Transcript:
they don't want you to but okay yeah
here we go
but yeah this this visualization here is of course two galaxies kind of
colliding and re-colliding you know uh but it is making these kind of halos and
star streams between them yep and that that little dot right there is an ejected black hole holes it just said
so some nice simulation
yeah say uh scott excuse me should i uh bow out for a little while
until it's my time to come in go ahead tony
should i uh go offline until it's time my turn to come in it's up to you it's up to you
something okay i have a few things i need to do go ahead and you you're logging on
correctly and everything so you're all good and then just so we're on the same page with
time zones i should be in in about 1 hour and 15 minutes yeah yeah if you
watch kind of your place in the queue uh yeah i'll be watching yeah yeah
then okay you'll see you'll see john briggs come on and then of course you're on right he's going to be introducing
you so it's okay okay good all right well i'll be around okay thanks tony sure
so looks like it's just me and you david so
we'll have to do the whole show by ourselves well we're gonna have to increase the percentage of profanity
then if you and i are going to carry the whole show that's right and i'm going to have to
make some cocktails i guess yes indeed yeah
well i'll try to be a good boy i'll try to be a good boy
there are a lot of good subjects queued up for tonight again oh yeah yeah i'm excited about it so yeah these are quite
good shows that you put together yeah it's just uh oh it's the
it's the people like yourself okay that come on and really make it
what it is you know so uh you know i've we've been fortunate to have uh you know
a global audience and and sometimes to have actually some of those people in the audience come on our
show as well which i really love um but uh
yeah you know i mean we've had uh you know it was a little unexpected
about [Music] robert fugate being on last world star
party and even more unexpected he's going to be on again tonight so um tony cook uh is just an amazing uh
amateur astronomer but kind of also a great historian like john briggs and yourself are you know i
mean you guys all know a lot about uh what happened before and so that's really cool
and they have that uh la heritage of of tony being in the city and and john
being at mount wilson years ago and so they know that that culture of mount wilson and the la
basin very very well oh yeah yeah can you imagine how
kind of heady all of that stuff was when uh when they're starting to build the 60 inch and then the 100 inch and then they
start work on the 200 inch you know and it's like that had to be well it was the center of the uh
professional astronomy universe you know it certainly was and i wrote that the introduction to my galaxy's book talked
about you know in 1923 la was a city of barely a million people
and you know uh mikelson had just won the nobel prize at caltech
and uh you know uh amelia earhart was taking the flying left david
hold on for a second i need to take that okay
uh
now for some reason david was not able to get the zoom link so but he's got it now so he'll be on a moment excellent
yep i was hoping there wasn't some uh complication with him that was troubling
yeah i'm glad he's with us
e2
i really like this quote by henry best and that's great yeah yeah
very nice you're really good at finding good quotations there's so much out there
you know so yes here we are
there we go
hello everyone can you hear me we can hear you hello david
hello david
we've got electron streaming right on through to tucson now
but i was starting to ask you david um
about these stellar streams it seems like they're mostly what i've found so far is that they're mostly connected
with black holes um but is that are there other reasons for
or more accepted reasons for these stellar streams well i think most of them uh
occur as stars and gas as galaxies encounter each other and the
tidal forces pull material out of a galaxy like this allegedly will happen with the milky way
and the andromeda galaxy eventually as well and so you and you know it has
happened with various dwarf galaxies that have been eaten by the milky way over time sag dig
it's happening with it right now um and the magellanic clouds have
contributed the magellanic stream of stars and gases as well so i think the
the most normal way for stellar streams to form is is extra galactic encounters
i see and some of them it's amazing are quite
long-lasting you know it's funny we think of things moving and you know
encounters over time but these things take so long we really are seeing still frames of a movie you know
so yeah things that don't exist very long and astronomical terms seem kind of
permanent as we see them you know
we've got lyric meteor showers going on right yeah there's there's indeed a peak i
think this later this week yeah mm-hmm never is too
orion is yeah now what about this other meteor shower tony cook was bringing this up i'll let
him talk about it some but there's this possible new meteor shower
or something like that uh yeah it was in the aopa journal
although i don't really know what it much about it but it's coming up around the same time as the lyrics i
think i only had a few minutes to talk to tony
about this particular meteor shower but he said that possibly it might be the biggest meteor shower of
all time so that's a big claim
yes it is
quite a claim i can drop in if you'd like yeah could you
yeah no what this is is the uh the so-called 73 period shower it's uh
it's from comet swashman bachmann 3 that broke up in 1995
and although it still continues to exist in various nuclei that are spread out
but um it made quite a mess in 1995 and broke
up even more in 2006 and were supposed to go
very close only 37 000 miles or 0.004 a you
from the 1995 stream of debris so a lot of
you know the people who predict meteor storms and stuff like that without with admittedly varying
uh accuracy think that the rates could be up to 150 000 per hour for a brief time
around five hours ut on the may 30th and um
i don't know if you remember it but hubble got like spectacular movies of the nuclei breaking up and stuff so it
all depends on what the ejection velocity of the fragments are
um but uh there's a french guy i think his name
is like vulva yawn or something who back in 2006 calculated that they should be high
enough to produce a storm that night and some of the particles could be
pretty big so there's a possibility of them also being very bright and there's also a possibility of not
much happening but there's actually several streams from that comet that will be hitting
that night so uh you're almost guaranteed about 50 per
hour which is pretty good but it could keep growing and very briefly reach uh stronger than
the leonids in 1966. wow so whether or not it happens i think
people would be foolish not to at least watch for it because it's early in the evening in the u.s
and it just so happens that the moon is ideally placed yeah it's perfectly it's new right at that time yeah and uh the
radiant is very close to m3 normally that
comet produces a much weaker shower which is like one an hour called the tau herculids
but this one because it's from an off stream from fragments uh it has a different radiant
and a different maximum time and stuff so sounds good to me
you know hopefully the clouds are ideally placed too so you
know that's mine did any of you see the 1966 leonid shower by the way
you say i have one friend who did and you know the thing is about it is that
it's as different in experience say for a meteor shower as
in annular eclipses say from a you know a total eclipse
so it's a very very different experience where you almost feel like you're rushing through space because of the
numbers of particles coming towards you that's amazing it fills the sky with like snowflakes
it's not like oh there's a meteor and there's a meteor it's forty percent everywhere right
wow that's cool well guys we are going to get started here we go
[Music]
a black hole is a single point in space that has a lot of mass
one of the ways that we look for black holes is to develop new instruments and
new technologies that can try to search for them [Music]
as we've observed black holes including the the supermassive black hole
in the center of our galaxy because it has such a strong gravity
because it has lots of mass stars will orbit black holes
and as stars get closer and closer to the center of the black hole
as it crosses over the event horizon what will happen is that the material of
these stars will get shredded apart because the gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that the
material of the stars gets pulled apart but there is an event horizon which is
the point in which the black hole's gravity starts to to pull you so much that you can't escape so as you approach
the black hole you'll feel its pull but then as you get closer and closer and closer towards the event horizon that's
the point of no return so you couldn't escape past that the easiest way to think of a black hole
is just like anything that has mass so the earth has mass and one of the reasons that the moon
orbits around the earth is because the gravitational attraction of these two massive bodies
and so earth is distorting the space around the moon and so that's what keeps
the moon in orbit and so now take that to an extreme so take something that's as massive as the
sun or as massive as a million suns and put it at a single point
and that distortion that you get is coming from that amount of mass in a
single point [Music]
black holes vary in size a lot we know that black holes can be formed by
massive stars exploding and then collapsing into the singular point and
those give us black holes that are about the mass of the sun so those are solar and last black holes
however we also know at the center of galaxies like the milky way there are supermassive black holes and
these are millions or even billions of times the mass of the sun and how these form is actually a mystery
studying black holes um really gives us a fundamental insight into how gravity
works because it's such a small physical scale but it's a super massive object and so
understanding how black holes work and the interactions of black holes in in
other parts of the universe really give us a fundamental insight that we could then use to think about how our own
solar system works and so if we can understand how black
holes work it'll give us a key to really understanding our universe
[Music]
[Music]
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so
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[Music]
[Music]
and here is scotty
right how about now that's better
for the third time everybody i wanted if you didn't already read my lips welcome
to the 91st global star party um we have an exciting lineup of people
here that you know i'm proud to have uh join us uh
you know of course we're real excited direct says scott buy four microphones
if i bought four microphones then we'd have four echoes going on it would be crazy anyways yes i was muted
um but uh it's fun to see all you guys out there i hope that you really enjoy
global star party tonight you've got some new people that are that have come on like anthony cook uh
from griffith observatory robert fugate joins us once again to
talk about astrophotography um and um you know and we also have
jonathan fay from worldwide telescope he's going to be joining us uh uh for the first time so that will be
um you know very exciting but maybe also more exciting is all the
people that are regularly on global star party uh that you know to come and love
uh because you know they're they're now of course my friends but they're your friends too so
um the uh the theme of stellar streams is an interesting one
um because stellar streams have been only recently discovered
when i say recently i mean in the last few decades but uh you know there's so much interaction
that goes on uh in galaxies with halos and streams of stars um
and i'm still learning about it myself but uh i thought it would make a nice theme to uh
have uh you know some quotes about and maybe some thoughts about not only in in uh
what astronomers call stellar streams but you know kind of metaphorically about the stellar stream is as we
connect ourselves to the universe but uh our first speaker as as usual is
david levy david uh uh always sets the tone in the pace for
global star party uh and he always has an amazing quote or a poem to share with
us so i'm going to turn it over to you david thank you scott and it's good to be here tonight
and a little bit later we're going to hear from anthony cook possibly about
a major meteor shower that might take place on the 30th of may
of this year we do have the lyrids coming up this week but on the 30th of may there may be a
really wonderful shower i first heard about this read about this last week a beautiful
beautiful article in the journal of the association of lunar and planetary observers about it
and i'm looking forward to hearing what anthony says has to say about it today it could be a doozy or it could be
nothing you never know scott you really hit it out of the park today with your introduction to um
today's uh global star party from henry best in 1928
for a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded
in its stream of stars pilgrims of mortality engaging between our horizons
across the universe and across the seas of space and time
i first heard about henry besten as uh the day after the uh july june
21st eclipse of the sun in 2001 i was in at the lusaka zambia
international hurrying airport get on a plane when i found the following quotation engraved
in bronze on the wall and i just stopped what i was doing and copied it and here
it is it has nothing and whatsoever to do with astronomy here goes
man in civilization surveys the creature to the glass of his knowledge and sees
thereby a feather magnifying and the whole image in distortion
creatures of the wild we patronize them for their incompleteness
for the tragic hate fate of having taken form so far below ourselves
and therein we air and greatly air for the animals shall not be measured by
men in a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained
living by voices we shall never hear they are not brethren they are not
underlings they are other nations caught with ourselves go with ourselves in the
net of life and time fellow prisoners of the splendor and
travail of the earth this was 1949 in the outer moses
and scotty's quotation was 1928
and uh so with those quotations i now give it back to scott thank you thank you david
thank you i'm gonna have to do some more reading about henry besten so
that's that's awesome um thank you david
uh up next is uh john goss um and he is
with the astronomical league john has spent many years with the league supporting
amateur astronomers leading the organization at least i believe two terms
as president and um uh he has uh devoted so much energy and
time to you know amateur astronomers to organizations to clubs getting started
uh to their own conventions all of this stuff and and the awards that they do
you know so uh you know the more you dive into the astronomical league you're gonna you're
gonna find that they have probably the best and most numerous uh collection of
observing programs uh maybe some of the best and most numerous of the uh
annual awards that they give out you know for lifetime achievement they also recognize youth in astronomy
and i think that that's really special to me uh that uh that they you know do
recognize youth through the jack horkheimer award and um uh also the national young astronomers
award uh i think that they're also um and david levy's very involved with this
there is a section of the astronomical league that is also becoming uh kind of
its own thing for youth and so that is all important uh and we all recognize that uh as we
get closer to the next moon landing the next uh the you know
taking the baby steps maybe to colonize mars uh you know it will be youth that leads
the way um and uh you know they will be telling stories about uh how boots once again uh
you know landed in the soil the gray soil of the moon uh to their kids and grandkids and
so on so i'm excited for them because i certainly remember
the apollo era and it's about to happen all over again so
really fantastic time to be involved in astronomy uh and if you are you know if
you're if you're a grandparent or a parent and you're listening to this you know astronomy is a great gateway science
that almost anybody can do and you know it doesn't have to be real expensive there's it can actually be
free there's library telescopes out there there's astronomy clubs through the league that can really help you get
started as well so the astronomical league has over 300
member organizations with over 20 000 members and they're
here each global star party to talk about uh the um or to present uh the door prizes
through questions that they develop and and you know they they do the selection
process and so that's really awesome and we're really happy to be affiliated with them so i'm going to bring you on john
here you are hey great great uh thanks scott for that wonderful introduction not um but please let let
me say that the astronomical league's success uh it's it's achievements and it's not
so much achievements have as really due to its many many volunteers across the
country um i counted them up once we have over a hundred volunteers
and without that without their efforts you know we we couldn't do well well any of these programs uh and so you know we
really depend on them really thankful for for for what they do and who they are you know they aren't
really uh unusual people you know there's people from clubs and people who enjoy the night sky
night sky enthusiasts people who want to promote astronomy but uh we really thank thank their uh and appreciate their
their uh participation in all of this and before i get to the questions just one more thing i want to touch on which
scott kind of rang a bell when he was talking about the youth in astronomy the youth
well you know when i speak to young people a lot of them aren't really sure about
what they're going to do in life and and what's out there and all that and i tell them you know you
you see these these nasa programs you see the astronauts you see the mish scientists
you see all the engineers you see the people in academia they're very well educated you see all these people and
and i tell the young people look there is absolutely no reason why the next batch of astronauts
can't come from where we live you know they have to come from someplace everybody comes from some place so um there's a
there's an opportunity out there for young people today because they're going to have to fill the rules that the
people who are in them right now will be leaving when they move up so um there is no reason why a young person can't
can't do this stuff as long as they pursue it uh put their best effort into it and and
stay on task so if you if this is for you pursue it it just uh you just might achieve more
than you can imagine plus it'll make your parents really proud and everyone loves that to do that
so anyway uh let me get on with some of these questions because i can talk all day on some of this stuff
so one moment please
all righty all right so what we have um are we're gonna issue three three
questions trivia quite well i don't really trivia but there are astronomical fact questions which we would we would
like to put before you but before we do we always like emphasizing that we uh please take appropriate precautions when
you uh view the sun um you know that the sun is bright of course
people don't realize how bright it is but it's 400 000 times brighter than the full moon
and the full moon seems pretty bright so don't look at the sun unless you know what you're doing unless you have the
correct solar filters on the front of the telescope um you know
and be careful uh when you're showing the public all this stuff it's very safe to do as long as you you take all these
precautions okay now let's review uh the answers
from last week we had three questions question number one was
a lot of you might recognize this photograph the 72-inch telescope held the record as the largest in the world
for seven to two years until the 100 inch and mount wilson went into operation
in one co in what country is this 72 inch telescope located uh well i think um
a lot of you know it is in burr ireland um and this is a hot spot for um
astronomy uh tours um this is something to see if you're ever in that part of the world
question two this is the second largest moon in the soul system sometimes people say it's
the first but no it's just the second the first is ganymede and the second is titan
number three this galaxy is a record holder what record does it hold the g in z11
is known a galaxy um right now things may change on that as soon as some
better larger telescopes come online including the james webb but it's the farthest galaxy known
we have a number of winners from last week what's going to happen is that they're going to
our our uh league secretary terry mann's gonna put these uh six names into a hat
and there will be a drawing later on in the month and they will be receiving the winners will be receiving a nice
astronomically gift we have billy beckett cameron gillis john williams andrew corco richard crayling and
connell richards i happen to know a few of these people although i have nothing to do with with this particular set of
questions but thank you for for participating next batch questions for tonight
a lot of times we like keeping our questions uh focused on observing talking about what you can actually see
in in the night sky question number one tomorrow morning about 45 minutes before
sunrise what four bright planets can be found spread apart in a line like jewels on a celestial necklace
in order from the from the east southeastern horizon is it a
or are they a mercury venus r is in jupiter or is it b jupiter venus mars and saturn
or c jupiter venus uranus and neptune
question number two a major planetary conjunction one that the public will definitely be interested
in knowing about occurs on the final morning of april it can be seen 40 minutes
in the southeast southeast before sunrise what two planets are involved
is it a earth earth and mars b the moon and mercury c
venus and jupiter
excuse me question three the location of the galactic north pole
on a celestial dome lies just east of what well-known star cluster a
the ursa major moving cluster b the coma berenices open cluster or c
the beehive cluster so if you know the ant those answers be sure to send them to secretary
astronomically.org and submit your name for that and if if
if your answers are correct your names will be put into a drawing coming up later this month
two more slides and then i can uh get out of here and quick quit boring with all this this weekend is going to be
earth day and i just want to emphasize some sentiments here
that this is our last best hope our only best hope our planet only one planet is known that holds an
atmosphere that is not choking suffocating or crushing while protecting its surface from deadly solar radiation
only one world is known whose typical surface pressures and temperatures allow water to flow freely and often
only one place is known that not only supports life but lets it flourish that place that world and that planet is
called earth out of the trillions of possible sites in our galaxy this is our home
our only home charism so think about that coming up on earth
day one more thing and then on i'm out of here uh next week excuse me and in another three weeks we have another
