Global Star Party 169

Transcript:

okay great okay we are starting to stream
live and if you guys are here let me start the chat here
um if you're starting to tune in right now and you're seeing this screen if
you've never seen this iconic image this is done by uh the Voyager spacecraft and
right above I'll I'll try to move a cursor there but right
above the U of pale blue dot is a faint pale blue dot and that is of course uh
the earth from an incredible distance away uh where it appears to be just as a
pixel and if you've never become acquainted with the pale blue dot
um today's an auspicious day for doing that because today is Earth Day and uh
so um uh it uh you know a lot of people think of Earth Day as a kind of a day of
u uh you know maybe of protests or you
know activism to protect mother earth but I also think of it as a day to
celebrate celebrate our planet and um uh so it's um I think it's a a great time
we've got John Ray tuned in from YouTube here in New Hampshire and he says he's
happy to be here so um so let's go ahead and get started here
[Music]
this video has no um audio in it but I thought it was
an incredible video this is done by NASA and uh it is uh one of the ways this is
a vertical gravity gradient and so this is I guess gravity uh strengths um
across our planet which I think is very cool
jeff Weise is calling this happy pale blue dot day thank you Carl
Sean and Paul Burgart watching on YouTube
howdy what an amazing planet this is
i think that's it what we've got Scott yeah so um anyhow uh today we have um we
I think we may have some limited um uh participation we're all getting ready
for various things including Starmis which will be uh the end of this uh
month um and uh we are getting ready for uh also a celebration of Astronomy Day
which is the the springtime of astronomy day which is going to be on May 3rd and so we're going to be live from the David
Dunlap Observatory with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada which is going to be a
lot of fun and uh uh a lot of uh people will be lined up uh to speak for that uh
event uh including David Levy that you see here so uh David um let's bring you
on are you still with us here yes I am let's see let me shut off your Yeah your
video shut okay your video hi
he's transforming behind this behind the scenes he's going to appear this out here
uh Scotty you've disabled me i guess I did something i disabled you oh no okay
um how about if you Oh here we go has to
start your video how's that yeah there we are okay there you go okay
thank you is it Is it my turn now try to behave yeah so anyhow this is really a
very pleasant It's been a while since we've had a global scar party yes and what a theme pale blue dot the pale blue
dot and uh I you know I just loved uh
Cosmos when the original Cosmos was on with Carl Sean but I think the best line in the
entire 13p part epis series was when he talked about the pale
blue dot which was the picture taken from Voyager after it went beyond the
solar system and looked back to get a picture of the inner planets and all it
got from the earth was a pale blue dot at which point Carl slows down and he
says everything that has happened in human history the great the great epics of
Horus and um the science being done by uh
Arimedes the legends of Arimedes Aristotle the great
thinkers the entire history of Great Britain the rise of the United States
and we certainly hope that that keeps on happening and
um and other countries all of the people that we have known everything everybody
all the books that have ever been written Shakespeare Mozart Beethoven all of these
people all existed on this one little pale blue dot that
voyage and of all the things that Carl said in that series that was the one
that meant the most to me it really really got to me for my quotation today
I'm going to do a little scene and I can see Scotty has ran out of the room
flailing and everything here well we can
I'm excited we're here for you yeah we're here for you oh we get money
Scotty sorry anyway um in 19 in the uh
middle 1980s Leonard Cohen was working on
his various positions album i think that was his album and he was t in his hotel
room talking with his agent and the record company
producer and he really wanted to put the song Hallelujah on that album and the
record producer said no way not going to do it is so unlike everything else on
the album I don't want it on the album and Leonard said I worked for years on
this song I did this and I did that and I pounded my fist into the carpet and
you're not going to run it i did all this work and the record
guy said "Yeah but is it any good?" At which point everybody in the
room just cracked up and then the record guy said "Okay we'll put it on the album but it'll be on the backs on the flip
side." And I think the rest is history because we we know what that that song has
become Winter Comb's favorite song and the topic of my poem for
today and um the topic is called cosmic variations on a theme by Leonard
Cohen it's time to go outdoors tonight the sky is dark some stars are bright
the Milky Way shines overhead now see a comet rises in the east with end
