Transcript:
of Earth mhm did it happen more in the ground or do you think it happen above
ground or both or we don't know yet I mean the the lean the the Leaning evidence you know from the Dawkins and
and everyone else working on this is you know undersea hydrothermal vents but we you know we don't
know Carolyn had a wonderful definition of the late heavy bombardment she said
there are two major episodes in Earth's early history
the first was when we when the planets were forming and comets were helping to
build the earth and the second was the late heavy bombardment when the earth got the stuffing knocked out of
it that's that's beautiful yeah never forget that and of
course now we know that comets and icy asteroids you know during that period did contribute a lot of water that ended
up in the oceans yeah and in my glass
coffee yeah
see Bob is uh signing
on so if you're listening right now um while we're so-called backstage uh we
have uh um uh David AER from astronomy magazine David Levy from The jarnac
Observatory Comet Discoverer and author and uh I guess David Iker is also quite
an author himself and myself Scott Roberts and Robert zelman or zum I'm
sorry does that happen to you a lot Rob yeah it does no worry about it I'm sorry
dude anyhow worries we really admire what you're doing and uh so um it's
almost hello Rob hi Rob how are you good how about you folks thanks
again for having me really appreciate it it's our
pleasure so I'm supposed to give a a five hour presentation right yeah it's five hours give take five
minutes sounds
good let's see sure we are broadcasting live looks like
we are see that Mike gner from Arizona has signed on Matthew Oda uh from
Phoenix also Arizona Matt used to live um in Southern California we did some
astronomy Outreach things together and I did some astronomy Outreach things together with Miker and so
um all my friends are are here so that's
awesome well it is six so let's go ahead and kick this thing
off NASA's huble Space Telescope has looked for evidence of atmospheres around several earth-sized planets in
the trapist one system including three that are in the Stars habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the
surface a lot of astronomers and space enthusiasts were very excited by the
discovery of the seven earth-sized planets of the trapist one system the planets orbit an ultracool dwarf star
about 40 Lighty years away scientists have theories about what these plants may be like and whether they could
support life but we won't know for sure until we get more comprehensive observations of this system including
data on the planet's atmospheres as a planet in the trapis one system passes between us and the
star it blocks out a small portion of the star's light telescopes like Hubble can look at changes in specific
wavelengths of Light which provide clues to the composition and size of the planet's atmosphere Hubble observations
in May 2016 of Travis 1B and C showed that these planets do not seem to have
thick puffy hydrogen-rich atmospheres this indicates a higher chance that they are rocky terrestrial planets rather
than many gas giants hble then observe planets d e f and g in December 2016 and
January 2017 in near infrared wavelengths and the results were similar
Hubble found no sign of thick puffy hydrogen-rich atmospheres for any of the four planets the data suggests that
there is not this gas giant-like atmosphere for planets d e and f and the data from this round of observations was
not as strong for Planet G so while there's no evidence for a thick hydrogen Rich atmosphere on G the researchers are
not yet ruling it out planets e f and g orbited distances where temperatures would allow for
liquid water while D is likely a little too hot Hubble has yet to take observations of Planet H which is
outside the system's habitable zone to summarize Hubble has not seen evidence
of thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres for planets B C D E and F and of those five
planets E and F are in the habitable zone Planet G needs more data and hu's
not yet looked at Planet a H it's worth noting though that even the planets outside the habitable zone still might
be able to have liquid water somewhere on its surface in certain conditions it's also worth noting that if any of
these planets have high altitude clouds and hazes that would block couple's ability to detect a thick hydrogen-rich
atmosphere but such an atmosphere is not likely to exist on these planets many
possibilities remain for what types of atmospheres these planets have or whether they even have atmospheres the
trapis one planets could have compact atmosphere similar to Mars Venus Earth
or something entirely different researchers hope to use Hubble's ultraviolet capabilities to look for
evidence of water vapor or methane and NASA's upcoming James web Space Telescope will look in the far infrared
to further characterize these atmospheres future telescopes also hope to look for hints of whether the planets
are habitable and if life could be present the Travis one system provides the best opportunity we currently have
to study Earth sized exoplanets over the next few years Hubble and other telescopes will work together each
contributing important observations so for the first time ever we will have an in-depth understanding of a set of
terrestrial planets outside our solar
system [Music]
a [Music]
for
[Music]
hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific in the explore Alliance and you're watching the 135th
Global star party our uh theme tonight is atmospheres and I'm really happy to
bring on uh some new guests and uh uh some uh regular guests and I think we're
all just happy to be back on global star party I can see uh many of uh you watching on uh in chat there and uh it's
a lot of fun to have our old friends there as well so uh thanks for tuning in
uh tonight uh we are going to talk of the subject of atmospheres I mean here I
am breathing I'm I'm not even giving a second thought about it but uh you know
if you do you start to think about the chemical composition of uh the
atmosphere that we breathe and uh um you know how did that come to be you know we
haven't always had an atmosphere that we could breathe on this planet I think it only goes back 500 million years which
seems like a long time uh and it is a pretty sizable chunk of Earth's life but
uh uh you know it is uh not not all the majority of its life and so uh you know
how did life spawn here uh you know uh
what will happen in the future you know with our atmosphere uh you know these are things that scientists do um uh
study and uh um but uh you know one way to also look at what might happen here
on Earth is by looking at other planets and uh that is is um part of the uh I
think very intriguing part of looking at uh the study of exoplanets is trying to
understand the signature of their atmospheres and so um so we're going to
talk a little bit about that uh we have uh uh David Levy is up next David of
course is our old friend uh certainly my old friend and um uh he has um uh been
patiently waiting several weeks while I made my trip into China and then came
back um uh to get ready for this particular event so David thank you very
much for coming on to Global star party and um I'll turn the stage over to you
well thank you Scott it's good to see you again it's been a while and it's good to be back with this our 135th
Global star party with a theme of atmospheres tonight I offer two short
poems the first of which describes a prediction for what our atmosphere might
look like now but this poem was written in about 1870 called the city of dreadful night
and I think he's predicting what the atmosphere is going to look like in the present time the comet hanging or the
waste dark Seas the mass the mass messy rainbow curved in front of it beyond the
village with the masts and trees the snaky imp doe headed from the pit
bearing upon its batlik Le
opinions I don't want to mispronounce that again uh but Rob was very kind to
come on to our program uh I had an early interaction with him when he was first
starting up a u a program called uh uh exoplanet watch uh which is a pro
professional amate collaboration uh where they were looking for amateur astronomers to help them uh
look at the data and um and to um well uh you know identify more uh exoplanets
I'm sure that uh Rob will give us more details on this but uh he is a
distinguished exoplanet astronomer uh he's he's uh right now with uh JPL NASA
and uh I believe working on a passage Ina um he's been on uh several missions
uh space exploration missions including like the origin Space Telescope and habex program uh which is um uh you know
uh something that uh uh I think all has to do with um you know trying to uh find
our way to you know H create habitats and space um correct me if I'm wrong Rob
but uh um you have a very impressive resume and uh I'm glad to have you on to
Global star party yeah thank you so much for having me Scott thanks for that really nice introduction your check is
definitely in the mail really appreciate that oh really I'm Rob um I'm an Exel plan
scientist at NAS je proportion laboratory out here in Pasadena California and hopefully that's showing
okay you're seeing the correct version of the SL great so um yeah like that very nice
intro I uh am part of a team that has launched this project called exoplanet
watch which is a proam professional amateur astronomer uh project to observe
exoplanets planets outside of our solar system um so as some of you might know
uh one way to observe exop plan planets is to leverage something called the transit method so for observing a star
if we're really lucky that star will have a planet orbiting around it and if we're even luckier the geometry is just
right where that planet will pass in front of the star blocking out some of the Stars light causing the star to
appear to dim and effectively the planet is casting a shadow all the way to here on Earth and from this we can actually
detect the existence of exoplanets and the transit method in particular is extremely powerful because not only does
it allow us to discover new exoplanets it also allows us to measure their size
because the bigger the planet the more light it blocks out from its host star but we can also use a typically large
space-based observatories and also some groundbased observatories as well such as the Hubble Space Telescope such as
the James web Space Telescope which has been doing transformative science with every single new observation that it
makes and then there's also an upcoming mission called the aerial Mission this is a European Space Agency Mission
that's launching at the end of this decade and this will be be dedicated to looking at the atmospheres of a thousand
planets so these three space telescopes can actually leverage Transit
observations to actually characterize the atmospheres of these exoplanets what
they effectively do is they look for when the planet passes in front of the star and they look for when the small
annulus or layer of the planet's atmosphere absorbs some of that star's light and from that they can actually
back out the composition of these planets but in order to use any of these
telescopes or any telescope in general to observe a Transit we need to know precisely when that Transit were to
occur otherwise we'd have to build in lots of observational overhead to guarantee that we observe that event but
this is where our project exoplanet watch comes into play we can help using
small groundbased telescopes four and a half inch Scopes roughly 8 centimeters or larger are can be used to observe
these Transit events from the ground update their timings and then that way we can use Hubble James web and Ariel as
efficiently as possible and hopefully maximize their science case and any of you watching this program today can
participate in our project and help out so this is what led us to launch exop Planet watch a citizen science project
to routinely observe transiting exoplanets to help keep these timings really fresh and by doing so you can
help enable additional NASA science uh we are a collaborative effort to
complement existing surveys all of our data is immediately public so you can go onto our website right now and get our
latest results uh we also have Target requests by professional astronomers so they'll say hey I'm about to observe
this Target on James web or Hubble can you help us out we've been doing some campaigns with them also if you uh
contribute a data set that is included for the first time in a published paper
you'll be listed as a co-author if you do the work you deserve the credit and
we are funded for the next few years by NASA's Universal learning so a huge shout out to them for supporting us
these last few years um as a citizen science project we have both science goals and educational
goals the science goals largely what I talked about before to ensure the efficient use of large telescopes also
we're starting to getting uh getting more into the discovery and confirmation of new exoplanets and one thing we'll be
starting very soon is monitoring of Stellar variability because that's really important for interpreting these
exoplanet atmospheric observations but for our educational goals is to engage and teach the public about Axel planets
and enable them to do science and hopefully to inspire the next generation of folks to enter uh T stem Fields much
less astronomy um so what I'll do really quickly right here is this is a sort of
a quick road map or overview of a user experience a little overwhelming at first but I'm going to step through in
pieces so let's pretend you're someone that despite all my bad uh dad jokes and
Star Wars references you still want to join our project if you have your own telescope what you can do is you can go
on our website enter your location on the earth and it can tell you recommended targets to observe any given
night that being said you can observe any Target you want we accept data on anything even a Target that folks have
been observing the last 20 to 30 years then once you plan your observations you
then go out and use your own telescope and do observations but let's say you don't have your own telescope that's not
a big deal we actually have a data request or a data checkout system we
have been very kindly donated about 11 years worth of archival data from the
micro Observatory this is a robotic remote telescope a 6in telescope in Tucson Arizona here the Southwest United
States and they've been observing transiting Exel plan for the last 11 years and they've donated about 2,000
data sets for our users to use so if you want to participate in this project you
don't have to have your own telescope you don't have to live in Clear Sky locations or uh even try to buy a cloud
filter you can just go on our website request some new data uh from us and
then you can fully participate in this project then once you have your data in hand either by taking your own
observations or getting it from us you analyze your own data um so you actually
take those images and analyze them and produce science grade uh data sets
there's a lot of different tools you can use uh Astro image day is a very popular one among the imager astronomy Community
we also have our own exotic as well that I'll be talking about in a slide in a second once you then analyze your data
you upload it to the aavo the aavo or the American Association of variable
star Observers has very kindly allowed us to use their database for free and
this was really key for us because for some reason uh JPL and NASA doesn't want members of the general public randomly
uploading data to their servers so it's really great the abso is letting us use this as part of our project you upload
your data to there and then you kind of sit back relax you can publish your own result you can also go on our website
and publish results that are currently on our website as well and some of our users have actually started their own
scientific collaborations as citizen scientists and have published I think we have about 5 to 10 first uh author
papers by citizen scientists that are peer-reviewed that have been published as part of this
project um so I mentioned exotic this is our exoplanet Transit interpretation
code uh this is a real astronomy analysis tool so this is literally the same exact code that I use as the
professional astronomer to analyze my ex Planet data the only difference between
the version of exotic that all of you might be using versus me is that we have a more friendly uh portal to interacting
with the software this runs in either two ways locally on your own computer or
we recommend people run it through a Google collab so basically you run
exotic through a web server and then the information and the the computers are all churning on Google side of things
and it's completely free and in as little as four minutes go from your raw data into a final light curve that looks
like this that you can submit to our collaboration or you can publish as well yourself we have lots of step-by-step
tutorials on how to use these as well and we have a very friendly and helpful uh slack community in case any of you
have questions at all I mentioned also a little earlier
was our observing campaigns one of our largest most successful ones was back in December of 2021 there is a upcoming
program using the jameswood Space Telescope to observe this transiting exoplanet um the only problem is is this
transi exoplant has a very long orbital period so the transit event takes
anywhere from uh 12 to 18 hours to observe from front to back and it's
literally impossible for a single Observer any place in the world to observe this full Transit so what we did
is we uh talked to our user base and got uh tons of folks super excited and we effectively simulated a large worldwide
telescope very similar to L Commerce Observatory made up of our users so we had folks for example in eastern Asia
start to observe some pre-transit baseline of the transit they handed it off to folks in India to Eastern Europe
uh and then to the west coast of the US and then back to Eastern Asia and we were able to stitch all those light
curves all those individual data sets together to make a single light curve so
this really shows the power and numbers that we can bring by having tons of
amateur astronomers across the world to participate in this project in addition
though we had 24 facilities that participated in this project all relatively small Scopes um none larger
than 30 Ines and most of them were about 4 and a half inches or about 8 cm across
but as luck would have it mother nature decided not to cooperate that night and
most of the northern hemisphere was actually clouded out so we probably had another 20 to 30 astronomers who wanted
to join in this campaign but were clouded out so this really shows why having a large distributed network of
users can really be crucial to helping out and as a result of this study and
our our amateur astronomers that participate in the study we were able to save the James we Space Telescope about
three to four hours of observing time on this one target alone and if you do the
math and depending on how you count an hour of James web time is anywhere from 100,000 to a million us so maybe we
saved $300,000 to $3 million so if any of you know some big NASA mcky mucks uh
feel free to ask them to write me a check that'll be a really nice bonus for the end of this year so um that's my quick little spiel
about Axel Planet watch if you are interested in getting uh started and involved in this project we'd absolutely
love to have you you can uh either memorize our uh URL here for our website
you can also scan that QR code with your cell phone or you just Google NASA Exel
Planet watch and we should be one of the first if not the very first thing that pops up and also this QR code still
might work this is a workshop that we ran back in January of this year and I think you can still access the recording
on how to um use exotic to analyze your data and fully participate in this
program so with that uh thank you so much for having me and I'll stop right here thanks that's fantastic that's
fantastic uh there is um there was a question which I think
you answered several times uh about uh the type of telescope or how large of an
aperture uh you know that that it would take you said roughly 4 inches but is it
um are there any particular telescopes should they obviously they should be able to accept a camera um are you doing
any there's no chance of doing any visual um work in this range yeah so for
I'll answer the visual question first so uh the trans of events at best we're looking for 1% dip and brightness of
these host Stars so it's very very difficult for the human eye to see um so
I've always been amazed though about the the the size of telescopes that folks have been able to use to observe
transing axle planets for example I saw online a few years years ago someone posted an astronomy Forum how they use
just a single DSLR camera on a very uh basic Barnyard tracker to observe a
Transit um the smallest data that I've personally seen routinely are with a 4
and a half inch telescopes so some of those I think were the unistellar EV Scopes that folks have used and they are
producing some amazing data as well and uh the micro observatories a 6 in
telescope 10 cm telescope um those are producing great data as well you can use
an ALT as mount for this the observations typically could take about 5 to six hours you know give or take on
any given night depending on the target um alt as track might have some tracking issues we've experimented with like an
off diag rotation problems well field rotation actually we can completely tolerate it our code uh is able to to
easily counteract that actually it's more about just keeping the star somewhere in the field of view and some
nice comp star stars in the field of you as well so an equatorial makes life easier um but if you only have an ALT as
it's not a big deal and also they sell some really nice astronomy cameras for uh relatively cheap these days too they
do they do i' I've been looking at them myself so um that's fantastic uh I know
that there's uh some people watching that will want to join and and try it out how how how hard of a learning curve
is it for somebody that's just a beginner I mean they're just going yeah I'll do it you know and they don't have
like a uh I know the unisell science team kind of makes this real easy okay
but um if you got to you know if you're kind of going through the steps uh from
zero to actually being able to uh submit something that's worthy how long do you
think that takes um yeah so some of our users are up and running if they don't have their own telescope they're getting
data from us in as little as half an hour to an hour um sometimes you can get some folks that can get in a few minutes
um we also have a very active Flack Community just like unistellar does as well and I'm on there all the time and
we have lots of other friendly team members and uh citizen scientists who be more than happy to help you and step you
through the process as well so if you do get stuck let us know so that's something we can improve on and fix on