astronomical league live presentation coming up this is going to be a like the rest this is going to be a very
interesting one cryovolcanism by jessica nobiello cryovolcanism in the solar system and
um i've heard some of this before it's very interesting stuff about
looking at the outer moons our moons are the outer planets and how they really um
that their surface features are are evolved and maintained by the eruption
of various uh water ices all volatiles just like
the text says here so it'll be pretty interesting to see what we've learned recently actually some of this is very
recently about uh the outer soul system including pluto's moon charon
so uh be sure to tune in and on that night we'll have uh carol orange which is the vice president or excuse me the
president of the astronomically chuck allen vice president terry mann the secretary and scott will be there and
david levy so we're looking forward to on this in three weeks
this summer at the bottom you can see we still have alcon planned i'll con 2022 july 28th to the 30th in
albuquerque new mexico so if you want to have a whole two or three days worth of astronomy packed with all types of stuff
please come to alcon it'll be it'll be uh pretty interesting to see especially since we haven't really had
it in person for two years so be good to see all these people again
so on that i'll turn it back to you scott um thank you for thank you
letting me uh go on and on and uh you know keep all that in mind especially about earth day it's coming up thank you
absolutely absolutely that's great okay um well uh
you know there's so much as i said so much that the astronomical league offers if you don't already belong to the
astronomical league you should check your local astronomy club many astronomy clubs are are
already league clubs and so when you join you're kind of automatically joining the league
at the same time if you're not near a club that offers that or if you're in another country the
astronomical league also offers memberships at large so you can be a member anywhere and uh all you have to
do is go to astroleague.org so i'd like to tell you a secret though
here's a secret for you so don't don't tell anybody this all right but i think statistically about half the astronomy
clubs in the country belong to the astronomical league wow so we have a lot of people involved but we can still get
more so uh you got the other half to work yeah yeah so it's pretty cool a lot of people
thank you thank you all right so up next will be uh
uh david eicher david if if you're new watching the show i haven't watched the show for a while i haven't seen david
come on before david eicher is the editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine uh
he got his start in writing about astronomy decades ago with his own deep sky
magazine and i think that that magazine was published until like the early 90s
he had been also working at astronomy magazine where he is today he's been there for over 30 years but something
you might not know about david eicher is that
he is an expert on civil war history and i learned today that he had donated
something like was it four thousand books is that right david yeah about a thousand books
yeah about the civil war uh i had too many but you know if you're a book collector
there comes a point when you have too many books in your house wow i tear it down i think it's like a lot i mean that
is a real library you know so yeah uh pretty astounding but uh
uh the you know dave iker's multifaceted
in that you know he understands science he's a he's a
lecturer he'll he lectures like at harvard university uh he uh the american
museum of natural history he's a regular lecturer there too as well as
clubs and organizations probably all over the world he has
been very much involved with the starmus uh event which he'll talk about at the end
of his talk which we explore scientific as being invited to for the first time
uh i mean man when you think of all the things that dave eicher is involved with
i really don't know how he finds the time he was trying to describe to me what his day was like today and
he is one busy guy so we're really fortunate to have him i love that he's sharing one of his
passions which is minerals and crystals with us and i think that tonight's uh
topic is irons so it's important to understand yeah it's
important to understand minerals and crystals because it's another lens on the universe you know
the uh you know earth is just one of maybe trillions and trillions of planets that
are out there and um yeah earth day is coming up and yes it is an amazing planet
that harbors life but uh might not be the only one so um
but i'm gonna turn it over to you david thank you so much for being a friend and for coming on to yet another global star
party thanks scott for having me as always i'm going to share my screen and see if i
can get to start a slideshow and see if you see a big red
rhodochrosite crystal but before i talk about planetary geology a little bit tonight i thought i
would quickly talk about stellar streams because that's such an interesting concept scott and i were talking about
it a little bit as we were kind of warming up the machine here to go a little earlier and you know there aren't too many
stellar streams that are known that are studied very well um and what this is you know galaxies as
they evolve over time do bad things to each other they they eat each other
because on local scales gravity is a dominant force and so these gravitational tidal forces will tear
galaxies apart that are really close to each other this has happened many many times that we've seen evidence for in
our local group especially with the milky way galaxy devouring dwarfs
and so many of these tidal streams that consist of stars and gas mostly
um that are known are in the are associated with the milky way or the andromeda galaxy
and the the best known one is the so-called magellanic stream these things are big though and eventually you know
way down the road the magellanic clouds are probably going to be absorbed into the milky way
but the magellanic stream this tidal tale of stars and gas that exists now is a million light years
long you know it's big that has material that the milky way has pulled off of both the magellanic clouds
and it's massive too it consists of about 200 million solar masses so there's a lot of stuff
in that you know they're not they're not sort of you know these are large structures and and scott and i were
talking they're not very well understood the dynamics of this yet and there aren't too many that are known because
they're very hard to study over long distances and because we see one frame and a very slow
cosmic movie of course that is going on but but uh it's interesting scott and
thanks for theming the the uh um event tonight with such an interesting uh idea thank you thank you
um so again i want to talk we haven't run out of classes of minerals quite yet so so we're talking about planetary
geology here the the way the universe likes to make planets
to put them together uh in an ordered way thomas jefferson one of the guys we
like to study in the american history division of things uh said i believe in a divinely ordered
universe before his time isaac newton said truth is ever to be found in the simplicity
and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things well it turns out that the universe is
ordered not by supernatural design as richard dawkins likes to say at starmus
we don't need to magic things into existence but by the principles of
physics minerals show us that because their atoms are assembled in precise ways because of electrochemical
attractions that are inherent properties of the atoms that make them up and guide them into
assembling and what mineralogists call a crystal lattice so there is no magic in
the universe except on television you know if you watch the science channel most of it is you know well i won't say
um but in reality it's it's physics and chemistry and and uh the sciences that
are driving this stuff so what's neat about some of the minerals is that we can look at examples of them and we know
through spectroscopy that uh chemistry is is uniform throughout the universe of
course local conditions vary widely but there would be minerals presumably
very similar to the ones that we have on earth on planets throughout the galaxy in the universe now someone last week i
think it was a presenter maybe i forget who shame on me mentioned a rare mineral and said well
do you have you ever heard of this do you have so this is my painite crystal which is an unusual and rare mineral
it's calcium zirconium aluminum borate it's an unusual mineral and there aren't too many
good specimens that are shown on the mendat.org the big mineral site
if you want to google that this is my uh example that's 3.7 centimeters across
and the brownish the reddish brown crystals in this matrix are the painite
and the little uh reddish pink spheres are spinel which is another
which is another fairly common mineral um so this is a an unusual mineral it's
from myanmar we now know as myanmar the country and somebody claimed last week
that a good specimen of this goes for something like three hundred thousand dollars oh my god now
um i just wanna say if you go to the well-known mineral shows twos in tucson
and in munich they often have a special the big dealers with fancy specimens where they
call it keystone where they give you a 50 off of the marked price
of a specimen so if anyone is willing to send me a hundred and fifty thousand dollars i will have this crystal in the
mail to you tomorrow morning okay i just want to make that clear right he'll deliver in person right
yeah not three hundred thousand dollars yeah but anyway i appreciate the
interest so tonight i'm going to talk about iron minerals uh the most common of iron
minerals uh is hematite which is iron oxide it was originally named around 300
bce by theo frastus from the greek for bloodstone
uh possibly it was the first mineral ever named with the ite suffix which is exciting to mineral nerds
it was translated in 79 a.d by pliny the elder to hematite for bloodlike in
allusion to the red color of the powder because if you grind a hematite can crystals can look silvery but if you
grind them up or see them in the right kind of illumination they can look radish which
looked very strange early on because it's a fairly common mineral
colors often are steel gray to black and crystals and massively crystalline oars
dull to bright rust red and earthy compact fine grained material well why is it so common
let's think it's iron oxide it's rusty iron so it's very very common because as
we know oxygen really loves to combine with things and iron is a good partner
so what do we see when we look at mars for example that orangy color
that's hematite mostly rust so that's that's our friend mars is colored by
this stuff crystallographically hematite is pretty
simple stuff it's trigonal and consisting of iron and oxygen atoms you
can see a simple stick and ball diagram as they like to call them here
for a crystal and let me just as i always have done show some examples none of these are
worth three hundred thousand dollars i promise you okay but um
unusually speaking native iron that is pure iron is relatively rare on earth
it's pretty common in meteorites as you guys know many of you know um iron iron
and some other uh elements nickel and others that make up meteorites native iron is fairly rare on
earth but they're very very good sources of it and this is a sliced uh piece of native iron from
this very well-known region in russia but iron is extremely common
combining with other elements on earth very very very common of course
mineral in our earth's makeup and crust so this is an unusual form of hematite
bladed hematite here you can see the stacks of blades here that are stacked
up with a little bit of pinkish and orange calcite that's another we've talked about it before common mineral
from a chinese deposit that's relatively recent about the last 20 years there have been specimens found like this is
this is sort of a heavy ball of hematite blades all stacked together
now iron oxide hydrate similar to hematite is gertait named by that
named for that german uh poet an author uh this is a variety
of it called limanite and this is a german specimen from the wolf mine uh in the rhineland palatinate and you
can get weird oxidation colors on a lot of iron minerals like this which this
piece shows and i think the next one does as well this is so-called iridescent gertite
from a famous region of farsis in andalusia spain
and you can see here when oxygen is reacting with minerals like this it creates all kinds of funky colors
because of the oxidation of the metals
here's another example of uh this is hematite but with a coating of iridescent airtight from an american
specimen from nevada a fairly common piece but a very nice blue there's some certainly some copper coloring this
as well in there to give you this bluish color now you can't see this too well and i
didn't reshoot a new generation of photos forgive me i didn't have that time to do that but this is
these are older photos but you can't quite see it in this image but this it looks sort of black and metallic here
but this shines like a mirror this piece of hematite you can see yourself in it and
in the brazilian forests where this stuff comes from they actually call it monkey mirror because
they claim to have found monkeys staring into pieces of this stuff
now you can truly say whenever you have me on scott i offer things that
nobody has ever talked about and maybe you didn't want to know okay but there you go
i like monkeys so you know i'm good with that monkey mirror there you go okay
and for those who were doubting the that nature likes to make crystals in a precise way this is pyrite which is that
very common iron sulfide mineral that's very fool's gold if you
will in many stories and explorations of the old west mining and so on and this
crystallizes normally in the isometric system which is cubic as you can see
here and here's a nice except for a few molecules missing on the top edge there
a nice uh very clean four centimeter cube of pyrite
this is a little dark here but you can see there's a black metallic uh
crystal in this uh this is a an alpine specimen from italy from the
italian side of the alps and you can see sort of stacks of bladed crystals of hematite here and this is
called in germany it was called very early on the ice and rose that is
iron rose because the crystal looks like a flower pattern when you look at it
straight on here so you can see just some unusual forms here you get with the same mineral but what mineralogists
would call different crystal habits this is kind of a cool one even though
it's a kind of a you know ugly ordinary junky looking piece of pyrite well this
actually comes from a black smoker it's about five centimeters across uh from 3 300 meters down in the indian
ocean so this is a pyrite a mineralogical creation
uh from uh an energy source that may have been you know way back four billion years ago
the original source of uh living molecules coming together on
earth we shall never know precisely but it's nice to have something that was dredged up from the ocean floor that's
not a piece of coal from the titanic here's a sort of an ordinary pyrite on
calcite and other minerals and we talked about and i wasn't giving the full description because i thought it might
bore the astronomers but we talked about the precision of how mineralogists like
to specify localities as they call them this is kind of like knowing exactly
which area of a galaxy something is in we might say here's something that is from the onion
peeled central flow tube dike feeder 3950 level the nine ledge 23 crossed cut
in the famous home stake mine in lead south dakota now this is cool for a couple reasons that's about as precise
as you could possibly record exactly where a specimen came from in an exact
little spot in a little level in a little ledge of a mine and also the
homestake mine is very famous to astronomers and cosmologists does anyone know why
because that's where one of the big first neutrino detectors was located in
the home stake mine when it was a defunct gold mine oh wow the famous home
stake neutrino detector here's pyrite golden pyrite crystals on
rhodochrosite this pink manganese carbonate and quartz from a
famous uh colorado mine here the champion mine just a nice looking combination of stuff
here dominated by iron sulfate sulfide voxite is a fairly rare iron mineral
it's iron aluminum phosphate hydroxide hydrate with another that's the blue stuff and
then the the whitish yellow stuff is paravoxite this comes the good stuff of this
mineral and its relatives come from bolivia and just a very unusual look for an iron
mineral this is english scoridite another iron mineral iron arsenate hydrate that comes
from a famous very old-time mine in england that's the blueish stuff there
chromite iron chromium oxide the silvery little uh crystal dipyramidal crystals
here if you can pronounce this town in zimbabwe you're better than i am
um but this is a an unusual and interesting source for a fairly an unusual mineral chromate here that
doesn't occur in crystals like this so often carmenite is another
lead iron arsenide hydroxide that's the reddish stuff here with oxygen combining with the iron and
others from a mexican locality here unusual again you know a lot of iron minerals
are not super pretty but you know they're important to study stannite copper iron tin sulfide this
does the brassy bronzy looking stuff metallic stuff in here which is uh beset by a bunch of
cor nice quartz crystals in this chinese specimen that's a relatively rare mineral here stamina
pyrite as we looked at normally comes cubically and in other variations this is an unusual kind of pyrite crystal
here called a diploid that's a variation that consists of 24 four-edged faces
that are inter grown you can kind of see that and i should take a closer image of this
someday from an ohio there aren't too many in my native state of ohio there are not too many really interesting
minerals frankly that come from ohio but this is one of the localities here
and here's a very nice uh specimen this is glued on because it's so fragile onto
an acrylic uh stand up base here but this is a this very deep uh blue voxite again from uh
potosi bolivia here just to give you sort of an example of the kind of a
you know a grab bag of different iron mineral types here so that's it uh for
iron minerals and we're starting to run out of minerals and then i'll get back to some astronomy after another few
weeks scott but i did want to mention astronomically we're teaming up to go to the starmus
this fall in yerevan armenia we're going to put it on things are rolling we have
a bunch of speakers we've announced already there's a major announcement coming we're going to hear about that
soon from our director garrick israelian of a second round of speakers
um and also the first performers we will hear about because not only will we have astronauts and
astronomy and astrophysics chemistry biology and other sciences with nobel
prize winners uh but we also have some rock and roll with brian may and rick wakeman and peter gabriel and others
because we want to exercise both halves of our what's left of our craniums yeah
that's great what is uh you've been to all i think all of the starmus events is that right david all but the first one
actually there was a conflict with the first year for me yeah and and what is the experience like
it's incredible and and you know inexplicably when i got to know uh brian
and garrick and others they invited me to join the starmis board which uh consists of a number of jill
tarter and richard dawkins and a number of others and and the late great stephen hawking was on our board
but it's quite amazing because this is a place where we've had you know three or four thousand people there typically at
a starmus but there are opportunities to talk to some of these big time folks not only do
we have talks by astronauts and nobel prize scientists but you can have a glass of wine you know with them and
chat a bit and get an autograph and talk to them about what they're doing in it part of this is that we don't want it to
get so big that that personal experience part of of uh this science festival is is gone so
you can see all about starmus on starmust.com um it's actually quite easy to get to
armenia for europeans very cheap and easy um so i think if you can get to
europe it'll be easy to get to this um if you can't come you know we'll we'll have a lot of coverage afterward
scott is going to help us put on a mammoth size start party with explore
scientific telescopes there we're also going to collaborate with michael back at your colleague and
others to do an astrophotography workshop and other amateur astronomy events
that will be coupled on to the professional science of starnes
wonderful that's good we're excited about it i think you're gonna have a good time my friend i think so i think
so it's going to be you know an event like this is something that uh when i first started starmus it
was just like i really wish i could go to this so uh when i was invited
to be part of it you know it's pretty much jumping out of my skin so um really really uh anxious to see how this
whole event comes off because you know starmus is um
you know celebrating science uh in the best way possible and uh you
know we are you know you'll hear david eicher often comment that we are living in the golden
age of astronomy we're also living in the golden age of science and discovery and exploration and
so it's a wonderful time to be alive and you know if you're going to go to any place to celebrate this
you should seriously consider going to the starmus event so thank you let me
just say scott one more little thing the cost of starmus is very negligible most
of the cost is getting there the cost of the conference itself is you know what a
couple hundred pounds i mean it's very minimal oh yeah because we want to get as many people realistically as we can
to come so it's quite inexpensive because it should be for people who want to be
there so people are right now saying that
they'll carry my bags for me [Laughter]
we'll probably need some help like that i don't know so we have to get a bunch of telescopes
over the way we're going to do it uh you know
our sister uh company is called bresser they're in
germany uh and they they manage and sell and
do service for the explore scientific brand over throughout all of europe but they are going to be sending the
telescopes directly from germany and we may see one or two of the people
from that group over there as well so i'm looking forward to it we have a lot of great ideas about
other things that we can do but we're really not ready to talk about them yet so anyhow uh it will be the highlight of
the year so that's for sure thanks scott thank you david thank you
again um okay so uh let's see we are
thank you uh we are going on to um john briggs now
these next two people that are coming up john briggs and anthony cook i i can't imagine getting two other
people together that knows so much about the history of astronomy astronomers the
gear the instrumentation you know who did what you know that led to something else that you know there's so many uh
incredible stories that these two people have and so much knowledge you know so it's a real blessing to have them both
on and john has uh john is is currently uh come
newly appointed the secretary of the alliance of historic observatories and this includes uh many of the
observatories that uh you know we fondly remember uh of doing groundbreaking
science helping us to understand the universe but he is interviewing people from each
