Virtual Star Party 5 Part 1

Transcript:

laughs

[Music]

well hello everybody this is scott roberts here from explore scientific and i'm really pleased to have uh the

virtual global star party uh the european edition uh with us today and uh it's nice for me

because you know i'm not up in the middle of the night this is it's block air central um we have astronomers uh

across the uk and we have astronomers across the united states as well so

it's great to have you all here i'm just going to go into grid mode here so you can see

our participants and um uh we are going to get started

keynote speaker for this particular event is terry mann who joined us yesterday uh on

our show uh to talk about the astronomical league terry is a former two-term president of

the astronomical league which is i believe the largest alliance of

uh astronomy clubs in the world is that right terry yep that's right okay all right

well i'll let you take it away from here so okay well thank you scott it's a pleasure to be here thank you for the

invitation i just wanted to talk a little bit about the astronomical league and what we are and some of what we do we have roughly

18 000 members and they are spread across the u.s and we have a few international

we have 10 regions in the united states and each region has their own conferences their own

awards some of them do actually some of them don't um we have a lot of awards

observing programs which i think is probably one of the most impressive things about the league we

have over 70 observing programs and if you're a league member with each program that you do you can

earn a certificate and a pin that usually is presented at your astronomy club or if you're a member at large a lot of

people live in the rural areas or in an area where there aren't that many people or there aren't any astronomy clubs

so they join as an mal which is a member at large and internationally right now you can

join that way and currently the league is working on putting together a program

for the clubs to join uh we hope to have that done very soon so we can have members from

all over the world and we can keep in touch this way we have like i said with our observing

clubs especially with all the observers here if you looked at the league's observing clubs as i said we have over 70 and we

just approved five new imaging programs and one of the things that just

came up this year that was approved is an imaging program and none of these programs are

easy i mean they might be for some people when you start at the lower level i guarantee you you will always learn

something and we have so many programs that no matter what you're interested in you're going

to find it there i just about guarantee it and that's something that you can really

work towards and it helps make you a better observer and it's really a lot of fun especially in these times when we're all

kind of stuck close to home and as i said we have awards that we present every year

we have the peltier award which can be given to just about anybody

that um has done significant service in astronomy the noi award

which is the national young astronomer award so we have national young astronomers that are

under 19 years of age and every year we have entries for that and they show their own projects and

what they've been working on and then they are judged and that a lot of three of them will usually

be at our conference if at all possible and we have one conference a year which is called

alcon it's the astronomical league conference that's how that came about

ours was canceled naturally this year was supposed to be in albuquerque we are rescheduled for august next year

in albuquerque we hope that happens and we hope to see everybody there too uh we have many awards too if you guys i

don't know if everybody has seen jack horkheimer when he was alive um jack horkheimer started quite a few

awards which was the horkheimer smith horkheimer parker which was don parker

horkheimer diora chippy dioria winter star party fame um we have the horkheimer o'meara

stephen o'meara we have mabel stearns which is a newsletter award for clubs

we have webmaster awards for the clubs and sometimes there are other various awards

uh with the astronomical league every quarter the reflector is published and that is

something else you receive and in there you'll find all kinds of items that are going on in all the

different regions and you'll notice all in every issue you're going to see how many people

actually applied for the observing clubs and how many awards were given it is amazing how many people do this

we have master observers that have done an incredible amount of clubs we have some members that have done

almost every club or every club that the league has and that is a real challenge

and those people are called master observers and they have special awards and they have a special forum

they answer any questions it's all about learning from each other so as i said please consider taking a

look at the league if you have any questions comment contact myself or anybody on the league

website and we hope to see you there under the stars that's great that's great thank you

thank you terry it's great well um i uh had planned this whole program

through gary palmer and uh gary is uh very involved in uh the astronomy scene not

only in europe but around the world when i first get to meet him in fact i

just saw a uh a three or four year old video that was on facebook you know how they give

you the you know your history your moments like that kind of thing well we you and i did gary and i did a

little video together that i posted a long time ago and i reposted it today it was just

kind of uh you know i don't know fate that it would come up today and uh and show up so i

guess this must have been the must be the anniversary of the day star event where we were at that solar

astronomy event so many years ago um but gary's a great friend to

to astronomers everywhere i'm honored to know the guy so i'm going to let gary i'm going to

let you uh talk a little bit and um and then we'll go back to grid mode and you can introduce

all the astronomers here okay so thanks very much scott thank you terry

that was uh really interesting um

tonight's going to be quite interesting we've got people from all over the world um we've got

uh live observatory in spain up and running um hopefully here we're threatened with

some clear skies so that that would make a change i think i've done three of these star parties now and they've all been clouded

out or rained out um we've got solar astronomers in

i think it's california and i think stevens steve is going to do some maybe at some

point in canada but really what this is all about is about having fun and

enjoying everything about astronomy it doesn't matter what your um really what your interest or

what your side is um it's really about enjoying it and making the most of

it and this is really where the all of these uh talks and the shows have come from

is by um joining everybody around the world and really when we're clouded out seeing

what other people are doing and also taking a different insight and different people's views or different people's

side of astronomy so it's about enjoying it and about having fun

as i said we we've got quite a few people on um we've got stephen uh malia he's up in

canada and um apparently he's clouded out so that's very similar to what we are here um on quite a

regular basis um he runs ontario telescopes

if i've got that correct that's correct that's correct um and i've known steve quite a long

time quite often chat on the line is a volume of knowledge in the industry

and helps people all over the place not just in canada simon tang he's out in california if i'm

correct i'm part of woodland hills cameras that's the one that's the one yeah

hopefully he's going to have some solar for us today

obviously i can see sunshine in the background there so it's looking a lot clearer than what is uh what has been here for the last

few days we've got grant um who's part of first light optics

and also uh stargazer's lounge and he's running this uh remote

observatory out in spain yeah which is a community-based observatory so we'll hear a lot more on

that later we've got jerry jerry hubbell he's um as you all know well

no well he's embedded in explore scientific in the development of the mounts and running

their their online forum for all of the details um we got shoes

choose style yeah chop star however you uh you like to pronounce it

i'll get it wrong um he was on the star party on tuesday

and had quite a lot of interest in things certainly from a newer person on this so we thought we'd invite him

back on and we were hoping it might be clear where he was but it seems again he's clouded

out and it's raining there at the moment um i just need to go into grid view here

yeah just to see where everybody is there he is and there's karen he's uh runs telescope house

yeah one of the uh dealers in the uk um and the game is the final knowledge

on all of the breslau and the uh explore scientific equipment um

and i've known again karen probably a long long time now but

now yeah i hate to think how long he is but we

used to do lots of events and different things and over the years

um yeah over the years um we've shared lots of knowledge and lots

of information on different things so i'm gonna ask scott was whether you

could put the link up for anybody who might be uh looking in around the world um

to maybe join the show yes okay all right so i will put that in the chat

if you would if you would like to join the show you just have to go to

it's uh explorescientific.com slash events and then you'll see the

virtual star party you buy a zero dollar ticket okay you'll instantly get an email

they'll give you uh the um credentials to go into our our green room as they call

it okay and uh there you'll meet kent mart you'll need zoom to log in

to that kent will check your audio and video and make sure you're good to go and then he'll give you

the broadcast credentials for this show so um and then we'll uh i'll admit you into

the show um as as uh as you log in so that's that's it so here's here's

the link um coming up in chat

and there we go cool i'm just very very quickly checking my

system just to see whether we're actually clear outside of the moment but there's still some clouds running

through so okay um i think we will

go over to grant because grant is actually running these images live at the moment

from spain okay quite interesting to hear about um the observatory and what you're doing

with it and how everything's going right let me share my uh scream

everybody uh good evening afternoon everybody wherever you are um

it's cloudy where i am in in the uk but luckily we have access to a remote setup in spain which hopefully you can see on

the screen get some knots yeah can everyone see that so this has been running whilst

we've been setting up in the background so it's stacked quite a few images now it's running 10 second exposures just on

m13 which is the uh a very very nice cluster to look at in

hercules i'm sure somebody else on the panel will be able to fill in with a bit more detail on the object and how to find it

and things like that but it's a great beginner object it's a really really nice object to have a look at

um one of the challenges with m13 is um is very bright so you're trying to get a balance on the

screen with showing you the size of it and without blowing out the core is a little bit of a challenge so i think

this is the best um view i've been able to get so far um but there's some nice detail there you

can see right into the the core and there's a nice little galaxy up here in the corner as well

which hopefully you can all see um yeah that's pretty good i can see the propeller just yes in the center there