our end to make it even more userfriendly um and then those of you who are astrophotographers out there if
you can do astrophotography this is like so much easier in comparison because you don't need perfect tracking you don't
need perfect guiding you don't need perfect Focus you just need to get those photons and uh even I can do it and I'm
a horrible astrophotographer so well I really appreciate you coming
on uh Rob U you responded really quickly
to uh my request and and um we're you know I'll try to get the word out as
much as possible I did put a link into the chat okay that they can just directly link on uh or click through on
um and uh hope to have you back sometime so we can talk about uh the successes of
your program so cool yeah thank you again for having me really appreciate and have a good one everyone talk to you
all soon thanks take care all right okay all right so I would like to interrupt
at this point okay yeah hold on for a second David
Let's uh put you on here there you go thank you thank you uh
I've just noticed that Steve edberg has just joined us yes and uh I want to give
him a real introduction Steve and I are very close friends we've known each
other since the international hle watch he was running the amateur observations night that's right back in the 1980s we
got to be very close then and we've retained our friendship it's it's been a while since we've been in touch but uh
the Friendship is still there and I'm so glad that he's with us this afternoon just want to say that welcome yes that's
right okay all right well he's coming up here pretty soon so thank you David
yeah and well I I I actually participated in international highly watch so um we might talk about that
just for a moment when you come on Steve okay by the way very dramatic
lighting you got on there I I like that okay all right so you'll see
[Laughter] why so um up next is uh David ier uh
David and I got to spend some time together in Chicago to see uh uh to
watch Brian May uh uh you know doing his his other job which is being a rock and
roll musician and uh um it was uh if you haven't seen the queen show didn't get a
chance to see the queen show uh here you might have to catch them in Europe but
uh uh definitely worth watching and I think there's some videos out there of some of the live uh activity going on
with his uh show right now but at 77 and I I don't think Brian May's watch
ing Global star party right now okay but if he is I want to say I'm really really
impressed with what you can do uh up there on the stage you know so uh
there's probably a lot of 30 year olds that could not keep up with that so
anyhow so we're back with Dave ier from astronomy magazine he is the editor and
chief of the magazine there uh his whole life has been centered around uh uh
educating the public through his writings through uh getting other people
to write articles and Publishing those articles collaborations he's done with
his books um uh and books he's written just all by himself but uh Dave is uh
has been deeply involved in educational Outreach on so many deep levels now for
several decades and uh so and it seems like he never gets tired of it and uh
he's he's taken this up to another level with staris uh which includes uh Brian
May and a bunch of other people that uh if you are interested in rock and roll
if you're interested in science uh you're going to want to go to this event and Dave Iker is now kind of one of the
leaders of this whole program so um he can give you all the Insight on that but
uh right now we're we're going to turn to Dave's exotic
universe or deep Sky objects there we go thank you Scott and it's it's great to
be back uh with you and to have the global star party going again and thankfully we both survived to Chicago
yes so I will share my screen and I will see if I can share uh a deep Sky object
and start this slideshow and if we have The Centaurus a
um that we're in the right universe but we don't have the right object because tonight I want to talk about a different
galaxy and that is we're still at a very high um latitude here in the northern
sky working our way Southward and I'm afraid that we still have more than 400 objects to go in this March onward but
tonight is actually for a challenge object is actually a fairly bright Galaxy NGC
6946 that's pretty well known um by a lot of observers it's sometimes called the fireworks Galaxy it lies literally
on the border of cus and signis um and it's called the fireworks Galaxy in
large part because it's a very notable producer of supernova over the years but
it's a face on Galaxy it's almost exactly face on to our perspective and
and so it's a really interesting object especially if you have you know an eight or a 10 in scope or larger in a dark sky
you can see some really nice detail in this galaxy so it's a good one to have
on your observing list it's an intermediate spiral not quite a Bard spiral it was discovered by
William hersel in 1798 it's about 25 million Lighty years away so it's close
um it's about halfway to the gravitational center of the Virgo cluster from where we are and and two
and a half times farther away than the diameter of our local group so it's
relatively close uh to us in the universe which gives us that great detail um as I mentioned it's it's one
of the best face on galaxies in the sky it's about a tenth magnitude object
overall and uh as I said it's a poster child for Supernova so there there are
Supernova that have occurred in 1939 48 68 69
1980 2002 0408 and 17 so there are at least 10 um times the production of
supernova in the Milky Way as you guys The Observers and Astro imagers both might know we're sort of overdue
statistically for a supernova in in the Milky Way uh most of the Supernova in
this galaxy have been magnitudes about 11 to 16 so easily imageable by by
amateurs um and there are many many past images of good Supernova in in this
galaxy that people have taken over the years it's a bit of a starburst Galaxy
sort of on the edge of that definition because it's got a relatively high production rate of stars annually uh as
you might know the star the production rate of new stars in the Milky Way is less than one which seems impossible but
remember that Galaxies have long time scales um compared to humans so the the
star forming in galaxies takes place typically relatively
slowly uh it also has a lot of Bubbles and open clusters and of course Supernova remnants from the exploding
massive stars um and so they're interesting features especially in a really large telescope or as an imager
to capture as in the current ERA of really incredible Imaging that we have
now with astrophotography you can capture a lot of detail in this galaxy which makes it
really interesting uh this is the uh sort of um uh required piece of chart
from Ron Stan's interstellarum deep Sky Atlas and and as I said you can see it's
literally On the Border uh you know part in each of these two constellations cus
and signis uh and there's this relatively bright open cluster NGC 6939
that's relatively close by and in a very large field you can see the two of them
together David while you're talking about this lovely lovely Galaxy H I
wanted to interrupt to just say that it brings me back to a very happy time earlier in my life yes when Wendy and I
went up to Kit Peak and Wendy was going to learn how to do some
astrophotography the object she chose to photograph was 6946 and she got a picture that's right
and it she got a picture very similar to this Tony Hollis image that you're showing right now wow and it just
brought back some wonderful memories thank you David for talking about 6946 today well that's fantastic dve and I I
didn't remember that story I don't know if I've ever heard that from you but what a great connection uh to one of the
great galaxies in the sky that story provides us that that's really great and
and touching and and as you can see you know Tony who's at the top of his game of course look at all the you know H2
regions in this galaxy it's just peppered with star forming regions here and and some nice bright and colorful
foreground stars of course as well so it's a really rich object and and quite
a good one and and as you can see you know this Northern uh Milky Way Starfield is is really something just
peppered with stars here's a wide field shot by David Wills of the um Galaxy and its
surrounding field um and it just has really nice uh arms that are very very
well defined and and with all of this Active Star formation going on in in the galaxy in in our era if you
will this is a combined Chandra with x-ray emission the purple and a Gemini
Optical image of the Galaxy just a very different very weird looking
image of of the Galaxy here very unusual but
eye-catching and a lot of high energy emission of course going on
here and I will mention that we are almost at the end now of the 50th
anniversary year of astronomy magazine uh which has been quite quite fun and quite a mission and quite an ordeal I've
only been to the at the magazine on staff for 41 of those 50 years so I missed the first decade but we've had a
lot of fun this year with some special features we had a big special uh issue that rich talot did much of the work on
looking back at 60 years ago now that Martin Schmidt discovered the nature of quazars at keltech um in this month of
November so um quite a number of anniversaries in in various ways going
on here uh quazar is of course one of those very interesting high energy types
of objects in our universe so um we also have I will mention Michael bakit and I
uh last year produced this book a child's introduction to space exploration trying to get kids pumped up
about this new generation of space that we have um we have some friends our pal
Allen Stern just uh made a a voyage last week you may have seen social media to
the uh to to uh uh um the lower part of
space of outer space if you will very exciting time for Allen and his two
comrades and Scott you mentioned that we have staris coming up and I was just
over in Bros laava doing a number of things a couple six weeks ago or so whatever it was and this may in May 12th
through the 17th in Bratislava which is actually very easy to get to it's a very short drive from Vienna so if you can
get over to Vienna Austria a major European city you can easily get to Bros
laava and we will have many many many surprises of very important scientists
not only in astronomy but in the Allied Fields uh Nobel Prize winners many of
them astronaut explorers some of the Apollo Astronauts and more recent
astronauts and as Scott mentioned some rock and roll with Brian May and some
other special guest stars the great uh the fellow who has uh put on the largest
concert outdoor concert in the world um that's in the Guinness Book of World Records Jean Michelle jar will be there
to open the festival among many other artists this year and and we always have our sort of family over there you know
Rick Wakeman and and Peter Gabriel and lots of other uh folks who were really
interested in science and art and music as well so I encourage you to join us
for staris and at that uh point I will turn things back over and stop sharing
and Scott thank you for okay again getting through yet another
galaxy I can never get enough of galaxies that's why I got into astronomy
in the first place I read uh a book called The Red limit by Timothy Ferris
you probably know it yep uh had a chance to meet Timothy a few times and um you
know uh guys like him guys like you you David and the rest of the people here
that are giving talks tonight have all been Inspirations to me so uh you know
so it's it's uh and and to be able to hang out with people like you and um and
to really just enjoy it and cut loose uh uh while while
we're we've had doing our thing you know is is a lot of fun so andt you're an
inspiration to me and to all of us with all Outreach as well and and we survived
Chicago and we'll have star we will We've Only Just Begun with with science
and and as Brian likes to say you need to use both hemispheres of your brain both science and a little bit of rock
and roll oh yeah yeah well you go to starish you'll never forget it soed that's for sure okay so we have a
question okay from um from one of our uh
uh people there in the live chat I'm going to bring uh uh Dr Rob zum back on
um so let me here he is let's add
you and Spotlight here we go I got screen side by side right now so the
question is uh and I think that this is a question a lot of a lot of people have
I certainly do um you know out of all these planets the
exoplanets we've looked at now we're I mean we're taking a very very serious attempt to uh understand the signature
the spectral signatures of the atmospheres uh you know and looking at planets that are you know hundreds of
light years away I don't know what the most distant exoplanet is that we've been able to study but uh I think it's
exceedingly uh hard uh to try to get uh
you know to get the data out of uh you know a couple of pixels off of the screen um
but uh there have been hints that that we're seeing some of the building blocks
of life on some of these exoplanets and and um uh you know we're we're dying to
know what you think of that yeah so uh what I was able to or what I've seen
personally is finding building blocks of life such as like carbon and methane uh either in molecular clouds that could be
Stellar nurseries to form new planets or also on the surface of Europa and that's one of the gilean moons that has that
nice icy surface and likely a large uh ocean underneath that ice where life
potentially could exist on its surface so um Europa in particular particular is
extremely exciting because if they do or were to find life on future missions such as maybe Europa Clipper that's
being launched by NASA in the next few years that would be uh transformative to our entire field because right now we're
admittedly using a very human Centric bias view of the universe when we look at our own solar system we only find
life here on Earth and as far as I can tell all life on the earth requires liquid water to survive so that's why
we're always following the water or searching for other earthlike planets around sunlike stars that also have
earthlike temperatures as well um when James Webb is observing these exoplanets
using methods like the transit method for example that I discussed a little bit earlier it is sensitive to a whole
new suite of molecules that we haven't been able to observe with previous space telescopes such as Hubble so literally
every single new James web observation that we make is transformative science and we're finding new molecules that are
Chang changing and challenging our Theory with every single observation so it's really an exciting time to be
following it right now um whether or not James web finds signs of life that's
going to be really difficult in my own opinion to sort of definitively say whether or not a planet does have life
on its surface or not we're mostly Pro um sampling the atmospheres of these exoplanets and we're looking for
typically uh things that are sort of byproducts of life such as maybe increase carbon dioxide by exhaling or
additional oxygen due to plant life doing photosynthesis and producing oxygen but the real problem though is
that a lot of these molecules that we're looking for can also happen abiotically without life and being able to
definitively say this is 100% life versus something that happens naturally
that's a very very difficult thing to do and that's one of what I would argue as one of the biggest outstanding questions of our field what signatures do we need
to look at so if we look at something with James web a planet a moon anything
what's sort of the bumps and wiggles what's the signal that we then need to say that if we have this that means we
likely have life um but perhaps James Webb might get really lucky and observe
that that would be incredible um but it also might take the next generation of NASA missions such as one that's being
built right now the habitable world's Observatory this is the one of the next big NASA Flagship missions that'll be
launching in the 20 30s 2040s as being explicitly to observe earthlike planets
and look for those bio signatures those little signatures of life well that's
great well I hope that you're involved involved with those programs uh far into the future and uh uh that you make some
of those groundbreaking discoveries as they come up so one thing I would like to do to add to what Rob has just said
is to recommend that you all watch 2010 not the original
we have to watch the original too but 2010 a major portion of that film deals
with the ice on Europa and in the fiction it deals with what that amounts
to as the film goes on and they got it pretty accurately I thought but I do recommend that yeah yeah that's uh U
while we were getting uh the show ready I was asking uh David uh when was the
last time he watched 2001 one which is his favorite science fiction movie and and certainly mine too and uh I probably
we're probably in a club of millions of people that would say that but uh uh you
know the I think that uh science fiction has really
um become a portal for uh humans to imagine what could be um and uh you know
through that imagination uh we built machines that allowed us to explore
things and to make discoveries and um while some of the uh science fiction is
really farflung and way way out there uh we have found things that are far-flung
and way way out there so I think that uh um the the whole process of uh I think
science fiction plays an integral part of uh spurring on uh and inspiring
people to uh follow a life of science so just a programing note Space Odyssey
2001 is not just my favorite sci-fi movie it's my favorite movie period of
any period okay 2010 is good and you I want you to watch
it to learn about the ice on Europa but it is in 2001 that's my
favorite movie period right right okay well David thank
you thank you and Robert Bert thank you for coming back on to talk about that that's great alrighty um so uh up next
uh we have Russ brick he is the president of the Southern Cross
Astronomical Society and he's held that position I think for eight years um Russ
is uh um you know uh I I was putting
together a biography about him uh uh trying to you know I try to make make a
page for everybody that speaks on global star party and uh one of the things I
learned right away is that Russ is a very modest guy okay but you know the
founder of Astronomical Society was also a pretty modest guy as well in fact he
was so modest that even though he's getting
like 2,000 people a day to come and look through the telescopes uh you know there in Miami
he didn't want people to write about him he didn't you know he he uh he didn't
want to be uh mentioned in other people's presentations that where where he had a
big influence he didn't want to be mentioned there either so um I'm not sure what it's all about but uh uh you
know the Southern Cross astronomical society's been around for over a century
I think is that right yes 1922 they were founded yeah so uh it's an amazing it's an
amazing organization made up of some super friendly people super knowledgeable people uh and they are
holding their 40th anniversary of the winter Star Party can you imagine that star party going on 40
years so 40 years yes and so I'm going to turn this over to you um Russ but
thanks for coming on to talk about uh uh Southern Cross and the winter Star Party
and how to get involved well basically the star party
this year will be from February 5th to February 11th on Scout key in the
Florida Keys um the star party is famous for its clear steady skies and the ability to
see southern objects that you can't see from the northern latitudes um ekarina specifically um the
southern Cross of course also uh Omega centu is a jewel we have really really
an amazing view of that in the Deep set Southern sky where there's almost completely no light at all it's all
ocean weather is usually very temperate and um good clean clear skies
for astrophotography and you'll see a lot of astrophotographers there yeah uh we have
a pretty good lineup of speakers this year um Dr Mario Moda he'll speak about
objects in the southern sky and if he has the time he built a 32 inch
dobsonian telescope ground the mirror and everything wow and he was going to give a presentation about that as
well one of our members Martin Caminos he's a commercial airline pilot uh what
you missed last year Scott was a new thing we have a demonstration of celestial navigation and he teaches you
how to use a sexon oh I've actually never actually use one so it's a
nighttime class and he he gives a very very thorough beginning to Celestial
navigation it's Prett really pretty cool that's cool Richard Wright is back uh
with his lucky Imaging series get lucky his amaz amazing astrophotography as
well oh yeah Randy sheak solar Imaging improving your solar
images um a perennial favorite uh Charlie Warren he'll be speaking about the asir
beginnings guide and its time the Zen and art of astronomical
Pursuit probably be a little Cosmic I'm sure um Mike Lockwood he always gives us
a great talk this time it'll be on the thermal effect on mirrors
uh John talot another astrophotographer setting the right exposure times and Adventures and imaging the
unknown Peggy Walker she'll speak for about astronomical League observing programs and Scott Roberts uh oh so
Scott I take this opportunity to tell you that Neil has reached out to you and we need to know what your presentation
is what the heck I'm gonna talk about okay yeah well I will i' a few things have
been swimming around in my head about this and uh definitely we'll uh talk I'm
going to talk a little bit about um telescope making telescope design uh but
also what kind of drives us uh to go out and look at the sky you know so um those
are the things I love to touch on I know we missed you last year but it was okay
yeah well it was my loss because this is a star party I really love you know I
mean it's um um uh you know the warmest uh place you can go to uh when it's like
frozen everywhere else you know yeah it's amazing and uh you know I've been there when it's 80 degrees I've gone
snorkeling you know during the day stargazing at night talking to you know
uh friends that come through uh our tent um and just you know meeting really
iconic uh uh astronomers and all of you that are amateur astronomers now uh have learned
that um uh the amateur astronomy Community is like one of the best communities you could ever hope to get
involved with you know they the I totally agree I totally agree uh you
know I don't know how many uh winter star parties I've gone to I think maybe 18 or 20 of them something like
that um and uh maybe more uh I think it's maybe more it could be it could be
I mean I've been going years I'm looking to get back there it is weathered you know the winter star party has weathered
hurricanes it's weathered all kinds of stuff um I guess politics you know and
uh um the uh but they but the group The Southern Cross Astronomical Society
always make sure that they have that site and or site it's now the Girl
Scouts camp and the boy scout the Boy Scouts right it used to be only the Girl Scouts camp so they got great facilities