one of these observatories that's involved right now and currently up is griffith observatory and
uh john uh john will introduce anthony cook so i'll turn it over to you john
okay uh thank thank you so much and uh great to see everybody here and my job
uh tonight is especially easy and fun introducing uh tony cook it's been my
privilege to know tony for a long time but tony is friends with many many
people interested in astronomy because for years he was a staff member there at
griffith observatory uh one of the members of the alliance of historic observatories so i've had a chance to
have griffith on my mind lately because of that organization but um even more so
uh i've been um thinking of tony because he was uh one
of the contributors in this cool book that i'm holding up i think i held it up last week too
public astronomy los angeles style tony contributed what i think
is uh arguably the the neatest chapter in the book on creating griffith observatory and
he's going to be talking about that for us but it to introduce him it occurred to
me that i would simply read a paragraph or two out of the back of the book um
because all the authors uh were were described here and i'll put on some spectacles then i'm going to do this and
then we're going to turn it over and give this whole tone as time slot to tony because uh because he has some
really good stuff to share but it says anthony cook has been part of griffith
observatory staff since 1978 and served as its astronomical observer from 1990
to 2021 when he retired now mind you griffith observatory is just an
astonishingly iconic place and so to be the the astronomical observer that griffith
observatory i think is just too cool anyway in that position he oversaw the maintenance and public operation of the
observatory's original 1935 zeiss 12-inch refracting telescope and
the triple beam solar cell stat he trained and had managed the observatory's telescope
demonstrators who provided free nightly viewing to hundreds of thousands of
visitors every year after he became aware of conceptual drawings of griffith observatory by
russell w porter the famed astronomical designer artist and leader of the first
wave of amateur telescope makers in the united states mr cook began an ambitious
program of original research into the origins of griffith observatory and has
published articles on this aspect of public astronomy los angeles style and sky and telescope and griffith
observator griffith observer magazines cook's studies in the special collection
archives is caltech mount wilson observatory which is the huntington library and ucla have produced articles
on the design history of the 200-inch hale telescope at palomar observatory in
addition cook identified restored and then documented the first astronomical
telescope in los angeles the five and a half inch burn refractor once owned by
the southern california academy of sciences and subsequently donated to griffith observatory where mr cook
engineered its public display in the ann marie and jack c wilder hall of the eye
mr cook has also written about local amateur and commercial telescope builders henry paige bailey robert edgar
and tom cave and the hail tall scope civil engineer mark a sierra
see sierra the serie a truss right serie a
anyway anthony cook was interviewed by astrophysicist donald austin brock about henry paige bailey for australia's
biography of walter botta uh cook's work on henry
bailey appeared in sky and telescope and it just goes on with with other cool stuff that tony has has written and
published so with that introduction um i think i'd like to just turn it over to
tony and let him share the very very cool stuff about iconic uh griffith
observatory one of the coolest observatories truly in the united states
thank you john um so let me get my screen shared here
oops
um i'm sorry just a moment let me uh get the show on here
here we go and uh are you all hearing me okay yes okay
good um now uh just to correct
the slide as john said i am now retired from griffith observatory um
i used to think i never would retire from griffith observatory honestly uh
and i went to uh the assistant director mark pine one day with a question
which is uh do you think when halley's comment comes back in 2061
that the mandatory retirement age might be like 105. and if that's the case that's unfair
because you know i'll be 106 when the comet comes and can i talk to the mayor about this has
he been born yet you know but but unfortunately uh because of covet 19
you know the city wanted to minimize long-time employees and
made it clear that if you were looking forward to a good retirement that 2021 might be a good time to take it so
they made sweet offers and unfortunately actually a lot of the staff is gone at the observatory now so
it's going to be probably a while till it's up and running fully but they are doing great programs now it's just that
it's not i don't think it's six days a week yet um but anyway um
i started working at the observatory as a guide in 1978
and it really struck me that the observatory is very very thoroughly designed as an
astronomical building it's perfectly aligned you know with
true north and the telescopes now are positioned so
they can get a pretty unobstructed view of the sky they're perfectly aligned astronomically
and it it struck me you know where did somebody come up with this stuff in
1935 i don't think you went to selastat's rs to get a solar telescope
back then but we had very little uh record
that was available anyway of how the observatory actually was designed and built and we had some clues
we knew that mel wilson was involved with it and i'd heard rumors that a fellow named
russell w porter who is you might know uh as the cutaway drawing person for the
palomar telescope uh he he made the magnificent series of drawings in the 1930s and
early 40s of the different mechanisms of what was then
the largest telescope in the world being built the hale 200-inch telescope
and it set a new standard for cutaway drawings of any kind actually at that time
um he's also well regarded in the ash in the amateur
astronomical community as being the person who really spearheaded the amateur telescope making movement in the
united states starting about 1920 with the first telescope making club in
vermont the springfield telescope makers which is still alive and kicking and holds a huge
annual conference so
um but i i wasn't able to find anything at the observatory that confirmed any
connection with russell porter and i read his biography and it there is one sentence in it that mentions that he
did some consulting work but um then and i i even called the author
burton willard of that book and asked him well how did you know that he goes well i'm not actually sure so he didn't
know which reference gave him that i felt kind of like well maybe it's not even true
but then that week an architect stopped by because the observatory was planning
sometime in the early 21st century a renovation of the building and this architect had bought the
company that had designed griffith observatory and was hoping to get in on the deal
and he brought with this portfolio some notebooks they had these scratch
sketches in it and i immediately recognized the style they were the same style as those 200 inch drawings i said
why do you have russell w porter drawings and he goes who's russell w porter so i
pulled out amateur telescope making and showed him those drawing you know this that kind of drawing that anybody who's built
telescopes does and he said well i don't know anything about it so he let me borrow the
drawings i photographed them and then went to caltech and started studying their correspondence and i was able to
come up with a story i'm going to tell you now [Music] so
that's kind of how i got into this um so
griffith observatory is a landmark of los angeles uh you know there are a few
like hollywood bowl uh the downtown uh you know city hall
uh dodger stadium things like that but the one that people can see from most of the city is actually griffith
observatory because it's on the south side of the hollywood hills excuse me near the hollywood sign
and it's a romantic spot it's an architectural landmark
people would come up there whether or not they were interested in astronomy it's just a great hangout place but it does have a
commanding view not only of the sky but of the surrounding landscape you can
see the pacific ocean the islands a beautiful view of downtown los angeles
and the picture you see here is kind of you know how how la uses griffith
observatory when the space shuttle uh program came to an end uh in 2011 it was
announced that um the endeavor space shuttle would be given to los angeles to display at the
science center so it would be taken on the 747. so i i was thinking wow so i called
edwards air force base and i asked them well have you thought about how you're going to fly the the jet over the city i mean
do you know the route and the reason i'm asking is a lot of people come to griffith observatory if
something's going on that they can see well the fellow there told me um you know we can't discuss the
uh position of assets of the united states and a highly sensitive situation like this they go okay okay i got that
but keep in mind that probably most people would come to griffith observatory if they knew that they could see the space shuttle flying over
and he goes um okay well you know i can't discuss it well the next day we get another call
from nasa and they want to send two photographers over to griffith observatory and then they started flying
jets around uh potential paths and seeing what good
photoshop for photosite it was so this is actually one of the nasa photographs
that they had so i'm kind of i don't claim responsibility for it flying three
times over griffith observatory but i'm sure there was some connection there but we had we actually were not allowed
to count the crowd there because it would violate all kinds of traffic laws pertaining to griffith park
um i'd guess around 8 000 people are showed up
anyways it was just a mad house but it's the kind of thing that happens regularly at grip with the observatory if there's
a bright comet we get a crowd if there's an eclipse a crowd every night
about a thousand people look through telescopes with the zeiss telescope that
uh john and scott mentioned uh is not adequate actually for just for
the number of people that come up now so we set up 11 11-inch telescopes and
others on our front lawn every night and there's a solar telescope that shows
people the planetarium originally owned had 600 seats and was
the largest in the i don't believe it is largest anymore and because of the
more advanced projection systems and just visitor experience it's been reduced to about 300 seats
that are more comfortable and and better better for viewing we've learned over you know 80 some
years of time um but anyway it's a beloved landmark and
it you know i'm sure has spurred interest by a lot of people over time
it's called griffith observatory because it's named after colonel griffith j griffith
he was a originally born in wales
and moved to the united states as a child because wales was a impoverished place in the
in the 18 i believe 1860s or so when he was born in 1850 actually he was born and um
his parents didn't want him working in a coal mine which is actually what most kids who were born in wales had to do
it was a short brutal life so he went to live with friends in new york
and got interested in journalism and metallurgy and
early on he moved to uh he briefly was in los angeles
and by the at that time in the 1880s los angeles was just the tiniest village you
know it was not developed at all and he looked at it and he goes i'll get
back to this but then he moved to san francisco and uh it was post-gold rush but a lot
of people were still mining so he became an expert on like what areas had the best silver mines and stuff in nevada
and california and he was so good at it that he made a fortune from people who got good advice as to where to build
minds due to his own knowledge of geology um
in any way he he moved back to los angeles
and decided that in in 1896 that
los angeles was going to be a great city in the future and he knew this because the u.s was planning to build this
panama canal and he realized that the san pedro port would be the main
destination of ships coming to north america through the the uh
panama canal rather than sailing all the way up to san francisco so
he uh knew that it would be wall-to-wall city as san francisco had been
and he realized that it was time now to plan for open space for people because
san francisco is built over without any thought for parks so there are no huge
open-air areas in the city of san francisco at least he wanted los angeles to have a huge
area that people could enjoy wilderness after it became a wall-to-wall city so he was thinking way ahead of time he
toured europe looked at parks and um and drew up a plan
and in 1896 he donated more than 3 000 acres of land that actually isn't that
great for building it's it's hilly and it's actually the east edge of the
santa monica mountains where the park is so he gave that to the city of los angeles in 1896 and they went what are
we supposed to do with it because between griffith park and city which was a tiny pueblo then
it was all just like farmland and oil derricks so why do we need open space what's going
on here so he had a lack of enthusiasm to his great gift to greet him at first
but this is a map of that area notice on the on the right upper right
edge that's the los angeles river which is now a concrete filled channel way
which was built because in the 1930s it caused huge floods around the area but
army corps of engineers turned it into a usable drainage system
anyway um now other things were going on in in chicago
uh george hillary hale had become the head of the astrophysics department
at uh yerkes at i'm sorry at chicago university of chicago
and um had been able to uh secure
funding by mr yorkies of the 40-inch refractor the
largest uh refracting telescope in the world but he had already knew that that
was an antique type of instrument he had an idea for studying the spectrum of
faint objects that would require much much bigger telescopes so what his dream was was to build a
gigantic 60-inch telescope now as we've seen there was already the 72-inch
telescope in in ireland but that telescope is really a visual
telescope what hale wanted to do is be able to put heavy laboratory equipment on the telescope and really dissect
light coming from the distant universe so he had sort of in mind the first
really plan for a giant astrophysical telescope and he was he was thinking he knew he
wasn't going to get any more funding from yorkies he really annoyed the heck out of yorkies and building the 40-inch
telescope so he knew he wasn't going to get anywhere there so he was on on antenna out for philanthropists who
might then fund his new giant telescope and the newspapers had articles about
this land giveaway of 3000 acres by colonel griffith so one of the first people that
hale wrote to was colonel griffith and said i want to build the world's biggest astrophysical telescope and he got a
letter back right away from hale saying i'm from griffith rather saying i'm not interested in building telescopes and
you know i want to build up my park and that's what my energy is going to go to but
good luck with your project but no thanks
and and this is basically what the 60-inch telescope was that hale had in
mind and these were the plans that were built up in the 1890s actually in chicago um
so here's colonel griffith now griffith was uh
always had big plans going around and people didn't like him a lot because he put on errors of being rich all the time
he had a you know fancy cane he carried around and you know he was always overdressed and talked in an affected way and but he
funded lots of things so people put him put up with him and
so one of the ideas he had was an observatory for for los angeles only the
kind of observatory he had in mind really didn't have anything to do with astronomy it was going to use a
funicular railway a kind of cable car sort of thing that went up to the top of mount hollywood
and there would be an observation deck that would look out over the city and the islands there would be a little
geology museum in a telescope for looking at the land it would not be so much an astronomy
thing um his inspiration for this might have may have been the melt low observatory which
at the time was just below mount wilson it did have a big astronomical telescope
and a zoo and a number of other things and the funicular railway to take people from los angeles to the top of that so
this would be sort of a competing attraction but not really so much based on astronomy
now um about that time he got involved with
probably the most controversial uh case of at least a near murder in los angeles
up until the uh o.j simpson trial
this was in 1903 uh he vacationed in santa monica with his wife
they would go to a fancy hotel there and lounge around is a regular thing
and one day he started acting like totally insane and he made his wife
uh admit that she was trying to rob all his money and give it to the pope and she goes you're crazy what are you
talking about you're not acting normal and he pulled out a pistol and said say your prayers and actually pulled the
trigger and unfortunately she flinched the bullet put out an eye but she jumped
out of the building and landed on on the awnings below which
saved her and escaped nearly being shot
and the trial she was in was called the trial of the century even though the century was two years old by that time
and um and he he was represented by an attorney who
recognized in griffith a secret problem that he had which was alcoholism
and and griffith benefited from his knowledge of
of his own problem and got specialists in to to testify that if people have
alcoholic problems that the their personalities can change he benefited
what we call a diminished capacity he was sentenced
griffith was sentenced to three years at san quentin and
which the attorney thought was a great failure but the attorney by the way was paid for
by griffith's former wife but she really didn't want him to die
for what he had tried to do because he she realized it was not typical of his behavior and there was something going
on that he thought she thought he could work on so he spent one year in prison he was a
model prisoner he wouldn't take part in any of the advantages that were offered
to him because he was rich and instead he actually started keeping a journal on how corrupt the prison system was
so when he got out of jail he he dedicated himself to two things one
to improve griffith park and two to show up the california state penitentiary system for what it was
and to get it reformed and he apparently is famous in the penitentiary world for
reforming the california state prison system and uh so anyway
well amazing time went on uh he he really skated off alcohol which was the
problem before and really did devote himself exclusively to the park now he's
separated from his wife but he gave her a huge house in one end of griffith park he took a house on the other end he
moved his parents from ireland to a park on the north house on the north end of the park
and you know had to make things nice that way in 1908 the uh
the 60-inch telescope which finally had been funded by carnegie was constructed
and griffith called george hillary hail and had him himself invited to look at
the telescope and learn about the observatory and uh because he was a even though he
professed not to be interested in astronomy he really was interested in intellectual pursuits of all different
kind so yeah what he saw at mount wilson really
inspired him and here we see by the way a picture of hale with carnegie but um
griffith decided what he wanted in his park was sort of a miniature version of what was going on at mount wilson
because he was so impressed according to one story by seeing saturn that he realized that everybody had a chance to
see something like that it could really profoundly change how you view your life and your place in the universe
now so he um he started drawing up a plan
uh based on what he saw about wilson the 60 and or here we see the uh the
75 foot solar telescope and the snow telescope for studying the sun but he drew up his
own plans and the basic idea of it was that it would have a museum with some
astronomical exhibit it would have some kind of lecture hall it would have a telescope at least 12
inches in diameter that would be used for viewing the heavens could be used for research and
a solar telescope so that visitors could see the spectrum of the sun and sunspots
so uh so he was very particular about this he specified that it would have
um uh it would have concrete construction that would last
forever and uh you know had very particular ideas about
the view that it would provide of the city all kinds of things like that now
griffith died in 1919 and um he provided
you know a seed amount of money that was put in a trust fund that he had set up
uh he's famous in the trust fund world too for doing
trust funds correctly but he put his brother and very brother one of his sons in charge of it and
along with some bank people and other people who had managed to make sure that the fund would grow until something
could be built with it now in the meantime other amateur astronomers in the region mars
baumgardt was an astronomy popularizer who had a radio show in the 1920s on astronomy
and he would submit ideas uh as they came to him to the to the griffith
committee on like what kind of public telescopes there should be in addition to the big
one um what kind of programs there could be this invention in germany the zeiss
planetarium projector maybe would be a good idea for this griffith park and
really built up enthusiasm even with the trust committee on what could be done with it
well finally in 1930 during the depression
the amount of money that was in the trust fund was considered sufficient to start construction of a building so the
trust committee now sent out kind of please for help to different
observatories around the area to universities colleges any place that would have astronomers
that might have an idea of what they could do with this with this fund and one of the people
it went to was george hillary hale also mount wilson in general robert milliken
and caltech which of course hale had helped install as you know the first
physicist at caltech and uh help found caltech for that matter so a
lot of it was kind of going to the same people but uh
walter adams the director of mount wilson observatory talked to hale and oh
we never thought anything would come of this i know we talked about with colonel griffith a long time ago but uh it looks
like he's actually going to do something with it so they formed a scientific committee that would advise the the
building and um you see milliken on the right side einstein in
the middle remember einstein visited los angeles in 1930 so he probably was hearing about
uh on the left uh with his hand in his
uh is uh albert michelson the famous optician who measured the speed of light
among other things and behind him is walter adams and uh all these people were
you know the core of what was going on with physics at caltech now einstein it turned out wasn't interested in landing
at celtic so he he was only there for a few months before uh taking off to the east coast but um
but the person who is the person who was in charge of uh
entertaining einstein was an architect uh
named uh uh john c austin now
uh austin would take einstein to like the jonathan club kind of a swanky place in
west los angeles um so keep that in mind okay now
in los angeles at the time and this is now 1928 and actually 1930.