to strife it brings us peace and calls us to a cosmic
hallelujah hallelu [Music]
well thank you for joining in on that trying to we'll join in thank you and
um I think the idea especially since there was a comet in the eastern sky just couple of weeks ago comet Swan
which I was able to see and uh beautiful little comet i couldn't see
the tail but I love the idea that it ends to strife it brings us peace
and one would think especially with what's happening in the world today when we go out into the night and look up and
we see a comet we get the sense that all it will be well with the world thank you
very much and back to you Scott hey thank you so much okay I like the
singing David it was nice and I like your take on it i like the
cosmic version better yeah okay that's great all right um so
uh as we move on um you know the Astronomical League is a huge part of uh
of the Global Star Party they've been on um uh since very early on they weren't
on the very first u uh programs which I was calling virtual star party back in
those first uh early attempts at learning how to broadcast i'm still learning how to broadcast okay but um it
was um uh you know it was such an honor to have them uh you know agree to be on
our program and to rotate uh some of the movers movers and shakers of the
astronomical league uh Lori Anne Souridge uh joins us on this particular
one she's been on many times uh uh so I I'm I'm really pleased to have Lori join
us um because she she takes the theme seriously uh and she u uh always puts
together a a beautiful interpretation and uh but uh Lori's also a very
enthusiastic uh participant in the astronomical league and has become a
very uh excellent astrophotographer her and uh you know so I got to um meet her
at least once and I think maybe a couple of times now um maybe more than that uh
you know it's when you see people on live programs and then you see them in real person it's kind of like you know
them right so it's like a continuation um and so when we go to places like we
recently were at the Northeast Astronomy Forum uh um you know it's just it just
kind of all smoothed together so um but uh it was wonderful to spend time out in
Texas with you and uh to share uh you know an eclipse sun with you um thinking
of eclipses uh you know some sad news um is that uh Mr eclipse Mr um you know I
guess Dr fred Espanak uh has uh did let all of his friends know that he was in
hospice and um uh so but uh you know he
did share that he did uh he had a fabulous life as far as I know he's
still with us but um and if Fred if you're watching you know from all of us
to you we show you our respect and gratitude and uh you know you you did
participate of course on our program but uh uh I know that you've given countless
talks and lectures and written articles and incredible books and you showed people the way to find uh you know that
fleeting shadow so thank you Fred for for uh giving a lifetime of work to us
and um um uh you know another another thing
that uh of course sad news or and even shocking news was the uh Pope Francis
passing uh right after he you know he gave uh his address for Easter and uh so
that was you know an auspicious uh passing I would say uh uh brother guy uh
uh uh I'm sorry brother guy I always get his last name um a little mispronounced
but I believe consolemano consulmano that's right because it's got olg n o okay um but uh uh we spent time
with him uh uh at the Vatican Observatory for a couple of days and it
was great to have him uh speak on Global Star Party as Well so anyways our
condolences and uh but in the meantime uh the uh you know our our you know long
line of astronomers and uh both amateur and and professionals still continue to
go on we're still on a grand exploration of who we are and where we are and and
what it's all about and uh so I'm going to turn this over to you Lori thank you
thanks for coming on Global Star Party oh thanks for having me again appreciate
it see if we can get a share going here here we go uh I really do enjoy um
stepping up to the themes that uh you all post and I really enjoy trying to
adequately represent the Astronomical League i really am honored and tickled
that uh um I'm can be part of the lineup um I think that the league has got so
much to offer wish I'd learned about it earlier in life feel like I'm making up for a little bit more of it now but um I
am just so honored and privileged to be associated with so many people of like
mind i'm just glad to be here and glad to share and glad to give back in the
the community so um like uh Scott showed in the beginning um uh we've got this little
pale blue dot that is from Voyager 1 looking back on planet
Earth and so I took this theme and I ran with
it um Voyager's mission I did a little bit of research um this uh past 24 hours
um was to really make it past Saturn and as we know it did so it succeeded and in
the planning of course Carl Sean thought it was a really good idea to have it turn back and take a picture of Earth of
us from just past Saturn before it became too small to see so since we have
the theme and the astronomical league his uh of um science and learning I put
