I go back later I can see what I did and what
equipment I used and stuff like that highly highly highly recommend keeping something like this with each one of your data
sets it's been invaluable as I've gotten a large enough collection of data that I can't remember what was
what um yeah okay so um curves transformation is just like the curves tool in Photoshop if you're more
familiar with that although it has more options just like in Photoshop you can you can tweak red green blue separately
from just the overall RGB you can also tweak luminance you can tweak the A and
B components which is um basically it's like color temperature is in Photoshop
and C as well which um my friend Terry explained to me and
I've already forgotten uh and then saturation is here as well you can tweak your saturation um
in in a curves type way which is really really nice uh if you hit this little open circle button it opens up a live
preview so that you can make your adjustments and be able to see what they're going to do to the image so
usually I make a nice little s shape um now I want to um desaturate the
background a bit because you I've got a lot of color noise in the background here so I'm going to um use a range mask
so I use a process called range selection and I hit the the live preview button
and I'm basically making a mask that's going to have just like the nebula and
the stars and I've got this fuzziness and smooth this parameter set here these are
not the default values but so that it's not like really hard cut offs okay so I've got my range mask I'm going to
apply that and look at it make sure did it right um I'm actually going to invert
that because I want to attack the background and protect my nebula and my stars
[Music] so um yeah so I go back in here to
Curves I've got the mask applied and I'm going to desaturate that
background now looks
better yeah and then um yeah just kind of ification s from here I use clone stamp to um get rid of
these dust bunnies here uh another one I really like is HDR multiscale transform
which um basically it's contrast
enhancement apply that little guy there um I did also another thing I did here
um not I haven't done it yet with this one but what I did do was I made a a star mask using the star mask tool and
desaturated the red on the stars
using the color saturation process where you can you can Define like I I want the I want red to
be desaturated and all the other colors to be normal because um if you look at my stars you can see that all of them
have this red tinge I see um actually I'll just go ahead and do that while we're
here I have this value memorized from earlier here's my star
mask oh that came out way too hot
um yeah U basically it's a lot of messing around to try and figure out like learning learning how if you learn
how individual tools work then you can come up with ways to combine them together to do things that you want so
I'm applying the star mask here so just my stars are going to be attacked and then I go into the color
saturation and desaturate the Reds I mean this is this is there's there's much more finesse way to do
this but this is kind of the quick and dirty when my stars are already not super great um so I just apply that a
couple times there we go stars look less red now um HDR multiscale transform kind of
made the um right out some little contrast here
and finally I do one more round of den noising so let me make another luminance
mask just by extracting that luminance Channel um oh yeah let me
apply said mask I want to invert
that and where's my D noise there it is D noise
again Y and then I used the Clone stamp tool to to stamp out these guys and uh
yeah that's um pretty much my completed image I'll uh you know do some Sometimes some additional purfication and stuff
but uh yeah so we went very impressive very impressive impressive yeah Molly I
I um uh I was remembering uh as I as I was watching this um that I met you uh
at the advanced IM conference okay oh just briefly and I took a photograph of
you because you just gotten this print off the Canon printer oh yes I remember that yeah and you were showing it to me
and I'm gonna share my screen oh no I'm gonna share my screen so that that uh
let's see let's uh show what um and you were so uh you were so pleased with with
this image and it was stunning it really was and so uh and that was that was my
first time at being at the Advanced Imaging conference and so uh was it was
nice to meet you back at that time so um you know and uh it was a real pleasure
to have you on uh the global star party tonight so uh uh it was
fantastic uh we have someone new with us not new who's been with us uh many times
but Dustin Gibson from opt is uh is with us here for a little while uh wanted to
give him a shout out and thank him for letting us uh also broadcast on the clear skies network uh tonight so how's
it going uh Dustin good Molly that was incredible um
watching you do pix Insight makes me feel very insecure about my own Pi it's
Tak it's taken like two years to get to this point so don't worry yeah no I was
I was messaging Scott in the background I was just like yeah she's pretty much better at this than
everyone yeah yeah that's incredible very it was really incredible we had a we had a great image processing tutorial
by Gary Palmer earlier for some solar Imaging and then this one with uh with