well i i was looking at this early because that's what i've always called the propeller as well but i believe other people call a

different feature the propeller which is a dark feature on on the sort of outskirts of m13 i don't know

what people think to that yeah somebody must have yeah that's right

it's uh it's a dark propeller uh shape that is on the not on the outskirts but it's

it's further out from the center for sure and it's it's a free arm propeller is

what most people call i believe right it's three that's right it's three three blades i've always called that exactly

like you gary i've always called the central sort of x the propeller personally but there we go that's one of the differences that we will have

with these things um uh just uh

that's the thing in different countries around the world um m45s renowned for having so many

names it's quite hard to keep up with um i was going to zoom in on this little

galaxy up here but due to the resolution of the system we've got over there it's it's not going to help much um you

can see it's a bit of a swirly galaxy but um beyond that it's it's a bit too

bit too small um so we'll leave it running m13 for a little while but we'll

over the course of the evening we'll switch between different objects and um probably switch to narrowband because

the moon's going to be quite bright this evening for the broader band subjects uh do you want

to sort of explain a little bit about what this setup is yes please so this is um we're calling

this the icarus observatory project which is a a project between uh first line optics who i work for

and the stargazers lounge forum and it's basically an opportunity for us to test equipment uh that isn't

in the uk as we've seen tonight the uk is pretty cloudy unfortunately and it's also a community project in

that we share the data we capture from this uh publicly the idea being to give

people access to some some good quality raw data for them to practice their processing on

um and we've been running some some sort of tutorials and workshops to help people learn how to process that data with the

sort of knowledge that it's it's a decent quality of data to get them started and i'm pleased to say just just a week

ago we launched the first set of data from this project which was a big chunk of m16 data which is the

eagle nebula um and there's a there's a competition at the moment for processing that data so

it's worth having having a look at that um the equipment itself it's a 10 micron gm 1000 mount and

it's a uh selemira 104 millimeter triplet telescope with a starlight express 694 camera on

the back um which is a very very nice camera for this type of work it's very smooth

very sensitive very low noise it's been around a while now but it's a tried and tested uh

camera we've got a filter wheel we've got octalong filters in there we're running a lakeside

autofocus setup and pretty much everything is controlled from a high-tech astro map hub pro

um so it's really nice to use remotely and if anybody's interest i'll happily show how

we how we control it remotely um if there's interest in that um yeah

that was fantastic it looks very interesting i was looking on the um

the website earlier today and there's a lot of information there and it i like the idea that the images are

coming out for people in the community to process some competitions running and different things like that

so um it's quite hard to get good data you know it's really not from

the satellites that's the key thing you know anybody can go on and process a hubble image but

it's quite nice to be able to pick your own targets really and then set whatever data comes out from it

well that's exactly and we're hoping the community will help us pick targets ongoing i mean it's only been

going a short while so at the moment we're picking the sort of the big hitter targets that we'd like to get through

but you know eventually we'd like people to be picking some more unusual targets perhaps objects that you can't see from

the uk um because they're just too low down and we're also going to dedicate some time to some more sort of scientific projects

as well so some accordation work and some variable style work and the community are very interested in

that so we're helping that this will hope and this will prove a sort of focal point for some of that activity as well

cool cool that's brilliant thanks for that we've come back in a little while and we'll

probably look at um how you're controlling it and whatever else is going on whatever else you can

manage to capture thank you that's great thanks for all

right thanks gary

uh it's it's going pretty good it's getting a bit windy so uh let me just share my screen first

and then uh i've got some things to show everybody afterwards but so this is actually live right now on the sun we're looking at an

active region which is technically on the west the western side of the limb um

i don't know if you guys can see my pointer or my mouse or anything like that but so this patch here uh is actually from a

sunspot around about three weeks ago so we had some pretty good activity where there was like a bunch of sunspots in the

whole nine yards and this is actually the remnants of that same active region

uh on average it takes about a week and a half give or take for something to go from

one side of the sun to the other and obviously another week and a half to come back round and it's it's still

active uh this one hasn't been classified yet because there's no sunspots so they're not going to give this thing a

classification or an ar number should i say that that's quite unusual because

normally even if they've got an active area there then they normally get a classic case

um normally yes but because it's been so quiet um they only classify the ones that have

any significant um activity this is actually on its way out in fact probably give it another two

three days and this will just literally be nothing uh it'll be just gone um there is actually a prominence that

is hovering around um so what i'll do is let me just manipulate the histogram for a second oh

just uh i need to move this out of the way

so you can actually see that there are proms in the top up there yep you can see that quite clearly

so let's uh nudge the scope slightly so we can get it more in the center so yeah so that's actually the same

active region again it was quite a big uh chain that was uh going around and this is basically the

remnants of what was coming back around uh the orientation of the scope is incorrect so this should actually be

like that way uh anti-clockwise or counterclockwise or what however you guys want to say it 90

degrees yeah to the left now i do have white light installed

on here as well but there is a zip going on um it's almost not worth doing it because

it's just literally a white circle yeah it started to pick up in activity a

little bit over the last couple of weeks the last three weeks seemed to have been that chain of active areas that was

running across about 10 days ago was quite interesting

um just looking at what was going on yeah i mean we are officially in solar cycle 25 now i

believe so we're coming out of solar minimum which is a good thing because you've got

the eclipse coming up in 2024 so as opposed to having something very very boring on the sun because the last

eclipse we had here in the us there was actually some like serious activity going on so it was actually

quite fascinating to see all of that and then hopefully excuse the noise the uh weed whacker guy

decided to black some weed for some weird reason um but yeah so for 2024 we should

actually have some pretty good solar activity who knows yeah it generally picks up

quicker it comes out of the sodas um so minimum a lot faster than it goes into it so you

generally start to see the activity pick up um it'd be interesting to see what

happens with this what equipment are you using on that at the moment i actually have a bunch of

scopes but on this particular setup because seeing is not that great although it's proven me otherwise right

now i have an esprit 100 and the spree 150 that i normally use my solar imaging

and then if it's bad seeing so to speak i'll use the uh explorer scientific ed80

which is actually what's running the white light right now um i could spin the camera around in

just a moment to show everybody uh it's kind of hiding underneath a towel because uh

the sun here is quite harsh it sounds crazy but it's all sun out here in california and

clear skies but you can't stand under the sun for more than 30-40 minutes uh otherwise you will get heat

stroke yeah i i could fully understand that

so yeah yeah no it's looking good that's excellent so hopefully later on

when it comes back to me um i'll show you guys a whole bunch of other things obviously this is a live look um i do have processed images of

the sun but we'll we'll hold that for uh later excellent thanks very much simon

no problem okay i think we're gonna have a chat with kevin as he says

nice and quiet okay and uh at some point we need to we have door

prizes to give out so we need to let start asking the door prizes

and we actually have some comments also from uh people observing from around the world uh in um

in our chat stream here um uh people are in general are happy that

we're online uh uh kind of blown away that i actually did a live stream at uh 1 a.m last night

so um let's see

people are happy it's friday there's uh says i'm a member of the

local club the mvas and i think i'm a member through the club are there any

advantages to having an individual membership this is for terry

you're you're beautiful there we go he's done muted me um actually you will have the same benefits

it's more beneficial to join a club like the nvas or any other club because your costs would be cheaper and

you have more people more telescopes to look through uh you can learn more so it's it's more

beneficial if a club joins the league um but you will have the same benefits if

you're an mal or a member of the league through an astronomy club

great we have um we have people uh with paul observe uh watching from new

zealand we've got we've got people observing from australia

paiola's observing from italy [Music] we have people watching for

massachusetts uh it is uh jorge alberto from colombia

carlos hernandez a good friend of mine says excellent image of the solar

surface simon would the act of the area be considered a plague

that's for you simon sorry i was just trying to unmute myself

there while uh doing a thousand things i i'm actually trying to keep my laptop cool because of the the heat out here

so that there is a couple of differences between all the solar features you are seeing some type of plage

out here um on the sun right now so if i just share my screen real fast

so hopefully you can see this but the outer part of it here is considered what is the plage

i see then the inner part here is is essentially what the active areas are um usually i refer to um

daystar's website because jen has gone out of her way to catalogue all these different things so she

she's identified what the difference is from a filament um the plage uh she even has something

called edamament bombs or something like that which i haven't seen yet because we haven't had those act that activity

uh spicules and things like that but essentially yeah the outer part that

looks like a blob almost would be considered where the large actually is because i think this stuff inside of there is called something else

i i can't remember off the top of my head which is usually why i refer to her website for all that information