uh Key West is 45 minutes away from the Star party yet the star parties's as you
mentioned is pretty darn dark okay you can see lots of deep Sky objects with
the naked eye and then when it gets still and this is really where it's gets
really amazing is when you get Ark second or subarc second seeing and a lot
of people have never seen that before okay where you'll see these guys with
massive telescopes and they are pumping up the magnification you know they go we
looked through some Scopes that were uh set up with hundreds of magnification looking at planets and they still looked
Rock Steady you know so oh yeah that was a thrill that was aill John Pratt and
Mike Lockwood yeah they always bring the 32 yeah and when you look through that
scope at Jupiter I swear it's like looking at a picture sometimes right and
sometimes you're right for one or two or three even four seconds the detail is
just stunning yeah you can't even describe it you can't leave the eyepiece
hoping it's gonna happen again that's right they'll be tearing you away from the telescope oh yeah but anyhow that
it's it's all fabulous um you know and when you've you know if it gets uh
usually have almost all the nights are clear uh but occasionally they get a
thunderstorm or something that comes by yeah I mean we are at the mercy of Mother Nature and um but goes by quickly
you're on that little strip of land and it flies by and and uh and if you stay
up late enough you'll probably have clear sky anyway so well here in Florida we say that if you don't like the
weather wait five minutes it'll change so that's right well thanks very much
Russ I am you guys gave us a oh let me just say that if you want to come to the star party go to our website
www.c.org and click the winter Star Party Tab and
then the registration pad stab tab scroll to the bottom of the page and
there is where you register awesome that's great and it's a very affordable
stay I I don't know if you guys have ever tried to stay in a hotel or a motel or you know or camping even like taking
your RV down to the Florida Keys uh it is pricey down there you go to the
winter star party you're there for almost it's a week right I mean yep and
uh you won't find a better bargain anywhere else than than to go this event especially if you're you know especially
if you tow a vehicle you bring an RV and you tow a vehicle yeah I mean you could just go anywhere that's right there's
really really really good seafood in Marathon and then of course there's Key
West as well sure yeah it's a lot nice Sunset down on uh down on the pier right
that's right or the most southernly point in the United States southerly you got to do that selfie so that's right
but if you haven't been you got to go and uh you got to go got take from us as
as um uh am astronomers that love uh great experiences under a great Sky
winter star party's got it all so you get you down there one time you'll be hooked I promise definitely will
definitely will let's play the little video that kind of shows some of the highlights of winter Star
Party come one come all to the Southern Cross astronomical society's 2024 winter
Star Party celebrating 40 Years of stargazing happening from February 5
through the 11th 2024 on Scout key in the beautiful Florida Keys get away from
the cold and adjust your latitude underneath the pristine Skies of Southern Florida with breathtaking views
of Eda Karina the jewel box the Southern Cross Centaurus a and of course the
Magnificent Omega centuri tickets will go on sale on about October 1 2023 at
sc.org see you there
[Music] right all right okay thank you Scott
thank you so much um Russ we will uh we will see you down the Florida keys but I
hope to have you on a few more times uh before the U before the event happens so
because come by anytime okay all right great thank you thanks Russ take care me
too alrighty so um up next is uh Steve
edberg and David do you want to introduce Steve sure I'd be happy to Great okay um
yeah as I mentioned before Steve and I have been very close friends since the international holat
days um but that's just a small part of what Steve has done with his life he has
um in in charge he took over Riverside from the late Cliff Holmes and ran it
for a long long time the Riverside telescope makers conference and uh then he has done a lot
of other things he is has his own collection of telescopes he is always a
brilliant thinker conversationalist he has a wonderful
wonderful family his wife Janet his children and I was honored to go to the
bot Mitzvah of one of them and uh I've never forgotten that wonderful
experience I'm not sure what he's going to talk about tonight but whatever it is I can promise you it's going to be great
and now presenting Steve Edward well thank you David that and and
Scott too um kind of now I have a lot to live up to David thanks for that um
actually uh what I'm planning on talking about is not a whole discussion of alien
life I couldn't fit that into 15 minutes and Scott is is standing there with or
sitting with his whip hidden to make sure I'm done in 15 minutes so I got to
be really on top of this and so first of all since atmosphere seem to be the
general uh discussion here I was I'm limiting my presentation to um
e exoplanet atmospheres and a little taste of what we can think about for
exoplanets in general and even finding life on them um Scott asked me to review
a little bit with the international Halley watch and I guess it was sort of a predecessor to what uh Robert zelam
was talking about the exoplanet watch and that was an effort to involve the
world's astronomers it was probably the biggest um event that involving the
greatest number of astronomers in the world uh at the time and maybe still that case we Pro ended up producing a uh
our Archive of data of Hal's Comet from when it was first recovered in 1982 with
the 200 in hail telescope uh right up to pretty much the the end of the hle watch
around 1988 uh and of course there I'm still waiting for somebody to send in new
picture of of Hal's comet in the next few years when it reaches app
Helen and uh amateur astronomers were involved in that uh because it was a way
to help besides getting observations in general whether across a wide variety of
of um types it was also a way of tying in the
previous uh apparitions of the Comet to 1986 and
maybe the a way of translating what we see in 2061 when it returns as well and
that involved visual observations uh as as a primary way of tying that up a
friend of mine Charles Morris who was a major contributor to the Halley watch is even working now on tying uh CCD
observations of fate faint comment into uh the visual uh scheme of
estimating magnitude so that we understand them better so it's it was it was a very very busy time with a lot of
excitement and uh a lot of fun too for amateurs and I think the professionals
had enjoyed it as well oh absolutely was it the first prom project like that of
its kind I'm a little hesitant to say absolutely yes but I think so yeah um
certainly in terms of its size it was um we had a couple of hundred I haven't
looked at the numbers recently I'll admit but it was it was a couple hundred of of serious amateur astronomers
contributing significant amounts of data and so that was that was very good and
and the professional Community was also very uh widely involved with a lot of
cooperation even with with Observatory directors to make sure that at important
times the the commentary astronomers might be able to push uh some of the the
Quasar astronomers out of the way for for significant observations that were
necessary so it was it really was a a huge Community effort at that time yeah
it was cool okay so let me get up my share my
screen and and if I oh there we go I have to
just do the right thing there we go and I'm going to go full screen for
you I hope there we go okay
so exoplanet atmospheres how do we know and as you can see um I am now retired
formerly at jet propulsion Laboratory I served as a science manager and system scientist for the space IM
interferometry Mission astrometric Observatory which was intended to uh do
a huge amount of foundational uh astrometry necessary for everything from
finding planets like Earth orbiting Stars within when within a distance of about 10 Parx about 33 light years uh
out to Cosmo cosm local measurements and a superb instrument
unfortunately it didn't get to fly so with that as introduction that's
how I got acquainted with exoplanets far more deeply and in particular with astrometry far more uh deeply and
discovered to my surprise that it's much more interesting than one would think it's not just measuring measuring uh
positions of stars in the sky uh and is huge amount of science that just comes from that and that's why I call it
foundational but let me get to atmospheres and and exoplanets uh I borrowed this slide from
or this table from actually I do not remember who but it was it was a a
collection of what can we learn and it was if you look at the parameter on the left side there you see planet Mass
orbit semi- major axis orbit eccentricity orbit inclination orbital
periods all that says this is what you can learn about exoplanets from
astrometry and that's a lot about the planets and about and something even
about the systems and even their history and uh it's it's it's good interesting
stuff but if you really want to understand uh exoplanets you need to know more and so I expanded on a a table
that had been started by uh one of the experts on this and I kind of filled it
in and this is it I'm not going to test anybody on this but we'll start at the
bottom there there are a variety of techniques that we can use for
determining the parameters the characteristics of exoplanets that
ranges from even using micr lensing where the gravitational
uh uh force uh around a a planet or a star can actually bend the light and
from that bending we can actually determine the mass of the planet or the mass of the star that's that is doing
that we can measure radial velocity we can measure uh and do Transit photometry
and Spectra we can do General astrometry that's the uh learning the
orbits we can use imagers in a Vari in a wide ranging
visible to the near infrared and separately mid infrared and even radio
frequency and just for fun if you look at that far right column going up you notice that uh it it goes from orbit to
Interior in yes to surface atmosphere magnetosphere and um one of those things
listed over there on the far right is artificial transmissions and you may be wondering
well what does that mean um that means somebody on a planet
uh sending television out perhaps or Omega uh type uh navigation systems and
and while you're thinking about that I mentioned Omega because in fact when Galileo made uh one of its flybys of
Earth back in the 1990s it actually turned around and
tried to see if it could figure out if there was anything happening on Earth that would indicate life and one of the
things that it discovered what were these Omega Transmissions it's now been closed down we don't want to alert the
extraterrestrials but um the Omega system is a navigation system uh that
worked worldwide and also you can see rectangles and Circles of irrigated
fields and that sort of thing so uh there is an indication not only of life on Earth but of intelligent well or
semi-intelligent life anyway uh techn iCal life how's that there we go there
and so the message here is that there's an a lot we can learn about planets
including earthlike planets if we use uh full service astronomy go across the
Spectrum use all the techniques available to us and I want to describe
one of those in particular we'll start with planetary transits um you've all heard about
Kepler and the numerous thousands of planets it has discovered down to uh
earth size and smaller as they trans it their host stars
and uh one of the way things that you have to worry about is does that really
work and if you look at you can see in the top left here just what happens of a
planet and we've seen plan just in the past few years we've seen transits of
mercury and ven um and they what they do is make a light
curve first of all this the star or our sun is at at a kind of a fixed brightness and then for a short time it
decreases goes off when the planet is silhouetted completely by on the star
and then as it hits the limb and goes back up it does that that's different from an eclipsing binary which you see
in the red here which goes down to some deep minimum and then comes back up so
that's why when we we observe these things we still go back and need some
additional information in the case of something like this radial velocity would go a long way to telling us
whether it was a binary star or a planet transiting uh if if this were not as
clear or obvious as in the light curve so that's that's one one way but
once you can do that with telescopes there's more you can do and I'm I'm bringing this up because this is a a
picture of the demo I'm about to do and so I can describe this here when you see
it you'll have a better idea of what I'm talking about but I have a this is a an
aquarium light with portion of one uh that is just standing vertically this is
the filament a Tungsten filament that emits light and let me tell you it's really
hard to find uh filamentary single filament um LED lamps now I was I've been doing
looking for a long time and found them finally but not not like this anyway um
and I want you to think of that as the star here you can see the spectrum of
the star and it's a nice continuous Spectrum in reality we see spectral lines on it most of the time this is
this is an artist conception of a of a simple um spectrum of a star with the
hydrogen Alpha hydrogen beta hydrogen gamma visible in across from the deep
blue into the red um if there's an
atmosphere around a planet over here that gets in front of the
star we see a fingerprint and in that and in this case
this is a particular kind of plastic that takes out all the ma magenta light
and lets every or rather it's it takes out all the yellow green you can see it missing here as it covers the star and
that is essentially what we can do when we look at transes and so what I'm going to tr do
is is show you this live I like people to get a chance I know you're at at a screen but
um this works well because at least you'll see it can be really this way and
so I've got I'm going to have my transiting Planet here turning on the light and oh I have to Steve let's I'm
gonna unshare your your presentation so people can see this okay yeah I'm that I
got it there we go there we go okay and uh you'll be amused to know that I had to use a single layer of solar filter
material because my star was too [Laughter] bright and there it is you can see
right over here is the and that's probably me
moving in the background or something I don't know uh everything's moving in the background this is this is a spectrum
and if I just put a planet through here you can see it's coming across and it's
Crossing in front of the star cool and the Spectrum goes out you can see it got
blocked oh right you can see them up on the on the top left and right there yeah now of course
this is a little this is a demonstration it's not a perfect replica I can't do it
but uh I can come close so here is the Stars light missing while it's the TR
planet is transiting and as it goes by it comes back out and we get in fact two
Spectra one on each side this is I'm using the left side just because that's easier to see here so now now I'm going
to bring around another planet that's orbiting this star and it's Crossing in front and you
see that in fact there is still and maybe I
should I I'm G to leave it as is you can see the the red and yellow are making it
through it's not much getting through the blue green but there is certainly that same loss of color that you were
seeing on the picture better and so that is what we can look
for in the real world I'm going to turn this back and share my screen
again once I
find here we go oh no there we
go hope this is
working there we go so here here again just to remind you the filament and the
Spectrum goes black and these are P these are real live pictures this is using the same uh whole display it was
just close up to make it a little easier to understand
so I want to show you also what can be done
with with uh pretty simple equipment again
here's an artist simplified Spectrum the same one actually just maybe spread a little bit
more H Alpha H beta H gamma the hydrogen lines um and I have two Spectra these
were made um with well in this case Planet
Trails um Mars and Saturn with a defraction grading and just in front of
a 5050 or 100 millimeter focal length lens and you can see in a couple of
places um some fairly strong lines there's an iron line in here in the middle of this there's so sodium the
sodium triplet or rather double it I should say is actually here and I'm
going to show you better versions of these yet but I wanted to do this and also notice the difference between Mars
there's nothing here and in Saturn there's something here that happens to be the spectrum of methane one of the H
sets of spectral lines that methane provides it's pretty weak but it's
genuinely there and if we were to play games with with reversing the color out laying them on top of each other we
could actually subtract out all the colors except we'd see that there is actually methane there not just that
weak this weak um value uh that that's present so I'm going to
go show you that again and here are these notice the spectral lines that
iron line is right over here this is hydrogen uh beta uh this is the sodium triplet
hydrogen Alpha in the sun is here and there is that that is methane in so in
Saturn's atmosphere all the rest is reflected sunlight but methane is
absorbing light in the atmosphere now the interesting thing about this is that
as I was able to to try and show you or showed you between the picture and the actual demo that you can the atmosphere
does take things out in transmission and the beauty of that is instead of getting a little signal like this you at least
have a good strong amount of light that makes it possible to see that and so we
can look for atmospheres of planets the uh other ways that we can
look for planets and is just at their colors and I expect we're going to be seeing more of this coming from uh James
Webb Space Telescope uh and just look it across the solar system Uranus and
Neptune over here uh very blue Jupiter Saturn Titan more midc coloring uh Venus
is an odd person Earth so it is also and Mercury Mars and the Moon are all up
here in this area so we we get different Spectra and not even Spectra we don't
need to we just get colors that are different from them we can also with
infrared telescopes look at those atmospheres and see carbon dioxide on
Venus not something that is especially likely to be caused by life methane it's
argued is a possibility but we know that might only be on on hard surface planets
not on gas giants ozone says there's an oxygen atmosphere
and that is very distinctive as a possible Source indication of
Life uh there are uh searches for bios signatures and ozone and O3 I mentioned
liquid water and uh well co23 water Al
together and methane all suggest that that would be the case you can model these things that's what the brown is
against the Earth shine Spectrum that's an easy way to get the spectrum of reflected spectrum of
Earth using the moon as the screen and by modeling what we think the atmosphere
would be like we can actually get a pretty good model that matches what Earth's is and would be then something
we might say notice this vegetation is included down here as well might tell us that there is life on Earth and again
that's been done also in the far infrared out the peak there is at about
20 micrometers and um we can see the contributions of carbon dioxide ozone
water dominant but there's also methane and nitrogen nitrogen monoxide
dinitrogen monoxide and I don't remember if that's nitrous or Nitric so forgive me I'm not
a chemist so I think that uh is about all I have I
I blew it I went too long I'm sorry Scott it's okay but uh it was
Fascinating People loved your demonstration um Steve's done a number of these things and um you know of
course he's a scientist and and he loves uh getting the information out of uh you
know the spectral um um data and uh you
know so we've had um we've had people on before that uh tried to show our
audience how to get involved as an amateur into collecting um spectral data
and U so it's it's not very difficult um just like um uh Dr zull was was
describing you know those that do astrophotography the beautiful phot
photography that's that's a much harder effort than it is to collect dat for
science you know so um but you do have to be uh disciplined in in collecting
your data for science you have to be disciplined in reporting it um and you
know that's that's you know all Hallmarks of being an amateur scientist
so but um we'll have to have you on again Steve that was uh we were just getting going I
think yeah thank you you're welcome thank you so much
okay all right so um you now know that you need to get a
uh uh a spectrograph uh Tom Fields who who's been on here before um uh would be
very happy to uh hear that I'm I'm suggesting you know that you get a uh
defraction grading and start using rpec which is his software that makes uh you
know looking at the details within a spectrum relatively easy so uh you too
can become a scientist Stephen thank you so much I was just doing some of that on
Saturday night in fact oh you were okay that's great that's great so is the observatory running Top Notch
now um it's getting closer okay it's getting closer progress is made very
good very good thanks Steve thanks for coming on sure thank you all
right so I was writing uh in chat about uh because people were talking about
Hal's Comet and and uh you know but it was in those years in 1985 86 when I met
Steve edberg and I got to see him in action and um uh he has only gotten
better over the years that's what I can say and he was fantastic then so thanks
thanks for uh uh particip ipating we're going to go down to uh the southern
hemisphere all the way down to Buenos Aries uh to Caesar brolo who is going to
talk about um his uh observations from his uh balcony in his Southern Sky
balcony presentation yes is go can you hear me good I hear you good okay okay well H I
was expecting that that tonight can be
uh Cod be but I thought that you can see now
that he fully clo was expecting more more party cloudy
but you know uh it's about uh the lacky
things in astronomy and well it's our atmosphere right yes
the idea was was um a point to a bright
star but the problem is that any star in the field of vision is is enough bright
to to be visible all through the the
clouds is it's a a kind of of uh of
um uh of clouds lower and with a movement uh from
Northwest to Southeast I can show you first of
all I I'll share my screen okay and I
can show you how actually this clouds are moving um well the discussion maybe
is not with a a a live image first of all I try to show
you I have something in my perescope
well here you are watching my screen my my camera control yeah looks like
Mission Control yes we
are I'm putting again my camera