Molly and I was going wow okay she really does know what she's doing here
so it was pretty pretty amazing yeah yeah well I I cruised in a little late today but I thought you know
I'm going to see how late Scott Roberts can really do these things I'll keep going as long as people
keep going I he's two hours ahead of me there's no way this guy's still going but look at he's well I did have a Five
Hour Energy drink earlier so you know you're giv that credit does help yeah yeah give give the
Five Hour Energy all the credit man that's right I do the same I live on caffine haven't sleeped in years yeah
live on caffeine and willpower yeah yeah you trade caffeine for sleep I haven't
slept in years that's right this was awesome this is the kind of content that needs to be out there
it's it's so crazy that you know think about this being like a a deep dive into
Pig's Insight being even available you know a couple years ago never would have thought about that that you could just
log in somewhere and for free somebody is digging into Pig's insight and you
know you maybe could have paid for it I don't even know if that existed I remember when I was trying to learn P's Insight nothing existed Adam block has
his uh his his subscription series which I hear is really good well he's very
good yeah he is I need to go watch his videos yeah no I I love that stuff and
it's so cool that these resources are available and um it's it's exciting man
very very exciting I love that I'm on the west coast though Scott I have such an advantage on you man it's only 854
here yes that's that is true oh yeah that's true you know but uh yeah
and Molly I forget exactly where you are I'm in uh Berkeley so the the Bay Area
okay that's right that's right you share this time zone yes yeah that's good for
you yeah it's been nice yeah but the uh it was a pleasure to meet you um uh we
briefly talked I don't know for five or 10 minutes I was really Blown Away by
the image that you were carrying around there and uh you showed that I guess a little bit earlier uh yeah I had in my
talk yeah right it's it's my favorite I've been I was I've been trying to image the Ruki region for a long time
and I just needed like you know I was trying to do it with my Nikon DSLR and my stock lens uh even with 10 minute
long subframes at Texas Star Party it was okay but using a Sony a modified
Sony a7s and a Rokon 135mm lens that I got to borrow like like sometimes it's
not just about processing sometimes you do actually need good gear to get good images and that was like a half an hour
worth of 30 second exposures that just blew my other much longer attempts out
of the water oh wow it's it is spectacular it is yeah Scott speaking of
good gear let me let let me interrupt for just a second about some good gear Scott you know you left um you left a
triplet Appo a 152 at our shop last time you were here J
jinny um you know but she she takes it in her van she has a an adventure van
and so Scott was nice enough he and Jenny are very close Jenny adors Scott Jenny's the other owner of opt she
absolutely Ador Scott um but Scott was a big part I mean he's part of the the history of opt actually a big part of
the success in direction of opt you know star parties don't exist through opt without Scott Roberts um and so they get
to talking somehow Jenny ends up with a 152 Appo from explore scientific but
when she's traveling around the country which she was doing right now she left it at the office because it does it
takes up so much space it's a big telescope and she traveling like that she doesn't take it so I was messing
with it and she just like my God man this
telescope this telescope needs to be talked about more this thing is so ridiculously sharp it's like it's an
unbelievable telescope and um you know I use a lot of refractors man I mean we we
make refractors but I can tell you Scott you've got you've got a gy in that telescope man and it's light thank you
very much thank you it's light 152 you know I I don't polish the Optics but uh
um you know I think that it has done a a a reasonable job for several
astrophotographers Jack Newton uh used one for a long time uh and you know
really loved it um uh you know a few others have uh have uh given us some
some nice comments about that scope so a lot of fun to use visually too he know
he knows me well I have no filter if it if it weren if it weren't great I would absolutely tell Scott this is uh we
don't use profanity here this is not good this is not good it deserves
profanity we spent a lot of time together yeah we spend a lot of time together but no man that thing is uh truly incredible
I I was very very impressed by it and was like Jenny uh even if this thing takes up the van you need to carry this
with you this thing's a beast it's it's incredible image quality even on things dropped onto the side of the van or
something you know so yeah you know little missile launcher on the uh on the car you know I'm going to share an image
uh I I've given I've given Dustin a uh a copy of this because this is uh some of
the early opt history here but this is uh this is me okay um uh at the U before
opt became opt it was called Oceanside photographic Center this is 1984 uh I'm over here uh demonstrating a
Celestron C90 telescope on an equatorial wedge uh but we did our star parties at
the at the front of the store uh back at the that time and um uh at this time uh