excellent excellent okay all right also gary i wanted to let you

know that we have uh uh the uh sue suhel

mehdi from um kosovo is is uh joining us and um uh he is uh

he is uh uh joining us is uh a special guest so i thought we'd let

you say hello and then hello guys hello hello from pristina

yeah it's very it's very nice and i feel very honored to be part of the

virtual global star party so hello everyone and thank you for watching it's good to

get people on from all over all over the world it's um that's what it's all about

okay in the meantime scott i think however you wanted to get joey to before we speak with karen and ask one

of these uh okay all right so jerry why don't you um why don't you ask the first question now

this first question uh the door prize will be a galileo

scope the galileo scope is a it is a telescope kit okay this is this

is a galileo scope here i guess you can't see it unless i actually put

the spotlight on me so let's do that this is the galileo scope

uh the kit was actually developed in the international year of astronomy uh 2009 as a cornerstone project

to teach students how a telescope works and so uh the whole thing um i mean you have to

assemble the objective lenses the eyepiece assembly all of that and uh you know hundreds of

thousands of these things have sold to students all over the world uh was developed by uh educators

and scientists and uh so it's a it's a it's a great kit if you do educational

outreach if you are if you're homeschooling right now okay which a lot of people are this is an

awesome thing to uh work with your kids with uh to teach them about optics and how a

telescope really works so that's the uh the first door prize you will need to

do two things um you'll you will not answer on live chat the question that jerry's about to ask

you you will email your question to kent and i'm going to write it down here

kent at explorescientific.com

okay and you need to join the explore alliances you can join as a legacy member which is

free and so uh and i'll give you the link for going there too

probably the best strategy would be answer the question by email first and then go join if you're not a

member but uh yeah

right yeah i would also want to say that these door prizes are all being sponsored by the astronomical

league so we want to thank them very much for sponsoring that okay so we're going to go to you jerry and let you

ask the question first question

yeah so these questions i'm coming up with today are a little bit different than previous

questions if you watch the show they're going to take some digging and

some searching a little bit the first question is how many objects are in the yale bright

star catalog

if you're not familiar with the yale bright star catalog it's a fairly old catalog that started uh from cambridge

okay in the 1800s but the yell bright star catalog has a specific number of objects in it

that's the number i'm looking for yale bright star

catalog uh if you're looking at the chat i've been putting the questions and the answers in the chat for the zoom

okay all right

excellent okay so there so

hey how are we very good thanks i

very much like you gary um i'm completely clouded out here in the glorious south west um we

we would love to have had some stuff to to show everybody to today but i'm just going to share a

little um little picture that i took with what we would have been using which is up here which is an explore scientific 127

fcd 100 deluxe um this was he said sharing screen taken

[Music] a few weeks ago can you see that yeah

oh yeah yeah there we go so no guesses um what this is this is of

course covered near wise and um this was just a little single shot of about 30 seconds

that i took with a canon 600d on it just a quick and

you know dirty shot in many ways because my field of view here is quite

limited to where the comment was and uh just goes to show

what you can do with not a huge amount of exposure um you can see the uh quite clearly the the

green of the head the the cyanides and some antigens in there

really glowing away in that kind of um very very green color and you've got the first inkling

of the uh the ion tail um off there as as well um in terms of um

people's experiences of it gary you're based in wales which is pretty

dark um what we what your major thoughts on it it was

i think it was fantastic that i mean i took the children up uh he was slightly blocked by my view

here because of the uh yeah yeah basically i'm on one side of it

so um it had to be the other side of the mountain um so i went further up into the

mountains and you know just taking the the children up there alone um once you point out where it was uh

it's fantastic hearing their views and other people um so i ended up a couple of times going

up there um and people were pulling up you know they were stopping by the side of the road to come and have a look through the

telescope and you're literally in the middle of nowhere this is a mountain through to one of the coasts about 40

miles away and the odd car will come through and there oh are you looking at the comet yeah can we have a look at it so it

created i think it really put astronomy on the map over the last six months it's one of those sort of

major events that suddenly came along and everybody was pulling up at different

points throughout the mountain run with a camera you know a tripod or a full telescope

set up i mean i i remember working back um

as a as a very young man at telescope house in the the 1990s 96

and 97 when we had both uh kataki and um obviously hail bolt

and just what it did for people just coming off the street and

being and just saying i want a telescope i've got to see this and we had to say to a lot of them

actually you probably see it better in binoculars but it was a comment is something that

really sort of inspires people and i've been posting things online on social media

and friends of mine from years back have been saying you've actually inspired me to go out

and do some astronomy um you know people who aren't normally interested um

really really took um great delight in this and it's just a pity it was over two

so soon but you know that's comments for you they can't all be hail bob and linger

around for you know nine or ten months pretty well it's been quite a mixed bag for the

summer over here we've still gone through a couple of weeks really hot a couple of weeks

cloudy and rainy and then another week hot and another couple of weeks cloudy and it is just

him to jump through a six week period where it's you know i was imagining this and it was

right down by uh capella when i first started imaging it and the next time i got up there it was

it massively moved around to the left um in such a short space of time over a

couple of weeks but it it it was really interesting and even looking at it's really binoculars as you

say it's a fantastic view um but one of the nights i was up there we had the

knock loose and clouds coming uh yes um early hours of the morning and i have to

say just standing there in looking at the comet with the the cloud structures changing in the

background and the sky lighting up it's about half past two three o'clock in the morning

um breathtaking is the only way

a question that's out there guys um is uh somebody wanted to know if you were

using an ir filter for this image um

for this particular one i i was using a bada or beta um oil filter it it's just a

it's not a tremendously harsh filter or anything like that it was just um trying to clean things up a little

bit but um nothing really exotic on this one

and that was the beauty of this comment in that you didn't need huge expensive pieces of

equipment to image it well some of the best and the and the the most inspiring pictures that

i've seen of it were were taken with very very wide field shots and i think

this probably has to be the the most photographed comet of all time

um because of the amount of people that are now wandering around with digital cameras that can very very

easily pick up um stuff like this so um it's it was very inspiring to uh

to see obviously um you never know with comets as we we all

know we've been there a few times before some of us have been observing for for longer than others and will remember

some particularly sort of disappointing um

situations with uh certain things that didn't quite deliver um the the first comment that i remember

seeing any great um detail at all wasn't halle

actually um embarrassingly enough um for doing the job that i do now um my my my mother and i

went out night after night trying to find it but at that particular period of time

my sky knowledge was not as good as it is now and it wasn't particularly bright for us

it wasn't well seen in the northern hemisphere certainly it was much better for those i think the southern

hemisphere in terms of that apparition lord knows what it's going to be like

into 2061 probably not any better than that actually but um

i think i'm right in saying that the uh the apparition after that that um you know none of us are gonna be

around for is gonna be an absolute belter i think it's gonna be something to

to see but uh sadly uh ambitions that i have to live forever uh

aside we're not gonna see it and that's the beauty of these things they they carry on we have a

our own little period of time where where we can we can just see these things for a very

brief period they'll come back around sooner sooner or later and it's just a privilege to be

able to see them when you can yeah i think with this i think it's um

it's all been something like uh sixteen hundred years when the otherwise it's a long a long

period orbit um and that it just sort of makes you sit back and appreciate that

you didn't get the chance to see it yeah yeah yeah but there was one um picked up in

soho the other day i think it was about two days ago that i saw one picked up in solo and that one's already burnt up he's

gone oh right that was the the croix the the sun raiser wasn't it that yeah it was

looking like it might might make it but but yeah yeah um from the last

reports i just saw that there was a bit of a towel visible and that's it but

anyway thanks very much kevin we're um we'll come back to you a little bit later

what i was going to do was we've got uh sue hill yeah from kosovo

yeah what i was going to do is find out a little bit about

sue hill and hope i'm pronouncing your name correctly

yes it's s-u-h-e-l it's suhan excellent believe it or not it means a

star so it's uh my daughter's name is seren in welsh and

that means that's very nice

cool so i can see you're part of the astronomy

yes so we are one of the first astronomy clubs in kosovo founded in 2014 so

we basically started with one telescopes

and doing like public outreach and like fighting other people who love

astronomy and since then we've been really getting bigger day by day because in kosovo

we have a lot of lags in the field of science and astronomy so our group is made of young people

that love astronomy and want to share the wonders of the universe with all the people here

because like astronomy is not very very much developed in kosovo so we're

trying to go to schools who are going to different cities just offering the people the view

through the telescope and so it's very nice to see that how it used to be before

we've been really really going forward with the help of so many international friends

international astronomers that are helping us with information with equipment so we can use them here in