lot of great minds had been gathered in at caltech especially in mel wilson to
design hale's 200-inch telescope that he had secured funding from from the
rockefeller foundation and this is what they thought they were going to build this was the winning design for the 200
inch telescope and
so what this has to do with griffith was they
these people came up with the plan to put a physicist named edward kurth
who i've not been able to find a picture of by the way in spite of doing a lot of stuff on the internet
um kurth was a physicist at caltech under uh under millikin
who um he was an ultraviolet astronomer he was already studying how to study ultraviolet spectra even though there
was no prospect of doing that from the earth yet at that time um
but he was supposed to take on this griffith project make sure it was scientifically sound
and uh would meet the scientific committee standards and then he would become the director of griffith observatory
when the building was complete and the architects were chosen by a
contest now the designs for the building were handed over as a responsibility to
russell w porter who i mentioned before porter um was a polar explorer at one point
then he had studied architecture at mit and one of his buildings is a little you
see down below that's in maine he pioneered
different types of telescope building and came up with the mounting you see the horseshoe
mounting in the upper right that was a unique design called the split ring mount and then he tried to
popularize astronomy with a with a commercial telescope called a
garden telescope which is what he's looking through there it's a tubeless telescope on the springfield mount it
could double as a sundial now it turned out though the that ended up being
pretty expensive telescope so it looked complicated and didn't really catch on i think there
were 50 built originally now you can buy new ones that are being made for something like eighty thousand dollars
but nice architectural decoration telescopes now anyway um here's porter's
office at cal caltech where he kind of came up with ideas for all kinds of projects for hail
he had an artistic knack in an engineering neck even though he didn't really have formal
training in those things but he could come up with ideas that solved all kinds of problems he was just sort of paid to
do that and so coming up with ideas for griffith observatory
was what he did in 1930 and 31 because the hail telescope was started stalled
at that point they were trying to build a mirror out of quartz and that was beyond the technology of the time and
they ended up spending like 10 of their money on a milk mirror that couldn't be made and it wasn't until about 1934 that
they decided to use pyrex so in the meantime not much progress was being made on the big telescope but there were
lots of other little projects that were handed off to people to keep them busy and griffith was one of them and here we
see some of the possible floor plans griffith i'm sorry uh russell porter walked up to griffith
park and looked at the geology there and and you know he knew colonel griffith wanted the building
built on the top of the hill but there was just no space there which he illustrates in the top
diagram you know where would you put cars and stuff the idea of a funicular railway was
old-fashioned by that time and was not really considered um porter realized there was a different
place that was a little south of the main peak they had a big plateau it would be a much better place for
constructing an observatory so he he got the place relocated and came
up with a number of floor plans that met the scientific committee's uh ideas and the one that on the lower
left is actually the seed of the one that was finally constructed it has a zeiss telescope on
the left the seala step the solar telescope on the right and on the top you see the 75
foot wide planetarium theater one of griffith's first ideas this is a
1931 drawing is recognizable if you walk in there today
here you're inside the main entrance you're looking west into the distance down the long hallway
and you can see somebody looking at a projection of the sun on the solar telescope on the left of the stairs
going up to the planetarium where you see a modern television set over on the right hand side and models
of planets there's a little foucault pendulum so even though it was not built
quite like this all of these ideas are you will see today even the columns on
the solar telescope and stuff now porter was not a licensed architect
in los angeles here in california so a formal
form a a proper you know firm had to be hired so a i'm sorry i'm getting
indications my my internet is unstable are you having any trouble hearing okay
no i'm not noticing anything other than those warnings right the only other warning i'll give you is
that uh we are going a bit long okay all right i'll i'll oh
anyway there was a contest to choose a former a formal architecture firm uh
there was an avant-garde uh you know richard neutral submitted ideas based on the porter
plans and john c austin submitted something that looks like a very formal building
but actually doesn't have a lot of astronomical going for it other than a rough resemblance but remember austin
was a friend of hale and one way or another he got the contract so
um enough said about that anyway so austin was a long time kind of
overseer of architecture in la and he his firm got that that plan
um one of the first actually the first thing decided was what kind of telescope to
get well zeiss was at that time was the only company building large refracting telescopes
and they built those gaps specifically for museums so russell porter chose the
12-inch telescope it's of a type that
several exist in germany czechoslovakia other places but griffith got one for
for los angeles um john c austin refined griffith refined
porter's ideas and came up with you know plans that start looking more and more like the
building that was designed um he took clues from porter's drawings as
to the dramatic you know uh sighting of the building
um by the way uh the solar telescope i'm sorry the the turret telescope at
cellophane vermont which also porter designed originally had a more dreamlike
uh in 1920 this version is kind of a big roman style building with stairs flanking it
well apparently the architects really like this drawing so they had griffith adapt
the ideas from this into the stairs that you'll actually walk up to the roof on when you visit griffith observatory the
upper right hand corner shows how it evolved into a single stair that goes on the building
porter came up with the specifications for the planetarium for the exhibit halls
he employed or he actually struggled with the idea for the solar telescope because in addition to the two
instruments that griffith wanted hale added the spectra helioscope a new
invention of his so this telescope would have to feed three different viewing stations
permanently in the building and uh so porter came up with a way of
tracking the sun with three different mirrors and then sending it to three different places in the building
and there's porter's ideas as they evolved here's what you'll actually see when you go there
um now porter got put in charge of a big lecture hall that was supposed to be under the planetarium underground
but the 1933 earthquake happened and uh the architects decided that
underground buildings the way they were planning actually would not survive a big earthquake
so before con just months before construction started a lot of the same
people at caltech including porter who studied the 1933 earthquake came up with
new building codes for los angeles public buildings and they over built griffith observatory
to withstand any observat any earthquake they could imagine
with the first building being loaded for sideways gravitational forces and things like that remember it
was caltech involved so so this idea for an underground lecture hall disappeared
but it reappeared when the building was renovated in 2006
by people who i'd shown these drawings to and they came up with a similar plan
but it's not really under the building it's under the front lawn so it doesn't raise any of the concerns that they had
in the 1930s but porter still contributed to what was actually built
um the 1933 earthquake okay and then here's the final design of the
building although some of the decorations got changed because of the of the earthquake problems
and uh but basically what you see today uh construction started in 1930
1934 in 1933 and took
about two years to complete so amazingly fast job one of the neat things is a huge model
of the moon that porter came up with and it was executed by an artist named roger
hayward who would become much more famous later as an illustrator also for scientific american magazine the amateur
scientist and many other things this model by the way was also copied by
hayward at the disney studios and used for filming the moon movies that disney made a
window that faces off to the east was originally supposed to
work a work with a speed of light exhibit that people could perform by bouncing light
off mount wilson and timing the reflection that's because
i'm sorry michelson had died in 1931 just as this program started and caltech
was in mourning so they were going to install this as kind of a memorial to to michaelson but unfortunately that it
was never built kurth died by taking a break from his grip of the
observatory job on valentine's day 1934 he went to see a
movie in pasadena and walked into the path of a streetcar that used to go down
colorado boulevard and then got knocked into a truck which bashed in his head
and unfortunately that was the end of him um uh another
physicist named rudolph langer who was involved with early radio astronomy and
suffolk caltech came in but he was very impatient with the whole thing and
didn't like the city was second-guessing him on a lot of stuff and
was only there a couple of months phillip fox who was the director of adler planetarium came in on an
emergency basis and saw the building through to an end and was the director for the first month of the building's
opening so the building was finished in may 1935
the zeiss telescope was installed just a few months before then and uh the first show was given by
philip fox on the 14th of may 1935 which was broadcast on any on khj radio and
there is a sound copy or a sound check recording of this whole
of this whole speech in which a lot of the famous physicists like milliken and all spoke to the audience
after the building opened in may 1935 uh porter went back to working on the
200 inch the problems with mirrors had been solved a mirror was being built and they had to get serious about building a
telescope uh exhibits were built um of a new type they were interactive
exhibits that people would push a button to start it operating this one had just
talked with the geologists explain that this biological history of
the earth and the huge clock and so anyway so griffith observatory really is a land landmark here's a view
looking from a nasa jet down at the space shuttle with the 747 carrier and down at the distance
in the recording that was made at this time you can hear the pilot say oh yeah grab the observatory
that little bubble down there but anyway so it gives us a little insight into what
went on with the formation of griffith observatory i will stop sharing my screen
um oh wait a second
ah this always happens here we go you stopped sharing my screen thank you tony that was absolutely fascinating uh
we'll have to have you back on uh yeah i'm sorry i went over i wasn't looking yeah there's a lot to say i get it you
know so um and it's not you know
it's not rare that uh we go a little bit long on global star party because there's there's so much great information to share but uh
and i really do hope that uh you can do a follow up on that so um any time you
know and it's great to see you again i haven't seen you in a number of years so thank you for coming on oh you're sure
welcome that's awesome okay well up next is
jonathan fay and jonathan is he's a software developer
he's well known for his work in astronomy he is the author of worldwide telescope
which is now an open source program managed by the american astronomical society but he's also a
developer who does uh software for imaging and visualization
he got a start when he was like i think only 16 years old writing
a program to develop charts out of spreadsheets back
in the 80s so his list of accomplishments in software
are really amazing when you meet um jonathan in person you know i mean we
meet so many amazing brilliant people in astronomy and space exploration but uh
jonathan fey is really a standout and uh i really have enjoyed my interaction with him and uh i you know he's he's got
a uh you know a mind that's uh truly fascinating and so uh it's his first
time on global star party and i'm really happy to have him on so thank you jonathan
uh thank you scott for the introduction and kind words um so
worldwide telescope if you are not aware of it is um a system for
being able to catalog all the information that we have about uh the universe and uh astronomy earth sciences
dietary science and bring it all together into a browser that runs from
um a handheld phone to a web browser to running in the world's largest
planetariums um so it's it's ecosystem of data
standards and data that's shared amongst different universities
um uh i'll take credit as co-creator there's a lot of people
over especially now with open source that contributed to the source code of worldwide telescope and a lot of the
various incarnations and the data and so it's a it's a very wide collaboration
so um let's talk about i'm gonna briefly go through some of the history of
worldwide telescope and um it it started out um
somewhere in the late 90s with some of the technology i had created a um
infinitely zoomable browser for uh earth science data uh along with um jim gray
and tom barkley with uh something called terra server and i created a 3d front end for that
there wasn't a lot of interest in developing into a product and so i aimed it at my
passion which was astronomy and created visualizations for earth and
the moon and mars and and different planetary uh work
um jim gray and alex lay had created a paper uh where the name worldwide
telescope comes from where they were proposing that the world shift from this environment where
astronomy used to be a astronomer would go collect for professional astronomy would go collect
a bunch of data um sit at a telescope capture a bunch of plates and then they
would that would be then they would study that and basically do work on that and write
papers on that and that was their private collection that they would essentially use for their own career
um eventually those glass plates turned into tape drives and disk drives
and but still a lot of this was the basement of these institutions housed all this data that
essentially wasn't really shared and wasn't meant to be shared it was meant to be the
data that they could use to make their discoveries um but as time went by there
became a point where jim and alex really pushed for this idea that there'd be large missions that would actually go
out and collect huge amounts of data and then distribute it free over the internet
and at that time it was just an idea without any technology without any you
know backing they uh jim and alex helped uh found the uh uh the national virtual observatory for
the united states now it's now known as the vao and and worked on on essentially the
sloan digital sky survey and making that all available in all public and that was a very big shift in the way things work
um so then um that's the work that jim and alex contributed um then curtis wong who
is um you know no knows just about everybody and been there he was even in cheers as
um uh knew the producers there and ended up as uh one of the minor uh bar flies
in the cheers tv show uh but he worked a lot in um um on tools like uh taking um
um davinci's uh codex lester that bill gates had purchased and turning it into
a um a product that you could actually like look at all the the the data see the
backwards italian translated in real time and it just was a master of being
able to create these interactive story uh telling narratives and these multimedia tools and so he had this idea
that he really wanted to uh tell stories with astronomy in a really amazing way and so you had this
idea of this global database um a narrative and then this
infinitely zoomable technology um so then there were other were people
that were around who were working at uh doing things like uh a strong astronomical visualization
metadata or the vamp project um there was a series called the astrovis and so there was a lot of
people that just basically were were kind of looking for what would happen next in in astronomy and so these all
converged into this into a worldwide telescope um
this is uh uh jim and alex um working um on the sdss database uh back in the
early 2000s i believe um one of the things that um um curtis had
worked with uh dobson about um uh creating this uh idea he had for
um uh a dobson's universe about being able to explore and kind of tell the stories
that way it didn't ever turn into an actual product but it was some of the inspiration and for the storytelling
aspects of worldwide telescope um and then um the tiled engine that i
talked about eventually after getting planets to work i decided that i wanted to create a 360
degree sky map and it was going to require a trillion pixels of data and all the processing
and it only took me about 10 years to finally do it and uh ended up building a super
computer with 250 uh um node cluster uh each with eight cores um to process uh
all the the uh plate data from the digitized sky survey and created
a uh the largest seamless panorama of the sky um
and that became the the the our all-sky background for worldwide telescope um
so we got together folks from different universities from
harvard from caltech from people from nasa goddard space flight
center jpl and on and on and got everybody to just
to show them the prototype of what could happen if they would just share their
data and make it freely available rather than just you know tying it up for their own process and also a lot of people uh
strong even professional astronomers they were like why do we need to see all sky why do i need multiple spectral why
do i need to care about other bands that i don't study um and so so some of those things we
showed them the power of what could happen when you uh can actually take um
data from multiple spectrums for all the sky and be able to uh be able to see data in context
um and then be able to tell stories with it um so um
about this time uh we had created a this uh prototype and this thing that
was just gonna be a demo for a tech fair at microsoft research that we have had every year
and in the final run up to the preparation jim gear jim gray just vanished
um on my birthday january 28th um and he he went out to sea to bury his
mom's ashes at sea and um his boat vanished and he was never seen
again there was no evidence of where he went and they put together using the technology jim was a turian award winner which is
like the noble prize of computer science um he he had created uh transit reliable
transaction processing you know the atm network and travel the way we know it today wouldn't be possible without a lot
of the technologies he invented and and he just vanished and a lot of the people in technology and that his life affected
went looking for him and um uh his he never found and declared dead finally
after seven years um but uh microsoft research decided to fund the
worldwide telescope project in his honor as a legacy for him because he really wanted to see this democratization of
science data and so that was the jumping point to to getting going
um so some of the problems we needed to solve back then we needed to be able to
have an intermediate projection to show all the sky images and all planets without having
any singularities you needed to be able to look at
a an environment that you could author and playback tours and you needed standard ways of of exchanging data of
the coding data a lot of a lot of problems to solve and and so we went about working with um
professional astronomers the amateur astronomers even things like uh incorporating telescope controls so that
you can control a real telescope and um even work with uh
you know number of uh work to make communities and and such to
come on um so in solving uh one of the other problems is being able to have
this all-sky imagery and be able to um zoom anywhere and not have a
singularity and so um we came out with this thing called the toast projection which allows us to
basically tile an entire spherical region without having any area that's
special more special than the other do you ever use a product like google earth and try to zoom in on the polls you'll
find that your computer will eventually crash or hang um
um so getting the um uh you know getting going from here
uh to actually launch we launched a ted in 2008 been
back there several different times to show the evolution of it we have a
full tools for science operability and for uh even amateur astronomers uh we
even had um uh the editor of sky and telescope was uh one of the guys helping out and um he
edited a bunch of text files to build the sky and telescope constellations into worldwide telescope and i was like
oh my goodness how much work they have to hand edit this and so we even added
a custom constellation line authoring tool built into the product
um so um in um the the in about 2014 worldwide
telescope transitioned from microsoft research to the american astronomical society who now sort of guides and and
runs uh um runs the the product and and does that so i'm gonna do a quick demo now
and um uh worldwide telescope is um
let's see if you just go to worldwidetelescope.com
you can i'm sorry worldwidetelescope.org i guess com will also redirect you um
let me just bring up a browser here and so our first version um
uh scott is this showing up on my presentation it is
okay so the first version of worldwide telescope required a high-end pc uh gaming graphics card all sorts of other
things like that to do it but through uh technology um we're now able to embed
this in a browser and so now you can come in and go like anywhere in the sky
at one arc second per pixel uh zoom in if you want to right click on things you can identify
uh different things in the sky um being able to uh do other research on
this of course uh the powerful thing is our guided tours if you want to learn
about things you can click on and be able to actually
look at uh um presentations created by professional astronomers and educators
or you know even general public other enthusiasts that they can actually guide
uh through um flying through the universe looking at different objects in the sky
and telling stories about science with overlays and all sorts of powerful tools
the one of the the the examples that uh i used for instance um
uh i know we're running short on time i'm not sure what all the beeps means got whether that's i'm out or whether
it's a countdown but um no it's not a countdown
okay go ahead and go you know so i'll i'll uh show um a quick demo here of
being able to look at um uh uh in all on all sky surveys so for instance right
here if i look at the sky and look at
setting up look at the
visual version of our sky visible light and then um be able to
look at x-ray i can actually cross-fade between the two of them and so you can
actually see um different objects that don't really appear all that um
well in in uh invisible light or they're not that there but you can see right right here in x-ray there's this huge
item um coming out in x-ray and if we cross-state into the visible
you can see that it's the veil nebula and so you can learn a lot by being able
to actually see what things are doing in different uh bands of light and so
the pa you know this is just i've given you a tiny taste a drop in the ocean of
the amount of the data and the capability that you have in this and this is just running with a web browser there's also a installable version for
windows and a cluster version for planetariums and portable planetariums you can
go to on your phone and you can even use all of the data tools of worldwide telescope to add your own websites and
very quickly be able to add visualizations to your data um so that's that's a bit of an overview
and um thank you for the time scott thank you
jonathan that's going to worldwidetelescope.org if you want to learn more about it yeah i have put those links into chat
and um yeah thanks again for uh spending some of your valuable time with us thank
you so much jonathan feels great okay
so um up next we're going to we're going down under uh
to simon lewis who will give a special program um i
didn't even know how to pronounce the the name that you have
you're going to help me out with that simon that's a reiki okay all right
wonderful all right i'm gonna uh i'm gonna share my screen here if i can juggle my way around the myriad of
let's see if i can share my screen now oh here we go
cool okay diamonds with the canterbury astronomical society down in new zealand
so can you see my screen yes we can okay cool great so
thanks scott i appreciate you uh inviting me uh along again
and um yeah i wanted to um give you a little update what we're doing down here obviously we've been uh
heavily impacted by uh omicron over the last months uh and it feels like the last couple of
years we've had some real impacts uh as scott said uh i'm the vice president for
the canterbury astronomical society i'm an explore scientific uh ambassador
i'm a member of the zwo uh usa team as well so um
i get involved in all sorts of stuff and um one of the aspect i really enjoy is is
outreach and um this is a little bit about what we're doing down here this is also um on the back of some
really exciting news from new zealand government uh over the last week or so
so we'll we'll head into that and i can tell you a little bit about what's been going on
so um matariki is actually the maori name for the start of their uh
lunar calendar which is the new year and um for those that are not familiar with
the term maori and the indigenous new zealand uh population they uh were great travelers
and um if you go anywhere in the pacific
all the way from hawaii all the way into places like taiwan you will see very
similar imagery very similar totems for example um the cultural
symbols are used the same so um how did mary travel across
um thousands of kilometers of ocean you know in open boats um
you know before you know the invention of compasses before the invention of you know modern technology well um they used
the stars they were fantastic astronomers and um you can
see a lot of uh the history in in maori culture where they have
actually you know look at the stars they look at the ocean they look at the land and all of this ties together in in
harmony and um matariki is a very important time for them and uh we're
just about to you know be heading into that season um it's always an exciting time for us as well um obviously uh for
outreach you know the interest in astronomy goes crazy you know uh we just can't have enough open nights everybody
wants to see matariki they want to come along to the observatory and uh and see what's going on and um the interesting
thing is is a lot of people don't actually realize that for for maori
this is this the m45 the pleiades rising above the eastern horizon in the
mornings so they're always coming to the observatory in the evenings on a friday hey we really want to see matariki you
know it's like yeah you might have to wait around a little while so anyway so we will jump into this if i
can get this to move so um matariki uh maori name for new uh the
new year and uh it is signified uh by the rising of m45 uh above the horizon
um and it's also timed in with the last quarter of the moon of the month so it
falls usually late june to early july it does move very very slightly now um
most people will know m45 pleiades um but there are many many different names for it across the globe
but there are so many um and in europe for example you might know it
as the seven sisters uh you know it's pleiades and the greek name um
anybody drives a japanese car or if you drive a subaru if you look on the
um the bonnet look at the logo of the car on the subaru car it is
actually uh the pleiades m45 is on on the uh on the logo
and um it's very very significant uh all across the globe very many different
cultures um for maori it's a special time of the year um
historically the stars were closely tied to the planting of crops it was their it
was their celestial clock it told them when to plant when to harvest when to go hunting and um matariki in particular is
the sort of the the midwinter festival it was the the midpoint the darkest time
of the year the coldest time of the year and if you consider you know new zealand is a huge variance in
temperatures and and climate if you go to the north to the
far north um new zealand is more into the tropics so it's semi-tropical it's
warm even in the winter it you know you won't get frost or cold um you know you
might get some mornings at you know three four degrees but very rarely would you get down to
freezing whereas you know if you go down to the south to invercargill in dunedin
on the south they're close to the poles another you know 1750 kilometers closer to the uh to
the south pole so down there the arctic uh you know some antarctic winds come up
they bring um you know ice and snow up from the south and uh certainly for some
you know for a culture that was um you know living in um you know
they were living in sort of uh grass houses you know they were houses that were dug into the ground but had roofs
of leaves and branches and um the that must have been quite um quite
horrific you know i certainly know that if we have some cold cold nights here um
here in canterbury i can get you down to sort of minus 10 i can imagine that living out in in
fairly sort of simple housing would not have been a lot of fun
so they must have been very very hardy to be living in that kind of environment but um
as as i was saying you know um the stars were very significant to them um they
have you know people within uh their tribes who would be
um you know almost the the the key observer the key astronomer within the
group that would learn this information only very few people within the tribes
who actually knew about this and they would be you know the elders and
the specialists in astronomy who um who the family fana was what they call it in
new zealand the whanau would look to this person to guide them as to when you know when to plan when to harvest when
to hunt and um the reason that matariki is so interesting to them is that it was a
signifier of what would be the next year how would it be like
if the stars were clear and bright at matariki uh it would you know potentially signify an abundant season
ahead and then of course if it was uh a poor matariki then you know they might say
well that might not be so good this year uh an interesting fact actually is that
um not everywhere in new zealand can see uh matariki at m45 if you live on um
on the west um you know at this time of a year in the june in the july
it doesn't rise above the horizon over there so you would have real problems so they use
some different stars they actually use rigel which would be the uh signifier of