okay the first thing that I I try is connect and connect and
again Ask in before say or the
computer Sorry by the
like the technical issues problems it's fine because
well okay first of all we are trying to to to
show something in this if we have something in the Feld of view I see that
now on cloud I I appoint an area of Mr
saragas here is a star but is impossible maybe you are not watching stars
now first of all we have two problems where we are uh in a city where the the
light contamination the light pollution is from the from
the the illumination of the city uh and reflecting to the sky and
this kind of of uh clouds you can see that are
horribly liting um yes and and you can see it's a live
image yes yes yes the idea was was talk about more than
atmosphere nothing but you know maybe the idea was
talking about May me maybe we can try move one star to the
center and maybe we can see
something I see one star I don't know if you are
watching something in the screen because maybe with the transmission the the
the you have a you have a star on the where the here and here do you have two
and three stars okay all right so if you track and stacked you could probably get
a number of stars even through the clouds I would imagine yes yes the the area is is the area of of um in the
south is is Indus the area of Indus um don't have a
a really so much let me
put smaller area but uh here
okay it's more easy see the STS and see the the effect
I'm I using a little more than one and a half second of position
mhm and more of the effect over the atmosph
atmospheric condition for tonight is more about scattering
defraction uh because um this is that the image can start suffering the change
in their way from uh for a condition where for example here you can have as now a layer
of clouds um but um you know you're are
having maybe um another ER Optical
effects like a refraction breaking the away from and
the shape of the star the star had not a shape of course it's it's uh it's about
the 0 but it's more a seeing
this I think that if it's not a Bright Start to to see the
all difference all difference effects over the the IM over
the the W from of the star we can
see that maybe maybe I need more more
magnification and less cloud out and a right wrer start is the same that stepen
ever show with a low light lamp maybe do you
don't have the all complete Spectrum or or something here we have less
information uh than we need to talk
about yes if I if I I
change this position only I have a lot of light
around the star in the background because it's not the background of the space it's it's the cloud that that
reflect more light yeah we can see the star you can see the star yes yeah
yes yes have and um of course that everything in the do many change our
perception of his space this is why web telescope and hav telescope is a great a
great idea of the humanity uh many many times I WR I wrote in books that of
astronomy but now works we lost the star actually but uh that we are watching we
are watching from the botton of the L when many I I don't remember if it was
in some ameter telescope making books or
or in the Tex books that that first of all our first limit to to to
the quality of our image is is ouros atmosphere our quantity of water in the
atmosphere the turbulent L when we are talking about the movement of different
layers of air and well the idea tonight
was talk more about seeing with a bright star but maybe for for our next occasion
we can make a an an a disc of uh image
uh with a maybe Max telescope and and see the conditions how we can see
the SC uh this that is something that we can
we can see and many in strong magnification and maybe in a laboratory
or maybe in a great great condition that are not easy and uh of course in cities
is more difficult to to to found is that
let me Che change the the stor share because it's to to
Waring the white image sorry uh and um
well I can show you how the this clouds are moving over this part of my country or
or My City I show you I sh the screen
again this is how we are watching the same now with the area I I was appointing my
my telescope to the South okay you're South yes where are where are you
exactly here right there okay right on okay I'm I'm
the the part where we was watching the star is the
Southwest the Southwest is here so so I I have a question for you
uh tell me when when you do have clouds but let's say you have a bright Planet up do you
generally find that the sky holds an at the atmosphere a bit
steadier with clouds do you see more detail on the planet than on a perfectly clear
night um or is this just chance it's well it's um in a clear
night you tell me Well the the real thing that that many times I'm I hope to
have a a really clear or stable image yeah of of a of a image of a
planet me and many many amateur astronomers that we are hope to have
something new in the sky with a clear and cloudly night if not very clear
without clouds but if you don't have an stable
atmosphere you have a mess a disaster uh
something that I I um I learned with the
time to to be not uh how do you say um
first of all I'm not Optimist with the first side of a planet uh maybe in the
first time of of the night we have a mixing of hot and cold
weather and do you have a a a first time that a a
planet is clear but have a contined
movement and you don't you don't have able to to to see any Tails this is an
effect of the atmosphere where you have the bad scene and maybe you don't have
any um any uh cloud in the sky but is a
a TR star n where you have this effect is where you have a very very bad image
of planets I don't know if I understood the the sorry the the question Scot i i i in
a moment that you tell me I I forget some no no no but I I was just wondering
do you see better images of uh of planets when there's some clouds in the
sky ah perfectly only do you have yes I've noticed this many times myself so
absolutely do you have the only thing that maybe can you ruin your rematch the
of in talking about clouds it's perfect that you tell me but maybe in a in a in
the opposite situation do you have a a teeny layer clouds yeah night yeah and
you are watching planets maybe the the loss of life that the The Cloud of of uh
are filtering to you especially observing maybe not for for photography
or video helping to you help to you to see
more details and is as you told me many
many times despite this scattering the defraction that losing some
details the the clouds that are um losing so bright help you to see details
as the as the storm in hiter and as BS or details in
um in the Saturn belt um you're losing some some um
details but by contrast to lose something of uh
light you are watching much better uh details in planets is maybe
a effects special effects of the clouds over your perception but it's great it's
something like a a small filtering of light enough to show you
details of contrast yeah you know is maybe if you
measure the the the quality of scene or or the
details of uh of resolution maybe you are losing
something because every every drop of of water floating in in in the sky are
defract in the light but uh but you
maybe you are having a a great a much better
experience watching in this kind of of uh of nights right right because you you
feel much better details about contrasting uh the Vans or or the the
red spot in in Steve edberg was uh chatting uh in our chat room here um and
he says in Southern and central California he says Alto level clouds indicate great stability in
the atmosphere I've had arcc seeing conditions on those occasions either
through the clouds or in holes or through the holes in them also when the
coastal Li Coastal inversion and you would get Coastal in sometimes Caesar uh where you are I
would think um when the coastal inversion is below his observing site uh
the scene can be also very steady so so you know the lesson here is is
that got some clouds uh but you still got some clear sky so you should
probably go out and do some astronomy anyways and uh if you're like Gary Palmer and those guys in England where
they have clouds a lot okay yes they often shoot they often shoot deep Sky
objects through the holes in the clouds so yes yes many many times when you
don't like to to lose something that you are apprecia to watch it's a great a
great idea don't H don't be afraid to put your telescope yes don't be afraid
many many times maybe you have 10 minutes of an and you have a great time and maybe it's
a short time in the in the in the night but you're happy because you see
something you experiment something and for me sometimes in the city or with the
bad weather that vosis is a place that is not great to have a
alltime clear skies and the light pollutions but you know that many many
times we have have a great a great moment and maybe we are appreciating
more this moments uh because are like a like a
small shells in the sky when we are in the H of the of it of the of the clouds
in the ho in the sky yes it's in the clouds thank you H it's a pleasure it's
a pleasure thankk you so much okay thank you to all audience thank you all right uh always great to have
you on um up next is uh Dr Daniel bar uh
Daniel uh has a series um uh called how
do you know and uh that has been running now for a couple of years and so three
years yeah three years okay great and um anyways uh we've got him tonight and um
uh you are going to be talking about expanding atmospheres yes yes uh I'm
going to give I'm going to give everyone flashbacks tonight uh do you remember when you talked about gas laws in
science class probably a chemistry class back in high school and the teacher said well if we could have a sample of an
ideal gas right what would it be like well it would be well mixed it would be
essentially so much of it that if you took a sample anywhere of any imaginable workable size it would be the same as
anywhere else and you think oh no such a thing exists but it it does
atmospheres are essentially ideal gases they are confined by nothing but
gravity and they are thoroughly mixed and yes there are there are uh the local
Specialties of our atmosphere U what we call you know meteorology that's a going
science but essentially on the large scale our atmosphere is very well mixed but atmospheres also responds to those
classic gas laws like uh boils law pressure and volume what you talk about okay if you
put an atmosphere under greater pressure uh it gets to be a smaller volume you
see Jupiter and Saturn planets of similar diameter but one is much more
massive than the other greater gravitation more mass more compaction of
that atmosphere and so you get this pressure volume relationship the other one you probably learned about in high
school chemistry was Charles law volume and temperature you heat something up it
expands uh all the ice engine cars thrive on Charles law while you start
off the ignition process you get gases which get very hot very quickly they
expand they drive the Piston down the road you go Planet atmospheres also work this way
when we add heat to the daylight side we know atmospheres expand and those of us
who remember the days of AM radio or who still do ham radio you know when at
night without the Sun the atmosphere contracts it steadies the ionosphere
becomes something you can bounce a radio signal off of so we know that heat and
affect an atmosphere but what if you had a lot of heat really quite a lot um
scientists have been tracking something for a couple of years and it's only as the data has finally come in people are
realizing what we're seeing what we've been able to see in a star that's been quckly named assassin
QJ or something equally fantastic is the Collision of two Neptune class planets
the these things are probably between four and seven Earth masses and they
actually collided in orbit in this solar system um yes an unbelievable amount of
energy what what tipped us off that was a planetary collision well one of the things that we looked at was gee
goodness it has a surface temperature of 700 centigrade and it's several a it's about
16 appears to be about 16 Au out so 700 centigrade is really hot especially for
a planet the other thing is they were able to compute the size of it it has a
diameter 750 times that of the earth so we're not talking about oh Jupiter is 12
times the diameter of the earth 750 times diameter of the so it has
star-like dimensions and yet temperatures which are far too cold and we realized by the signature of the
dust cloud boiling off basically that what you had was two planets and what we think happened and
this is this is spectacular one about four Earth masses one about seven and we
think that essentially like gas giants as they collided they had essentially a
glancing blow and tore each other shreds gravitationally tily disrupting each
other and the two planetary masses Recon converged a final time and smooshed
together uh about a year later and this whole process of creating a new planet
yeah it has 99% of the mass of the old one uh this is not unlike the protoe and
Thea Collision that created a body about 1% of our Mass which is the moon uh here
you have Collision of two Neptune class uh gas or ice giants colliding and
making a new much larger Planet but what happened to that
atmosphere that Collision an incredible amount of of energy um get your physics
hats on kids 10 to the 34th Jewels 10 to the 34th power 10 34 more
zeros um unimaginable that's in energy the amount our sun puts out completely
in all its Spectra solar wind eny total energy output for eight years in this
single massive collision and guess what Charles law heat of gas up it expands
hot air balloons my golfier brothers oh no we're going to go big this thing expanded the these things were probably
about four or five Earth diameters as Neptune and uranos are and this thing
went to 750 Earth diameter at 700
C and obviously the atmosphere is going to collapse massively as it cools would
that we had a closer seat what would it look like when a planet's atmosphere collapses about oh 700 fold down onto
itself as it cools off and sheds energy over the next few years it would be a fascinating process to watch how did the
weather patterns establish themselves from essentially let's completely
randomize everything we're going to collide the two planets and the atmosphere becomes well mixed and
gigantic a giant ball of ideal gas but then gravity and the laws of
thermodynamics take over Charles law as it cools off it contracts and obviously
all sorts of new uh weather patterns chemistry all sorts of new things are going to sort themselves out in this new
planet right uh it would be fascinating to have a closer seat but obviously with
an event that energetic too close to seat would be it would be not good to be down and what Shakespeare would have
called the cheap seats yeah that might have been uh a bit too close for comfort
but uh it's interesting to think of atmospheres uh as Dynamic gases that
respond to things like temperature and pressure and uh all sorts of laws that
go on but uh fun to see things at this sort of scale yeah anyway so there you
go thank you great that's awesome uh we
are uh getting close to our break time we have one more talk here by Robert ree
but um uh I think instead of being a 10-minute break it's going to be like a five minute break um but uh Daniel thank
you so much for uh coming on and um
there we are and our next speaker is none other than Robert Reeves and
he is going to be talking about a walk through the
clouds on the Moon the Moon does have an atmosphere
correct a very tenous one it's uh it's one I wouldn't hold your breath over but
U um an atmosphere on the moon is is actually you know on a molecular level
you know a molecule here a molecule there not much in between but um uh
there is a detectable atmosphere on the moon that extends yeah several thousand
kilometers above the Moon uh this has been detected by the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter which is still
very active and orbit around the Moon it has the uh the lamp instrument on it the lman alpha detector and U the um unusual
thing about uh that is it was designed to look down at the surface of the Moon looking for water ice things like that
but uh lunar lunar constants Orbiter is Runing out of attitude control fuel so
it is being um uh controlled a lot with reaction Wheels now um as a result um
every now and then the reaction Wheels need to be desaturated so the spacecraft tips on its side quite a bit and it's
looking high above the Moon and the Lyman Alpha the lamp instrument is detecting hydrogen at very high
altitudes above the moon so U there there is an atmosphere on the moon but U
uh for all intents of purposes it it you can consider it a vacuum but uh my uh talk tonight uh a
walk through the clouds uh what I'm going to do is go through Marin nubium
on the moon the the the Sea of clouds um down on the uh uh Southwestern
corner of the Moon uh we're at New Moon right now so we're not going to be seeing a moon in next couple of days so
I can pick any place on the moon I want but uh I chose Marin nubium because it's very special to me um I took a
photograph of Marin nubium with my Celestron eight oh gosh well over 10 years ago and U the photo I took um
indirectly led to my job with the SLR telescope company so uh I have a bit of
affinity for that one particular image but um before we uh do the uh scary
screen share experiment um two things um something
marvelous happened in my life earlier this week uh I came into possession of several hundred of the original lunar
orbiter prints that were used back in the 1960s to to map the moon and the
mission one two and three were were specifically for seeking out Apollo
Landing sites and uh at my feet uh I don't have a place to put them yet but
there is a huge stack of them crowding me out of my desk at the at my feet and
another stack on my H printer table and uh in about two weeks I'm going to go
get several hundred more pounds of them so um for somebody who has been and love
of the Moon as long as I have followed the Space Program from the beginning and
uh was old enough to follow the technicalities of Apollo um U having
this windfall of lunar orbiter uh imagery fall into my lap is I mean it's
it's a gold mine um oh let's see if I
can I've got tons of the original fullsize prints
put together by the US Army mapping service why does it why does it look
like there's a lattice work going uh because the the nature of how the images were taken um they were taken on 70
millimeter film aboard the spacecraft and then and then uh there is a flying
spot readout that uh U shined a light through the film and it was read by a
photometer and the verying intensity of light was in then digitally or or it may
have been analog back back then uh the signal was sent to Earth H where in turn
fed into another device that shined a light on film u in proportion to the
signal received from the spacecraft and uh it did this in a series of strips and
uh um hold it up it it broadcast each one of these strips and then these were
manually assembled each band was physically pieced together uh and then
photographed into a master negative uh huge Master negative and then uh these
huge contact prints were made from that and that's what uh has been distributed uh to uh all the places that U use this
stuff uh these particular prints were originally at the Johnson Space Center and then after the Apollo
program uh NASA and all of its Infinite Wisdom just decided to throw them all away oh
so they were intercepted before they hit the dumpster and they became the uh core
of the material at the lunar and planetary laboratory in uh in in Houston over on Bay State Boulevard I've been
over there many times I've poured over these very same images on their light table back in the 19 late 80s and um now
here they are they're mine uh but uh last May lunar planetary laboratory
decided well we're going to throw all of these things away uh yeah so some a
group at the Corpus Christie astronomy club uh um rescued them and put together
complete sets gave them out to various universities and the remnants are are
all falling into my lap so uh it's it's been it's been quite a trip uh so uh uh
I'm I'm I'm literally have my feet propped up on probably about what cost a
million dollar to produce so anyway such is life in the big city
with the the government when they're finished with something boy they'll throw it overboard in a heartbeat but uh
now it's it's mine to enjoy and pour over and uh and uh and relish and compare to my own photographs and of
course uh we would you share any of those digitally or I have um um a stack of
about 6 Ines deep that duplicates and I will find good homes for them nice so
and before we take a walk through the clouds of course Christmas is coming up if you have any interest in the moon you
know anybody who has an interest in the moon of course go to Amazon look for exploring the moon with
Robert Reeves it'll be delivered to your doorstep within two days so so much for
the 10 Penny commercial let's try the screen share experiment I'm only going
to do one picture and uh if I can find
it and let's hope it works all righty wait a minute I didn't
hit screen share let me go back I'm making the mistake this time
um okay where are you whoops wrong one I make a muck out
of this every time don't I uh yeah
yeah there we are okay now now I go to screen share yes
and let's see here hit share and hit that and now hopefully you
are seeing an image of Marin nubium we are seeing thumbnails but oh
here we go again Mar nuum is one of the thumbnails yeah well I don't want to
thumbnail I want the actual thing uh stop
share let me bring it up to full screen first and
then now I've have lost you how do I get back to you so I can go
back to screen share H do um your control Tab and you
can tab through your programs control tab h control tab like you're hitting
tab tab tab and you can see the different programs
there well this
is is that your other laptop again uh this is the uh the one I've used before
and it's it's okay go back to screen share okay let's click on one of those now
thumbnails or Mar there you go you did it okay great okay now uh we're gonna
stay on this one image because Walk in the Clouds Marin Nubian the reason I like Marin Nubian so much it is a
microcosm of so many things on the moon so many different features there's reals
there's uh there's grabin there's um complex creators 's simple craters
there's ghost craters there's uh all kinds of features uh and some serious
history too floor fractured craters uh new craters old so uh um you can see my
my cursor moving around I hope yes good okay well let's start up in the upper
corner right hand corner and uh of course bordering Marin nubium up in the north whoops don't want that up on the
northeast we've got the uh the triple craters tus alonsus and arachel and uh these
aren't necessarily Associated directly with Marin nubium but they border right up next to it now these three craters in
their own right are an observational uh triplicate triple pair that uh they're
not related to each other but they're so close to each other that we we observe them as a unit now notice uh alonsus in
the middle at the 9:00 1:30 about 4 30 there's dark spots on the inside of the