kosovo and show the audience the people the wonders of the universe

that's excellent that that's that's really what this is all about isn't it it is yes and what's uh very

important is that kosovo doesn't have an observatory so there's a really small observatory in

the city which was functional in the 80s since that time it was never used

so we want to renovate that observatory and make it like as our headquarters because a lot of people are asking us

if you have like an office or something so maybe that can be our our center so more

people can come and observe the stars the planets with our through the observatory which we

got it from the mayor and with like seeking donations so we can uh open it as soon as possible

uh for the public so and then of course the people will come and see how it feels like to go inside an

observatory that's excellent that's that's

really what this is all about isn't it is bringing it to astronomy to a different audience and um

obviously in different parts of the world you know they've had uh tougher times

than other parts so it's harder and i fully understand how difficult it is to build that sort of

thing off of the floor um with not a lot of support from maybe internally in the country

yes and we wouldn't be here where we are right now if it wasn't from our international astronomers that are

helping kosovo towards science with equipments like explore

scientific pressure and other popular brands that are supporting kosovo in this

direction and it's really bad because like a lot of schools in kosovo probably have

telescopes but they don't know how to use them so we're going to schools uh teaching

the teachers the students how to use the telescope so showing the practical

uh way of astronomy because it's they talk a lot about astronomy but

it's very nice if they also see it so that's what we're trying to do and uh until now we've been uh

having a lot of help a lot of uh support and that's very nice because as i told

you we started very small and i have this uh expression with the

journey of the thousand light years begins with a single step so we start

small then just like the big bang we started very small so we aim to get really big

that's brilliant that's brilliant can you um in the chat room here can you share your

uh contact information yes down the bottom of the screen here there's a little um chat box

yeah and you can type that in here i think jerry's asking okay for the chat for everyone

yeah down there that's it okay at the bottom of the screen yeah i'm using my phone right now thank

you copy that also for uh the uh chat uh out to our general audience if you'd

like to be contacted worldwide um the uh there was a question someone

wanted to know what light pollution was like uh in kosovo is it a big challenge

scott you were asking about the light pollution in kosovo yes yeah that was our audience so

uh we actually um there are some places in kosovo that

you can go far away from lights like mostly in the west uh region of kosovo so we have so kosovo is

doesn't have a sea but we have really great mountains so we have some really good

places for astronomy observations uh so in the balkans where we are

because kosovo is located with albania macedonia serbia and montenegro and this region where we are

it is declared as one of the really nice reasons for observations and yes there are some but

this observatory that we are trying to open is located in the center in christina

and it's real it's really not in a good location because it's has light pollution it's very accessible

to the citizens to the people so they know where we are and what we're actually trying to do now

is we're trying to um build a new observatory

we're part of the astronomy commission which is part of the ministry of education

so we like plan made this strategy and we're still uh with some experts in

kosovo we're locating the best uh position for an observatory of course that's gonna

take a really long time but it's a real it's a great step forward

that's great that's great yes pretty sure that i know a few people

that are involved with the astronomy club anyway um i certainly know a few people that have

um i've seen on tv or i've seen a lot here in other places

excellent so anyway i've been asked the question over this side um for some reason they can't ask the

question online but um i've been asked the question by paul and it says

how will elon musk's styling affect astrophotography in the future thank you

so what does everybody think

speed steve you're welcome to answer do you think thank you um i'm i'm of the opinion that

it if uh it's a little bit overblown um and it's not gonna have too much of

an effect on astrophotography um uh where i am in canada

uh there's been a couple of flybys of what of the starlink satellites and uh

they're pretty impressive to to see um and uh kind of neat because it's something you don't normally

you normally wouldn't see uh go by um but with the uh the different types of

stacking methods and the software that um that we use now um uh when we

uh though uh because it's such a short duration right the software is pretty slick where

it will take uh that erroneous signal that's not might be on one or two different frames

um and delete it it'll it'll remove it from the overall

stacked image so i i think it's a lot of hype i think a lot of people are are taking it uh a little bit too

far and and don't um uh are are making too much of a big deal

out of it i i don't think it's going to affect astrophotography uh in imaging um that much there there

are thousands of satellites up there right now thousands right yeah and uh um

i have uh i can i can image all night and and half my frames will have something going through it to me it doesn't matter

you know throw them into the battery processor stack them up bring it out and they're all gone as if they weren't even

there so um i i really think it's something that we we have other things we can worry about for astrophotography like uh light

pollution um uh we you know we could put more effort and energy into that than we can

into um the starlink project and it it really the reality is it's not going

away not right it's there there's other satellites going up similar projects so

um uh with with modern uh stacking uh techniques now and algorithms i i

really don't think it's going to be an issue for anyone you know i'm going to make a point here i think

a lot of people are over hyping it and i've seen quite a lot of pictures

now where somebody has gone out of their way to create a mosaic of the uh starlink streaking past

and they're basically making the point that oh my gosh this is going to be a problem so let me make sure you guys can

understand this at home is if you look at something like an iridium flare

the international space station or any other satellite out there that is moving in order for you to be able to see it it

must catch the reflection of the sun so if you're in the night time the chance of you catching the sun

when it's in low earth orbit is less likely unless the sun was coming in at a lower angle so to speak so

i kind of feel that the astronomy community in some ways have been so unfair uh to spacex with the starling satellite

incidentally once they reach their actual orbit they become geostationary from what i'm

aware of because remember they're trying to provide uh internet service to one specific area

the problem here is if this satellite is moving around this area of coverage moves so they have

to be geostationary so if you guys are into this if you look into the southern sky you'll get

all the geostationary satellites in one big long arc from my perspective at least anyway

uh because i use these satellites so galaxy 17 is a prime example it is always in the same place and if

you took a picture of it you wouldn't know what it was you would just assume it's another star so i think the biggest complaint that

people are really having is they're seeing moving objects and

they're mistaking it as starlink when in reality i don't think it is

yeah and i mean i have to agree with um what uh speaker was saying about

being able to process a lot of this out now um and exactly what you're saying once they

get up to their set orbit um then they're going to be less visible

i think that yes there are an amount of them and i think when they uh the bad pressure really

started on them a couple of months back it was just when after they've been launched and when they're doing the testing so they're

running around that low earth orbit um but certainly running sigma clipping

in a lot of the software is removing them i mean we've we did a test on it and removed up to 50

satellites out using sigma clipping so

yeah i think that'd be less of a problem i mean for those people who shoot orion

if you shoot it early during the evening when it's low in the sky whether you like it or not there are

satellites that just whiz right through it all night for at least a good two hours but once it gets high enough

suddenly all that traffic stops it's like somebody just shut the freeway down and there's no more cars allowed to go

so it's again it's people's perspective of the whole thing

um and to be totally honest this is another part of astronomy that i've started to

get into uh may not be so astronomy than anything else but i started to chase the international

space station in any shape or form possible whether it is just as a regular visible pass or through a

transit or anything like that and it's actually fun to find all these little random objects out

there that are very very faint and then you have like your scope point at it and you're just waiting there for something to go

there it is so it's another thing to do to be totally honest and and it's not a bad thing there's a

couple of comments about this um already

we have someone that is saying that they they don't believe that they are going to geostationary

orbit at this time um but um mike weisner points out that the american astronomical society published

a study report earlier this week on meta constellations eventually with

tens of thousands of satellites in low earth orbit a satellite will cross the field of view

of the telescope every 30 seconds the bottom line of the study was that the that astrophotography will be dramatic

dramatically impacted um that is um you know that may be true for

for the moment but you know what mike i think that uh amateur astronomers are so ingenious

and getting around that they will figure it out somebody will develop software uh who knows maybe elon musk

will actually provide software himself uh that will be free of charge for any astrophotographer out there to eliminate

you know the satellites in the field of view it may be a problem

for professionals astronomers as well but again uh you know we'll figure out a way i think

that's true i think this is it's a static way of looking at things as if you create a problem and it's

never going to be fixed i mean that's just a bad way of looking at anything uh yes it's a problem there's there's an

issue that's raised but again you gotta the other thing you gotta consider is uh

the benefit of these satellites what it's gonna do for the world bringing internet access to people that

don't have it and to think about amateur astronomers that are out there in the middle of nowhere that would like to be able to

connect to the internet that's you know true yeah

and but people are people will develop techniques and they're already techniques for doing this like we've

talked about you know you do a median combine on your stack and it gets rid of all we already deal with hot pixels

which are you know as nuisan as much of a nuisance as the start starlink satellites might be you know so

yeah what's the um astronomical league um discussed on any of this terry

um i really haven't heard an official statement from the astronomical league about that