matariki for for the west coast uh but here on the east we have a good clear view out to the ocean
um from my observatory here uh i'm at about 150 meters above sea level but
it's flat out to the east across the canterbury plains out across the ocean so
um and if you're on the higher ground certainly you get a fantastic view out to the east so uh for example uh banks
peninsula which is a dormant volcano um is a great place to go uh go observe uh
matariki and that's where a lot of locals do actually go out there
so um they actually used you know marie's um
you know the uh the stars uh the movement of the constellations the rising of stars
and the phases of moon it was very very important to them and they were extremely valuable they were very well
noted very well recorded and they have a very precise understanding of the
seasons and that certainly helped them as they cross the pacific ocean so you know if you go to hawaii for example as
i said you will see very very similar um totems very similar color schemes
and um imagery used and that travel you know i've traveled quite extensively across the pacific and it's amazing you
know you can go to hawaii and see this kind of imagery and then if you go to the
western pacific you go to taiwan for example all the way across those thousands of
kilometers ocean the same imagery appears again and again so
and the one thing that's also worth noting is that many of the pacific cultures also have a similar um festival
to matariki it's not not only dedicated to maori
a lot of the different cultures across the pacific used the same time um as a time of celebration and it
really was a time of celebration it was to think on the past to think on the present to be with
family and to be with friends to eat good food and enjoy um time together and
then to look towards the uh the next year ahead and and many uh many people
in new zealand actually use this time uh still today they will go out they
will go and enjoy the stars and go and enjoy the country and get together with
food you know friends and family and um it is still a special time here in new
zealand matariki it um it's enjoying a bit of a renaissance as well because
um up until the sort of the last sort of 50 years or so um
it wasn't a truly sort of new zealand uh in you know holiday or
something that the white settlers the pakiha uh would uh would take an interest in but um
there has been a huge renaissance in the maori language and maori culture which is absolutely fantastic and so this has
become really really special for us um so just a quick look then this is a sky
view of the east uh out towards uh matariki rising you can see that just
above here in the the northeast um with m45 rising above the horizon on the 24th
of june at 5am in the morning and this year is going to be spectacular because
um we have this fantastic alignment from mercury down on the horizon here
venus um a last quarter moon mars jupiter and then all the way up
here saturn so we've got this fantastic line we've got a huge amount of interest this
year um much more than we normally do because we've been telling people about this fantastic
alignment that is coming and it's going to be great going out on the 24th of
june in the morning we have a uh a special event lined up with our local city uh where they've basically given us
the grounds and uh uh their largest library here locally
and uh we'll go out and we're going to do a special event with the local council as well
so that's going to be really good looking forward to that one and um
the great news this year um previously matariki has been very much a
a personal celebration and while we have a number of other um
awesome holidays here in new zealand to celebrate our culture um
this year uh the new zealand government has announced that matariki going forward will be a national holiday
and the first year this year will be the 24th of june next year 14th of july and
then back to the 28th of june uh in 2024. so what does that mean well it means actually
we're getting a wonderful holiday to celebrate a friend's family
but suddenly we've ended up with a holiday which has become a national astronomy holiday and that's the way i
look at it the interest in astronomy has grown significantly over the last years
we've seen huge increases in the number of people in our local observatory uh
canterbury astronomical society we've doubled our membership and more over the last two years there has been a
tremendous increase um in the interest a lot of that interest comes from the wonderful images
that people see online astrophotography everybody wants to be doing it they're interested in getting involved in it and
the great thing about new zealand is that the schools also teach astronomy as
part of their national curriculum so the schools will be in this year talking uh to their classes
about asteroids and comets and eclipses in the moon and we uh as part of the country
astronomical society um we've got a number of school events as well we've got one coming up in uh in june i
started sorry in may which is um going to be 300 kids we're going to be running
in an evening um where we're going to have multiple telescopes going to have some astrophotography gear and we're going to
be setting up at the school and it's a local school but we um we get a tremendous interest um
in astronomy uh over the last years and that's absolutely fantastic so um
i can't um can't be more excited we're actually getting a national public holiday and a large portion of that
holiday is about celebrating astronomy um because the event is actually an
astronomical event can't ask for more than that it's amazing
so um we've been very heavily involved with uh a local uh local city over the
last few years and um every year we get involved uh in matariki celebrations
um in the past we've done uh astrophotography exhibitions for them
and we've done some talks uh in the previous years as well and we've run
observing and we have a really great um relationship with our local city
regarding outreach uh amer is a member of our society i mean you know
what do they say keep your friends close but your enemies closer and our local mayor is actually
part of our uh uh astronomy club um he's uh he's active he has a a 10 inch
dobsonian which he he drags out and there's a number of his staff who are
also heavily involved in astronomy so um we have a lighting covenants around
our observatory they have reduced the lighting for five kilometers around our observatory
and that engagement is um is you know really really important for us
they they promote us and um encourage us but also we get you
know uh some fantastic support from them and they produce these wonderful
leaflets we produced a leaflet on uh stargazing in selwyn which is our local
district and uh that was all funded by the local council which is which is fantastic
um if anybody's interested to see uh the kind of uh activities we get up to
there's a link here which is selwyn.nz which is the local government
slash things to do stargazing they created a uh a youtube uh broadcast for
us um and that was based on footage that we took
and took part in and again another celebration of the engagement that we
have with a local city um to support uh outreach and astronomy within uh within
the christchurch area and um that's uh that's been spectacular we um
we also had a spot on national television a couple of years ago and uh we literally sold out all of our
um winter tickets uh within 24 hours um because they did literally a
three-minute slot there was a planetary um alignment like there is uh this year
and uh it made um national news and uh we literally i literally for 24
hours all they did was take bookings and um answered um journalists uh you know
ringing up asking for information so so uh just coming up then so we have a
very busy winter programmer of course and this year in particular because of matariki
we've got our outreach open nights you know we run from april through till september
we run every friday evening we get about at 90 to 100 people through the door not quite
the thousands through the door that griffis observatory uh can muster but that's not
bad considering that christchurch is a city of 300 000 so um
the local area really is interested we get a lot of scout groups a lot of schools groups uh coming
through and they're encouraged because the kids of course are learning you know they're learning astronomy at school and
then of course they want mom and dad to take them to the observatory and actually use the telescopes there
and we also do private groups as well uh in the winter months at least once if not twice a week as well
and then in july we do kids fest so that's 15 nights of absolute mayhem and
chaos uh we get between 80 and 100 kids through the door
uh on every every evening for 15 nights if the weather is is good
and um that's from sort of ages five to fifteen and uh that is a um
again a uh local city sponsored event and um that's uh that's a sellout every
year as soon as that goes up online within a few days that gets sold out as well
between those two events we will get between seven and a half and eight thousand visitors through the
observatory every year so um again not like the griffiths but
certainly for uh for a local you know local astronomy group here in uh new
zealand that's pretty good and then on the the 24th and the 25th we'll have some matariki celebrations uh
a out at the library doing an event there but also then on the 25th we'll be
doing another open night um in the evening for the uh for the lilies that can't get up at five o'clock in the
morning that's including me because i i decided to vote for the evening session
not the morning morning one and uh of course you know uh later on in
the year um m45 will be background into an evening object and then that's when uh the
astrophotographers uh can get on board instead of trying to fight imaging a uh an object that is close to
the rising sun in the mornings now we've got a ton of other stuff that
we're doing this year now a quick quick quiz on scott which famous telescope is
this hmm [Music] it's the back end of the telescope i
don't know yeah uh this is the back end of uh it's a 2.7
meter telescope and it's the back end of a boeing 747. ah sophia
sophia so uh this this winter uh sophia is back in town uh
it's been a year or two since we've seen her here and um she will be back in
june july for the southern deployment in 2022 now we have a fantastic relationship with
sophia we get private groups and tours as well as
some engagement with them they come to our winter barbecue every year so they bring the s'mores and we bring the we
bring the barbecue and we have a fantastic evening uh with the crew um always a pleasure to see them we really
miss them over the last years but they will be back this year as well
and a year or two ago i got a fantastic tour alongside the team
with nick veronica in the group and we uh we got on board and had a great time with the gang
and so we're really looking forward to those guys being back as well so um
why do they come here uh well the winter sky here is very dark
it's dark early so they head off down towards the ice it's very cold
the telescope is a 2.7 meter uh infrared telescope sophia is standing for the
stratospheric observatory stratospheric observatory for infrared astronomy and um
they go up and they fly up to about 45 000 feet down here in the southern ocean
it's cold and the gang uh spend many hours flying around observing uh different uh
different objects and um they they enjoy the the dark here as
well coming from california of course um i'm not sure that they like the cold um
they're still trying to get their head around doing a barbecue in uh in minus five degrees
but we warmed them up with some um we uh we have some uh some nice special
drinks down here that keep them nice and warm and a barbecue around a big bonfire so
they really love that so we're looking forward to seeing them again this year and finally um we're looking forward to
the reopening of the christchurch observatory so i mentioned this previously um
and this might be of interest to the guys in terms of historical telescopes
so this is the townsend t 6 inch refractor this telescope is very very old it was
back to the 1800s and is an amazing piece of hardware um it is
absolutely um a work of art in terms of the controls and the mount that is on
the mount is actually pendulum driven uh with a clock and to keep sidereal time
and um it's was housed at the top of the observatory tower here in christchurch
um until the earthquakes and unfortunately this was the states of the telescope um
after the earthquakes um we um we unfortunately
lost the whole building and um the telescope itself was was buried under many many tons of uh rock
um the building itself is made of solid stone and um the dome you can see there
there's the dome here on the ground that dome was was up there oh my god on
the roof so all of this tower collapsed all of the side of this building collapsed and uh landed in the uh in the in the
square um and the telescope was basically destroyed wow um horrible the
um there was various donations to rebuild this telescope and one of our canterbury astronomical
society members um was a very good engineer he worked with the
university of canterbury and um they uh they started to rebuild the
telescope unfortunately uh he uh he passed away some years ago but the legacy was carried on his wife has been
doing a huge amount of the work actually in terms of repainting and taking the you know
telescope back to its original condition for preservation and um
they're not far off actually the tower itself
has been rebuilt um so what they've done is taken the facade of
the tower and rebuilt the inside to
seismic standards so that the tower will be safe in future earthquakes of which
new zealand is prone to unfortunately we live on the ring of fire so
it's certainly a a time here that we will have more earthquakes in the future
so um the tower has been rebuilt it opens towards the end of this year
uh the telescope here you can see the telescope on the right hand side it has been mostly um repaired there are still
some final parts to be finished off before it will be placed back onto the tower but um we're really looking forward to
seeing that back in operation and why because uh the canterbury astronomical society our
founders were actually part of this original project and the canterbury astronomical society
was was shelved for some years uh the money from the society that they had gained at
the time was given to the uh to the telescope to keep it running and then
we've restarted um back in the 60s in our new site which is out of the city
actually um so we're about uh 40 minutes out of the city uh on a dark sky sat at
west melton but um that's pretty much um you know um
fantastic to see and the council has put you know many many thousands of dollars of you
know monthly money back into building this and so um who knows maybe we'll see some open
nights at the uh at the christchurch observatory as well um in the future
with the town's nts and by the way um the the the primary
objective of this thing is is in a um in a wood packing crate and uh it takes
four of us to lift so it's a it's a pretty extensive lens
so uh yeah so that's pretty much it so matariki is going to be uh a busy time
um we're going to be busy with um with our outreach program
um it's going to be absolutely um fantastic and looking forward to it as
always and with um coverts quickly disappearing there here in new
zealand we're already getting a big lift in interest so that will be us for the winter season so
looking forward to it and i'm sure we'll give you some further updates on the towns and tees and i can see john's got
his got his hand up so he's gonna ask me a question about this telescope mom yeah
yeah it's like you look at the new building and everything it's cool so oh yeah yeah it needs to be it's solid uh reinforced
concrete and they've just used the old old stone around the front to create a skin
i just wanted to say how grateful i am and uh to see that the tower is being
rebuilt um this is the first i learned of that i had i had my fingers crossed that this would
happen it's a was a lifelong memory for me because i had a chance to visit christ
church several times and i had a chance to use this telescope before the earthquake and
the tower looked like that and some very kind people down there in uh the canterbury astronomical society let me
visit i've spent time at your uh observatory out sort of near the airport
but also in this dome i spent some time alone up in this incredible dome and for
a guy who grew up in new england in the united states to come find himself in new zealand in a dome like this
looking at southern stars it was a memory i will never forget so uh when
the earthquake hit and i heard about it it was of course devastating it was amazing that the uh the lens the six
six inch lens was uh not broken so it's not like you're having to redo the lens
amazingly the lens survived this catastrophe as i understand but thank you very much for the update on this
wonderful project yeah yeah i i have to i have to think uh you
know there is a there's a few individuals that have taken this project on the university of canterbury have
been absolutely uh supportive of this but um you know um
dale kershaw um who was the um the widow uh of the gentleman involved um dale has
taken this to heart as well she wants to see it back on the uh on the roof from the observatory and by
the way if you're just wondering how you know john was talking about how to get up to the scope here uh
up this ladder around the roof gosh so so um to get up there actually was you
know through the building and then up the rails and then onto the roof here so wow
yeah and this was very popular before uh before the canterbury astronomical society was on its site where it is now
um this was uh this was the star attraction and meant a few of our members
used to used to run this on saturday evenings in the town so um yeah there is uh a lot of history here
as john says you know it was it was fortuitous that the the primary um was
buried but it was buried under the dome and saved from you know uh
probably certain destruction if you look on the left-hand side i'm just thinking that that lens must
have been shattered you know so and this the scaffolding was actually put up after the because we had a whole series
of quakes over six nine months the the first at the first quakes they
had put up the scaffolding to to try and um you know shore up the building but
also get access to the roof to to start saving stuff unfortunately before they
could remove the telescope um we took a big hit and
actually that earthquake actually destroyed much of the much of the central business district of
christchurch and even now we're still rebuilding the city um after those
earthquakes so i'm sure john next time you're fancying a trip to new zealand please
come and revisit we would love to host you again
new zealand is to be highly highly recommended the south island is incredible are you are have you made progress
rebuilding the cathedral in the square as well i imagine yeah so the the cathedral uh is actually
in progress but it's taken a long time because of obviously the money involved
and there's quite a lot of politics and you know organizations who had different ideas about it so
um the rebuild has started of that but that's some you know another you know multi-year project but the city will
look very different i'm sure a lot of the uh old buildings that were here when
you were here are gone and the city is starting to look like a very very modern uh new zealand city which is
fabulous but one that is not forgetting its history which is great the scope was made by cook if i'm not
sure we mentioned that and i'm pretty sure it dated from the 1860s but a classic cook tall stove made in england
uh and it was magnifi the condition was in magnifice magnificent when i saw it years ago
yeah and you know when you um when you we actually had the case for the uh for
the objective it really you know it was beautiful everything in it was brass i did point out the um
uh here um the the timing mechanism is actually on a pendulum which they
actually uh wound up and graham uh kershaw he actually rebuilt all this by
hand and um it's just an absolute work of art
when you hear this thing running it sounds like the most beautiful uh grandfather clock sitting
ticking away in your hallway and um you know the mechanism yeah i i could watch
the telescope and watch the stars but i could also watch this thing spinning away with his government regulating time
uh really measuring time cool um so yeah pretty much uh that's
the update from the south here uh let's go thank you very very much for um
for inviting me uh back on yeah you are welcome of course anytime uh
simon i i love that you are able to make it i i understand you're on vacation right
now so maybe that made it a little easier uh it did sometimes these uh meetings unfortunately fall uh in the
middle of the working day here yeah so um it's not always um the easiest time to
get on but i do love um coming on and and sharing what we're doing here um
it's really um it's really uh very remote from the rest of the world
so it's not always easy to know what's going on down here i know that yo you'll probably get more of an update than many
people because i work you know spend a lot of time i'm helping tyler and the
team there as well and um you know i appreciate the support you guys give us
we appreciate the support you're giving us so thank you very much so thanks and uh yeah let's hand it over and then
let's hear some more awesome awesome updates thank you very much but for now we're going to take about a
10 minute break um so it's time to stretch your legs and get a coffee or get a sandwich and we'll
be back in about 10 minutes so that's it
at this time i think i'm going to take you up on that scott hola maxie
and the hammer nico maxi maxi was already maxi was already
eating i saw him earlier on he was eating eating his breakfast
i'm gonna go grab a late snack of course simon as the uh scourge of covid
wanes i uh i have planned not only to visit maxie in argentina
but to go to new zealand with camera and toe see what i can do to some of those uh
some of these southern skies that you have there's some beautiful beautiful areas out there that i would
love to see if i can see if i can capture and bring back north yeah you should give me it you can be
shout when you've got it booked up so we're um the flights are reopening the
uh requirements for uh you know um isolation have been removed we're pretty
much reopening new zealand to the world so oh cool that's a yeah i think australia is still
a little close that's where my brother-in-law went he just got back unfortunately he tested positive while
he was down there he was fine but he followed the quarantine protocol while he was down
so his his vacation was extended by a few um
by a few days uh chris yes i actually wanted to get up and go
but i had to start talking night sky so i am the halftime entertainment
harold lock my good friend hello good to see you uh my marcelo souza dr marcelo souza
is here and will uh i know he'll be on next before i
show well it says nightscapes but uh gonna be moonscapes tonight because uh
we've had a lot of clouds and and the uh moon is full
yeah we've had the same problem here we've had the uh cloudiest wettest summer in 80 years so
it has been absolutely awful for um for astronomy and um we've had um
you know normally in the summer we get uh fire bans and you know we're worries worried about how dry it is but this
year everything stayed green so we've had nothing at all uh it's just
been cloud and um and rain um so yeah we're looking forward to
getting into the winter and getting we're starting to get a few clear nights and starting to get cold without one or
two frosts already so it's definitely heading um heading towards that time
reopening the observatory at the end of the month as well so that's that's going to feel like
it's going to feel like getting into winter again standing out in the cold for three hours
talking to talking to the public but um it'll be good it'll be good so
lots of lots of things lots of things planned which is always you know we'll blink and it will be september you know
yeah i know winter winter there is i think some of the best uh night sky time because you're look the
milky way goes straight overhead we in the northern hemisphere call it milky way season
and i've always been quick to say well not so fast you
wait till you go to the southern hemisphere before you talk about milky way season in the core
because it's it's it has a different meaning where you are where maxie nicholas you all get to see
a lot more of our uh galactic bulge than we do yeah we also struggle because of
course you know when you've got the nice the nice northern targets for us are in the middle of the summer and then you
know we're dealing with daylight so if i want to shoot stuff in the north you know i'm yeah getting out i i have very
very short windows for northern targets which is which is a bit of a shame so um but yeah in the winter you know
it's um i'm in a i'm in a bottle two here towards it just two three really
depending on the um on the sky conditions but um
in the winter i can be doing 12 or 13 hours in the night and so you know it's
it's great yeah um but yeah come the summer if i want to shoot stuff in the north
then um you know it's really it's really really hard maxie will know when it was like 11 o'clock at night and it's you
know still light it's like come on
yeah isn't there a um time where the northern cross and the southern cross are in the sky at the
same time i don't know about i don't know about here um
yeah because we have because we have multiple crosses yeah i think uh
here here we can see the the north the north grass but maybe
maybe up maybe in in brazil i don't know if it's material
yeah it would be whenever the summer triangle is visible that's where cygnus and a part of cygnus
basically forms the shape of a cross it's a uh northern so we we call it the northern
cross even though we also call it cygnus and um
southern cross of course you have to be far enough south to see it as it comes up
um jeff weiss says he enjoys his portal seven plus skies well jeff it may take a few it may take
a few more frames to gather some data but i've seen some pretty spectacular
work about 45 hours of integration and you can get you can still get some
pretty incredible stuff but uh it's 45 hours amazing amazing stuff from
in cities on tokyo for example anyway narrow bands and um just doing fantastic
work but yeah i much prefer bottle two out here and uh going out and just
looking up and it's like okay wow yeah
yeah i got my my microphone nude so you were trying to join in
yeah i was talking about you know what right yeah we were just talking away
what is maxie saying we don't know it has the same problem more really so it's
but um we're here in my home i can see signals uh
to the north you know and [Music] it's a huge constellation
yeah [Music] but
yes i i can see it i i remember that i can see it uh but i have my neighbor with the led
slides and everything but i can see the the party the the principal stars i
think i i need to destroy the next 20 kilometers of my house to break out the city and maybe see it
[Laughter] now about
i i only have it i don't know uh [Music] two or three minutes three some coffee
i'll be right back okay i have it three or four hours a
look at the north because i sometimes i try to take pictures to
i don't remember the the nebula let me find it
[Music] what is your latitude maxine uh 34
oh okay so you're uh uh [Applause] uh
you're still in the southern hemisphere so you're literally literally the same as me i'm just further way around
because we're 40 we're 43 here so we're a little further south exactly you're mostly like
here that's and that's why you can see uh i i
remember you share some pictures of the um [Music] australis
yeah that's right yeah yeah but yeah there was aurora here last week but it
wasn't um strong enough to make it up towards me but in the south in dunedin invercargill they got some fantastic
pictures but yeah it needs to be a lot stronger for it to make it up to to me because i'm
you know i'm i'm 700 kilometers or 800 kilometers from the south of uh you know
new zealand um so if they see it down south it's not always possible for us to see it here
but i have a good view straight south out of the back of the observatory
is flat so straight to the south so um i have a fairly good uh view of it if
it's if it's this far north i can see it pretty good um but yeah last week was also full yeah
getting towards a big bright moon as well so not easy
always the best the best night is with full moon yeah of course yeah
yeah if you're gonna get the best aurora ever that's gonna it would be on a full moon you're right yeah
nico when you when you went to you can't see it no
when i when i was i i was in ushuaia twice and
in we can't see anything oh
maybe the solar activity wasn't yeah
[Music]
[Music] well hello everybody hope you enjoyed
your uh 10 minute break and uh we are ready to get started with uh marcelo souza down in brazil uh
marcelo is the uh senior editor of sky's up magazine he's
also uh you know powerhouse uh astronomy outreach
in brazil and throughout south america and uh it's about to launch uh is uh
the national um astronomy and astronautics
symposium uh
nice to meet you thank you again for the invitation for your kindly words
we are now preparing for the end annual event that you organized
that's here happened this friday can you hear me
yes we can hear you okay and we are preparing for the events in that will
happen this friday but uh something that we are talking about now here in brazil
our group is here many people are asking us are you share here
uh my screen with a moment oh sorry any moment
i'm that i think that you talk during
many times about this but he's a solar activity
i was talking with the our friends and this is the others of your group
internet jesuit prediction of the new cycle the 25 solar cycle this large prediction
made in 2019 this is a daisy you see here
they predict that you will not be a social strength or so strong
cycle or if you not so many activities in some activities but
it is not what is happening now this is in 2019 the end of 2019
these wise what is being measured
in the solar activity we can see that you have more
actives than predicted here we can see the county of the
sunspot the number of such parts here
then here i have the 19 28 21 22 you see here
that you probably will have a stronger
[Music] is indicating this unless uh
i will show only last week from the beginning of april until now
we have this was the prediction of the activity in april
fought fourteen that's a why the geomagnetic stone
class that you arrived and today
i believe that i don't know if you are seen there
but it was predicted in april 40 but i know that
in south region of canada they saw auroras in this field
and now nearest on april 7th
we had another one x class solar flare
then we know we can see that see we have a rough chips
happening in the sun and now we have these three
big sunspots yeah we are predicting
that you have this is prediction from today they're predicting that
there is a 75 percent chance of m-class solar flares today
yesterday for i don't know hey in brazil it is yet c april 19.