together a couple learning points here couldn't resist so this picture was one of about 60 frames taken on Valentine's
Day of 1990 from about four billion miles away and it's it was at about 32°
above the ecliptic plane and it was only.12 pixel in
size and it's actually in a scattering of light ray because of the image being
so close to the sun at the time so this was one of the final photo uh
assignments that Voyager was given and then I want to give uh part of
the quote from Carl Sean from his book Pale Blue Dot from
1994 look again at that dot that's here that's home that's us on it you have you
on it everyone you love everyone you know everyone you ever heard of every
human being who ever was lived out their lives the aggregate of our joy and
suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic
doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and
destroyer of civilization every king and peasant every young couple in love every mother
and father hopeful child inventor and explorer every teacher of morals every
corrupt politician every superstar every supreme leader every saint and sinner in
the history of our species lived there on a moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam
our posturings our imagined self-importance the delusion that we
have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of
pale light it has been said that astronomy is humbling a characterbuilding
experience there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human
conceits than this distance image of our tiny world to me it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish
the pale blue dot the only home we've ever
known thank you Carl Sean for that wherever you are
and thank you Lori for reading it to us that was beautiful thank you i I was totally inspired and
touched and so um what follows is uh definitely a take on that so thank
you to me astronomy is the nexus of science and human emotion in
context and intertwined is human history and yes politics and politics is
basically our relationships how we get along with people so a little bit of
history here so circa 3000 before the common era we had
Stonehenge and world megaliths which all had to do with our
beginning understanding of seasonal importance marking human uh needs for
planting crops and understanding the heavens we have solar and lunar
alignments and solstesses marked in these megaliths but the construction of these
required community and cooperation early cultures look to the
night sky commemorating cultural stories and star patterns and those stories have gotten
passed down through generations surviving the original storytellers themselves these stories were intended
to outlast them and in fact I just want to point out here that the Astronomical League has a
wonderful program uh called the alternate constellation observing program one that I'm in the midst of and
hope to finish this year and it goes into great depth of that i found it quite enlightening
fast forward a couple millennia and you have around 350 before common era
Aristotle who figured out that the earth was the center of the universe
and in 270 before common era Aris Starkis felt that the sun was the uh
center of the universe now during all of this getting to the intertwining of
human history and politics world events um couple things of note we had our
first light pollution around 289 before common era in the form of our first
lighthouse which was on the Nile so you can't build a lighthouse unless
you're looking to in community try and save ships and people and products from
collapsing against the shores so certainly very important also you had
Alexander the Conqueror expanding his empire so if you can imagine before the
time of internet and fast communications having the hordes from
Alexander the Conqueror's uh armies coming upon your villages and your homes
out of surprise and have those lands be taken over it uh really expanded quite a
bit across the uh middle of um the east very very troubling times
fast forward a bit and uh I discovered in in putting these points together that
this would really be the makings of quite a dissertation sometime but I'll keep this short um in the early 1500s
you had Capernicus who figured out that the Earth spins on its axis daily and
the sun is the center of the universe not the Earth
then you get to the 1600s and you have Kepler who figured out that God created
the world with perfect numbers and with that knowledge he came up with the
elliptical planetary orbits that we understand today he also believed that
Mars was led by angelic chariots world events happening during
these times you had the Protestant Catholic wars between nations you had
new world explorations and conquests and then you had in
1633 Galileo recanting the belief in the capertic theory so if you can imagine
again no global communications these groups of people who felt very strongly about their
ideologies and religions coming together and clashing in pretty horrific ways and
the Europeans coming to the new world and clashing with the first nations in
very horrific ways very very apocalyptic for the folks who