crater walls those are volcanic ash deposits from volcanic vents that uh
spewed this ash out over a billion years ago and it is still visible today um in
higher resolution pictures uh you can see these little volcanic vents they're only about 2 3 mil kilometers in
diameter but the ash surrounding them is larger and makes them stand out uh back
in 19 1959 Nicolai kyev um um got some Spectra and visual
observations of some sort of strange obscuration in this area that was
interpreted as volcanic vents gas VA venting from a Volcan volcano now nobody
else saw it but the spectrograms are real and that was so intriguing that uh
NASA sent the uh Ranger um nine spacecraft to impact in alonsus looking
for evidence of volcanism of course it didn't find it um alonsus look very much
like it does in our views and telescopic views from Earth but still a little bit
of space history uh that was the targeted area for the ranger n spacecraft back in
1965 um down on the east coast of Marin Nubian straight wall one of our U very U
oh go away one of our uh uh very um popular um sentimental favorite type features on
the moon um quickly becomes a favorite of of novices and the experienced
observers come back to it again and again because it's so unique at Sunrise like now it casts a shadow creating a
black line feature uh we're talking about this line right here and then of course at Sunset I wish I would quit
making that come up uh the sunset the uh slope of straight wall
is brightly illuminated it becomes a white line feature uh heading further south just
off the southeastern shore of Marin nubium look this huge huge crater here
uh this is deslandres it's well over 200 kilometers in diameter and it is so old and warn that
it wasn't even recognized as a crater until the 20th century and it wasn't even named named until after I was born
it was named back in the late 1940s uh before that it was simply called hell plane uh named after this
crater out here hell crater named after father maximilan hell and U uh but um
today we know it as deslandres a little bit further south our familiar Tao
crater one of the youngest large craters on the moon thought to be about 108
million years old uh which means uh its formation occurred about the time T-Rex
was roaming around on the earth and the the flash of the impact of the asteroid
that created that surely got the attention of even the even the dinosaurs because it would have been
spectacular um cruising along the southern border of Marin nubium um thus
crater here um a floor fractured
yes I can enlarge it how about that um a floor fractured crater that's been
flooded with Basalt from underneath basalts wed Up From Below uh same magma
chambers that fed lavas into Marin nubium also pushed up from below
completely flooded the interior of this crater and we can see along the northern rim of it uh these these reals fractures
where the floor buckled up same thing happened to a hotus crater
right next to it and notice the direct Center impact Bullseye impact of a small
crater within a hotus kind of gives it an artistic effect and then look right
below U the the little concentric crater hotus a uh even in this lower resolution
you can clearly see there are two walls on this crater a an outer wall which we
expect on small crater or all craters and then an inner wall uh perfectly
concentric uh this is not a chance impact of another asteroid uh that
struck the middle of this uh this is actually a a volcanic feature there are
51 concentric craters and they primarily hug around the edges of the Maria and uh
frankly we're not sure why or how that inner concentric wall formed but their
group proximity to uh the uh uh Basalt
Fields the Maria um says it has to be volcanic um cruising along the southern
uh nubium we see these ghost craters here's this just the very rim of a crater protruding another one right here
the crater Keys U lubanski up here uh more of them up here these ghost graders
were in placed on the new be EMB basent before the lava flooding that paved over
the uh the entire Maria so uh uh these crators are extremely old and filled up
with Basalt as the Nubian Basin flooded and now all we see is the very rims of
their craters protruding above the basalt uh we call these ghost craters
and there's a high number of them in the uh Nubian Basin and uh that tells me
that the basalts within nubium are not necessarily that deep U uh no more than
a a kilometer or so otherwise these these uh crater rims would be completely
buried um a rather well oh down here
right next to Key's crater notice the little tiny shield volcano inside the
circle I'm making with my uh cursor you can even you can even see the C there stop that
there you can even see the little Caldera in the middle of it that's that's a little shield volcano what we
call Keys pie uh p i the the like the Greek uh letter and um the very typical
of lunar domes shield volcanoes on the moon uh there are no tall vuia like
volcanoes on the moon they they're all very shallow um only several hundred meters high um 10 to 15 kilometers wide
uh the slopes on Keys pie oh probably no more than about two degrees uh we can only see it when the sun elevation is
extremely low just right after Sunrise uh otherwise they disappear we can't see
them because there's no relief um cruising in mid of middle of
Mari Nubian uh the very unusual crater wolf
um don't quite know what to make of this one uh uh whether it's an impact modified
Central Peak to the uh Nubian Basin I find that um probably not believable
because uh no other basins have visible Central Peaks uh Central peaks in a basin are probably covered over by
impact melt almost immediately after the Basin was formed but um more than likely
just a a chance crater formation That Was Then partially flooded with Basalt
um but my guess is wol formed on uh the in the
Nubian Basin after it was already partially flooded so it didn't form on the floor of the Nubian Basin it formed
on an elevated uh partially flooded U part of it so the rim of wolf crater is
higher than it would be if it had been on the on the very floor of the Basin therefore it didn't uh become as much of
a ghost of a ghost crater but still the interior Ed but we have this unusual
heart-shaped outer rim and then marching northward more overlapping ghost craters
um um the rather well-formed complex crater bull Aldis uh here we see the
classic form of a complex crater U Terrace walls collapsed sloping inward
to the middle of the crater uh complex uh of central Peaks that rebound upward
from the impact that uh create the crater and the uh ground surge radiating
outward in in all directions now bull Aldis is
too old for the ray structure to remain you know like Tao or cernus but one time
bu Aldis had a pretty healthy Ray structure but Rays fade after about a billion years because of space
weathering you know the in infall of microm meteorites churns and tills the
soil and eventually uh covers the uh uh the the Rays and um solar radiation also
dulls them so crater rays will go away after about a billion years um good
indication of crater age is if they have Rays it is less than a billion years
old uh moving over toward the western shore uh the western shore of marinum
borders right against the Maria u humorum u the Sea of humidity sea of
rains right next to the Sea of humidity uh and let's shrink this back down and
see the harpalus reels here um these are essentially stretch marks where the
surface was pulled apart by the the the slumping of the basalt within uh the
humorum Basin off still in the shadow but as the uh the balt within that Basin
depress the center of the basin and all the basalt started slump toward the middle it stretched the surface
stretched the surface and pulled open these cracks um more
U oops wrong direction more ghost graders up above and
here following my uh cursor um we can see a mountain chain
here some U crater rims here U Garrick crater
um Perry and Bon PL and let's shrink it down a little bit more and frao crater
here and of course just north of fra Murrow the uh Apollo 14 Landing site uh
where Alan Shepard played shot as golf balls and of course everybody is wishing
Fred Hayes Apollo 13 astronaut a a happy birthday today he's was 90 years old I
think yesterday and this landing area would have been where Jim level and Fred
Hayes would have touched down had Apollo 13 not had their their incident so uh
Happy Birthday to Fred Hayes I wish that had been you picking up the Rocks up there and uh Allan would have gone on on
a later Mission um this like I said I was tracing out this area here uh this
oval is what is now called Mario cognitum now back in 196 4 uh this used
to be part of Oceanus procerum which is almost entirely still in the shadow but
uh this was the eastern part of it and then in uh the summer of
1964 we U launched Ranger 7 which became our first successful Moon probe um up to
that point we had had a miserable string of luck getting spacecraft to the Moon they'd fail one after another Ranger 7
changed that after that it was nothing but success uh Ranger 7 impacted in this
area which we now renamed Mari cognitum the known sea in honor of the Ranger 7
Mission U as Ranger 7 got closer and closer and closer to the surface it kept
snapping pictures and transmitting them in in real time until uh the final
pictures uh show details of about a meter in diameter uh the pictures show
that yes indeed the uh lunar surface would be strong enough to support a
landing spacecraft which was U Good News because by then the design of the lunar
lander was already Frozen was kind of hard to do a massive redesign of it so
it validated that everything is going to be good um um grick crater this I me llarge it a
little bit this one right here partial ghost crater looks like it's got a crown
on its head um I remember watching the uh the ranger n uh excuse me Ranger 8
pictures being uh broadcast on a a live um television special that evening uh
Gerard Kyper describing them U as we get closer and closer and closer to the uh
to the the surface and Garrick crater looming larger and larger and larger and
finally it drifted off to the right side of the field of view because theace spacecraft was on a trajectory heading
in toward uh stop that uh heading in toward what became uh Mari Cognito
before that like I said it was a portion of oceanos prum but u u Kyper proposed
renaming it this particular area Mari cognitum and the IU approved it at a
record fast time um there's also this
extension of Morin nubium up here on the east side between grick and Perry bound
plan frao and over here on this side tus crater this this uh baylike extension
going north here it's unusual in that it does not have a name uh most extensions
and Bays protruding from the Moon from Amaria do have a name but this one doesn't and uh I've lobbied to have it
that area named sinus mysterium the Bay of mystery
but so far uh I'm not getting too far with my my naming
campaign so um walk around the clouds I walk through the clouds or whatever uh
Marin Nubian the sea of clouds so uh I hope the next time you look down in this
this area of the Moon recognize some of these features uh um understand a little bit of the history of it uh oh I forgot
to mention the rotus down here uh this huge real linear reel which is uh
created by a a volcanic Dyke that pushed up from the molten core of the Moon and
then and split the surface and the land collapsed between the two fault lines
and created this linear reel it goes on for several hundred kilometers and uh the Dy didn't reach the surface as an
eruption but it did split the surface so um in the interest of uh not
renting terribly overtime I think we'll we'll wrap it up there and uh hope that
um next time you look in this area of the Moon remember some of these features and uh enjoy the view thanks Robert
that's wonderful that's you're welcome you're you you leave many of us that uh
um are not as familiar with the moon you know that call ourselves amateur R omers
uh a little bit in the moondust so to speak may I ask your
Technique is are you doing a video and then taking the best moments of seeing
out is that or yeah yeah that's the technique um I Capt capture 5,000 videos
uh off of a planetary camera I can't remember which one this was uh I've had
a number over the years um but the technique is capture all that have the processing program it used
to be regist Stacks nowadays we use Auto stacker and there's a couple of others that I I haven't used but uh it sorts
out and picks uh the best percentage you you choose I I usually go to the best
500 out of 5,000 and U create a um a single Tiff
image out of that which I then import into Photoshop and then uh do the further enhancement
so it's a pretty straightforward process and uh it works well for me does the
atmosphere change some of your results from night to night like potentially you
got to throw out more because yeah yeah some nights it's not even worth I I look
at the the at the jello that's just quivering on my screen nope it's a
Netflix night let's go watch something on TV yeah it's a lot of patience yeah
yeah well for every uh every success that I show here there's there's 10 that uh just don't make
it they're probably brilliant too well buy my book you'll see them yes
that's right that's right thank you very much being that uh you were talking about a Netflix night
be as we go into our uh short break here I want to show and you mentioned the Luna reconnaissance
Orbiter um uh the LR website has just some amazing uh images in them and one
of them is a little short movie of the um Apollo 11 Landing site so uh you know
there's there's sometimes as amateur astronomers we run into uh naysayers that say hey we
never went to the moon you know that was that was faked that was fake that was Hollywood
right well here here is Apollo 11 uh uh as image by the lunar
reconnaissance Orbiter cool and the Earth and the moon are flat
right or no not this
time so that's the Descent stage those are footprints huh look at
this this is the TV Camera they've got that identified in
here yeah the Apollo 11 site is the only one that does not have a standing flag
they plac it too close and it blew over on takeoff blew over look at this though
the tracks created by Neil Armstrong I mean that's amazing they'll be there for
a couple of thousand years not a billion no they'll they'll fade after uh maybe
10 20,000 years wow that's amazing cool
stuff cool stuff okay yeah the mountains are
unbelievable when you fly inside the [Applause] [Music]
crater [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
back one
[Music]
[Music] two [Music]
well back call you back I'm at the global
Star Party wanted to thank everyone for uh participating uh so far and making their
presentations uh we are uh coming back from Texas where um uh Robert Reeves
lives uh in my birthplace um and shooting over to
Brazil to talk to marchelo Suza the Lewis cruls astronomy club and the
editor of Sky Up Magazine thank you very much
marello hi thank you very much for the invitation it's a great pleasure to be here thank you nice to meet all of
you let me share here my screen because I I make first a a short report about
what happened for the observation of the glips here in Brazil in our place here
in our place it was if it was possible to see we saw a partial solar eclipse but
unfortunately the we worked hard here we
got thousands of glass gles to give for solar glasses to give to the
population and we visited many schools many
schools talk with a lot of people make organizing many things but unfortunately
in the moment of the eclipse we had a lot of clouds in the sky I will show the
ma is here I would like to thank sh St ham then what the donation of the
glasses for us he donated a lot of glass thousands of glass here we visit many schools
organizing many activities in many places we organize activity in 15 cities
at the same time we're prepared to see at least 15
cities yeah you see very prepared
to if we during the day it was possible
so uh this is the day of the eclipse we were there in many Place different place
but to see that I visited many TV shows here to talk about the
eclipse here in our region even in Brazilian TV channels
they use the glasses to to to show the importance to
to be protected to see the eclipses we did what was possible but
unfortunately the weather didn't help you yeah I will show I will show part of
the reports now you see this this
guy this was one day before the eclipse have a lot of clouds and in in
the day of of the eclipse was totally clouds wasn't possible to see
the here is a report showing the organization for the observation of the
eclipse this was before the
eclipse I I I move you forward
here she was prepared to see for first time a solar
eclipse another another student that you was prepared to see for the first time
uh solar eclipse
here this one of and this was hot after
the the moment of the eclipse
here this was at in same day at night this was the in the day of the
eclipse itn't possible to see the unfortunately to see the sun weet
try it these are the part after the
eclipse it looks like they're having fun we organized video conference we
show the eclipse in other places this is not us they use a
different image people using but we very we had
glass see the observation this why not here in our city because it just not possible to see
here the solar eclipse here partial solar eclipse
here ah these in another place that we organize you organize in many different
places but even with the where the with
many clouds we had people that visited the places and stay ref there to try to
see something even for a few me moments Eclipse but it wasn't possible let me
go and this is what happening here and organiz many we a lot of people in
different places this H the new generation of your
astronomy group this is the giant mass map
that produced by the buz foundation they sent one for us here is the biggest Mass
map that you have in the world with 80 M by 80 m is a very we using schools people
walk in the map and see the places where the hor landed and we show and here
the event this this ER students here not students they're
physicist that is Cia we have a good news about her now because she was she
participates in a selection to work in the Mal iseland oh and she was selected
and then she work with teaching and the popularizing astronomy in the m Island
jary now January 2024 and bring on to Global star party
that would be fun yes it be fantastic the experience the experience for to be
there and for us we need to have it's
not so close but we are now begin the preparation for the eclipse in
2027 because it will be is last Sol CPS that you can see here in the map we will
pass near the coast here in our city here comp great will be here two
kilometers far from the coast deeper in the ocean then we need to we already
organizing the observation we are talking to have boats to ships to people
for the people they need to travel for a a best
observation 9 kilometers far from the coast in the ocean then we are from now trying to
organize the the events here you see it's very close here G here where we are
then 207 we will try to organize a big activity here and I hope that the rather
help us we be in February that is during the summer here
is the duration of the eclipse February 6 as we talking
about I will finish it showing something that
ever that I see and I I showed for in presentations
people like to to see this here A Planet
sat ring is fantastic from the h from the cin
but what I'm going to show here I know that most of you already know but ever
is fantastic to remember is the experience if
the the when they send uh uh the Hans grou to analyze the moon
Titan that here we can see the osphere of the
Danse atmosphere of the this moon Titan that have most of the nitrogen you have
also methane and hydrogen but what is fantastic that
this Pro had the opportunity to land in on surface of of the mo and
showed fantastic images and this is a video of the touchdown in January of
[Music] 2005 and this is a fantastic World
different Animation Show and then soon we are going to see real images from the
probe when they the probe enter cross the atmosphere of the moon
is a Danse atmosphere you can't see the the surface of the the Moon it's like
Venus and this are real images from the group when we
can see that you have rains there you have Rivers you have
lakes everything like we having in here in our planet crazy the only difference
is that the temperature there is below minus 200 degrees celsus then in the
atmosphere you're have most of with nitrogen methane then the the the cloud the rain
is not water with water we have methane now have hydrocarbons leaked at this
temperature and then you have leaks of these hydrocarbons methane we have rivers of
these hydrocarbon then is a different to what
this a real image that showed the the Hans probably landed on the surface of the
Moon and then send only one IM from the surface and
stop wow this is the only image that you have on Surface and these are not Hawks
these are blocks of ice water rice is a very different words no
and for us to find life there uh very small kind of Life
Mich we need
to have a different definition for life because
it's not life like we see here one possibility if for have life
that the base of the life is not carbon may be a is a possibility to have lives Bing
ammonia then here are the lake the rivers and the lakes these are imag from
radar taken by the cin spaceship here you can see the the
rivers lakes on surface of this
fantastic tit and one of the Lakes has this one has a name
ug Lake that in Portuguese call that is after name after La this
Lake that have in our city in Brazil
[Music] the was Lopez was here visiting us and
she said that she are show because had the same shape of
the lake that you had here in our city in Brazil there a different this is the
only image that you have from the surface of this moon and the SAT is
fantastic It's a Wonderful when we show for here is what
they like to see that they like and in
2024 we're organizing our new event in honor of this person that John Batista
say look that live here in our city and it was the first time in the world that
sent a report by a report about a naked I view of the
the last naked I view of the har comments Oh wow was made here he sent it
to the Astronomical Society of French France and he republish things
that in the beginning of the 20th century and we are going to honor him in
our next event here in April 11 13 2024 the 60 Edition and thank you very
much awesome than for the invitation a great pleasure to be here thank you
thank you very much Marcelo thank you it's wonderful okay all right so um up next
is um uh here let's do this marello thank you so much
really really informative and entertaining um Dan Higgins is busy
busily preparing uh for the second um astop paloa program um which I
think is December 2nd if that's right and uh Dan has um Dan has a a uh long
history as an amateur astronomer someone who interested in astronomy like most of us since childhood and um uh as I
recall um Dan did you find a telescope in the Attic of uh of an apartment that
you were in is that right oh yeah and we also how that story go we also have Eric