and it uh twenty-five percent chance of a fox flash this and here is a reason of this
we have three big sun spots in the sun that's now
is in the direction of the earth the other one that happened
they were not in direction of the earth now is direction i
i don't know what will happen in somebody
i'm you have a possibility to have another character event probably
i don't know if it is it happened but since 2012 we we almost
had uh calendar events here the pictures of the sunspot have another thing is
near here and this is the kind of event for
i want to remember that first and to september 1859
was the largest geomagnetic islam that was required until today wow
colorado's voicing in caribbean the heavy parts of el roda was visible
in cuba mexico and the house in colombia
or as a strong magnet some have many facts here
on earth and one of them is the lagrange systems that fails right you have also the
distributions of power that didn't work many things happen here
on earth surface then me what's happening now
the question is this you have a new character like events you need to see because
almost we had in 2012 foreign foreign nine days
if he happened many days later we had do you have the an event like the new
caring for the current events and we have a probability now
we're we're having another event like character
i don't it's something that he now have satellites here
in other words andy on february
40 and star style links that you're going from
elements satellites had problems because of summer storm then if we have a big solar storm now
we're having different effects than what's happening in the period of the character events
there's something going to remember this andy showing that it is important
to look to the sun in the spirit
we are doing active and we have here many people that
wants to know what is happening with the sun as we have more active than predicted
let us see what we are going to happen this is our event but we're helping
everything if everything works well as we are organizing for you you will have a
place first time since the beginning of the pandemic is first time that you
organized a theater an event in a theater on april 22
and you have also an online event these are the
invited speakers for these events we have a doctor of varujan
grazian from naza jpl
and also dr david v scott hobbits that's it
tom fields mike siemens stephen hermesdan
tus tezelle from turkey suraj
[Music]
is from peru but he's living here in brazil i see these are the brazilian
if i i will participate in the dennis that's not from brazil but you have also
another photograph that is uh a physician that works with us photography
here he wrote an article for the sky's up magazine
last year excellent samir that is responsible for
the pakistan design the first next skype in latin america
and now have the new talents here this is paolo vito he has only 17 years old
and he is studying the einstein's equations and now digital
equations he usually unified field theory
and he is also solving in his yet
in the high school in school but he solves the problems of
past graduation here he's working with you he's in cosmology and there is a new talent that we have
here in brazil he's very young and he he
likes mathematics yeah
talents here to develop program now that app is for
compute for smart phones three girls that they passed
isabelle participated here you want to have to do two programs here
and the the two talents in astronomy here at deborah and the blue blue devils
participate in your program here and these are
enemies that you make a presentation during the day events here
she has only 9 years old yes she she has support of her family and she is
doing a fantastic project with other students in
the city that she lives now this is uh and what do you have also
during the international events they ask us to do again we are going to do against driving
uh of astronomy during the event that's fun that's great we have we organized it
on saturday this saturday and sunday during the events the event will finish
saturday and begin the driving of astronomy and something that's curious here because they want us to
make observation of the moon but i said many times to them that see we have not
we had third party of the moon it's not possible to see the moon in the beginning of the night but they insisted
included in the announcement of the events that we will see in real time
jimmy in the sky this is something that we try to explain
every time that you organize that event but today they many people imagine that you can see any
time that you want to see the moon in the sky and here i made
of the last yeah i think that we're organized here and
this is now we have the characters that you participate again
and this is a active that you will do again this year
that looked like a completely lot of fun yeah a lot of fun
i like the drawing of the rabbit on the moon in that yes that was cool
the kids reaction is priceless it's awesome
and this is what we are going to do again this time
thank you very much god sorry for this shock presentation but oh my god thank you oh it's actually perfect that it's
about the children i'm very tired today because we are organized events and
it's awesome but i believe i hope everything works well
i look forward thank you very much it's nice to be with you all of
we'll you you this weekend take care thank you bye bye
okay so um up next is uh uh a favorite on the global star party
uh adrian bradley who does beautiful landscape nightscape work
uh you know blending his talents for uh handling a camera with his love for
the sky so um adrian thanks for coming on again uh i don't know how many global star parties
you've been on now but it's yeah probably two months worth ever since
david ever since david levy said you should come on the global star party
with me and you invited me in i said yeah i'll do it and i've enjoyed
it um it's been a great outlet for me not only
sharing my work but then it inspires me to go get more work and um
use it to talk about the night sky i've gotten back into bowling recently
but as i told the bowlers i gotta go because i have a presentation to make and i won't miss
so with that i'm gonna share my screen and actually i i think i showed last
week some of the bowling pictures that i took so when it's cloudy
as i always share the skies just get cloudy
at night and what looks like a promising night
quickly goes away with the type of weather we've had here so because the full moon has been
slowly coming up um i've decided to share more of my
attempts at moonscapes as well as things that are going on in life you can kind of see the overview of
everything here we'll start with this picture of the moon every once in a while
just holding hand holding a camera i get a pretty good shot of the moon
um one thing that i look for is on the limb if i've got some detail on the limb
especially with this now in the southern hemisphere here the ears of the rabbit everybody every the
rabbit's upside down when you look at the moon in the northern hemisphere but when you've got
some detail like this that means either i had a combination of steady skies a steady hand image
stabilization all of it had to work together to get the type of detail
where you could continue to zoom in with a handheld shot at this point it's beginning to pick
it's beginning to pixelate a little bit but you can see you can see hadley's reel which i
believe is this area right here if i'm not mistaken you can see some of the areas in the
apollo landing zones um let's drop back because i believe apollo 11
landed somewhere either this plane or that plane and apollo 16
wasn't too far apollo 17's up here apollo 15 the all michigan crew
that hadley's real and then there were two more that when i took this picture
weren't quite their apollo 12 and apollo 14 which apollo 13
was supposed to go where apollo 14 ended up going
so there's a couple of different so the early full moon
is rises during the day for us and um this part of the moon
is cut off um it appears full except for this
particular piece of the moon and um
when it rises late this part
gets cut off and you can see a little bit of the terminator somewhere around there i may have a 100
full moon i'll have to look and see if i can find it but uh most of the time
you get when you shoot at the full moon you'll get an early or you'll get a late if you
look at your astronomy software you can find out what percentage of the moon is covered
and you can challenge yourself to capture a uh 100 full moon if it's going to go
to 100 while you can see it now one of the [Music]
best things to watch if you can is moonrise
and um this is a just a quick picture of seeing the
moon come above the horizon um trying to take a picture of it you
generally blow out the moon with everything else in the sky but
it's quite impressive to see suddenly the disc of the moon disappears on the horizon and it's slowly rising up
if you go over water it's easier to see if you take a large picture of it
now this is with a camera um you can see that this was a composite
you've got the detail of the moon but it looks like it was kind of
plopped in on this um otherwise there's a blurry rising of the moon your eyes see it a
lot better than this um so i'm still working on getting a good composite that makes this look the
way that it see that it seemed to the ai similarly um
i'll show a couple of the pictures this is from a different full moon rising
um and based on where this is i believe it was the [Music]
i believe it was the early full moon i have to thinking of how dark
it was here it may have actually been a little later but that's the actual size of the moon i
scaled the moon to the size based on everything else here the lake
a lot of times you'll see the moon appear larger in composite shots but it
really isn't it's in these sort of wide-angle pictures it's a tiny thing
this was probably the best one that i've done and i know i've shown it here on global star party before
this is how our eyes see the moon over the water and this was where the because of the
weather there was turbulence here it sort of split the uh light from the moon into two
but this is this is as close as i've gotten to a naked eye
shot it's a composite and i had to do a lot of um smoothing out of the bright light where
the moon is here but that is pretty accurate as far as how we see the
detail the contrast and how we see the rest of the night sky it's a it's a really nice picture
and and that's right that when you see the that with your eye
you can see something like this and when you take the picture you you you get or
the moon all white or just that little dot in the sky yeah
it's really hard to to get like that while we see that's what you get
yeah that's bright in the sky and you know you're that's what you see so
it takes i want to show what i am saying and this is really hard
yeah and that's what makes this such a you know i worked on that picture for a little
while um because let's see this one i think i tried to work on it too see this one the
moon's too big it's neat looking but it's too big it's
not quite you know i wouldn't call it quite as realistic
and then recently i tried to capture it this
image everything else very nice and then the contrail went across the moon but
what you're seeing is when i plop the moon in place it looks like it's ahead of the contrail
so there's still some work for me to do to make these shots more
realistic opacity you know the moon might have been a good thing to do here it may have
that may have actually done the trick for me but um but i'm still working at it
so other other compositions um we were recently talking about
observatories in the cathedral and this is the this is the church that i was in front of when i took some of
the photos and you can you can't really see it this is actually betelgeuse
and those are a couple of the belt stars of orion orion was in the sky
the winter hexagon was behind it but there's so much bright light
that getting any starlight at all there's a lens flare but um so that was the church that i was
in front of and those of us celebrating easter recently we i use the uh statue that's cool of
jesus to make a composition here and there's that bright moon you were talking about nicholas um nico
um i didn't bother composing or you know doing a
composite of it i wanted to see tonight yeah how that how that would look now i
know there's a larger much larger statue um that i would love to
frame something like this in the world and let's see i think that's yeah those
are all the images i of course we talked about aurora
and this is one of the images i'll always love when we were able to see it
from my spot in michigan um it looked beautiful on the horizon this
was one of the pictures where i was able to frame it in between the trees and i recently edited this to
show some of the uh rocks and some of the foliage that
where i was standing when i took this photo and um
so that is basically it as usual i share images of uh
birding because sometimes the night skies cloudy just go take pictures in the day
we have a lot of juvenile bald eagles in the area this one's scouring for food
tomorrow i'm going to watch some baseball so i'm going to see a scene something
like this where one of the hitters for the yankees will be batting and
there will be someone catching that netting is there to protect us from foul balls what's interesting is i i think
this is the only sports photography is the only type of photography where i
don't use any of the same kits to do night sky if i were a paid sports
photographer i would use the exact same kit that i used to capture this moon
but i would just shoot a little bit faster but um so with that
my moonscapes for uh this particular full moon hopefully in two
weeks i'll be back at it shooting some milky way photography my plan is to go
to one of my um favorite spots about three hours north of me
and catch the milky way coming over a fairly large sized river
um i've also planned on heading to
okeetex i went ahead and registered along with another astronomy buddy of mine
so i'll be i'll be at oaky tex in uh late september and i'll see what kind of
uh images i can get i'll probably do some more visual astronomy
as well when i'm down there so looking forward to that and um
and scott that's it for uh tonight thank you very much thank you
all right so up next is maxi folaris maxi is uh down in argentina of course
and uh it's good to have you back on global star party maxie
if max he's there i think what he goes away
okay so why don't we why don't we move uh uh who's up next we have
is caesar available hi scott okay hear me i hear you caesar
okay we'll let you go on and then uh catch up with maxie okay yes yes okay no problem we can talk
okay thank you okay thank you i'll give it to you yeah yes it was a week where uh after
the star san rafael mendoza we are uh working with the people
uh and talking about the pictures that every people
uh took in the strawberry um watching some process
uh for different different uh view
landscapes we will with milky way
um something that normally for one shot
picture and maybe i can talk with uh about this when adrian
bradley because he's an expert about process for
for landscape photography i tried um of course that um
[Music] using using uh photoshop the classic adobe adult photoshop
is easy to to take a
stronger milky way with a view
with a more spectacular view of colors um
you know uh you can have uh touching the curves of of
everything you can change very fastly
colors and make a more spectacular
spectacular impress of your picture but in another
way something that we tried less spectacular than adobe photoshop
and sometimes when you have the option of
something that it's a a free software free astronomy software
uh i tried something with a serial that is an available free
software for astronomy and you can use in a similar way like
when you have you have a single uh sorry and stuck a
picture of a nebula or a galaxy you can use for of course you can use
for um cr2 or rav rav
raw sorry raw format image um well let me check if
i can share this let me
one minute to share because i i was not
totally ready prepared for for this because i was thinking that maxie was first like
behind me and um let me okay
adrian you can open your microphone because it's your is your feel about
you know well i'll tell you yeah i use photoshop and i use um
some of the astronomy the anything that does flats isn't so good
if you have a landscape but astronomy tool has a thing that enhances dsos
that i use a lot it actually works for milky way photography and it
brightens the mil it'll brighten the both the milky way or any other
um hydrogen alpha object the other thing i do is i'll reduce
stars or i'll shrink stars i think it's an option to
shrink the stars which makes without taking all the stars out it'll make the milky way a little more
prominent you want to you have to be careful between when you process your image
you want to make it beautiful i try to make it beautiful yet realistic so i try
not to do things like strip the stars completely or balloon the milky way out so that it's
this big thing and nothing else in the sky absolutely so there's a few different
you know i like doing single shots so there's a few different options that
i may not excuse me may not take based on
what it is i'm trying to accomplish so sure so yeah it's worth playing around
with we can try we can try this is a life this is a live star party i never tried
uh make a single picture of milky way with siri
i don't know we we can do it this well first of all i have one i don't
know if yeah if you can see the the listen uh
yes okay because i have my monitor in my my background but in my back i have the
the the tv okay it's great okay list open
all time you can use the buyer to have the three channels
and maybe you can experiment a low or noise
when i work with my computer because it's totally in full capacity in this
computer well okay one thing i don't worry too much about noise because the tools to denoise things have
gotten better and better over the years um i do typically shoot
um not much higher than iso 6400 but in like portal ones guys i've gotten
away with iso eight eight thousand and i've seen iso 10 000 shots that look
just fine um so it's all about exposing the um exposing the target
and getting a clean shot and um and i've done it with a i plan on taking
a stock camera that's got a ton of megapixels and seeing what i can do with that
in the um in the border one skies i'd like to test it in portal 2 skies first to see what kind
of brilliant shot i can get there yeah um
but then of course i'm going to use my camera that's modified and that one i don't need to turn the
iso up as much because it can read a lot of the aha data
it's basically designed and i also got a uh filter that i'm going to be
testing a uh a uh ccd filter for the uh
the um light pollution reduction i'm looking forward to seeing what as soon as the moon leaves the sky for a
little bit i'm looking forward to seeing what i can get yes something that
totally adrian something that of course that we are talking about try another another way to
to make something in our pictures single pictures of
not the second pictures in of course that first of all we need a raw image
uh here you have a part of a roof here you have a part of milky way
here you have the southern cross the the
cold soak called sac here um we are in the red channel
um the first thing that we need to make is uh make a selection
to make something that that we can make is
we can extract maybe for this part okay
now we are in um [Music] color correction
that's pretty nice okay i have to do i do white balancing to try and make it
yeah you know that color correction just does looks like it does it for you
yeah something that i don't make was uh first of all i need to
make this the outer stretch sorry okay i have a
first error first is the outer stretch and second one i'm start here to make
the color calibration if you have if you have in cereal uh much better um
do you know maybe you have a southern cross or something that the the this kind of of
system of recognition of of stars uh
you can try with a photometric color calibration but here maybe
you don't have something to do to write for example you can try for example so
cross and you can put fine
and maybe don't don't
how do you say don't find nothing and maybe here you can try with uh
fine and maybe this object is in the in the catalog in in symbol catalog but
you know okay i use uh it's it's a grand open area where i i charge
the values of the pixel of your camera the my camera and the focal
lens but i think that maybe is is too confused for the program to to
say for example with a call sack and and
not really something that the program give you uh the the reconcile the recogniza size of
of stars and here i think that put a sign that say fail fail to to
recognize recognize stars my computer is is thinking but of course
that i think that is impossible but the second one is is take a take uh
okay pl played solving play solo filing of course that is is too difficult
maybe if yeah if i put uh in this kind of program
uh if i put some stars marking stars uh with the mouse it's
more possible to that the the plate solve and recognize uh
constellations it is possible but today we can or tonight sorry we can use the
only the color calibration that we use that is only only
taking a part of the background in color saturation we can
of course that i am in red color but normally a normal value that i use
let me check global is okay
okay we can check of course that is more conservative the
the the kind of the picture
so another thing that we can make it's well vendor revolution is not
not necessary here maybe background extraction
green another another tool that we have here remove green noise
it's interesting because the green green noise from ccds
work in the way to have a component of a
green color stronger than other colors
okay
i think the same that the other hand i go to photoshop to put stronger way to milky way in
color and shape okay yeah this i can see the
i can see the benefits of this program where it can you're taking it in the different uh
you're shooting it into different colors and then just putting them together um [Music]
yeah those those tools look like they're absolutely working to begin building the milky way image of
course the the number one thing is data and um how
you know how much data you can get yeah and i tend to try and go where i can get a lot of data in a short time so
i would be struggling to pull the milky way out of that too absolutely you've got it i mean you
when you stretch the histogram you pulled out a lot of detail in that section of the milky way
which you're helping me get familiar with does this isn't this down here the uh
ada karena region so if you go down to the lower right is that yeah
section with this bright area here
yes we can make an area of without extracting
oh i see you here background yes and we can put of course that we are experimenting
tonight sorry when here is more to don's track
the brag areas is where you can't you don't need a struck bride
maxi this is because you're late
i was having a dinner so okay i had to go for a minute yes i haven't
traveled because we are experimenting alive okay generate extract applied
this is what this can be horrible or something great i don't know
well some some mistake is not so bad no yes but it's something that