went through that and still astronomy and the expansion of our human knowledge
continued fast forward to 1900s you've got Henrietta Swan
Levit who found 2400 variable stars from four Novi who is uh known for the sephid
v variables and created the Harvard standard for photographic measurements
but because she was female she could not vote and she was also very limited in
her allowed use of her intellect and in the recognition she received even though
she was considered one of the brightest minds at the observatory many many works in the field
of astronomy were built upon what she discovered and put forth as building
blocks world events going on while these things were taking place in Henrietta Lever's
life were the women's suffrage movement and of course World War I we know that
uh World War I also followed had following it the great um pandemic flu
and between the world war and the flu so many people died and it was a pretty
horrific time but still astronomy and human discovery continued on
fast forward to Carl Sean's Cosmos and his uh documentation
basically of humanity's journey of exploration he talks about Voyager 1 and two in this
1980 book and TV series encapsulating humankind on a gold long playing record
with a 1 billionyear life exper
expectancy sorry about that and just think it's only been a few years since
uh we've been able to find record players in stores anymore and there's one on a
spaceship we also had in his time of his writing of this book the postworld war
II cold war era and in cosmos he takes a lot of time to tell us about or warning
us about the implications of vast devastation and at the same time
recognizes that Voyager's technology is built upon the knowledge of these same
intercontinental ballistic missiles that could take us all out his book Compos
even contains graphs that shows the uh increase of the world population and
what the potential devastation of the population could be from these uh
nuclear missile heads he philosophically questions the folly of our human ego on our tiny dot
of dust and rock so that's pretty dire of course um I ran
into this meme on Facebook today couldn't resist to share it here and that's a picture of Spock from the Star
Trek original series and he says in the meme "To destroy your home planet's
ecosystem for imaginary wealth is highly illogical." So happy birthday or happy Earth Day um
on that one as astronomy is the nexus of science
and human emotion and context fast forward to today and humankind humankind still has biases ego
and aspirations for conquering still looks to divide over
differences but still looks up and marvels at the sky and still looks to
the good in others and to do good it's all in the choices we make as
individuals and collectively on our pale blue
dot just a couple benefits to society from space exploration when I went to
find some of this stuff I ran into this whole section on the NASA website that I
hope stays there for a long time it covers the yearly benefits from 1976 to
2005 um it talks about so many benefits to society beyond just getting us to
space and exploring in it nasa employs people in all 50 states is a half of 1%
of our budget with a $76 billion output it's provided technology that
allows for home health monitoring wearable devices few of us have those
nutritional supplements radar for detecting heartbeats under wreckage wow
think about those earthquakes and trying to find survivors ambulance sterilizing fog
fogger if you think about uh the COVID and and what they had to do there and
how beneficial that was surgical endoscopes enhanced video medical
devices for all kinds of purposes but in particular there are people who are very
UV sensitive and they have UV blocking suits and of course lithium car
batteries for electric cars well that's just a couple of the
highlights there are thousands of them on those spin-offs and when people say
"Well why put the money to space exploration when we can solve world hunger?" Space exploration in part is
helping to solve world hunger i have to say amen to that one i was
thinking about that on that uh page remember the last global star party we
had we had yet someone else kind of challenge the spending of money on space
exploration and what good does it do and there may be some watching who feel that
way i believe it's a growing sentiment and uh any of the sciences I guess this
this nails it home that any of the sciences including space exploration and
astronomy are able to help us live we'll say quote unquote a better life discover
things that help us as humans on our home world and that should not be taken
for granted nor uh dismissed because of a selfish world
view that we need to focus on something else or you know just so I I really love this
slide thank you i kept it really really high level i could uh do a whole presentation
on this sometime there's also depending upon the missions um by mission there's
uh different spin-offs for ways in which it's benefited um humanity so for
example the international space station alone has its own set of spin-offs that are very helpful including um growing
organs for human transplant very nice yeah I'll I'll probably hit