and my co-host in there somewhere if you get him on as well Eric wat okay all right Eric hey there okay let's add you
on there there we go we go hey hey there Scott welcome to Global Star Party guys
thanks appreciate it yeah so you guys are busy right now getting ready for this event tell us a little bit about
Astro paloa how did you come up with the idea to begin with and um what was the
last one like and what do you hope for this one well really I mean asra paloa
was kind of like a joke it wasn't really a real thing we like what what are we
going to do let's let's you know you know we were in the time where NE was
happening wasn't happening didn't know what was going on Co was going on all this stuff was
happening so there was a void kind of there to be filled a little bit and uh
What uh I guess I think it was me Eric and Jason I think if I remember right yeah Jason too yeah we were like well
well let's see what we could do and get some people on and uh you know and it
turned out to be a 9h hour live event on YouTube last year and and I think it was
so stressing that I actually ended the show with a shot of whiskey you
did did I forgot to bring any alcohol here
so I you know you know well well last year and and excuse me for any of the
presenters that I forget last year we had people like Charles Bracken Dr
Christian sass Molly Wakeling Nico Carver Shan neelson all the masters of
picks in sight we had some members that made some presentations Ernie and Josh
um Amy little yeah am I forgetting anybody else ER I don't know I know that
this oh there were there were so many uh we had Shan neelon and Wayne Parker from
Wayne Parker uh yeah from from Sky shed pod so yeah I mean it was a huge huge
event uh now you guys you guys uh mentioned neif for those of you who don't know what neif is it's the
Northeast astronomy forum and it's it was something we typically look towards
uh every year but uh during the coid uh pandemic it was uh it was difficult
so Dan and Eric and who else put this on
well Astro Pala was I mean I direct the show from from my house and um you know
Eric came on well Eric had the football game he had to watch so he was he had the Army Navy game
going so so um and Peter started off the
show but then he had to play he was in the finals of his hockey league so that basically just left me um for about
three hours and then Eric came in did the other seven with me um and uh you
know it was really cool it's really it was really nice putting everything together because it was very well received and it was just amazing to have
so many people that actually we wanted to be on and it was just like a half an hour but Community come together to
exactly exactly and it just was it went off so well we actually went bigger this
year bigger um well um iess I guess new
newer members and newer presenters um yourself being one of them and it's by the way just before we go
further it's December 9th not December SE 2nd so December 9th so oh it's
December 9th okay yeah all right December 9th starting at 2 pm Eastern
and ending whenever it ends but but um but we have and if I could share my
screen a little bit I let me see if I could do this real quick and Screen two
and share and do you see yeah you see it now okay so um you see the astro paloa logo
now yeah yes all right good all right so this is Astro paloa 2 and and for those of you that don't know the show we've
actually been doing the show twice a week um for the past four years and
Eric's goingon to talk about something a little bit a little little surprise for tomorrow night but um um astala 2 is a
yearly event that we we're going to be doing every year as long as we can and
and um so here are some of the guests we have uh Trevor Jones from Astro backyard
Dylan O'Donnell from Star stuff um Sean sorry buddy I guess your picture got
broke but Sean neelsen um visible dark Stacy dton Astro Stace Charles bra
Bracken and Dr SAS for my telescope are back um all the masses of picks Insight
Simon Lewis Scott and Way Parker on uh on skyshed observatories plus I didn't
have any pictures but Prim luch lab will be on as well um talking about uh what
what's going on over there so it's it's gonna be a star studded event um it's
going to be pretty amazing so um I'm really excited to to do it again really excited to do it with Eric again because
me and Eric have have have grown this friendship of ours you know pretty
pretty strange but it works out you know and and it's really really been a great time doing it uh with Eric and the rest
of the team and it's it's been awesome so yeah great looks like Eric's inside
his Observatory right now I am go ahead ER go ahead I yeah I am I'm actually
we're talking about Wayne Parker I'm actually in my sky shed pod right now my ex1 with uh my scope right now before I
start Imaging tonight and yeah we have a big event coming up as a matter of fact tomorrow tomorrow marks episode 300 of
Astro World TV wow so it is a great
milestone for us is it's an awesome awesome time uh to come on to astral
world if you haven't been um had an opportunity to check us out yet and hang
out with us here from our viewer membership and so many other people and
just be a part of the community I consider astal World TV like a an online
at astronomy club oh sure you know when it comes to astrophotography because we primarily focus on
astrophotography but anybody can come on and you know exactly Dan and I have been at this for four years and it's been a
great partnership a great friendship and we're just a couple of crazy you know guys that you know just love doing what
we do love Imaging and going off the rails and just having fun we're just two
wild and crazy guys wild and crazy things that's exactly taking shots after
a 9-h hour marathon broadcast oh yeah I mean Eric and I have had a couple of
chances of getting together when I was in Chicago for work and uh um came back
from the Nebraska star party this year and starfest in Canada and all that kind
of stuff and er Eric did you make it to your star party or no no it got rained
out yeah it got rained out during the annular uh the annular solar eclipse that weekend was wash out but yeah and
we've just had such a ball doing what we do I mean you've mentioned NE I had the
opportunity to go to NE for the first time and be a part of Astral world doing
that and hanging out with so many other people I know we saw um so many people
from sport scientific other companies that's met a lot of other really really cool people likeminded people so I had
to see you Scott and spend a little time with you uh it's just that was just a blast so I'm just looking forward to you
know the future and what the future holds for you know astal World sure and
uh you know I'll do you know I'm gonna take a page out of Robert ree re's book with the with the 10cent uh commercial
but uh something has happened since the I haven't it's been a long time since we've been on GSP um you know things
have been happening on it's been three or four months something like that I think I think it was like right right
after NE I think it's like almost six maybe yeah yeah been a long time and
things have been happening really really fast and um AST World telescopes say
astal TV has expanded into retail so that's true that's true and
that I haven't said so yeah so now you've got uh you've got a lot of U you
know it's a dynamic uh deal all the way around because you've got a fantastic uh
online presence um you've got um people out there that genuinely want to like
most amateur astronomers genuinely want to help other people get better uh get
the results of their dreams you know and um uh and now you have uh you know this
retail arm where you can really recommend and make sure that they're getting the right kind of equipment so
uh because it does take the right gear you know it absolutely does not only that not only that because you can you
can buy gear that's not so good and if you're a great astrophotographer you can
make it work you just have to work harder at it right so so you know but you know if
you have all of that together where you have have people that are can guide you through answer your questions get you
into the right kind of gear for the kind of Imaging that you want to do and there's a zillion different versions of
that P puzzle okay uh you know so that I I really commend what you guys are doing
I think it's great yeah you know and I just since since I have the time and I
have you on live I just want to go publicly and say uh thank you personally to you Scott because um I know I said
something to you at NE and I spoke to you at NE but but on a serious serious note this isn't just because it's your
show thank you so much for giving me the kick in the butt when I needed it so that that that's all I want to say and
that's all I'll say you know what I mean but uh yeah I I know but no you were you
were already there you know so just needed to be pushed off the cliff
yeah sometimes we need a little just a little I didn't have to push very hard you know I think IED
noed I us my pinky and I said go he was already on the edge but I
know it now it sounds well there's people there's people that need to be
involved in this you know and um some of you may be listening right now uh you
know you've been thinking about the kind of life that you have what you're doing where your passions are and stuff and if
it's astronomy you know uh you got to go out and just do it you got to go out and do
it and you need to make it uh a strong part of your life it may not be the only
part of your life but but um you know uh the the number of years that we have to
really put the energy and the passion into it uh are limited and so you need
to make it happen very and it really makes me happy to see your success Dan
so that's great thanks so much man yeah but don't forget the 99th come check us out from 2: to 10:
Eastern um come check us out tomorrow night at episode 300 um we're giving
away that's Astro World TV on YouTube right yep correct Astro World TV on
YouTube you know so if you go to uh uh there's a link uh in this uh for the
global star party and you can see Dan Higgins there's a bio on him but there's
a link to astop paloa 2 and um and I
think on both of those pages is a direct link to your Astro World TV so awesome
but it's not hard to find just type in Astro World TV on the search bar of YouTube and you'll find it but you gotta
put TV don't just do astral you do astral you end up with Travis Scott's
song so I'm not gonna you know not kick it I've been trying to kick him off YouTube for for like four years and Ste
not happening that's right that's right all right okay well great guys well
thank you for coming on uh you know and uh we expect to see you on often so yeah
great thank you be on we'll see I'll see you next week okay great see take care thanks take care Eric thanks take care
see you bye bye okay so um we are let's
see if uh we've got so I'm on Scott I'm just uh I'm in transit I I see you're
there yeah I there's by oh yeah I see like a couple of
little dots dots that are might be eyes you know
Reflections yeah so you're driving right now yep I am fully uh
handsfree I just came from League where now the last time as you recall
I had uh ended league and I was somewhere in the uh in the game room
doing a presentation right this time I'm on the road from League where I did not
have a very good League session but it's all slowly starting to come together so
what I decided to do for this presentation there isn't much going
going on we've had Cloudy Skies up until last night and tonight and so I did get
some images last night of a place where that it cleared up and I did not
have my main camera with me so I tried using the iPhone I'm going to share some
iPhone photos okay which is one of the things that you do when you forget to
bring your good stuff you don't expect the weather to break let's see
share the good camera every camera you have is a good CA a pinhole camera it's
good camera that's right it's a good camera I'm gonna start by
sharing let's see here's couple of images here's one that I'll
share uh I guess I can share more I'll share this one I'll share this
one and I'll share that one why not all right so
I'm gonna add those let's see if it works okay there you go you're looking
at me trying to shoot the signis region what I did do while I was um see the
Milky Way yeah you can see the Milky Way in there and that's in our um bort for I
didn't have my uh you know the sqml meter I later went back on a similar
night and it ended up being a 20.9 or 21.0 so pretty good for our region here
in Michigan and um because all I had was my iPhone I
went ahead and I just took pictures with the iPhone and I did naked eye astronomy
so I tried to see if I could see the Northern Kack I looked
for I looked for Stars near copia which I don't think I have that image here's
another one and you can see the uh you can see the plane of the Galaxy heading towards
copia and there are a couple of stars that are 4
point x 4.5 to 4.9 magnitude that were visible right where Caroline's Rose is
NGC 7789 um Tow cast rast and sigma cast
um if you can see those three stars you're in at least a bort for you know
they're you know your limiting magnitude is somewhere above
five and uh you can you can see a lot more stars as well there's another shot
with those trees and that's a shot over the lake you can see the effect of light
pollution on a h sky that this is this is a great lake so the the bright lights
to the left are from Windsor Canada the bright lights to the right are from Fort
hon USA and look how much light even in an iPhone photo you can still see all
the light that's being cast up I think that's it I'm going
to um unshare if I can let's see how
does this work with the iPhone here we go
and next I'm going to share a couple of photos that I
took with the good camera and by good camera I mean my
um let's see ad so here we
have it's a Milky Way shot and the clouds are moving in um this is my Canon
6D um that I use for these wide angle shots this was an attempt to recreate a
lake Hudson shot that I had taken where I could see the entire I I could see the
galactic arm going down to the at least near the Horizon there's a lot of light
pollution here but clouds can give an element to a wide angle image yeah they
can it can really beautify it and there is a little uh Easter
egg so there's a closeup of the region Hercules is to the right and Aquilla is
to the left this is uh you can't see my where I'm pointing my thumb maybe I can zoom it in okay that is
uhin what is Alter and tared in Aquilla and that's Barnard's e the dark nebula
that should be somewhere in the center over here is a little Easter egg
you might see a green fuzzy patch that is Comet um what is it Comet lemon uh
c2023 H2 lemon that was on November 10th
that was the location of the Comet it was it was over here and the nice thing about that night
was I pulled out the binoculars and I spotted the comet I could see the color
and everything the little fuzzy patch just like it shows up in that picture I
was able to view it in 10 by 50 binoculars it was rated as a magnitude
10 in Sky Safari Pro I would have guessed it to be more of a magnitude 8
but either way it showed up and it showed up with color so so my advice to
those who are out doing their um yeah you can see the lights and everything so
my advice if you are doing your Astro Imaging um I advise go out and actually
look at the sky do some binocular astronomy do some naked eye astronomy see how much of the night sky you
actually know and as you're Gathering your frames as
you're Gathering you know you're taking your photos um a lot of a lot of
established imagers automatically gather what they want so they're sleeping but if you're
not sleeping and you're next to your gear or you're up take a look at the night sky and observe with your eyes see
what you can see and what you may find especially if you're if you're a wide
angle um imager where you're doing you're doing the whole Sky there may be
something in the sky like the um like the comet that ends up in your photo and
you may not realize it unless you pay attention to current events and you know that there's a comet in the sky so so
that's so in other words keep looking up even if you're doing Astro Imaging it's
it's kind of my my theme going into 2024 you know with all my images is make
sure you take it in with your eyes and just enjoy the beauty of the night sky
that you're seeing especially if you live in a an area that's always clouded out winter can be a tough month it's
cloudy it's cold but when it's clear it's uh it's beautiful to watch and I've
got a few more images for next time where I'll process that'll be the uh
it'll be the images that I uh took when I went back out to that site and used my
Canon 6D to gather the information the information instead of uh the iPhone
even if you have an iPhone take pictures see what you can do Scot I'll turn it up back over to you all right okay well
thank you very much um you drive safe out there and we'll see you hey you
almost saw my face for a second I ran by some lights we here I think this yeah
there you are I'm gonna it really is you yep see it wasn't a recording it was
me and I'm gonna say this in front of all the people that are listening astronomy beats bowling two to one I do
love bowling but astronomy beats it two to one it's just the way it is so go
outside and look up it'll calm your nerves after a bad night of bowling oh yeah that's right all righty take care
Adrian thanks it's time and it's time for John Schwarz my buddy Adrian I have
a a bowling ball too it's white like a cuq ball I call it the lunar module it's
reactive resin and it it knocks those pins silly
cool I'm like you too I love astronomy more than anything
I yeah and before I before I fully hand it off I do have a bowling ball called
Crux which is a constellation in the yeah it's called CR a cross and there's
a they made another version yeah it's the Southern Cross
they don't have the southern on it it's got purple and silver it's but they
named it krux that's the one astronomically related fing ball that I
own and I the only one out there oh there are more the bowling storm well
they're round I guess could be planetary so yeah so listen to these names Scott
Storm bowling company has you know they have the physics they have the proton physics oh
wow they have the astrophysics those are actual names for bowling balls that's
cool and I think there are a couple of others that have sort of these out of
this world name um so there's you know then you
have Mo panel who um had had done a he's
done a commercial about mass and motion and putting that technology into a bowling ball he started out with a
picture of Einstein it says Einstein probably never thought about a bowling
ball but if he did it would look like this okay and that's how he L off with
his uh commercial so on bowling index.com there's an article it says on
the ball full moon bowling balls I guess this is a manufacturer of bowling balls
and they look like the moon yeah so you could so you can buy a bowling ball yeah
that looks like actually wanted to do that I still all right I don't know if you guys out there like bowling but some
of you do and there that's the bowl one of the bowling balls for you it certainly is the one for Robert reev so
yeah it looks like the moon it's probably the one for me too I need to go ahead and order that ball yeah then then
I can always you know whether it hits or misses its Target it's still the most so how many pounds do you bowling ball do
you bowl with I throw 15 pounder a 15 pounder 16
Adrian 16 or 15 16 that's what I throw I throw 15 all right so 15 he throws 16 I
throw 15 yeah they're they're only 150 bucks I'm gonna go get one you're gonna
go get one okay my lunar spare ball bowling they have the Jackie gleon ball
Adrian no I don't have that it's called Fly Me to the Moon yeah oh
okay okay that's the ball I'll end up with so yeah we apologize to those of you listening we've turned it into the
bowling Space Channel bowling show that's right yeah the bowling Channel but uh all right John you better start
talking about your drawings all right take care gentlemen nice to see you Adrian good seeing you again happy
Halloween by the way you know I'm really sad that we couldn't have done this on
Halloween I had a little more stuff ready to do but I have a guest I wanted to clear it with Scott if I could
introduce my Halloween guest tonight yeah why don't you and
uh hold on Richard just wait a minute you're fine I haven't been out in a
while okay here he comes you hello everybody it's been a long
time my I want you to know the Moon Landing was real I can tell you it cost
America a lot of money I wouldn't tell a lie I never tell
a lie you never tell a lie you know you're not a crook I'm here for the election I'm just
on sabatical right now yeah that's great so I'm gonna turn it over to John I just
wanted to say you're doing a fine job with this Global star party it's very
thank you very much thank you very much
president Richard thank you so much I appreciate hey everybody how are you
it's John hey I'm back I don't like to argue with this guy because he's has a
lot of pull you know oh yeah I work out but it's two bodyguards they they were
holding his army of Secret Service agents yeah yeah but uh he assured me
the moon landing was real so that's right it's assuring because if it wasn't I would that's one of my
favorite things to look at is you know the moon and the clouds together it's
like Adrien does and it's true when you see clouds you think um kabash if you just check periodically you can see the
clouds open up and um I created a Halloween picture and the universe just
dropped it in the you know yeah into the view I couldn't believe it and uh it's
an amazing one but I have it coming up so let me get started man I really miss
the uh miss this you know I've been um yeah me too i' I've like I do I love to
do the Outreach and dedicate time and and um do stuff like that but um the
problem is you know this is my passion and when I do it outside it's it's h work you
know much more work than um doing this this is what I love to do it's never work you know yeah this does
not work so yeah I it took me a while work anyways no until after you're done
then you realize you're tired well okay I've got it um get
refreshed I'm a little rusty at this it's been a while right so when I was putting together my
my uh I make files with the whole picture thing so I keep a record of it
and I I couldn't every time I would get the pictures onto the zoom thing you
know for my uh folder it would dump them you know if I if I swipe down by
accident too far it dumps them I did that like 50 times so and then also when
you do these it's in Reverse right you remember that y that's
another thing you have to keep in mind because um so I do it backwards but I set up the
thing I did it all right I was good we're almost there uh it was I
missed Caesar house Caesar yep he's doing good he's doing
good he's doing he was clouded out so he's a little bit bummed but yeah you know those clouds they always get
Caesar I mean all get them all get them so well we're getting I love I love them
you know they they remind me of Orion sometimes with the spectral cues that