um you know i i'm sure there we've seen pictures from astrophotographers that

had talked about that weren't happy and others that actually worked around it um i don't know if it was through

software or what but we've kind of seen a little bit of both sides of it so

you know we're just kind of waiting to see what happens because who knows there might be software that

can easily take care of that that would be my hope yeah yeah so far we've managed

with um basic uh integration to remove quite a lot of

them but i did see a picture of comic neo wise recently with the whole array of uh styling

coming past it and i wasn't actually sure whether it was real or whether it was photoshopped in

to make a point but it it did look a bit too well placed

with yeah i saw that i saw that image uh gary and and the guy just took every

he did the opposite of what we do he stacked all the sterling images together so it looked like there was

a lot of stuff on that one image you know so but you'd never see that in real life

cool so a question about this um from brett blake to jerry

is well someone is trying to find and map out minor planets sets might be a problem

what do you think so the way you typically do minor planet

measurements is you take like you said sets of maybe three images

of each minor planet over a one or two hour period uh and you're spacing the images but

again satellites are intermittent they're not they don't

last they don't stay there long at all but this but the uh you know but your your minor plan is

going to move slowly across the sky so you should be able to still unless you

unless the satellite crossed right in front if you occult if it occulted the asteroid you'd be

darn lucky to catch it uh you may see a satellite merge with an asteroid in terms of the photograph

it may not occult it but you may see it come close so one image you might have the satellite next to the asteroid

where you may not be able to measure it accurately uh that would be the worst of it i think

but i that that's i don't think it's very likely uh that you would have that very often so

in terms of measuring uh asteroid positions it's like anything else

you can work around it and it the opportunity one other thing is like uh simon said

these things only occur you know right after sunset or right before sunrise because the the angle of the sun

to the orbit of the uh the satellites and it reflects down into our and for us to see it and

most of the night it's gonna you're not gonna be able to see these plus they're putting sun shades on these things

to make them as dim as they can even during those times of uh you know right right before sunrise and

right after sunset so i think the problem is going to kind of go away after a while once people get once the

system gets online and people see the benefit of it i think you'll start and then astronomers will work out the uh

the tools needed to mitigate the problem it'll be like the y2k problem back in

2000. it'll be all all about nothing you know like making his own oatmeal he has a iss

transit image that he can show related uh simon you want to share your screen

yeah so let me uh unmute myself um

there is the share screen button there it is so i am going to share my desktop so you're gonna see

absolutely all of my junk flying around and

i'm gonna quickly show everybody

what you actually what i actually saw during the actual internationals

during the eclipse let me just make sure i get the jpeg otherwise this will take

forever to load up okay here we go so hopefully

we'll be able to flick through these so this was actually um in 2012

was it 2017 sorry 2017 or whenever the eclipse was i forgot already i should notice by now all right so

that's not a fly that's coming into view that is the international space station and as you can see

it just clips the edge of the moon and then comes popping back out the

other side so hopefully you guys can see that yeah

um so again i understand what the premise is and the the gripe with all of these

things are with having satellites whizzing around but in reality

course things like this could never happen if we didn't have all these satellites

and things up there and it's actually kind of fun watching some of this stuff go whizzing by because the

chances are you will see the international space station cross over at some point

um at night and you don't pay any attention to it and you don't think anything more oh it's a plane it's

a meteorite or something but reality is it's actually the international space station that goes

whizzing past and there are astronauts on board and we're up there so i kind of feel like

some people who turn around and say that all these satellites going up into space and we've got 10 000 plus satellites up

there that are going to ruin the night sky but to be honest it's it's part of all of this is the way

i see it a comment is uh

he says it's fine now but when starlink has 30 000 satellites in their constellation and

jeff bezos has his 30 000 and webweb has their 40 000

and china has their thirty thousand i'll predict it'll be worse for ground-based scientific astronomy than you guys are

thinking but you know these are just still tens

of thousands of objects versus many millions of objects that are up there

you know the the other thing here is though it's the relative size of all of these uh satellites that

are being launched they're not all sizes of a school bus or a semi truck a lot of them are the size of a suitcase

because they have all these micro satellites and cubesats that they've started to launch they're so incredibly

small and in all honesty um if you've got an 18 millimeter scope or a small

reflector the chances are you don't have the resolving capability to even see them when they're that small

and the other thing is it's not a static it's not a static problem again by the time we get to 30 000

satellites up there they'll be they'll be thinking hard about the impact once there's 150 000

and and they'll there'll be a fix for it there'll be some change some something they'll change they'll either decide we don't need that many

satellites and these other companies will go out of business we'll start sharing things better you know it's hard to say what's going to

happen 20 years from now in terms of these satellites you know there's already 15 000 objects up there

now you know so uh that are being trapped what was the name of that really

expensive black paint you've run about the other day it's got the one for the insides of the telescope

oh i've actually seen that stuff by the way it's it's really freaky i kid you not um

if you're looking at my black t-shirt i i am not exaggerating this stuff when you look at it you have no depth perception

if you put a white dot on there you have no idea how close it is if you bring it towards your face or

move it away it's just this white dot that hovers in absolute invisible blackness it's crazy

it's vantablack it's vantablack so the first time i saw anything like

that when i was working at meat instruments it was a lock key didn't come out with it it was called speed black

and it came in this special gem jar and everything you know it was delivered in a special package

pretty impressive delivery and lockheed wanted to spray or to treat the

interior of the explorer or beet instruments tubes the schmidt gaster grains

i have no doubt it would have increased progress dramatically in the telescopes

but the cost the cost to you know to put it in there was

way out of line for what uh what you know would have made it cost effective and we couldn't have made it

just a a deal where we would do it by special order uh you know because lockheed wanted to

do our entire inventory so um hey scott you can almost say the

prices are astronomical astronomical

it reminds me of um it reminds me of the the the rockumentary from 1984 with

spinal tap yeah right so black it's really nice

so something really funny actually happened in kosovo with the starlink satellites

because like uh people were thinking they are ufos because you know it's the way they

travel is very interesting so then i made this post telling that it's not the ufos it's

startling the satellites from spacex so i have all this like media calling me for interviews and for

like it just was like everybody was scared like ufos are invading and this is uh that people like me to

research and read more because it was very interesting here in kosovo

cool okay i i think that ellen we should all start tweeting ellen to buy

out the company that uh makes his fans at black yeah and then he can apply it to these satellites and that will solve the

problem yes well if you get a guy like banksy with some vantablack

he could make these holes in the sides of buildings that people would just walk into so

[Laughter] sudden stop so

anyhow we are about uh 15 minutes away from our

10-minute break okay uh we should probably go with question number two uh jerry and

um let's see let me copy it okay let me see so these

questions are gonna seem off the wall a little bit they're gonna take a little bit of work

to find uh if you're not familiar with but i give you some hints on how to find stuff so this specific question another

warning do not post your answer in the chat okay no you can't win by by posting the answer

in the chat and you're giving away the answer to all of your competition okay because the first one to answer it

in email to kent at explorescientific.com and become a

member of the explorer alliance is the winner okay so we are going to give away

another galileoscope okay and and we have we have more so what is

the question all right so the ii the international astronomical union

minor planet center certifies observatory locations and assigns a code to each of these observatories

so when they do observations they they when they submit their data they know where it's coming from

all right so if you look for a list of npc observatory codes in google or other search engine

what is the name of the observatory assigned the code w54 whiskey 54 it's

w54 what observatory is that code assigned to

okay and i am putting that up in the chat as well

and where you need to answer it too so there you go what what was the um

that one's got that is going to be another galileo scope oh cool and the number it's door prizes

but it's another galileo scope i'll have you guys uh know that um

uh gary palmer has proven that this is a high performance astrograph as well

as he has already made he's made an image of the moon with it uh with uh uh

you know a nice uh uh astronomical imaging camera so very versatile instrument

has a quarter 20 hole here for mounting onto a tripod if you'd like

you could make there's there's a number of ways to uh use this telescope and you can go to

galileoscope.com to learn more so um but um

i'm happy to say that explore scientific is the is currently the official maker of the

galileo scope so where are we going to now gary i think we might have a um quick look

and see what grant has um got coming in because it's a little while ago that he was

building another image up i think he said the pickering's triangle if i remember rightly

oh i think i muted you i'm sorry grant hold on for a second

let me unmute you pardon there we go

are you unmuted there you go yes can you hear me thank you thank you okay so i wish those are over

to a hydrogen alpha filter for this one running uh subs we're up to 84 of them

so we've got a reasonable amount coming in there and some nice detail coming through so this is pickering's triangle