you up for those uh URLs um later on and I'm sure some of the uh listeners and
viewers will probably would be interested in some of those as well so uh very good work uh thank you for
sharing that with us yes and if folks uh watching the replay just simply pause
the video and uh take a look at the um the uh URL here it's uh you can search
it on nasa.gov but specifically it's spin-off.nasa.gov
and there's a whole um section there and NASA's got uh lots of ways that you can
find that it's a pretty good search engine there but at risk at this moment um is
the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that uh as I understand has been on time
and within budget set for a May 2027 deployment
and uh we know that um James Webb was very delayed and for good reasons and
we've had a lot of success with that up there um so it's a good thing that one did launch but right now um there is
some talk about some pretty deep cuts at NASA and that would be a great loss
because the uh Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named for NASA's first
chief astronomer who was considered the mother of the Hubble
telescope and this will have a field of view at least 100 times larger than
Hubble's potentially measuring light from billions of galaxies in its lifetime and
able to block starlight to see directly the exoplanets that may be around it and
planet forming discs and perform a complete statistical census of planetary
systems in our galaxy and also settle settle some essential questions we have
about dark energy exoplanets and infrared astroph
physics um so I I don't want to get political but if anybody's in the mood to write letters to try and save funding
um there's a a good one there switching gears I would be remiss if I
didn't mention that throughout the year uh the Astronomical League in
conjunction with NASA is doing a 35th anniversary of the Hubble telescope
observing challenge i've been participating in this i've got January
February March and April done um you don't even need to be a member of the
Astronomical League although I could do a whole another talk on all the benefits of being a
member and you can earn a certificate and you can also earn a certificate and
pin if you participated in all 12 months there's northern hemisphere objects
there's southern hemisphere objects they're all on the NASA website and the
Astronomical League points to the objects of the month right there on the the page but the fun part really is
you're asked to observe and one of the objects for if you're going for gold and
to either draw or photograph that particular object but then compare yours
to Hubble's and draw a box around what part of yours is that field of view in
the Hubble picture that you see and that to me has been sort of a a microcosm in
my experience on the pale blue dot sort of like okay here's here's what Hubble
saw here's what I saw look how much Hubble could see with its
technology also from the league Scott mentioned at the top of the hour that we
have Astronomy Day coming up May 3rd the second one for the year in the fall is September
27th and Astronomy Day is been a powerful movement dedicated to making
astronomy accessible to everyone and to all so in an era where technology often
distances from the natural world this event serves as a bridge reconnecting
people with the night sky and limit and the limitless possibilities it holds um
I've been a part of uh organizing and putting on many astronomy days two of
them I've put in for astronomy day awards that the league offers and received awards for those organizations
each time it is a fantastic opportunity to really watch people's eyes light up
and get interested in astronomy and have a chance to ask questions and really be
a part of um the enjoyment that we have with astronomy there's also the Astracon 2025
which is only just a little more than two months away um this is Bortal One
Skies bryce Canyon National Park is where it's at i think there's only a few
room reservations that are left every uh astronomical convention that I've been
to has had wonderful workshops star parties guest speakers awards but most
of all I have met so many friends that continue um to be friends and in great
relationships even when it's not Astro and I am so so grateful for all those
acquaintances and friendships and checking in with them and how they're doing seeing them in different places
all of that is just such a wonderful wonderful experience and then you you run into them at different places like
Winter Star Party and and Ne all over the place mhm i'll just mention too that
uh if you're looking for a a good road trip um the uh national park has a north
rim star party that starts a few days before that and in my own travel
planning I've learned that Bryce is part of the big five in Utah make a larger
road trip of it and uh see several of the um national parks in a relatively
short distance and I'll stop there and ask if there's any questions that folks may
have well just some comments that uh you know uh that people love to hear
your voice and um uh that they could listen to you all night long so I think