you get I have really up close right I mean yeah it's very similar to like if
you've ever been on the ocean which I have as a fisherman sure um my father
would take me on some of the greatest trips and and we did go to South America and I have to tell you how absolutely
beautiful South America is and the southern sky is it's amazing I mean I
should have never waited for um Omega centuri to come up higher because it
clouded out and guess what I missed it but I saw 47 yep and it was the most
unbelievable one I've ever seen uh with a 12inch telescope it's like looking at
one my 28 inch you know I couldn't imagine so our title is
atmosphere this one I uh have shown before but this is a a real nice picture
that I was blessed again when I was walking my dog the clouds were out and
it wasn't quite this color but the Rays of light you know it just fills you back
with um positivity and you know realizing the glory and the gift and how
wonderful you know there's nothing bad anymore once you go outside and see something like this but um I added some
stuff to it to give it that feel and and it was you know basically like another
planet that might have had a methane atmosphere or a little different atmosphere with crystals of ice that
come down and they sparkle and the Rays of light from their twin sun and you
know I kind of visualize these but uh you know the atmosphere is so critical
for life um it's indicative of the magnetic field that protects us keeps
our air our water in it gives us the air we breathe and the air plants need too
and basically it's The Giver of Life an atmosphere these are just a a few
pictures when I walk my dog that I've been honored to capture and share you
know the spectral little just the clouds the beauty of the atmosphere uh this was
an acrylic painting I did of the beach wow and it's it's a real loose style so
you have to go way back to look at it it was a departure from my it looks like a
photograph though from the screen it's thank you you know I've looked at some of mine on there and they don't look as
good um but the resolution this was an actual painting that's why it's it it
appears better because of photographed better then some of the digital stuff doesn't look the same this was one
morning I was uh just getting started to work early and I was kind of bummed out
you know it's early and I missed my family had to go to work early and there this came up just oh
yeah it it washed away the day it was a beautiful start yeah uh these are
similar these would be considered macel clouds and you know with the Ryan nebula
back in the day hersel and Tao and mostly the 17th century guys there was a
lot of uh guys that sailed you know to navigate the world and they used a seant
and looked at the stars but they also saw the most beautiful clouds and you
know Skies crystal blue with these flocks of sheep the mackerel clouds and
hersel had said that the clouds in Orion reminded him of the macro clouds that he
saw at Sea so you know atmospheres it could be
considered a small atmosphere you know when the star takes that material they have an atmosphere and then when it dies
it blows it off new life is created this is a just you know our
atmosphere look at the beautiful planet setting looking through there some stars
and then the ocean this was a trip I took with my father in zuao and we got
off the plane took another plane little plane I was scared because it was small
and we end up on this island in ano and it's this little teeny town with
this hotel and there's all those birds or crickets chirping and and lizards and
it was just Enchanted you know and we went down to the beach we still had our suitcases in our hand and we set them
down and sat down my uncle and my brother and I and this was what we witnessed is that
view I tried to capture it the best for memory you know that's just straight out of my head
so here's another Cloud I captured just the amazing
shapes that almost looks like the Seattle Seahawks the the head in the middle the bird head kind of thing but
you know with clouds you can um see whatever you want you know it's that
par dilia is I think what it's called is what Salvador Dolly would see hidden
shapes within oh sure and um that's a common thing so whenever you go out and look at the clouds I mean you can see
amazing things that you know your eye and your mind will turn it into from the
paradia you know I've had some amazing rainbows um in the last couple years it
just seems like whenever we have a rainbow on there this one was really cool I added the moon to it because I I
thought that would be a great view to see a moonbow which I have seen um but
this was really cool it had like six bands and it made a complete half of the
McDonald's emblem this was another uh red sky at
night our atmosphere you know because of the angle of impact on the sunlight as
it the sun setting it's looking through much more atmosphere and therefore it you know the
particles turn the color of the light to a hue of red because it's it's almost
like looking through dust it's obscured and pushed to the other end of the spectrum
look at this rainbow it was sideways I've never seen one like that coming out of the tree yeah I mean I I just see the
most amazing rainbows probably because I'm always looking up you know looking for that amazing see a lot of stuff when
you keep looking up you know but um yeah I mean sometimes I do it when
I'm driving so it's yeah don't do that I know don't do that I know so I saw
something the other the road I was looking at uh you know I'm always looking for the mothership you know that
if you don't look you won't see it you never know when you're gonna see it yeah of course so I'm looking and I go there
it is it's there it's it's no colored lights I've ever seen it's got like a whitish pink light and a red light and
it's like it's huge and it's like moving super slow like it's hovering I'm like I
got to pull over so I pull over get out of the car and
it's the fire helicopter wasn't the Mother Ship but it was really weird because when you're
driving it just doesn't appear to move but yeah that is dangerous I wouldn't recommend it right uh this was the same
day that I took that moonbow one but this was the other side of the rainbow
and it went across the palm trees and I was trying not to get soaked but I couldn't get the right shot so I had to
run out and just stand in it until I could get this yeah but man you know the atmosphere
look at the the beautiful things that this atmosphere produces for us you know it
just gives us so much it's it's life it's everything I mean yes plus air is free I love that
you know Air's free another weird sunbow kind of thing
in the in these clouds I don't know if people call these
Chemtrails I just think what these are a lot of times is when jets fly really
high up that little Long Trail you see that's an indicator there's a lot of moisture oh yeah like if you're
observing and you see like a trail from a jet that goes across the sky you should probably pack it up sure uh your
views are going to be not sharp will probably be blown out but um these are
amazing too the light was coming through and that was when I was walking my little
buddy this is just a wonderful Moon one I did I I remastered it's a sketch
digital painted this was just the other day I I
was asking for a good one for this for the atmosphere yeah and boom look at the
Rays in the clouds yeah yeah yeah it just man to to there if you don't look
up you don't ever see this stuff and you know a lot of times you forget or you just get so consumed with your daytoday
thing and and yeah you know this is AET some little crazy problem that you think you have you know but you go outside and
I look at that and I I just say to myself John look at look at this yeah
which you can't really remember what what the problem was okay but you remember this okay this is the problem
Sol important I call this perspective yes it gives me perspective
of this the glory the just how of a magical thing that this is our life in
this planet Majestic it's awesome it's it's a miracle I mean it's the greatest
thing there couldn't be and I guess maybe if you can fly into space your
spirit and Float around and and look at all the stuff I can't see up close then I'm in you know but I don't want to
leave everybody this was my friend shot uh Mark penderson who used to work at
Woodland Hills this was a I showed him a storm cloud he goes John you haven't seen a storm cloud he this is
Colorado that that came over I think Pikes Peak and this this weird Cloud
came in and then it got black and it just he said it it was like the worst storm he'd ever
seen so the atmosphere can hurt and kill too you know like hurricanes and
typhoons and and storms I mean not only is it uh a giver and it gives us a lot
of things we need Water and Light and oxygen but it can also hurt you pretty
bad with tornadoes and you know weather phenomenon lightning and hurricanes it's
don't want to mess with Mother Nature right yeah the moon like um that
fellow was saying I forgot his name what was his name again the guy that wrote the book he's amazing Robert re Robert
yeah uh so I wanted to go I was gonna say that you know I was watching
something and there is a small atmosphere on the moon and uh maybe on
the South Pole in some of the dark side some of the crators haven't seen sunlight many years like probably
hundreds of thousands of years maybe I'm not quite sure but so there's like there
could be water ice they've picked up spectral traces of that and they also
have detected there's an atmosphere I wonder if that could explain some of those lights you know
with it could be electrical um statical like in our atmosphere it could be some
kind of a particle interaction or a field you
know and then Venus our twin planet um roughly pretty close in
size but that's too close to the Sun and and the atmosphere uh turned into a
greenhouse you know where the clouds and it doesn't allow the heat out so it it just turned into literally a um Inferno
like a acid planet and um you know not really good for Life as we know it
perhaps but you never know I mean there's life at the bottom of the ocean in those vents that boils water so there
very well could be life there or even on Jupiter's moon because it's an ice Moon
there could be thermal vents because you know those are very thermally challenged because of the grip of Jupiter you know
look at IO and the volcanism because it's like taffy when it gets around Jupiter it's just twisting it up and
that thing's getting hot so I would imagine there could be a good chance for
life underwater you know water could be considered like an atmosphere similar
right yeah I mean our our atmosphere is basically a water atmosphere you know so
um this was one of the best views of Venus I've had that was from that trip
from Mount Pinos when I went and hold on a minute my my little buddy is very
impatient right now so when we were looking we stayed up all night that that night and I was looking at the Blue
Snowball at 700 a.m. with that uh lumacon gen 303 filter and Orion I have
never seen Orion uh the trapezium separated so here's a great bit of information for
those of you who want to look at the planets and get your best view and it's
just before the sun comes up and just after Sunset you get this weird Moment
of clarity the stabilization where because of the brighter color you don't have that stark contrast between black
and white so the details really come out in color so for instance if you were to
look at Jupiter you could catch some amazing bands and the colors are rich
much richer than when the sky is dark because you know the contrast is too Stark your your eyes are you know it's
like an astrophoto it blows out the the cones that can see the faint you know
but anyway so this is what was happening I me I was still going so I'm like this
is amazing and then my legs cramped up that was uh two days straight I you I
tried to sleep I barely did because I have my dog but um you know two days on that ladder of the 28 it's it'll kill
you here's another one of Venus I had um great view very stable you know that's
the good thing about our location for planet work you have very stable onshore
flows so you get good planetary viewing typically but you know that can change
in a second as Richard says you know that's the good thing about having that video you can dump the bad ones this
thing was like so far away I used an 18inch starm Master zambuto primary at
4.3 with the paracore and and this was the view I got and it's I forget how many arc seconds
but this this thing was so far away there was hardly any detail when I showed this to my friend he goes that
looks like more detail than I saw in the 60inch and I used an 18inch telescope
but it was much less affected by the atmosphere I've shown this one this is the one that I created with the same
telescope this was from the transit when the moon covered Mars and you know Mars
does have a pretty substantial atmosphere more than people think but
it's still very thin and um it wouldn't sustain much other than the biggest dust
storm you could ever find uh which you know sometimes you'll be looking at Mars
and you go why can't I see anything and it's because the winds on there are so
bad that these giant like uh habo I guess you would call it or or uh
monsoonal you know in Arizona they get these things they're red dust clouds they just come in and they're deadly oh
yeah I've tried to drive through some before and very diffic they tell you to stop you know plus it's bad for your
lungs you don't want to breath that right here's another shot of Mars I did this was through the 60 and it was one
of the best views I ever had of Mars that 60 inch is for the planets and
planetary nebulas this again was from Wilson that was our
night oh wow you remember we looked that was yeah that was unbelievable night
that was just like we were seeing it probably better in the this was from Mount Pinos with my 28
inch and um I can tell you something about this one the the red spot there is
a giant cyclone and and those other clouds are moving in a Direction
uh I think they're opposite directions but when that red spot hits those clouds
those clouds the vorticy and the power of that storm they just get pushed right around it like like it just like passing
it by you know like you're driving a on the freeway and a car goes by that storm
is so powerful to do that to that air mass yeah you you couldn't imagine being
in that thing but and um you know the cool thing about
Jupiter is is if it was able to get more of the mass that the sun if the sun
didn't gobble up you know if it left just a little bit less the Jupiter could
have been a star it basically has the same you know
basic composition and elements as a star but unfortunately it didn't get fed
enough uh material to cause the fision to have gravity collapse on itself
but I mean I would say it's you know similar to a a dwarf like a red dwarf or
but it's not hot at all it is hot actually right it's pretty hot in there
pretty hot uh this again you know Jupiter and Saturn has an
atmosphere and uh they're they're like monitoring that constantly but something's going on on both you know
they're changing constantly that hexagon storm on Saturday that is so that is
weird man and then so when I was at Mount Pinos when I did that Jupiter shot
we were having a major shootout between all the telescopes and I had a little
trick up my sleeve I had an off aperture mask so I put it on and I brought the
bino viewers out so it was like a 10 inch F15 or something right
and put that mask on it got so sharp and those clouds I've never seen those
clouds the bottom section of the the globe was a green like a pale green
yellow like an ochre in color and then the storms were like a a gray white you
know and they and they were on the bottom and they looked like clouds this
was uh actually our view from our live broadcast on the great conjunction this
was my sketch that I made from that video clip of course I just used the
video for position I had to repaint everything but you know this is a
sketch very nice spectacular to see those two planets in when ipce feel to view did
you see Venus and the moon the other day uh no yes they were like right next
to each other and I I heard in Europe that they were almost was touching it went behind that's cool I I always
wanted to see that um for real you know like the one Russian flag has the the
Crescent Moon with a star I think that's what they're emanating and then this was the Saturn
View beautiful there's a hint of those white clouds but in the eyepiece it was hard
to draw that because I could it was gone you know I I was like in in awe this is
uh my latest sketch that I've finally been able to get it good enough to show it's not done yet it's never done
they're never done they're never done this is Saturn
Opposition from this year so that was in August uh I think on
the 28th it's a great night um I just looked at
Saturn in the hexagon you can see there's a little uh and you know I used
a technique on this that I learned in art school it's just the lighting the way you make stuff pop like that front
ring so I had to just draw this ever so faint it took like 500 tries to make it
blend seamless and be nice and straight because it's freehand you know where the iPad I can
use procreate and if you draw a straight line and keep your finger touched it snaps into a perfectly straight line or
if any curve or r I you do boom it's but it's so easy I get much more pleasure
doing this freehand because it's so much harder sure I'm pretty proud of it I
like it it's a good view yeah there's another version so when I
do these I do mockups I may have 20 30 40 different versions of different
things I apply or or shading and then I'll save them and I I don't like it or I'll dump it then then I keep going back
and forth it's it's pretty bad I mean I'm never
satisfied I just want I want these perfect separate you between the people
that uh draw for fun and and uh you know a real artist so you know if we're gonna
do this or do anything you do it you know how to do it we we knock it out of the park because a lot a lot of stuff
I'm I'm enriching you know the kids and and they're blown away and it's just the
hobby just brings people together and um you know it just the kids need more
nowadays they need more stuff like this like astronomy and you know getting out
there and experiencing things you know that that are like really happening like
right now you know and not on a screen but I mean it's all good everything I've
been on a screen a lot more than I thought I ever would be I think this was neowise you know you know um so with our
atmosphere our atmosphere has protected us for a lot from a lot of things from I
mean so much you know every day those meteorites you see if they
didn't burn up that would be like someone shooting you it would just go right through your body and then you
just fall down it would be a pinhole but it would you know yeah we it it
definitely uh protects Us in so many ways and we just take it for granted you know just we wake up the morning with
our alarm clocks you know and and we're racing to get our coffee and you know
you go start up the vehicle and you know you're thinking about a zillion things about work or things you got to do for
the your home family all those things you know and you got to do those things you do you do okay but you gotta be
responsible you can take two seconds and take a deep breath of air and think
about about how amazing it is that you're alive and
you're experiencing experiencing this and just just for a moment you know just
understand that all things are possible you know so uh is it not amazing to see
a Ryan coming up it's amazing and just remember some of the things that you
understand as an astronomer you know we are we're flying on this planet we are
uh it it's a miracle that we're even here you know so uh and that doesn't
take very long at all to kind of let that sink in and um and then you can go
that's what I've been doing and worry about your problems you know I I was at the store and I see this poor poor
elderly lady fighting with the cart and I it's like let me get this for you yeah
and and then I help some people get their material in you know I I've been blessed with this physique I work at it
but you know what I I like to help people when they're struggling with with lifting stuff and I accidentally smashed
up the guy's drywall the corners because I pushed a little too hard I didn't take
him off a sheet at a time I just pushed like a stack of six sheets up and in off
the dolly which was not smart because I could have blown something out but um I
got it in quick so that was good yeah um this one was um again uh I want to say
thank you because that refractor it's so sharp that when I look
at the sun I see the falula detail it's amazing yeah that was the um total
eclipse the last one we were supposed to have remember yeah but it was only partial here and it was cloudy and I
came out and I'm like I'm like please please let it clear don't do this to me
now I'm like and then I go inside I go the eclipse the eclipse I call my kids
and my wife and they come out and it's clear and I'm like it was just Marine
layer it burned off but um you know these sunspots are bigger than the earth
uh you can actually see the mountains on the moon and uh yeah that that instrument is
a Precision instrument and you know I love using it for the lunar the detail I
wonder what Richard's shooting with I didn't get that is he using a refractor or a
reflector Richard re Richard Rees is using a Celestron Schmid Crain wow yeah
well that's the advantage of being able to use that um program Sky stacker
because you know like you said you're dumping out the bad and you know
in what is it in 30 frames per second you get with video so that's 30 pictures and out
of those 30 you have Micro seeing moments of perfect seeing where
everything's dead still you stop time for that hundredth of a second so that's what I think he does because those
pictures are like the lro they're so sharp for a Schmid cassegrain that's
absolutely amazing um this is AEL 36 a weird
planetary kind of bipolar but um it took a good the good filter a
DGM filter and and a lot of power and a great KN I did that one for cloudy nights of
course we've seen this I've been working on it since because I'm never satisfied uh I have several versions
here so I'm going to just run them through you know stars have atmospheres when they burn all the
critical elements they run out of hydrogen and all the what is it else
helium there's a couple but when it converts down to Cobalt you better
run because that's when it's going to blow I was looking at Beetle Juice and seeing I'm like thinking to myself what
if that blows up and then because they said it' be like brighter than the moon
right maybe I don't know you know and it might like this one it's the it's a
little more colored version and then this is the the later one I did I toned down some of the Stars
you know I try to the stars and color like what I'm seeing because I do see color in my scope like I can see color
in the triffid uh color in the dumbbell you know the swan most of the