the whole store is filled with telescopes we had about a 100 telescopes on the floor um wow and uh you know it's
uh it really was the beginnings of us trying to figure out the telescope uh
retail business at that time but what was really a surprise to me was the incredible Fascination that people had
with telescopes and astronomy it was something I didn't see in the photographic world at that point and uh
uh it was really it was really amazing so um you know I really thank uh opt for
um you know o the Oceanside business uh in general for giving me that start and
uh it's been a huge adventure and it's not over yet you know so it's still going on yeah I don't I don't know if
you need to thank opt you know I I do um I was just doing um a thing for a
newspaper you know after the satellite thing with space Fab we get these calls and they're like we want to talk to you
about all these success of opt I'm like you're talking to the wrong guy no you're talking to the wrong guy we you
know was here Dustin you've taken opt to new heights you know that that I never
would have dreamed of so man I've got that flag in my office um opt is older
than Alaska and Hawaii as States so there's a 48 star flag in my
office that's what what was flying over the original opt and um you look at the Legacy and
and it's it's hard I get crazy impostor syndrome because of like the you're guilty of it Scott you send me these
photos I'm like my God this yeah this is so long before I even knew what this
place was right guys were doing it you know and so talk about the weight I feel
to like carry that flag forward Man Dustin you're doing a great job
uh you know you are you are the astrophotographer that I always dreamed
I could be and um and you're doing things that's just totally amazing uh
with Gibson picks and your Global reach uh with astronomy getting getting young
people really young people involved in imaging and uh showing them all the
ropes uh you've empowered so many people your podcast your uh all the stuff that
you do that your whole uh the opt marketing team does an incredible job uh
in social media but it's not just the branding part of this this is It's the
experience and uh being able to uh convey what this community is really all
about and uh uh you do that uh uh better than almost anyone I know you know
so thank you Scott you know guys I hope you were listening to every word of that I pay Scott so much money it's not true
it's not true I you've earned beyond that thanks man
thanks yeah yeah and and speaking of the podcast we need to get you back on there and honestly every guest you bring on
here we need to get back or get on to the podcast Molly you know you really you really should join us you know
wasn't Molly amazing yeah I was so you know I was like wow you know I hit here
so this is great yeah talk about this stuff more Y and we started out this
whole thing uh with a video of uh of um
uh uh oh Grace what what's her last name
uh um I it escapes me right now but we had this beautiful video of this lady
that had been very instrumental in uh getting the h space telescope uh off the
ground and um oh you know so wow no big deal yeah it was it was really amazing
so and it does my heart good to see uh uh women uh involved as much as they are
I see it more and more all the time uh to have Libby and deep te on you know uh
we're kind of seeing the future of of uh you know future scientist here and Molly
is she's right at the brink of uh uh you know taking over uh you know some major
Observatory somewhere so I'm I'm I'm sure of it so uh um you know and Molly I
didn't really have much of a chance to ask you what what are your future
aspirations uh you know I'm only my uh I'm in my second year of grad school um
and I'm hoping to go work at UH do some research uh research Labs stuff like
that I don't really know yet I'm trying to figure that stuff out in a perfect world where where do you
see you as a as a professor do you see running an institution or how do you
applied for the astronaut program okay well you're young
enough do want to go to Mars yeah on a return trip though not the one way stuff oh I see I was gonna
say sound like terrible deal right get a return trip it's not so bad right well
excellent well thank thank you very much for everyone that's U uh been on the show today Dustin thanks for for coming
in um and uh to all of our viewers out there it's been great um uh you know any
any uh parting words uh Dustin oh okay throw it at me man I was
here for two seconds yeah that's right yeah yeah you're telling me you've got last in first out launching the Hubble
Space Telescope Molly's throwing every think there is to know about pxs inside and you're like Dustin you want to wrap
this thing up you want to wrap this one up yeah yeah thanks for the warning uh
no no no I'm just excited to see this I think it's so important Scott you and I talk about it every time we talk but
yeah um this is you know it's it's late this is this community deserves this 15
years ago and I'm so glad it's finally here and uh you know we've got champions for it like yourself and then everybody
on you know your panel here every week I come in I can't believe the the crews that you gather up I don't know how you have time for what you do um you know
it's it's it's what we should be devoting time to you know because uh uh
you know if you're going to be in this uh Community or in this industry you know we talk about like the industry but