that's wonderful uh Jeff Y says that you uh tell a great story and um you know
um and that uh yeah so it's always it's wonderful to
hear uh your perspective Lori and uh uh will you I I guess maybe you did point
out that you will be at uh the Astrocon um event yes I will and thank you is
that what it's being called this time time is it Astrocon or is it They they are actually calling this one Astrocon
yeah yeah okay all right well I was I was at um uh an event that they held at
Bryce Canyon and it was just wonderful being with all those friends and uh you
know doing uh things that they do only during a you know an Alcon type of event
but also being under you know incredibly dark skies uh Dr tim Hunter uh who's a
great friend of David Levy's uh was there I think maybe David did you go to
the star party as well i've never been there and I'm glad you asked i wish I were going i thought I
was going but it turns out I was never invited so I'm not going to be going
this year i'll be missing it but I would very much you'd like to go so that's
that's going to be David i'll invite you personally to come out unfortunately I
don't know if I I am a member but I don't know if I have the power to do that but I'd love to see you there yeah
we'll have to talk David because I will be doing some broadcasting live from there and uh so it would be um uh it'd
be wonderful to have you there joining me as well so uh let's see what we can work out
um we have um uh you know if you haven't already
joined the Astronomical League you should join them they have an incredible
uh group of uh astronomy clubs there's like over I think over 300 clubs now uh
that's part of the astronomical league federation of astronomy clubs making it
the world's largest uh such organization and um uh they are I think also at over
25,000 members uh so you're going to find someone that you're going to uh you
know be a great matchup for you to go out stargazing and there's just really
no better way to learn astronomy than when you're going out with um uh people
that know the sky and are willing to share all their all their knowhow all
their skills all their secrets you know and so um I was uh watching a program uh
kind of recently and they were it was they were talking about uh the markers
of intelligence and one of the markers is um uh the of course is the ability to
recognize yourself in a mirror there is um uh uh the ability to
communicate but uh one of the altruistic markers of intelligence is sharing
information and um and so the more information the more
things you're willing to share uh is marks you as a a very special uh
individual on this planet so and amateur astronomers in particular love to share
and so I think that there's a lot of brilliant people out there that are in this community and you're going to find
that they are some of the friendliest most generous uh uh most trustworthy uh
types of people you know we go to stargazing events and sometimes
laying out in the middle of the night is thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of gear tens of thousands
in many cases tens of thousands of dollars right and that's not to you know
uh to alert people that would be would be thieves or anything but uh um you
know it shows that uh uh amateur astronomers are a tr a trustworthy bunch
and uh um so anyhow um when you're out
uh and about and you see some amateur astronomers doing some stargazing don't hesitate to stop and
say hello and uh and always ask if you can get a glimpse because they'll
probably gleefully uh want to introduce you to the view
that they they have in their telescope but uh um but you know uh but do ask you
know because just going up and looking it just isn't cool so okay um Lori thank
you so much and we I would like to say something at this point Scotty please
Lori I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation oh thank you i was especially moved by reading of Carl
Sean's lines about the pale blue dot which was actually what he said on the
13th episode of Cosmos and that was so wonderful to hear it again and so
wonderful to hear you read it like you did um last
November a new astronomy discovery center was opened at the Lel Observatory
in Flagstaff Arizona scotty and I were there for the opening and I was blown
away by it and what I would like to say is that I think that that building
represents the biggest advance in getting people to love the
sky since Carl Sean's Cosmos 40 years earlier wow i am looking forward to
visiting that i've seen and heard so much about it the outdoor planetarium
i'm just I'm It's on my to-do list absolutely yeah it's it is an incredible
uh facility that was largely put together and and conceived by certainly
a large group of people but kind of heading that up was Ian Mlennon of a
Canadian uh um uh astronomer and uh you know uh consultant for science uh
outreach centers and that kind of thing and Bill Peters who's also from Canada so there's this Canadian thing that's
going on i I I don't know what to say except uh you know where uh you know
David knows what I'm talking about very well and uh um you know I'm uh I'm
excited to go up to Canada uh I fly up on May 1st i'll be there at David Dunlap