bigger nebulas amazing colors in Orion the crab had some great views of
the crab this one was using some malen cam uh you know data I call it data it's
just I added what I saw from the screen scen uh you you know you record that and
then you look at that and I can put it in the side by side mode on my procreate so I literally have on the same screen
my drawing and then the photograph and I can extract out and you know you want to
be clear about that when you're doing that because it's misleading to say oh
this is what I saw on my telescope and you know with light pollution in the
atmosphere it it takes away from a lot of that you know light those photons
have been traveling for eons like I think how long ago this is like 1 1600
Lighty years or how many years right so yes how many uh so it was recorded by
the Chinese they saw the Supernova in it was daytime star I think
it's 1054 1054 so how many years did that light travel before it reached us
yeah yeah I'll find out and it and it's changing you know oh and like it's
Conant in 10 years there's a guy who did a 10-year time lapse wow okay and you
can see the this Center spinning and you can see the cloud expanding and this is only 10
years you know I mean a Monumental image you know but but I wonder how big that
star was if it was as big as Beetlejuice or bigger so so I want to go into the
story about the eclipse so I've been you know I'm lost without this Global start
party because I'm not current cool look yeah so so the Crab Nebula just I'm just
I had to walk my dog and get some some sunshine and and some Cloud views and
yes I go out and all of a sudden I'm looking at the this is another thing folks um great trick if you ever want to
verify the eclipse you just look at the Shadows coming out of the trees and they
look like Crescent moons but what that really is it's a crescent sun because the Moon is in front of it so when I saw
that I started to like hyperventilate I'm all dude we got to go home now I my
dog he's already ready to go on this huge ro we're going back and I had to drag him back he was pissed but um so
this is what I first I did I stopped there and I'm trying to look at the sun which don't do this
it's not smart I mean you can look at it you know like a welding torch it's
similar but if you look at it just a split second too long or under magnification magnification will burn
your eye it'll it'll damage your cornea and probably fry your retina but um even
naked eye it's not smart don't do it I had sunglasses on I squinted but I'm dumb enough to stare at the sun I go is
it an eclipse and it's like I could barely detect there were some clouds in that and I had a weird view I was like
wow that's cool but I can't quite see it let me see so I put my hand up with my
camera obscura and um lo and behold I go I confirmed it so you can make a pinhole
camera piece of paper just to do it you know you can also take your telescope a
little refractor 60 M millimeter and uh shoot the diagonal onto a piece of paper
you know in the shade try to put it a shade over it and then you can see some beautiful detail sunspots just uh a
focal reflected on the paper now this one I colored just to give you an idea of the real view now
this was actually done with only uh cell phone and then some of the
details I added I used the 80 millimeter to get the sunspots that was with a
um Bader the Bader filter Astro solar it's a myar like a plastic silver it
gives you a bluish tint I just went back and recolored it this would be what you would see like back in the day when you
got a full aperture glass solar filter from Thousand Oaks and you know the
glass gives you a natural yellow orange Hue that was a nice cast that it gave
but um I think the biter has a little better contrast but this was de biter
now the crows so I got the crows flying in front of my thing we have crows here
I have pictures of them circling and just flying around they every night and every morning they go from one end of
the valley to the other and I found out where they go there's a little shopping
center I will say this don't park your car there at night because I mean you'll
have a primered car just white you'll have to get it painted again so this is
cool I have fun with this you know um I have I just was able that's cool this is
yeah photograph or a painting uh it's a combo it's a combo but mostly it's it's
using cell phone uh my cell phone you know this new Samsung cell phone is
amazing it's a 200 megapixel this isn't this part of it wasn't even done with the telescope I just put my filter over
the cell phone camera so if you have those glasses you could put those glasses over your cell phone and take
some amazing oh yeah and uh and then you use I use um photo shop Express it's
free and it has a bunch of levels and sharpness contrast Clarity and all these
features that you just you know play with the toggle and and you know that's how I do the Renditions when I clean
them up I mean it's amazing what I can do with that Here's the final result combined so
I was seeing these clouds this is when I'm squinting at it like a very not smart person would do
and um and then when I when I uh zoomed in on my phone with that filter I could
really see it it I got some really amazing sunspots they were actually showing detail that was with an 80
millimeter my little 80 millimeter trusty Orion I set that up because it takes a second but I missed the eclipse
I wanted to get that thing in in totality when it's maximum but pretty cool right different
view you never see clouds that's squinted view right there so I I just
you know I was gifted to to be able to create this and share it I I don't know for me I'm like I love this this is like
for me a postcard or something to heaven but um and I saw the annular and
a friend of mine Lisa Schwarz you know Lisa she works with the college more
Park College she's very yeah she's really uh into Outreach and and she
worked at Griffith but they did a picture of the annular eclips in her
hand the total one where it's a ring the red ring it was such a cool picture to see
she's holding her hand out like this and the and the eclipse is on it this was my Halloween one I would I really love
Halloween because I'm an artist and I wanted to you know do something special this was my gift I got you know I added
the bats those were my wife's Halloween bats they stuck on the window I just took some pictures of them and then I I
put them in and um the moon and the clouds and it makes like a skull face
right you see it yeah the paradia the skull somebody told me that but I saw it
and I was like this is so cool once once you see it you can't unsee it yeah and Adrian would love this and and like um
one of Ray said that Ben you can't stop Adrian and he's right because you know
what just because it's cloudy it doesn't mean I mean if it's clouded out you know
it's a marine layer there's no point but if you see broken clouds it's a it's one of the greatest opportunity to see the
moon in the clouds is something that spiritual that's that's true and there's
so many different ways it looks you just I've been blown away every time I see a
different one so this is all of us we do pumpkins I I did with my granddaughter
that's her pumpkin of course Mama helped her with it uh and then Patrick my son
in-law the father that's his on the left and Sandy always makes a happy one you
know because she's a happy mom and happy with the baby and we're all carving of
course I was working on a picture and they're yelling at me and I go okay okay I'm coming and I come down and you know
which one's mine uh it's the the scary one but
anyway so I I'm trying to I always try to do it I used to be the pumpkin carving champion of SEI Valley uh like
for years in a row and then we stopped doing it but um this was a cool one this was freehand sketch from you know
looking at a picture of course but on a pumpkin that's hard to do and then I'm
so meticulous about it has to two hours with the pumpkin my wife was yelling at me get out here now so we go outside I
light it we take the picture this was a sketch from the picture and then um we
got hit with the worst Santa anic wind so when morning came we all went out they were going to work and I was saying
goodbye to them and every pumpkin was shriveled up because we cut a lot out of
them and the heads was so dry they just were shrunken in yeah so mine the lips
were closed it looked like a 90y old Gremlin guy my poor pumpkin I didn't even barely
get to show it on Halloween I had to rebuild it with toothpicks and it's still fried but so this was the
Halloween Moon Rising through the palm palm trees out front and then I put my
scary face on it and and the stars for a special
Halloween Moon Rising for the global star
party I know it's gone but I really love Halloween because it's fun for me and I
wanted to do some more gags you know I I I was trying to ask the wife what I could dress as uh again here's this was
last year's I we had so fun everybody was gone the kids and the wife goes come on let's carve the pumpkins it was like
we were two little kids again yeah together and and it was magical moment
it was special and then we lit them up she gave me the eyes she had these plastic eyes and I added them and so
yeah that's scary pumpkin man that is a scary pumpkin that's true that one was
totally done from my head you know jeez this was my costume I asked her
what do you think um commander schwarzkoff of the USS New Horizons what
what do you that's stupid okay I go how
about Commander sprock I want to be a
Vulcan yeah so I just went as a rock star there you go I had my wig on and
fake tto you know some guys came up to me goes
dude we thought you were like some girl bodybuilder you're hot I'm like dude
please don't tell me that I don't want to hear that I think they were talking about
let's get back to the yeah sorry well I was that's the finish of the Halloween we're back so this is myy I've been
doing I have many versions of Orion I'm infatuated with Orion
um I couldn't imagine looking at William herel this is a drawing right this is a
sketch uh this this here this is years this is years of this is one version I
don't know which one I'm gonna enter yet because I just I'm too hard on myself I
but maybe I can get an idea if they want to chat it say hey this one looks good
what do you think and then then I'll make a choice I'm gonna enter the uh cloudy nights contest I want start the
year by winning and finish the Year by winning and Ryan's a winner and it's just coming up at night now and and the
running man's in there and Orion and I think uh NGC 1999 you can Party
Like It's 1999 with NGC that's a great one this is
another version yeah that's not my contest one this is
another one it could be this was uh earlier uh Ren condition of that one
that's how far it developed from this the first one you said you
liked this is uh the Green version like the ring you know the your eye typically
sees a bluish green cast um you know in the 28 you do see color for sure and on
good nights with this even a a small refractor you can see color in Orion
pink and green this is my my winning one I think this is the one I like the
best um it's subtle I've got a nice color in there you know it that's as
much color as you're going to see on on your best night from Pinos with like the 28 and the 32 I'm also blessed to be
able to use a 32inch telescope which is super fast F3
Lockwood then there's this version more of a Stark
and and the trap Stars nice look at that the Trap stars are really the Trap Stars
so I stayed up that night I told you and we were looking at with that with a good
um oxygen filter you know you could use do do you make those oxygen filters as
well SC we have we have nebular filters we have do the same but the ones with
the more of the darker you know like some of the oxygen ones they put a darker cast They Don't transmit as much
light that's true because they're extremely narrow band that's when you use LINE filters you know so
when and that they only allow a certain wavelength of light through right so it it knocks out all the solar right so
this was cool so I want to say I'm looking at Aion and that's where this this concept was derived from is the
clouds I was seeing inside the head head like this it's illuminated I call it a head it's like an
eagle it just reminds me of an eagle I got the spikes and the stars from the
spider the Astros system spider the trapezium I was looking at later and and
that's what I sketch from to to get the perfect you know spread on them from The
Real McCoy and then look at the the cloud how it's drizzling down on and
that you know that's cold gas that's just in the hot you know light and um is
that the emission from those stars is like pushing that those clouds away and it's heavier because it's cold and it's
just like dry ice it's just drizzling down like that and um so with that with
those filters those uh they add a lot of contrast to the dust cloud the dark
filamentary stuff that's what this was trying to portray and I'll tell you something
every line I put on there I'd erase because I didn't like the way it looked I mean I had a general idea in outline
but a lot of that's ad live later so it'll help to go to one of mro's
pictures and look at it which I'm going to show you um but you see there I you
don't usually see that kind of detail in the in the wing or the arm because with
the daylight at the daylight the oxygen filter I don't know what it is we even
looked at the Blue Snowball at 7 o'clock in the morning it was Daylight because I kept my go-to on now
this another version of that this one I like because um I brought it into procreate and I really cleaned it up you
know made it smooth and I changed the orientation of it and kind of softened
it darkened it down a little because in the eyepiece this is more reminiscent of what you're going to
see you know maybe a little brighter but I tone them down because I want to do
some that look like the real thing so you try to you know you don't astrop
photography makes it a lot brighter you don't see that kind of detail that's a same picture different
orientation trapezium look yeah so those
macro clouds were above the Trap stars and and around it that's what he was referring to William hersel although he
was using a 40 foot telescope in pristine Skies but really good
view this was merco shot from Anza bgo of Ayan with a 32
inch and look at how many stars oh there's a lot
and I mean I bet you back in the day that 40 inch scope with that kind of seeing and no light pollution it must
have been been pretty close to that sure
that is an amazing shot right look at that Majestic
cloud and um wow yeah we're blessed man that's one
of the best nebulas out there another just a little different enhancement
technique but isn't that amazing northern and southern hemisphere
observers yeah you know what was weird when I was in uh South America I was looking at Aion in
the North and the Moon too and this was uh what I tried to draw from what I was
seeing so again with Jupiter and Saturn in in the Twilight moments before you
know Dawn and DUS is when you get those really great moments of stabilization
good seeeing and an extremely nice color now this I noticed the little stars the
bottom star the F star was orange more orange I didn't finish uh this one all
the way because I was working on other ones and the other ones were bluish white but the little one on the bottom
had more of a reddish Hue you could see that and in the daylight uh this is with
a I think a six ethos with a 28 at 43 so I was probably up there you know
probably 5600 and the image scales amazing amazing but um I've never seen it
separated like that at night again it's that contrast thing so it's a great time
to try to see stuff I remember you told me a story that you were talking to Jack Newton when you were at meet and and he
said hey Scott how are you he goes guess what I'm looking at what the stars in
the Big Dipper I'm like what that's
crazy but anyway that was pretty impressive impressive it I wanted to try it but I used the go-to because I stayed
up all night my go-to was still on so that's the beauty of staying up all night yeah this is um my progression on
m33 which is out right now great Galaxy for all of you triangulum it's probably
starting to go away quicker but um it's still there and you know with probably a
3-in telescope you could see it in dark enough Sky it's quite a nice um Galaxy
that's in our local group too right smaller though right than the Milky it's an amazing Galaxy very low
surface brightness this was a great night again we had this is my
M8 one I always get these mixed up m81 bodess is that right or is the other way
around screwed it up again m81 now 82 is the
cigar right you know 81 and 82 they're they're
connected I'll get that this is one rendering one version that I did it's pretty amazing
Galaxy same thing discovered by Johan ERT bod on December 31st
1774 you know with this galaxy galaxy visually it it doesn't
reveal like you would think I mean it's actually more spectacular than the other
one 81 but um it just 81 is so unique
and and the plasma coming out of the core it just has a very unique Starburst
Galaxy uh is what it is and the quality of it it's a beauty one of the showpiece
and so this I was able to finally get one of the views that on certain
nights everything aligns like you're seeing oh sure
temperature and when when it snaps in it it's like the Astron magic just settled
over the parking lot and con every telescope on the field is is
amazing and um you're seeing a lot more of the the spiral separation usually
it's a lot more opaque and just soft you know because it takes very good Optics
uh extreme aperture and killer eye pieces and then conditions you need
conditions you know that are GNA give you that once in a lifetime view that may have been one of the best views I've
ever had of of those two objects and a photograph you should see
what it does it's amazing so here was the the combination of the two um together so this is what you can
see with a nice wide field view yeah and uh if you do it
with um with a Astro camera you'll probably have to Mosaic it to get both
in the same field of view unless you have a huge chip and then it doesn't matter but um that's what's nice about
drawing too it it really teaches you how to uh use your peripheral vision and
then um you know you dark adapt and you you confirm that indeed you did see that
detail so you can add it in there yeah and and a lot of times it might not be
exactly what you saw but you try to get it close and you know I had one that I was
working on I want to tell you I had cracked The Da Vinci Code this might have been one of my
greatest um and I deleted it I think it was like eight hours I was
gonna I was gonna save it I told myself you should save this one real soon
because you know what happens and right after I thought that
it happened what happened it kicked me off oh and you know what I
say John practice makes perfect that's okay then I don't get mad
it's just practice you have to practice Yeah and uh I'm getting close to the end
I hope I didn't go too long I missed this you know I really enjoyed um doing
this for everyone and and sharing my stuff it I don't know if I couldn't share it
it wouldn't even be worth doing really you know that's what it makes makes it
all worthwhile that's what I want to do is just try to brighten up you know and um think about others too you know and
help out and put a smile on someone's face make them laugh make them enjoy you
know and or bring them back to the realization of you know look at this gift I've got
this little little buddy it's like a child almost and he doesn't bark and stuff and he loves
astronomy he always goes with me I've been putting him in my moonshots because
he's always there he doesn't care he just wants to hang out sure you
know like kind of like I I like hanging out when I'm doing astronomy and it's just a good companionship and um under
the stars together right but anyway thank you so much I really
appreciate thank you thanks and
U I appreciate it yeah thank you so much take care my background is atmosphere
it's kind of a meld of the horse head and a planet an imaginary place where
they have a nebula similar to ours on their Planet yeah they're looking out
and wondering just just like us y you know and
uh nice nice couple of messages here uh
um John rice saying thank you for returning with the GSP I really appreciate your commitment to amateur
astronomy en enrichment and Outreach uh through this digital medium thank you
John for tuning in um thanks R and uh
um yeah so it's uh it's great audience and uh great presenters and and there's
our little dog there that's Bosco he's been nipping at my leg the
whole time he wanted to say hi that's right okay so that that wraps it up uh
thank you so much and um we are going to uh uh end up with with um our outros for
the program uh we'll be back next Tuesday with the 136th Global star party
so tune in and we'll be uh we'll have a great program uh lined up for you
so thank you everybody and uh keep looking up you know get out there
looking up that's right the planets are are perfect right now Jupiter and Venus are there and Orion is ready it's just
it's just getting up early enough to where you can get it done early and take a look and each night you can see it it
appears different depending on your scene you know yeah our Ever Changing solar system so and it's beautiful I
can't tell you guys how amazing that is to look at all right so take care and we will
yep we'll see you next week take care
come one come all to the Southern Cross astronomical society's 2024 winter Star
Party celebrating 40 Years of stargazing happening from February 5th through the
11th 2024 on Scout key in the beautiful Florida Keys get away from the cold and
adjust your latitude underneath the pristine Skies of Southern Florida with breathtaking views of Eda Karina the
jewelbox the Southern Cross Centaurus a and of course the Magnificent Omega
centuri tickets will go on sale onon or about October 1 2023 sc.org see you
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there are your eclipse glasses safe for looking at the sun let's check to see if your eclipse glasses can handle the heat
or if they need to stay inside first off never check your
eclipse glasses with the sun that's a good way to injure your eyes take your eclipse glasses and find a bright light
like a lamp or a flashlight hold your Clips glasses up to the light and look through them the light will appear
extremely dim or not appear at all when looking through the glasses for example you should only be able to see the
filament of a light bulb but not the glow surrounding the bulb also if your eclipse glasses have any marks or
scratches on them don't use them if you have older eclipse glasses from a previous Eclipse give them the check to
make sure they haven't been damaged or scratched all safe eclipse glasses will meet the iso 12312 D2 standard it's best
to store eclipse glasses in a safe place where they won't become scratched or punctured remember never look at the sun
without eclipse glasses or a solar filter be safe and happy Sun viewing everyone
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