uh they the community supports us you know and uh and we owe it to do whatever
we can to support them and to popularize them and to give them the exposure they
deserve um and so it's it's a it's an honor kind of thing you know so man
after my heart right there you still belong at opt Scott yeah I love it man I love it once you're in you never get out
it's like joining the mafia so right yes sir that's right so yeah hey it's great
stuff and I I agree wholeheartedly this is best community on Earth never seen a community so supportive of each other
and uh you know it's just everybody giving trying to lift each other up where do you find that anywhere with
people that are doing something that's literally life and perspective changing um I don't think it gets any
better so I'm so glad to see it and we have um this thing's a magnet for clearly hyper intelligent people um it's
it's the best thing on earth I love it I hope more people get into it and uh I hope everybody here continues to drive
it Forward because it's the vehicle it's the vehicle to drive before get in front of people and it's all it takes right
right well Dustin um any anyone that uh of course shows up on my programs if
there's someone in particular you would like uh to invite um you know I'll get you definitely hooked up and you know
because I think it'd be great to have them on your show Absolutely yeah let's do it and and that's what uh space junk
podcast is about and um you know reach a lot of people so so I mean truly I'm
inviting you right now that is it there is no like mailed out RSVP this is that
invite so if you are interested please email me directly Dustin optc corp.com
um these are the conversations we have it is half philosophy half visual
astronomy and because we're not good at math it is also half uh
Imaging okay so it is all of those things all at once and then when Scott Roberts comes on we also talk about
Arkansas so oh yeah yeah I still get people oh wait a
minute talking to me about that okay so what's happened here in Northwest Arkansas is the Walton family is
offering really this is serious okay they're offering if you'll relocate to Northwest Arkansas they'll pay you 10
grand oh I saw that they'll pay you 10 grand and they'll give you a free mountain bike okay so we have hundreds
of miles show Ozark was the mountain biking capital of
the world and uh and we have a 2 4 in brashier 1910 brashier refractor that
we're trying to build a multi-million dollar uh Science Center and and uh
planetarium here so how can it be the mountain viiking Capital if there's no mountains in that part of the country
that is such a great they're called The Oar they're not mountains though they
were they were Scott is the king of Arkansas facts
it's so hard to get him away from he has all this obscure your information I told Scott when he came I was like look it's
a great it's a great platform you know you're going to reach tens of thousands of people talk about explore scientific talk about the stuff you're excited
about he comes on and talks about rice rice fields in arkans rice fields in
Arkansas are amazing you haven't been out much have you we more rice than China
does yeah he was telling I know more about Arkansas rice that's
right the meteorite men you remember the meteorite men one of them lives here in Eureka Springs Arkansas that's right I I
don't know what you're talking about man I really the meteorite men you don't know I think uh I think I saw them at
Star Discovery Channel yeah oh okay yeah oh oh that's right the Discovery Channel
on that's right got you're a legend thanks for having me on man I I disrupted your entire
program all right thank you Molly thank you so much and for the rest of you that
are still with me thank you than you so very much Caesar thank you uh you know
we hope you don't fall over uh unconscious after the eclipse I know you're going to work really really hard
um in getting everything ready deept thank you again for being on the program you're welcome every time we do it um uh
you should take Dustin up on on his offer and appear on his program you too
Molly I don't know if you've ever done the program with Dustin but he's awesome and of course the beard Astro beard
thank you so much man Richard Grace uh he's been on every Global star party
it's been awesome so thank you and thanks all the audience for watching uh we'll be back on uh with the uh Von
Brown Astronomical Society they're doing a global star party on the 20th that's
this week and um so it's uh uh a uh they
are going to be the uh host of that particular event and we're really
excited about it and so um support your local astronomy club if you can if you
can't uh you know certainly join the explore Alliance um and uh be part of
the night sky Network and all of our support uh also goes to uh the
astronomical League we thank them for being the sponsors of our door
prizes as well as our do prize part Partners which include uh
uh vacuum of space uh Astro gifts um Gary Palmer astronomy the mark Slade
remote Observatory uh also opt has participated in this as well um and uh
uh explore scientific is is a part of this as well so um thanks a lot keep
looking up and we will see you very very soon in fact we'll see you tomorrow okay
take care and good night
good night good night
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