Observatory david you must have gone there many times i I would imagine many
many times yes uhhuh and um so it's got a long rich history and uh um I think
the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada now runs it so it's uh it's great and um
so Kareem Jaffer will be on later in our program to talk about it but right now
we we are going to switch over to Adrien Bradley adrien uh let's bring you on
yep and there there we are there we are all four of us are here thank you Lori thanks for being on and uh thank you
Lori i also agree that was a wonderful presentation which is why I barged in in
the middle of it um especially and the reason being that the
um sentiment of focusing more on what's earth is troubling to me because this
night sky I have as a background is something that I've always found peace
and I've always turned to and part of the reason I love doing images of the
night sky is for its own sake and not so much you the opportunities that have
come my way because of it um being on global star party has given me the opportunity to meet all of you from
discoverers of comets to um outreach Lori you amazing outreach
and should get to know more of some of the things you do you're also a very talented astro imager yourself and um
you know I saw the awards and the work that you did um very splendid that being
able to capture the night sky is and of itself a uh gift a skill that not
everyone not only has time or patience to do but I honestly think some get into
it for what I consider the wrong reasons and um you know the night sky has been
there before us we'll be there while we're yet here and when we go the way of
our uh departed Pope Francis um I also lost a uh beloved priest this year uh
from my Catholic faith but we continue to push forward
um I wrote a bunch of notes to discuss on uh we're talking
Earth Day there's a lot of inspiring uh texts that you uh read and gave to us
Lori and um also Scott and Deved there's
just a jumble of notes here that uh I wrote down that I wanted to bring up
because of course we're with us being a little light on the participation um there may be a little
more time first I'll start with uh saying that I will be at Astrocon um a
good friend of mine and Dr brian Autumn is one of the presenters for astrophotography and um I'll be running
around as his assistant uh the plan is we're um we're we're going to be camping
in the RV um if you would rather live in comfort do get to those rooms before
it's too late but if you're going to rough it with tuna sandwiches and uh you
may even have to hunt for your meal uh that's what we'll be doing but then
we'll also be taking images of the night sky i had the opportunity to do that at
Okex and remarked that uh the skies of Kenton and Black Mesa Oklahoma were
noticeably darker than the surrounding areas including Capulin so can't wait to
see the skies that Bryce Canyon will offer and I will be able to make a
comparison now unfortunately the skies aren't always at
their peak darkness um transparency you can be in a dark sky
but have it marred by the uh current conditions and for Milky Way photography
we've lately been contending with skylow on every single image so even now in
okitex and this is this is where I'm going to go ahead and share my screen while I continue to ramble my thoughts
um I wanted to find out how far away Voyager 1 was and it is now
15.4 billion miles but I get to that is now a little under 15.4 according to
NASA now it depends on the time the date that this was uh um gathered it's this could be
different but what we'll do is I'll hide this i'll hide
the Zoom workspace screen and highlight this image that I have in my background
which I love because it's a bit of history when you
find a place and you don't have any human lights anywhere in the vicinity of where you
are you get a sense um these were the footprints in Kenton there is a Jurassic
quarry um dinosaurs like the Allosaur the Allosaurus
um were roaming around in this area 150 million years ago um these are
footprints of an Allosaurus um you get the sense depending on your time this was right
after astronomical um we're into astronomical twilight and
we're heading to astronomical darkness as this image being taken and you get
the sense that you you figure out what it's like uh what was it like to be on
the earth so far ago you could use your imagination and even imagine that this
creature is still roaming around here somewhere um sometimes I think we take
for granted the the presence of human beings even in dark places like this you
see a light here or there you see different uh markers that let you know
that there are humans around and so you
know we definitely live we enjoy our life on our pale blue dot and we
sometimes forget that there are other things besides us so now this is an
older presentation um part of the presentation
includes these two slides which I will I'm going to leave it
in this mode and see if I can just show the
slides um yeah this was a slide where
um and see Alpha Hercules is over here this star right here there's a
triangle of stars that is not far from one of the more popular targets of Milky Way