um some nice nice detail coming out there and that's looking pretty good for um

very short subs yeah yeah very limited subs but it's um yeah come on coming through quite nice

and cleanly so uh i'm going to save the data as well and see if we can have a play around with it offline afterwards and

perhaps share around what we've kind of got whilst the master show has been going on excellent

that's pretty fun they photograph that you can share what the telescope looks like what the gear looks like

uh yeah i can dig one out okay

well grant is looking for that um there was a question for terry mann

about they want to know what kind of guide scope or what you're using to connect your guide scope to your

to your dslr yeah um i'm using an l bracket on my camera

and then what i have done is um this is a zw 30 millimeter

spotting or guide scope what i have done is taken like a quick release bracket

and screwed the uh guide scope back onto the bracket and then i put the bracket i slide it

down on the l bracket for the camera so i think i have an email from him i

will send him pictures close up so he can see what i have done perfect okay it's good all right

go ahead grant yeah i'm gonna have to stop sharing share a different screen so i don't have a picture on the

the remote machine so bear with me just uh just a tick uh say can you see that there we go

beautiful instrument look at that so it's it's quite a modest setup and that was one of the ideas we didn't want to put

stuff that was sort of out of reach of of sort of regular astronomers we wanted something representative of what the

community would typically use um or you know it's it's yeah

intermediate higher end but still it's certainly within reach um there she is over in in spain

as we speak in spain there we go and collecting photons through a narrow

band filter is that correct yes at the moment it's got a hydrogen alpha filter in place

um you can see in that image there it's showing it closed down with a flip flap

which is an op tech product and that not only protects the telescope during the day but we also use it as a

flat panel for taking flats for calibration purposes so that's a really handy little device

um on the front of it what's it called a flap i'd i'd really like to get something like that for our observatory

yeah optics as an american company op tech make them um

um they do all sorts of sizes and it's an incredibly handy device um yeah both for

protecting the scope and also taking your flats uh remotely and i have to say the guys

over in the remote observatory do a very nice uh wiring job much better than my rig normally looks like

so it it works very well excellent ah stop sharing that one

all right and we got about 10 more minutes before we go to uh our break

just because if anyone has any requests for objects i'm happy to move move the scope around wherever and leave it to build up on the next

target okay i'll ask the uh the audience here

object request imaging requests

for the observatory in spain

somebody's going to have to get out their plant spirits and go what's up in spain right now

yep excellent afterwards we're going to we're going to

give away some 52 degree eyepieces for the uh door prizes so we got a couple of those as

well so cool cool so i think um we've got a few minutes

why don't we run over to the shops because we haven't had a chat with chopstick and see what he's been up to over the last few days since the last

start party yes he's been very patient here with us so hey guys thanks for having me

on the show um i was hoping to get some imaging but the weather's not really helping us

in that department so let me share my screen and i can show you guys

it looks like you're up on the international space station yep saying it

on a solar panel or something yeah that space weather is tough sometimes it's hard to yeah the

sun is still yes i'm just about managing it you know i'm surviving yes

so if you can see my screen this is um m57 which is what i was working on yesterday

i didn't get much data i've got 12 subs so these are just stacked i haven't

actually edited any any of the images um and then again i've just been playing

around with old images that i've had previously i'm 31 uh-huh yeah but again this one i was

you do you think the opportunity how do you grab these chucks um from my back garden or the front

garden there's a couple that i went to a dark site a few weeks ago which uh which one was it

i'll have it open yes

m27 which was that was 13 lights um

no darks or flats or anything else all stacked in cyril so as i've only

started over the last four months of hitting deep sky objects and photography in

general i'm still sort of finding my way around and seeing what's in the sky

see what's available um remind everybody how long you've been doing this chucks remind tell people how long

you've been doing this so five months in total including photography because i didn't even know how to use the camera actually

um and then i started with um trying to test it all out on the moon

because the moon was quite a nice object to get into that's when i ordered the scope and the

mount and started getting into astrophotography i think i might have spoken to grant at first light optics a few times when i

had issues with my xs100 many email exchanges with him and

rob i think was it um and then carrying on with the luna this

is with the scope that i bought it's only budget scope it was a skywatcher 102t

and then i've got the exos 2 gt mount um and i use nina to do all of my

processing in the evenings um i've been looking at uh this is one i edited a little bit in

with just a few levels and curves nothing spectacular um but that's the next part of the

journey that i'm trying to get on to that's not that i wouldn't i wouldn't say that's not bad

that's great uh four months five months in that's awesome right all right yeah cheers um goodbye to some

of the other ones i've seen it's okay but yeah i was pleased with

that one that was in a portal 4 area wonderful wow look at all those stars

man i think there are early images we all look back at them you know when you've been doing this a

long time and you might go yeah we've improved massively or you know we've totally changed our equipment and

our view on where we're going in astronomy but you still look back on those and i

look back on a lot of my early stuff and go well yeah it's not as good as what i can do now but i learned a lot from doing that

and that's part of the process these images will build that process up yeah yeah definitely i mean the first

time i saw a nebula come on screen i was like you know jumping up and down with joy i was

like look i've got it i've got it it was m51 i think the first one i ever tried to get um

and when it finally got there and everything clicked it yeah it's a difference

that's what it's about yeah but no it's been a really good journey there's been lots

of people helping and guiding me along and it's been a really good community to to get involved with you know so yeah and

i'm really grateful for all the help that i've received you know i'm gonna make a quick um

uh comment for the for those people out there who have just gotten into doing astro

photography is try not to compare yourself to some of the other people

that are out there because it can be discouraging um i mean chuck's just hit the nail on

the head when he said when he first got that nebula and he's jumping up and down saying i got it um i mean

that's that to me is what astronomy has always been about it's about discovery it's not about that guy's got a better

picture than me and i'm gonna try and beat that person um it's it's it's that journey of discovering

something so usually when i talk to people and say to people why do i do what i do is i like to make the invisible visible

that's what it's about and very rarely do you find me doing any kind of long exposure i mean i'll do

20 minutes and i'll move on because i just want to see something and that's the general premise of what

everybody who's around me when when i do outreaches or star parties they want to see it

and when they see the pillars of creation for example in the eagle nebula for the first time and i said you can do

this as well it's not as hard as it looks i might make it look complicated it really isn't

and chuck's you know is a prime example of the inspiration that some of you out there

probably need is don't compare yourselves to you know some of the great people out there that do this

compare yourself to someone like chucks and say i can do this as well

excellent excellent yeah thank you chucks that was awesome thank you hey that was thanks yeah

um simon there was a question they wanted uh chuck lewis wants to know

what filters are you using for solar imaging um right now is a hydrogen

alpha filter uh i'm gonna make this very clear this is not the same hydrogen alpha filter that

you get for nighttime astronomy they are completely different um this particular one is actually made

by a company called daystar in fact since the angle is good it's actually

right there hanging out it looks like uh it looks like a little man hanging off of my scope uh

upside down because it's got two little beady eyes sticking out and his uh mouth is kind of filled with spaghetti

or something i guess so that's that's the uh the filter

or the blocking filter should i call it is actually that's the one that i'm using so the explorer scientific scope you

can't really see it because it's actually underneath the towel because i've got to keep the sun off of this because like i said the sun is brutal

uh that's got a solar wedge or a white light filter

um and that's pretty safe to use in to a certain extent and it's a great way to get started

they're really inexpensive there's different types you can get the ones that are front mounted you can get the ones that rear mounted so forth and so

on okay great well gary do you have any uh

comments before we go to break here no i think um i'm looking like i've got

some stars visible here so i'm gonna um see whether in our break

we can fire the system up it's all sitting there waiting so providing it's not filled up with water

um and the gaps have come along afterwards um we're gonna have a quick look and see

where we can fire that up but um thanks to everybody so far who has been contributing and commenting online

even though i can't read all of the comments i will certainly have a look at them later on i'm pretty much the guy

doing that i will tell you grant that uh some of the image requests and you can you can pick

any one of these um uh but uh since you asked uh brett blake

brett blake came back with ic1101 he said but it's really really faint he

says i'll get it though one way or the other uh another request for uh

i can't read it because it's red type up there but it says crescent nebula

question mark or ngc 6888 yeah that's a crescent yeah that's

interesting because that's our next data release is on uh 80 hours worth of present data which which gary's having a look at at the

moment so that's interesting i was hoping someone would say the pelican nebula because that's what i've gone through but i'll

have a go 101. all right michael whitaker says ngc 1275

for csa uh elliot neal who's here in northwest

arkansas he says any shots of globular star cluster in 15.