something is interesting is that appear the black part of the roof
of the wall sorry yeah i don't know but yeah yeah
[Music] to the photoshop we can open save this
image and open this with photoshop here i have something that to resolve in
this area and in this area too because it's just a conflict between
yeah the you know the color of that is interesting to to
to try because this is an interesting tool because between the conflicts between
the landscape um milky way stars is is a is where you can try another
another's you know
another effects to have for example here
i don't know
we can try something with it the component the component
of the instagram the instagram not instagram okay
but we can we can [Music] we can uh
uh follow trying um but here from the from the original
picture do you have a uh most uh you know
looks more detailed in the cold more detail yes yes and do you have some
color correction um i think that that cereal can be an
option to to try landscape pictures with
milky way um and maybe it's something that we can
finish in photoshop for more details or more stronger color like eta cardinal
nebula here but i think that the tools of um it's a it's
a software that can be very helping especially because it's free you don't
have license uh or you know and this is interesting
because for for people that can't er can have another another
programs they have options because the people started from the the
from a cell phone you know or reference
reflex camera for starting without telescope and i think that that the people can can use
[Music] this program more because it's uh have many many steps and
the steps are more educative uh i'm more um how do you say more
um more about astronomy because the tools talk about astronomy
um it's very interesting to to try
because it's it's a free tool
this is all for tonight for me
well i think it fits um the milky way certainly looks kind of
like a stellar stream i know that was the part of the um theme of tonight's star
party and um you were imaging a stellar stream going
across the sky so yeah so that that works sure if you if you compare
i i can give you only one thing more that is the how how i make the
the same picture with with uh photoshop if if
only one minute
i'll open photoshop
i'll share now in few seconds
but first of all i need to open another picture or the same
where maybe we can change some information but the effect is more spectacular
open [Music]
okay that is if the computer will let you do it yes yes i'll i try with the same
in the most fast fast way i try to [Music]
to put something more how do you say more
more easy to to see more bright in the same picture of the milky way
that photoshop is opening and i just sure i need i took it
only yes yes absolutely because they need to change to ssd
disk hard drive my computer no yes sorry that
i returned from the third party my my computer my actual computer that is
the my notebook is the a7 it's okay but this isn't it's in the service because
the the components that i need are important and i need to
to wait maybe i don't know two months more and i carry a computer from the office
my and yeah no impossible
okay it's it's impossible tonight no next next party global safari i we can
try this because it's impossible open yeah a program and talk no because it's a administrative computer you know
and yeah yeah sorry no it it's next week we can comparing some some in a live we can
compare it somewhere today yes some the same that we can make in life but uh
with another with a with photoshop and compare the the two different results
but i think that but well maybe i'm sorry only
i can share only the share the my screen
my astronomy mug by the way yes yes but here only only my my
my world piper is the same my background of my screen is one of the pictures that i took only
with photoshop here you have the completed center of the milky way
but with only one picture of 30 seconds but
but my my idea is make this in a life of course change the original pictures um
yeah you know we can make this together because
well it's a pleasure it's only for for tonight is it's uh
yeah only is this that that i can make
thank you caesar thank you thank you scott thank you okay so um uh
maxie are you uh are you ready to uh to give a presentation here
yes sorry for be late hey i have to get dinner and well sure here i am here you
are okay good night everyone hey i'm maxi faleres i'm from argentina
and i want to show you what i've been doing a couple days ago
we have some really good weather with a good
just dream a good seeing and everything and
i i have my equipment outside for almost two nights so
i've been taking pictures of a lot of things but first of all for example this is the
the live view that i have uh the morning of the 15th
yeah she was there all night long besides the
equipment they don't er bites the cables or anything because
well they learn to not do that so telescope dogs now
yeah they do that one only one time especially
she that's uh here's luna she was beside of the equipment and i
when i went outside she was there and it was sleeping then it goes
up so well the 15th i was taking pictures
of too many objects in this case four objects
in this case it was the the c100 because this is in the catalog
of a cold wall and this is particularly a
no yes er it wasn't this place sorry i know yes it's a
[Music] the running chicken nebula and this is almost practically hydrogen
you can see all is like red but well i was
taking pictures for almost i have an hour and a half and
this is the example no sorry it wasn't this uh i think it is this
the yeah yes
here we are this is only the the stack image
of this place this is nearby of carina and you can see here
that this is not a dust this is a or the the the book
i don't know to say in english the the book clouds
this is like a dark clouds floating in here by these stars
exactly exactly and also in this case
we have in the the fringe of the picture there's
a lot of gas and dust but also too much reflections
to to see it of course if you have a narrow brand filters this is a
huge place to to take pictures but well
i don't have it for from now maybe in the future
so also i did pictures of this particular place but
this is a really huge hydrogen place but it's
you i think you have spent very nice to to grab a lot of information because it
doesn't have too much uh info even when you're doing five
minutes pictures this is a almost in an hour of taking five-minute pictures
and it's beautiful and you can see
it's a lot of stars and this is nearby
um [Music] a constellation
then i want to what ngc this is a well this is a really
good place uh for those who loves taking pictures to galaxies
and i want to be clear these are not a processing image only stacked and
[Music] doing some dba
filter but that's all but here you have almost
four particular galaxies but also there's a lot in the background
for example in this place you are seeing here one two three four
five six and more down there's a globular galaxy
a cluster there's another ones and it's a really good place it looks like some
halo around the um that one galaxy yes this this one
yes gas and dust surrounding the
star stream so i think this this is a good place to
to take pictures in in the in advertising for example without and
taking lots and lots of hours of night because i will have it a
practically undeserved so it's a good place to
to take the another object this this was the
cat's paw nebula and i
did some stacking i was doing almost the night
taking pictures from this place but i didn't like the
stacking so of course i have i have a full moon almost so
but anyway when i did the stack
i get all this but i i didn't did the
the dba procedure to check the the good background and
everything but you can see the the caspal really
big and of course this is also a hydrogen
region very rich so i remember when i woke up that morning
and i said okay what can i do next
i would i decided to get my weapon outside but i want to start to do some planetary
pictures so i search for venus saturn and jupiter
and in this case i had i did this one he was almost
at i don't remember seven a.m something like that and
this venus here we got saturn this is practically almost at
daylight and it was really good to see the the rings
and started now to see the the south pole it's amazing to to observe the
the planets on the daylight it's really nice yeah that's an amazing shot
you caught both saturn and jupiter during the day it's very good
we have here also jupiter and this is one one moon here but i don't remember what
what it was but i only did the stack doing some
wavelets and that's all i uh because i did i did not much information and
also it was in very daylight so the next night i
went to another objects that i've been doing [Music]
in pictures for example in this case it was this particularly open cluster i really
love this place and when i get the stacked
let me find the master light here
i only did in this place one minute pictures for almost one hour
but this is a really good place
also for a serve you know when i sent this picture to nico he sent
he told me what is that it's like a v
yeah and i and i run to symbol to find the
that part of the sky and and watch what was that but
i want to do a research or find double stars
yeah or maybe a thrift slip yes maybe it's a system
so i was taking pictures of this place of course this is a also nearby
[Music] a constellation [Music]
i went to taking pictures so this paper i didn't stack it
this is nearby carina and another place that i've been [Music]
doing pictures but i didn't stuck in this place are you almost taking half hour only i think
uh but that's a good place to to take pictures um
the next one that i stacked it was the um sorry
it wasn't this it wasn't the the pictures that i posted on my facebook page
it was the [Music]
let me show you this one and let's open it here
i don't remember this yes
here we go this is a really good place this is practically
a processes and gets colored you know this
cluster is really good and i really love the the colors and
of the background and also the stars and here we have the
gabriela mistral we can see the the the
this particular shape is and it looks like the
the purple of that a poet of chile
but also i call this the palpatine nebula because it looks like the
the senator hey palpatine star wars that's this is my opinion
it's an amazing picture and and that that that shapes reminds me uh
like uh the border of a creator it's it's
i think it was in this place that you told me right there that one
the the right one of those of those two stars this that shiny that is my double star
this one no the left at the left there's two that now that
in these two the right one ah this one in here the here are two stars then
there are doubles this is of course from nico double stars that he
discovered a and i won that's right yes
that's right so it was like a bonus to of this picture
and well uh i i didn't know that that he was there he he told me so man that's really
good um and the another object that i
did the pictures to to finish the session for
almost the day all night long it was the
the i don't know it because right the shrimp nebula or
glass scorpius nearby the godspawn nebula
but i couldn't have pretty good information this is for example the the staggered
picture you can see here the almost the core of this nebula
you have this reminds me the eagle nebula of the pillars of creation
and let me do it do some um dba
i have here the software to get without the the background
let's do some screen transfer function to out of stretch it
and here we go you know when you see this you'll say oh
now that that's nothing but when you do the dba it shows you
all the information that you have and in this case it's a really good
place to to to take pictures and another particular place that i like
i don't know if the something of my pictures but this place
because it gets contrast of the the other places of this nebula is more like white
whites but i don't know if it's an error of my pictures so
i didn't process this i want to take another chance a couple of
weeks to come so
what let me stop the screen and that's my little presentation for
tonight thank you thank you nico i really enjoy um
in particular the uh images of uh the globules um
you know i'd always heard of bach globules and read about bark bach and and his wife and the work pioneering the
work they did on the milky way um but i didn't know about thackery so i was
kind of diving into that a little bit and uh the in the running chicken the
bach globules are also called factories uh globules so uh it wasn't known until i think 1990
until they could actually prove that these globulars were you know hiding embryonic stars so
it's uh uh fascinating to uh to learn about the process of star birth
and that whole cycle so thank you very much thank you very much
of the audience okay okay so up next is uh robert fugate uh
robert joined us on the last global star party um
and uh discussed um he ended his discussion on astrophotography and i knew that we
didn't get you know enough time with him uh during the our last uh gsp
and so he's taken another deep dive into his process um really fortunate to have him on our
program and uh it's an honor to have you on uh uh robert so thank you thank you for
joining us on the 91st global star party okay scott thank you very much um
actually just call me bob mom is that okay yeah that's perfect um
i'm a pretty informal guy so oh okay that's good i am too that that would be uh that would be
great i'm really fascinated by all of the presentations tonight and
and the imagery and i have to admit that when i started seeing some of adrian's
images i added a few more to my presentation so but but i'll try to make this
i'll try to make this not so long so that uh we're not here all night anyway let me try to share my screen
and see if we can get started
uh what i wanted to talk about tonight was uh some models i've made of
sky brightness and um how to how to use that in computing
signal to noise in deep sky images so
excuse me this first picture shows where i live
this is albuquerque new mexico and they've recently had a big campaign here
like in a lot of other places to convert to white leds which are of course
very broad spectrum and and make any kind of filtering really really
difficult this particular picture was made
there's a mountain east of albuquerque called sandia the sandias
and um there's a place you can drive up and um
visit and take pictures and it's called sandia crest it's at ten thousand six hundred feet
above sea level and my house which i've tried to show here
um just out of the frame is at 6 200 feet so this is about
6 000 or 4 000 feet higher than where i live and gives a nice view but
but what you see if you can in this picture is a lot of white lighting in the city and
um it's it's like i say really really a problem
so i ran across on the internet a fellow in poland actually
who made a a homemade uh spectroscope or
something to measure spectre with and it's basically a little zwo camera
and a prism and um and he's been measuring uh what his
night sky looks like it seems to be really hard to find a spectra of night sky
of the night sky and so this was one of the best ones i found
they still have some sodium lights there you can see a big sodium spike here
at 589 nanometers
but mostly um it's all of this light is coming from white leds
and of course when we add filters um
you know the black here is is a typical luminance filter uh the the blue outline is a blue filter
the green is a green filter and amazingly enough the red box is a red
filter and then i tried to show in a little darker red here hydrogen alpha
and sulfur ii and these are not to scale in terms of width because they're very much narrower
in this and i actually have three nanometer filters which
i've really come to appreciate here in my light pollution and over here is
of course oxygen 3 and kind of the just shy of the real green
so all of the broadband filters l r g and b let all this white light through
and it's something we have to deal with and so in trying to quantify that here's an example this is a photograph
an image i made looking northeast away from the city i live on
the east northeast side of the city so if i look northeast i'm looking away from the city and
that's the darkest part of the sky so this is made with my takahashi
and zwo uh asi 6200
uh and it's through a green filter so and it's it's a one minute exposure
um and you don't really see much gradient in one minute you know there's typically
a light pollution gradient because you know this the image is brighter on one side than
the other based on where where the majority of the light is coming from and so i've i've drawn a line across the
middle of the sensor here and read out the pixel values which we can plot
now i used a program i have the home edition of mathematica but
other things like fits liberator and whatnot will allow you to there's lots of programs that allow you to measure
the pixel values in your image and so here's what they look like now
in the statistics of understanding signal to noise i just want to comment that what you
normally would do is look at one pixel over time so you would really take
a picture read out the value of that pixel you take another picture and you would do
that thousands of times in order to develop some statistics
well the you know the modern sensors are so good pixel to pixel that
it's essentially equivalent to take one picture and look at a bunch of different pixels
and that gives you an idea about the the shot noise um
the rand the cost by the random arrival of photons and as probably a lot of you know this
is this obeys something called poisson statistics which means that if i
if i look at the average value this red line that
runs through the middle and i don't know if i don't know how well my
cursor shows up here but um it shows up just fine okay um i have
somewhere i have a um and a fattened bright red cursor but i
didn't turn it on i should have been on the ball here i'm not i don't do this enough to
to uh become a professional presenter but any rate because it is poisson statistics the
the rms value and the rms value is the root mean square value of all this
variability here this noise this shot noise if i take the average value and take the
square root of that then i have a measure of the noise and
so sort of plus or minus the mean which is plus or minus the square root of the mean
gives me how much noise i have and i can use that as a metric
to calculate a signal to noise uh in order to convert
photons to electrons you need to just know what the gain of your camera is
in terms of electrons per adu or digital number or or whatever
units you're using so would that be for a for like a mirrorless or
digital slr would that be the iso or is that a different yeah it's it's a
little it's a little harder to figure out for some of the dslr's or mirrorless
cameras what these conversion factors are but they are available around on the internet so
uh if you if you hunt around you can find what and and there are
um you know there are these guys that spend their life measuring sensors and dslrs and
and mirrorless cameras um and um [Music]
i think one of the one of the sites is called uh photons to photos or something like
that he gives all of this information in great detail um for almost every camera made
these numbers are you know if you hunt around you'll find them okay yeah i'd be curious because i've
been one of the cameras i've been using is an a7r iv from sony right and despite
the uh number of megapixels it has which is kind of a you know simplistic thing
i've been pretty happy with its low light performance similar to what i'm
seeing out of my canon 6d so so that's some homework for me to go look up some numbers and see what
i guess it's rating you know signal the noise on how i bet it does a pretty good job
with the uh with it so yeah um
so you know the the actual um so what we're seeing here is noise
caused by the sky you know it's the it's the noise in the signal if you call it a signal
from the sky now what what is convenient is to
try to characterize you know when you're looking at a photo like like this one or or one row of the of the pixels in
the photo is to characterize how bright the sky was when you took the photo
and so i think a lot of us have these sky quality meters um
that are little handheld i'm getting mine soon okay
um i carry mine with me most places i go and uh just because i'm
curious about you know how dark the sky gets and but basically what this does is it
it integrates light on a detector and compares it to a reference voltage
and when it reaches reaches that reference that gets converted to a brightness in
magnitudes per square arc second and the one i use has the they have a
couple of models i have the one that has a lens in it that limits its field to view
to about 20 degrees and that's handy if you're if you're looking in a particular
direction in the sky with your telescope you can sort of hold this up alongside
and and see what the how bright the sky is in the direction you're looking
so as i move around here's some examples um here are the sqm readings in magnitudes
per square arc second for my backyard during a full moon
and here it is with no moon so it's quite a lot darker even though i'm still fighting a lot of
light pollution uh when there is no moon uh so it's still a good um
a good scenario when you're trying to do broadband imaging and then um
i have a friend who has a cabin in the gila national forest
in sort of southwestern new mexico which is really um
[Music] um quite quite often they're a border one scenario
and it's an interesting war story is the the first time i went down there and i
think 2015 uh i had my sky quality meter
i pointed it up to the sky and i held a button down and after about
30 seconds it had no reading and i thought it was broken i mean
it makes a little ticking noise you know when it's when it's integrating but but uh so i
you know i tried it again and you know nothing so i changed the battery in it i had a
spare battery i put a new battery in it and no difference and finally i just kept holding the button down
and after a minute and 15 seconds it made a reading
22.00 wow so it just kind of blew me away that's as dark as it gets that's as
dark as it gets and i'll show you some pictures that i've made from there they're they're kind of
nightscapes a few few deep sky pictures but um uh it's truly
you know getting to a truly dark site like that is uh really worth the effort and um
so you know i i of course highly recommend it if it's
if it's at all feasible for you so um
so here's my my sky brightness model and so what i have plotted here are are
my sqm readings from various times and and places and over here i'm plotting the number of
photo detected electrons so i've converted the adu's to electrons
number of photo detected electrons per pixel per minute and when you're computing
signal-to-noise ratios you really need to use electrons
you know it's a it's a voltage and that's what you need when you're
computing signal-to-noise ratios so i've drawn some colored bands here
this is kind of a range of of sky brightness values i see in my
backyard and what i see when the full moon is out
over on the right the far right is my friend's place in the gila
and it's typically 21.9 to 22
um sometimes a little less and then john briggs who was on earlier