so i don't see any others at this point but i'll let you concentrate on that grant

and uh you know um and uh you know if uh

if none of those are in the cards then of course you it's it's astronomers choice too so

right so we are go we are going to go to break um

give us uh give us 10 minutes and uh we'll be back

hey scott before we run off to the break uh do you want to leave my solar up live so they can watch that

oh we could do that sure while the place blows away yeah yeah we could do we have 10 minutes

of solo that would be fine yeah so i'm just going to share my screen so yeah off we go awesome okay

we'll see in about 10.

okay

all right

okay

all right

hey scott scott yeah yeah so i i've got some processed

images of um the sun literally from just now so we've got some of those and i've like i said

i've got tons and tons of pictures great okay so i don't know uh if you

guys are squeezing for content as in pictures that is i think there's plenty of

content with this talk oh we can we can show those

nicholas wrote yeah they can hear me uh they can hear us uh in the in the

broadcast right now our party's winners please yes nicholas don't worry we will

we're way ahead of you wait you're not going to tell one of

your stories in the background now one of my stories what kind of story

you know that's the question you know i'll tell you okay so when you were talking about stories on the last stop star party when you

went for your break i was listening to one of the ones that you were telling and i've heard that one before but my favorite one you've ever told me

is that need scope that had the serial number and why you serialize

every single one of your explorer scientific scopes do you know which story i'm talking

about i recall the uh it's the mead eight inch scope

that was cursed or something that and people said they could see ufos with it or something crazy along those lines

yes you're talking about you're talking about the heavens gate story yes

yeah it's kind of crazy story because um uh during uh during comet hill bob

there was a cult organization uh that was headed up by a guy named

marshall applewhite and marshall applewhite was a fan of

a radio program uh that's that was produced um by art bell

and it was uh broadcast i think it's still on the air today our bills program i don't know if art

bell is still with us or not but um an amateur astronomer who used a

mead 10-inch lx200 telescope had photographed

comet hill block and in the tail through the tail

there were white dots okay now most amateur astronomers would recognize those white dots as

being background stars right because the tail of the comet was somewhat transparent

but uh he shared this uh image through his 10 inch lx200 with arbel and

our bell immediately uh said well those are those must be

companions to the uh the comet you know and uh you know i'm not so certain that

art bell was much of an astronomer um but he did talk about ufos and

paranormal stuff a lot okay and um so anyways the amateur astronomy

community uh busily got to work with uh identifying these background stars

but another guy that was listening to this show was you know it was marshall applewhite he was a fan of bart

bell and um he then recognized something different

that that the companions were coming for his uh for the heavens gate members

and that this was the sign that he had been looking for and so uh he sent two individuals

uh uh that were wearing uh apparently the uh you know the the

the kind of more or less strange clothing that is uh that the heavens gate members wore uh

into uh uh oceanside photo and telescope opt

at this time and they bought a need 10 intel x200 so they could inspect this for themselves and so they

bought it with the heaven's gate credit card back then credit cards were swiped they were actually put into the machine so

they left an imprint of the credit card itself um they purchased the telescope they

took it out to their desert their california desert uh location and uh after a while

using it you know i guess just within a week or so of using it um they returned it and they said that

we'd like to return this telescope um and uh you know of course the staff

said well why do you want to return it and they said well we can't see the companions

and so by this time they had all these stars identified okay in the

background and they showed these two members of heaven's gate that these were not

companions that they were background stars you know the amateur astronomers had

plate solved uh the uh the field okay back then uh this is before plate solving was

really that popular with amateur astronomers but they had done it and uh it seemed that the two

individuals who uh were returning it uh recognized that oh okay their background stars and they

said well we'd still like to return the telescope okay and the scope was like brand new um

uh you know and uh so opt had returned the telescope back to meat

instruments to get it re-boxed you know

they wanted to have professional packaging they wanted to check it out because they they were going to sell it again and so

normally what would happen is we would re-box that telescope and we would ship it right back to them okay in the meantime what happens is

that the uh marshall applewhite uh and the entire heavens gate group committed

suicide okay the telescope was sent to meet instruments

meet instruments instead of returning it back to opt like they should have and this goes back

to serial numbers not being tracked very well okay opt or meat instruments

accidentally shipped it back out to a customer a dealer an unknown dealer we don't know

where it went okay in the meantime peter jennings film crew and

the the nightly news shows up on opt's doorstep uh to cover this story about this

telescope and the suicide of heaven's gate and um at meat instruments we're now

getting phone calls uh from across the country looking uh for the death scope as it was

being called um uh because um you know people wanted to know where it

was what happened to it because opt didn't have it okay and uh so some um

amateur astronomer today has heavensgate's 10-inch lx200

hopefully it's still working hopefully still doing what it's supposed to do but it was a very strange time

um and uh you know so there is a dark side sometimes to

uh discovery and amateur astronomy and stuff and um so you know uh it's

it's best to uh keep to the science as much as possible right uh

not that we don't believe most amateur astronomers don't believe that uh there isn't life all over the

universe uh which they're very you know it just it i'm i'm one of those that believe that

there's life all over the universe but i i am a a ufo skeptic and um

so it's uh um i think i said this to you already scott i think i said um

i would be surprised if farah ended up with it

maybe so that's anyway that's that is the that is one of the stranger stories that true stories that i have about uh this

hobby and uh um and one of the reasons why i that i put serial numbers on everything

is that we do track them it's not that i hope that something like that would ever happen again because it was a terrible

tragedy um but uh you know it is

uh it is one of the reasons why i put serial numbers on all our products i do

want to track it i'd like to know who's uh using it um and uh you know we

have we have benefits to us our products because we have a no fault uh no fault transferable uh

forever warranty on our products so and if you can't have a serial number to

track that with and you then you're then it's uh it's a problem but um anyways we're back

uh guys and um uh you know thanks for uh sharing that

simon that really cool images of the sun there and how's it going out there gary

hi scott i'm just going to log into the system so if you give me a couple of seconds i didn't know whether we wanted to have

a chat with stephen about a few things steve and canada and i will

just get this logged on and uh sorted out and then we're actually locked onto a target we've got some

clear skies out there for a change which is the first for the uk

i think we might have lost him steve steve posting the chat that he had to

drop off right okay just give me a couple of

seconds i guess that's why you guys are leaders in theoretical physics because you never have clear skies to look at anything

[Laughter] oh jeez

you know what i'll tell you one thing this is one thing about the uh being in london that i don't miss is just clear skies

yeah okay well while he's doing that behind me i

you know i i never get a chance to look through a telescope when i'm doing my uh broadcast here so i decided

i would start looking through a microscope and we sell microscopes and uh um

i can share uh the screen with uh with what i've got here in the

telescope right or the microscope right now and so let's see

that's the lowly microbe is is made of star stuff just like we are that's right that's right and so what

happened here right now uh we have uh a corn stem

uh this this is a prepared slide that we have and it's just a lot of fun

uh looking at this but next time that i'm out i will i will have uh

i'm gonna have live specimens so i i'm gonna prepare uh some uh diatoms

and some uh tardigrades and some probably mix protozoa maybe some

rotifers uh it's really amazing to look at this stuff and uh but um

you know this is this is uh looking inwards and you can do this rain or shine so uh stop

can i just ask you it's is that the the infinity stereo you're using that i'm using a

bresser infinity microscope i'm a micro micro camera

you know the funny thing is though scott it's kind of scary that that almost looks like the sun in white light

if you were like really close up into it right

that's the thing about fractal patterns they all they all look the same no matter what the scale right yeah exactly yeah i get some other

slides here too and in fact i've got i don't know if there's anything alive in here

but i do have like some pond water so i'm going to put a slide up there

let me get a clean slide

so we can come up with yeah i see gary phoebe feverishly uh working

away in the background there yeah i'm uh just setting everything up

to capture what

there we go i will just quickly share my screen

there and hopefully we can see that we've got m31

starting to come in there we go just need to adjust it up a little bit

oh yeah it's not going to be the clearest because it's running through

team viewer to connect up otherwise i'm going to lose the connection on here but um it is actually working

and capturing at the moment so i'll pull one of the stills up in a minute that come in and then uh put that on the

screen but for a change we're actually uh

capturing something which is good excellent excellent

okay well who's next here

i reckon we should go to jerry um and have a chat about the observatory okay

oh do you want to talk about the mark slade remote observatory i appreciate that the opportunity to

share what we're doing there a little bit um let me bring up my

and we have a question for terry that we'll do we'll ask after after uh you talk about this okay

yep so let me share my screen

all right can you see that sure do so one of the things that we do we do a lot

of science at the mark slade remote observatory we're we're a non-profit organization we were

incorporated last year about a year ago uh msro science dot uh

income msr science incorporated but uh our website is msr science.org

and we run the uh we have we have the main station that you see here uh we run on donations from a lot of uh

loaned equipment from uh explore scientific some donations from myself and dr marvin

masuda who's the director of the observatory we actually have three stations

unfortunately right right now we've had a few failures on a couple of our stations they i just

had to send this focuser out to be repaired uh it's uh

this past week so this this station is out of service right now

uh some of the work that we do uh we do um asteroid i do a lot of asteroid work

uh not not uh it's an aw if it's off and on thing because i jump around a different thing

i do asteroid work i do exoplanet work that i just started to get into about almost three

years ago i guess and also we do occultations we have another uh team member dr

um uh bart ballard who is a retired physicist that's in our

team he uh he does occultation work but

so let me i'm gonna jump down here to the instrument that we

currently have installed that i've done some work on and done some testing and it's called a

an engineered diffuser it's basically a way to uh process the starlight coming in

through the scope into an image on the image plane that allows you to mitigate the effects

of scintillation and tracking error

because the the key thing to do in high precision measurements for exoplanets is you want to make the

you want to get rid of all the error in the system which includes the noise due to

sky scintillation and other things the sky conditions cause the uh

noise in the measurement so you want to mitigate all that noise that you can and this is one of the uh

instruments that we use to do that and

so the way that the way that that works is it looks like you're

defocusing the star it's just like and that's a method that you can use also to

get higher precision measurements of starlight as photometry is what it's called

so we do photometry on the on the stars which measures the brightness of the star

and what you do when you you're looking for changes in this brightness to do the measurement

and what the diffuser allows us to do is to do a much higher precision measurement

compared to just a defocused image and this on the left that's what the diffused image looks like

it's it's look like bobby stars it's it's not very pretty to look at in terms of uh you know the beautiful

pictures that a lot of astronomers make with really pinpoint stars and things like that but

this is this is for science purposes so we want to make as accurate a measurement of the starlight

as we can so in that way these images are similar to the beautiful images their high

high performance imaging is what it is so

just to to give you an idea of the image what it looks like on the uh on the chip the way it's it's created is

typical star images are create what's called a point spread function and it's a gaussian shape curve just

like this on the right hand side and but when you use the diffuser it creates

this more stable top hat shape where it's has steep sides and it raises

to the uh raises up and is flat on top and uh it spreads the light out on more

pixels which makes the more pixels you have the more accurate or the more precise the uh the uh measurement can be

because you've got more sensors making the measurement and you're averaging all the errors out basically is what it comes down to so

with this with this diffuser we can make and there's another view of it that's a 3d view and it's kind of cool

the way it actually looks if you look on the lower right and upper left you can see that what it actually looks like on

the image but that's that's kind of what the profile looks like

so one of the things we observed with this is exoplanets and here's an

example of a light curve for the exoplanet hat piece 16 b that we observed on november 11th and

2018 and what what this this chart depicts

is not just the light curve when the when the planet crosses in front of the

star it dims the light and for example so if you look here this is

another light curve that we did this was the first uh exoplanet we ever

observed at uh at the msro but you can see this is what it what it does this is the

planet passing in front of the star okay and then when it does that it

blocks some of the light so that that's why you have this dip and a light curve and for a jupiter

size planet which this first one was that we we imaged it's it drops the light about one percent

okay so you're looking for a one percent change in the light which is equivalent or very much close

to 0.01 magnitude okay so that's that's measuring uh that's detecting a

change of 0.01 magnitude all right now that's just for detection

so you can see how noisy the data is here on our first measurement for this

exoplanet now cut jump to november

of 18 and using this uh diffuser instrument the scatter is much

less and the depth of this transit is about the same it's

um [Music] it's 12 i think it's like 12 millimeters

it's uh so 1 1000th of a magnitude is called a millimag

so the depth of this one is about 12 millimag or 1.2 percent this is how much the

light dimmed 1.2 but if you look at these individual data

points they've got these little error bars that's the precision of the measurement

okay so all that's left after you after you've corrected for

scintillation and tracking air and stuff like that all you have left is this long-term

light variation that's this little bit of scatter and uh and that's that's what determines

the precision of the measurement so our measurement precision on this

typically with the previous one this is about

a precision of about 10 11 millimeg okay which is about the same as the

depth on when we're using the diffuser the precision is down to

this one the total precision was 2.7 millimag or two you know

two one thousandths of a magnitude three three one thousandths of a magnitude is the precision of this measurement

and that's that's professional level measurement is what that is with a six and a half inch scope

wow and this so the shot noise precision which is what the um

what the diffuser really mitigates is the shot noise it's one millimeg rms

noise one one one thousandth of a magnitude noise and then the total with the residual

scintillation and the shot noise is 2.7 so that gives you an idea of what's

possible so on this when we did this exoplanet we were able to take this light curve and use it in the modeling

tool that uh we use astro image js our processing software it's got a modeling tool that

allows us to model this planet uh in terms of the size of the planet and

and the inclination the orbital inclination so the catalog value for hat p16b is on

the right uh left hand side and then our measured values are on the right hand side so you can

see we we were pretty good in our measurements the other thing the big thing that they

like to see is the transit midpoint time that keeps track of the orbital period

and then also the transit length those things are very precise also so we were

we had a very good measurement there um jerry someone uh wants to know here

isn't the point spread function what bookies use in las vegas [Laughter]

i guess so i haven't i haven't heard that term used in that context but uh that's kind of interesting function but

they they aren't the point spread that's right point spread that's right it's uh they're looking at the point spread

right no but this was amazing uh now is this the same

this is the same measurement we did live yes yes exactly and so uh jerry

had uh just put all this stuff together and i said jerry we got a we got to do a

a live show about this this is one of the early live programs that we did and um

so he was just supposed to just do a demonstration okay it ended up that

his first try okay and using this diffuser uh and his first try of aiming this this

thing at uh at a uh candidate which was p16b uh they did detect this exoplanet

and so it was like uh you know your first time up at bat and you hit a home run you know

so yeah the data off the uh i mean i had been working with this diffuser for a while testing it uh

but this is the first time that we had uh done uh a good over a full transit

on a planet

question uh for you jerry uh how do you normalize the system noise temperature etc

uh so in terms of the can the instruments themselves the camera is temperature controlled you

know we set uh that and we do calibration frames uh to get rid of that noise

you get the rid of the uh readout and the dark current uh noise and flat field it also

now there's there's been some talk i don't want to get too much in the weeds but uh depending on how many how many uh

calibration how you take your calibration data sometimes if if you add calibration or if you do

calibration of this data it actually adds more noise into the

into the measurement as opposed to taking it out calibration frames typically are used to

make things look good okay now they they do also calibrate the data set especially

the flat field that that normalizes the gain across all the pixels so if you're taking very

precise numbers on that the flat field would would make sense in terms of the the bias and the dark

[Music] i've heard discussions that for exoplanet measurements they could be

problematic and adding more noise into the system as opposed to less noise but the biggest thing with the noise is

not just it's not the actual temperature of the instruments or anything that the biggest thing is the sky

and the shot noise of the measurement because we're gathering we're not just gathering um typically on a defocus

star you'll gather half a million pixel photons let's say

to make the measurement you know on the diffuser we're spreading

the light out much more and we're taking longer exposures where we're gathering 10 million 20 million photons

to do the measurement where the shot noise if you're familiar with that term is

equal to the square root of the number of photons that you

that you gather or another way to put it the signal-to-noise ratio for the measurement

is equal to the square root of the number of photons that you're

gathering so so for example a 1 million

if you're gathering 1 million photons that's equal to a signal noise ratio of around

one millimag okay so we get the shot noise down that far

but but there's other residual errors that that actually takes more than a million photons it's

we try to gather five or ten million photons to do the measurement to get the noise down at that level

does that make sense yes jerry can i

can i ask a quick question here um i'm often asked about

how people start off with with doing this and what the most important criteria for

a camera would be how would you would you like to comment on uh bit

rates of converters because they're they're quite crucial to accurate measurement aren't they

that's nice karen because that's exactly one of the questions from the audience as well using

so say that again about the bit rates well just um would you like to comment

on how um bitrate affects accuracy of of measurement

because this is an important factor um in astrometric collection isn't it

yeah so uh the data the data that you're gathering there's

uh in terms of the exposure how how fast you're taking the exposures and how long

the exposures are will affect your readout noise and uh i'm not sure bit rate i'm i'm not

exactly sure what what's meant by bit rate but in terms of noise the you know if you take a high k