lives in magdalena and i've made quite a few measurements there and that's sort of this area so
it's it's um a really good approximation to border 1
but not quite and you know it varies from portal 2 to portal 3. now these these curves are not
all straight and part of that is due to the fact that
um the sky isn't you know the brightness of the sky isn't
uh white so to speak it's not uncolored and also when you get into the gila kind
of darkness uh you see air glow and you see other things like zodiacal
light and you know people people that complain about that as light
pollution you know we need to do something to those people because
they should be so lucky right [Music] so any rate um
in general though these curves you know if the sky were if the sky were white and and
not uh colored or favor one color over another or didn't have an uneven spectrum
these curves should actually have a slope that's proportional to one over
2.5 to the delta m so if i go you know two magnitudes that's about a
factor of six or so which means um that's you know
how the noise is going to scale as you go from one sky brightness to another
so let me show you some pictures from the gila from this from this black band here
um here's 30 seconds at f 2.8 with a 14 millimeter lens
on a nikon d810 and iso 800. this is uh zodiacal light the reason i
took this picture was i was looking for an asteroid about
in here and uh you know the
i was like wow i've got all this background light when i'm trying to see this
19th magnitude asteroid and um so that just gives you an idea of you
know this is kind of the spring arm of the milky way here we're looking west
orion here is just setting and uh this this color in the sky is air
glow so yeah i'm happy to say that i've taken some pictures with that same color
um kenton oklahoma i think approaches some of the similar darkness to uh i'm sure it does yeah yep
and uh yeah i've got some got some air glow looking like that so careful i'll show you i'll show you some
more air glow here in just a minute yeah um so here's another picture i um
i was at this when i was down there this time i was i had a bunch of cameras set up and i was running around and
attending to them this is 379 seconds nice at f 2.8
same camera same iso same lens it's a nikon zoom 14 to 24
and i had it set at 14 here and here again you can see
you can see some vestiges of air glow and you know
it's especially interesting because it occurs in bands quite often
um and i had this on a tracker but i didn't make a composite so you can see the
horizons a bit blurred so while i was doing this uh on this same trip and oh by the way
here you can see ursa major right on the horizon over here yeah so this is polaris just to get you oriented and
here's andromeda um so uh i was i had some problem with one of
my cameras and i was tending to it for quite a long while and i had forgotten
that i had my other dslr running and
it took a 2025 second exposure holy smokes
and uh you know i kept so when i looked at this uh in any detail i thought
is there anything like reciprocity failure and and ccd or cmos cameras because why isn't it this
just all white you know after 34 minutes and of course you can see tons of air
glow here and most all of these stars are just totally
whacked saturated but this really speaks to how dark the
sky is when you're in a border one scenario you know i had noticed that whenever
i shoot portal one i could i would actually up the iso
i didn't shoot for as long but i noticed that i could get away with longer exposures and get more signal
and i think that you were you just proved that you what you get is more amplification it doesn't get you more
light of course right and and it does reduce your dynamic range when you turn the iso up
and so if if now if your sensor is so-called iso invariant
um then it's best to shoot wherever the minimum read noise is and that's
typically around 400 or 800 for um
for sony and nikon cameras the nikon sensors that i have were made by sony
yeah so um they all kind of have the same characteristic but
but anyway that's that's a very long discussion and and we should you know
get get somewhere and talk about it sometime so here's some more air glow now this this is a composite
um my friend's place they actually have what they call a bed and telescope
and um so this is the this is the bed
um so the so the foreground here was 180 was three minutes at f2
with the 40 millimeter sigma art lens again on the on the d810 at iso 800
and the sky was a single 30 second uh with the same lens but opened up to f
1.6 and um but it really shows um in just 30
seconds it shows lots and lots of air glow so here's a couple of others since this
is it's streams of stars uh here's one this
is now this is a different camera this is a d850
and it's lower iso 400 and it was shot um
let's see this thing is covering up my hold on you have 180 seconds f 1.8
yeah i couldn't stand by let me go back uh okay so it's three minutes at f 1.8
and um it's basically the milky way core area
um and here's another one i think that's similar but this is back to the d810
yeah so um uh you know it's it's just
um for the i think to me the most the best part of being in a bortle one
sky is just being in the sky yeah and being out there and looking at it with your with your
eyeball i mean i would agree it is just absolutely marvelous and gorgeous
so um so what i wanted to talk about was this
little simplified signal-to-noise ratio model and
because it's poisson statistics for random arrival of photons
which which occurs for the for the target or the object the sky and for dark current
uh the signal to noise since the noise is the square root of the signal
it goes like you know the signal this is this would be the total integrated signal over if
you're doing subs out you know all of the subs uh and then because these are
independently random variables we need to add their variances
if and take the square root and so these um you know these noise
numbers here this is like the square of the noise inside the bracket here
but the read noise is a number you know that occurs each time you read
out the camera so it's just the read noise squared and
if we then break this down a little bit more into the sub exposure time
and the um
let's see i guess i'm still getting some funny indication here and then here is the
the the rate at which we're collecting signal so this is this is now like electrons per second
and then over here uh this is the total integration time divided by
uh the sub sub exposure time which is just the number of subs
and so this comes out to what we're all familiar with is that you know the quality of your image
increases as the square root of the number of subs which is kind of a disappointment
because that's a slow slowly varying function so to get some idea how how this is
useful um here's here's a plot of
the witch head nebula which is not super faint but it's not super bright either
it's not like orion of course it's a broadband target and this is um
this is for an l filter and i've determined that for my telescope and setup through this l
filter i get 5.6 photo detection electrons per minute
i mean that in and of itself is just kind of amazing when you think about it um you know this is this is because there's
a quantum efficiency and optics transmission involved this is maybe seven or eight photons per minute
that's that's our signal and so this is a plot of signal to noise
per pixel versus the total integration time in this case the numbers are in hours
for two locations albuquerque is the green curve
always lower and the gila which is the orange curve
the blue curve is what we would get if we had no read noise in our detector
essentially a perfect detector and we had no no light pollution in the sky the sky
was totally black we had no dark current we had no read noise the reason this isn't a straight line of
course is because there's still noise in our signal and the target that we're looking at
still has noise in it but you know our objective here and all of
what we do in astrophotography is trying to move these two curves as close to this one as
we can get and for broadband imaging you can see i'm a ways off this is a log scale over
here so i have a long way to go if i'm in a bright sky i have not nearly as far to
go if i'm in a dark sky [Music] and this model includes a read noise of one
and a half electrons and an almost insignificant amount of dark current and so here
uh in albuquerque um you know if you can get a signal to noise of five in your image
it's a pretty good image and here is uh that a witchhead nebula that
i took here in my backyard in albuquerque and this particular image involves
a hundred one-minute exposures and then 41-minute exposures for rg and
b for a total of 3.67 hours and so that falls over here
about in this region and you know it's it's a pretty good
oh wait wrong direction um in this you know over here so i'm i'm
probably less than a single noise of five in this image but
it's not bad for you know light pollution and by the way i i don't have
i don't have it here but i've annotated this image in pix insight
using the gaia catalog and determined that the limiting magnitude in this image is 19.
okay so now for narrowband it's it's a whole new ballgame because
i'm really blocking most of this most of the sky and if we look at our model
and ask you know how much signal are we getting or how much background are we getting
from the sky in the gila it's 0.007 electrons per second
and even in albuquerque it's only 0.05 um this is with h alpha
and i looked at um the spaghetti nebula when i was down in the gila i only had
40 minutes or so because it was setting it was way too late in the season but i wanted to give it a try and
compare it with albuquerque and um i got about 1.8 photo detected
electrons per minute per pixel so a couple of photons per minute is
in the brightest and that's the brightest part of the nebula i'll show you in a second
so um but this shows that even in albuquerque
with a narrow band a three nanometer filter [Music] uh you know in in two hours
i can get a signal to noise of eight and it's only ten or 12
[Music] in the gila now you know so that so that basically means
a three nanometer filter makes albuquerque look like the gila
but only for emission targets so that's of course the downside so
here's my um integrated image and this was 80 minutes of total
exposure and there's so little oxygen i should have i shouldn't have wasted my time on the
oxygen and should have spent all of it probably on each alpha it's beautiful so
somebody had a comment yeah me i said it's beautiful oh thank you
um so one so what this you know this is almost a trivial
comment next but so what it means is uh for narrowband filters
uh if i increase i'm sorry for emission targets if i increase the bandwidth of
my filter i don't get any more signal these emission lines are very narrow
they're they're much narrower than than any filter we can make that we can afford
so they're much narrower than three nanometers much narrower than one nanometer
so here's two images one made with an r filter of orion
you know like the brightest thing around and another made with an h alpha filter
and here they're plotted in terms of electrons per pixel again and of course
the r filter being nearly three times 30 times as wide lets in all this background sky
and the accompanying shot noise with it so
so the message is for emission targets the signal does not increase when the filter bandwidth is
increased uh now we have to be careful of course because if you have a really fast
telescope narrow filters the way they're made as with stacks of material
interference filters they have a spectral shift for fast
telescopes so one needs to be careful about uh you know losing signal when
you're using these with like uh rasas or hyper
uh telescopes at like f2 now for a broadband target here i'm
looking at andromeda um it turns out when you increase the
bandwidth of the filter the signal does go up because it's everywhere
um here i'm showing a 280 nanometer l filter and an 86 nanometer green
filter and the actual measured signal on the detector
for those two filters so for broadband targets the signal does
increase when the filter bandwidth is increased and so if we use the little model that
i've built uh we can see that in the case of orion where i'm using a
narrowband filter an h alpha filter at three nanometers i get much bigger
signal to noise than if i'm using a red filter at 100 nanometers whereas for andromeda
i'm better off using an l filter to get more signal to noise and of
course this is one of the one of the reasons that people do lrgb
imaging for broadband targets now this may not always be true it depends on how bright the target is and
and what its particular spectral content is so any rate that's um that's kind of
mostly what i had to talk about i wanted to show two more images um
this was down in the gila the one thing about the gila is um
you know even after 45 minutes you can't see the ground
and so it's really hard to just walk around right without stumbling
and but what that means is when you point an one four forty millimeter lens
at orion and this is not a ir modified camera uh you see stuff like this in
five minutes this is a total of five minutes of integration incredible
and um so then recently i i picked up a used
nikon z6 a mirrorless camera i had it modified this is the only
modified camera i have and um
so this is 18 minutes at f16 oh this should not be 135 this should be
105. um the the same sigma art lens you saw
from some pictures in the gila but this was made only a 20-minute drive from my
driveway wow on the east side of the sandia mountains where it's where it's
like 1.3 magnitudes darker and
so this is 18 minutes of exposure and i really like the colors
and you know things that one can see here of course you see
uh satellite streaks here since orion is smack dab in the middle of the geo bill
sure um and this is a composite i actually don't
have uh the information about the landscape in the foreground here
but this was made in the national forest just on the east side of albuquerque
so that's um that's what uh
i had to present tonight very nice very nice i'm really uh it makes me really want to go to gila or
is it called pronounced gila or gila it's hela okay really nice
oh yeah we will have to talk some more because you've um really piqued my interest on
getting images and taking into account
the capabilities of the sensors inside the cameras that i'm using right and uh
because i i typically would just up the um i'd up the iso and then i'd use my noise reduction
tools to pull some of the luminance noise out that i would end up with
and still end up with decent images but i could see a higher ceiling using
basically setting the gain here the iso to a level at which the camera that
sensor where like the signal-to-noise ratio is i guess optimum
right and then exposing for the right amount of time with as wide
open a lens as i can get a lot of the lenses i have are
i have some one four um 1.8 lenses on the sony's
um all of my canon lenses where i have my uh modifications are f28
and um some of them are actually i have an f2a a larger f28 lens coming to do more you
know slightly narrower um deep sky stuff so it's it's something that i'll be
experimenting with and in september i do get to go to kenton oklahoma so
i get to play around with the dark skies there i think they're they'll be comparable to gila in term i've i saw
all of the stuff that you were able to image down at uh while we were in kenton we saw the
fall zodiacal light so it went the other way right and ryan was on the other side of
it right um so it was uh it was st you know it was beautiful like
i also appreciate how you said just look at it i mean i i took the picture of orion and the fall
zodiacal light after walking out of the camper and seeing it with my own eyes right and and i froze for about two
minutes just looking at that and then i ran to go get the camera so
so yeah i really appreciate the information you're sharing
okay thank you martin eastburn watching on youtube says that he says nice presentation bob i'm
an old physics type with years of ee i'm into jitter in the femtoseconds
i'm into jitter in the pentose seconds okay so there you go bob thank you so
much for coming on and showing us your beautiful images uh and giving us
insight into the signal to noise ratio how you can measure it
and how you can use filters to best uh you know serve your imaging needs so
that's very cool very cool i look forward to having you on next time uh and um
again thank you okay thank you so up next is uh
uh nico arias or nico the hammer as we like to call him uh
nico is uh again uh with our group down in argentina and
uh nico you want to come on hey how are you scott hi everyone
i hope you are having a great night we have a really nice csp tonight and i'm really happy to
be back yeah we're happy to have you back okay well let me
share my screen i have some repairs
now for those of you that might be watching out there that have not and you don't know about nico
uh he is uh one of the astrophotographers out there that has done so much with so little uh he makes
uh he often makes images deep sky images uh using his dobsonian telescope without
any drive any electronics other than the electronics that are running his camera
so um of course he also has a uh equatorial mount and he does some
long tracking type of uh astrophotography as well but uh
he will uh he will surprise you on what can actually be done yes
most of my images are taken with my dobson because i really enjoy to to be
with my dog and to try to find the the right short exposures and
it's really fun and today we we will talk about that because we are starting the planetary season
so i called my presentation to get up early to greet the neighbors
good and this morning this very morning i i
woke it up at 5 00 am and i i i really
i already checked that it will be a really stand uh atmosphere
so i i want to to do my first shots on saturn
and this is an and simulation about the the skies on this morning and we have
saturn we have mars we have venus and jupiter jupiter is really really low in the horizon
so i i will wait uh maybe uh one or two months more
and i i i like to do to show to
people when they ask me how i find the the planets on the sky that you can
watch with different softwares the positions in the sky but it's really nice to to to
understand that that our orbit in our position in orbit
is changing and that's why you have a season with the planet that
is rising in the east and in a few months we will watch them
maybe at midnight uh on the senate and that's all because the the
the earth orbit is is getting closer mars jupiter saturn
it's it's really it's a it's a really nice topic to talk to people who is
trying to to enter in this this world so uh as i say i started this morning with
the lord of the rings the saturn and i have a little clip of one of the the videos i shot
and to show you how you you can see the the planet
moving in the screen because the laptop and my observant have no tracking and no motor
oh i so there and
i make my videos like this and you will see how i correct the position
every few seconds and i make videos and about one and a half minutes
you see my handshake in the this is my my mothers are there
and as my camera is a monochromatic camera i i need to make the the four channels the
lrgb channel this is the the stacks the the first thing the first thing that
uh stunned me this morning was that before putting my camera i
i obviously put my eye in the ice piece and it's shocking how you every year you
see saturn uh the moving the the rings are moving and we
we can see this this year the the south hemisphere of saturn
and it's amazing that in a few months you can see several changes in the position
well this is the when when i apply the wow the wavelet when ricky
[Music] and this is the the composition of the very nice four bands
and i also uh may uh
stretch it more the channels to do to see the little moons
of saturn i really love these compositions with the moons of saturn
and uh well i was out so i i really missed it mars so
it's really far away but it it shows
little details you can you can see some some terrain details and the
the south pole and uh i think like i will make
several captures of mars in the few months to see how how big it gets in time
when we are getting closer and [Music]
the last uh was the the beginning this these days i was
making shots of been this is a few days ago and in daylight
and this is from this morning and i am using an ear pass
filter for the luminance and i i could get more stable
venus and i can play with the with this color saturation
it's really nice and i really want now a uv filter for the clouds but
it's amazing to get these images of venus is stunning
uh so this was my my little presentation this is how i
what what i was doing this very morning
wonderful nico thank you very much thank you
yeah it's always a pleasure yeah wonderful
uh we have uh we have now got to the end of the 91st global star party i want to
thank all of our presenters i want to thank our guests who are watching right now
we started out this program of course with david levy we had john goss from the astronomical league on dave eicher
from astronomy magazine john briggs from the alliance of historical observatories
tony cook retired amateur astronomer from griffith park observatory with all
that history uh tony cook um uh you know will be back i think uh with
uh more uh historical type discussions i think that you'll find uh
what his experiences to be very fascinating uh jonathan fay from the worldwide
telescope uh you know genius programmer uh in and visualization and imaging for
microsoft um you know you haven't seen the last of some of his amazing programming and if
you look him up and uh you know with the words microsoft in your search you'll
find he's done some astounding work for that company uh simon lewis down from new zealand
showing us the historical observatory that's being uh that was destroyed
during uh the earthquake and now is being rebuilt uh marcelo souza with the
uh message about um uh you know the uh activity of the sun and uh you know
hopefully uh hopefully we don't have a major carrington event but um you know
it it's happened before it'll probably happen again so um but that's just the way the universe
rocks so uh adrian bradley with his beautiful nightscapes uh
uh you know showing us the you know the poetic uh
landscape views that he he uh dives into cesar brollo um
uh came on uh with us and uh to talk about astrophotography bob fugate um
with uh equally remarkable uh deep sky images just really breathtaking really
wants me makes me want to get out to new mexico uh to see those skies again but
uh you know showing us the way of how to uh use our gear and um you know exposures
and skill to get the best possible deep sky images and then of course nico uh
showing the the amazing images of saturn that he did so uh
we will uh we will pause the global star party for only one week
and then resume for the next tuesday as i have to go out of town
on business so but thanks a lot and until that time you
guys keep looking up and uh wishing you clear and dark skies
bye-bye thank you scott thank you thank you scott see you all right have a good night everybody
everybody good night bye
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