photographers such as myself many of you that may be watching are calling it
Milky Way season because this particular part of the galaxy's rising again there
was something special about those three stars because in
19 90 this picture that we all know and have already seen as pale blue
dot was taken but based on where we feel Voro 1 is now
the instrument taking this image triangulated somewhere between
these three stars when you're looking up at this region um you're looking up at an area of the
sky where Voyager 1 currently resides now good luck they they have what are
known as ain't no objects and uh the sun's glint off of Voyager 1 is such an
object it's it's uh ain't no way you can see that object but when you're looking
in the night sky and you find these three brighter
stars you are looking in the direction the book end of the instrument that took
this image the pale blue dot you can imagine this is this is what it looked
like in 1990 and right now if Voyager were to manage to somehow take an
image this pixel would not show up it's it's too far but at the time it took this photo
the sunbeam was a refraction from the sun's over here the light coming
in based on the lens that's on Voyager created those
sunbeams so it's you know there's no lens hood on the um on the Voyager craft
or else we may not have gotten the sunbeams so it refracted and it just so happened
to refract right through the area where the um pale blue dot where earth resided
there were the other planets are over here and if I'm not mistaken some of the sun beams actually caught some of the
other planets as well the uh chance alignment of a an optical
sunbeam and earth coincidence or depending on what
you would like to believe it certainly made for a very striking image one that
I don't know that it won a Pulitzer um but you know our home world from so far
away now it doesn't stop us all from being selfish and being human in fact
you know we we are human there isn't much we can do about that and a lot of
you know a lot of humans will if you like Milky Way photography you'll look at this image and throw it out because
of this plane that's crossing right through the Sagittarius small cloud star
cloud here and I do believe this is M23 this bright spot um it's blowing right
through that and well we can't use that image um but there's still some
significance and I remember discussing that so so this was the start of the
presentation but what I'd like to do is go into a couple of images where I've
taken pictures and decided to go well let's see if we
can find the uh area where the pale blue dot um image
would have been taken
and I found it at one point this is this these are triangle uh alpha so
rasleg alpha ofucus um alpha hercules and kofucus i think
it's kappa here's your triangle where somewhere not captured by
my camera um Voyager 1 speeds away from us
and you know past the helopause we know the um what we've you know we've been
told and can believe that interstellar spa the gases of
interstellar space are intermingling in the sun zone influence has diminished now there's a
discussion about whether or not the Orort cloud exists and Voyager neither
of the Voyagers have reached the Orort cloud but um and that it would take more
than our lifetimes in order to get there so more
more observations and research would have to be done on that but here you see
those stars so this is so any of your Milky Way images if you like
taking Milky Way images like this and maybe you take pretty
pictures there's still the opportunity to see if you manage to capture
um the bright stars of Ofucus and Alpha
Hercules and see if you can find where Voyager 1 is and in this
case it would be somewhere down here i'm not spotting them easily but that's
because this is a live exercise where I'm going through some of the other
images now this one we'll look at this image you won't find it because this is
the other side um we've got Pletes rising and a whole host of other things
cassopia is up here and Perseus is over here this is where uh
Perseus is andromeda of course is over here and so that's a
different article that I'm looking to write about where we look at other parts of the Milky Way but um with today's
theme pale blue dot um and relating it to where you can look
naked eye in the night sky if you're looking up you're in a dark sight you're going to see most of this naked eye you
may not see some of the color that got pulled out but you're going to see this star cloud you're going to see these
dots these regions you may even see this dot which is Messier 11 the wild duck
you might see the point of light where it emits naked eye in a dark
place like this this is this is Kenton Oklahoma and again I can't can't wait to
see if I can take a similar image now this was uh this says 470 seconds that's because
this is stacked it's a stacked image um 470 you have to divide it
by based on this either looks like it would have been my
um Canon 6D um and I would have take used that to take the image this could also be my
Sony but um based on what I'm seeing with color it was more than likely Canon
and then I changed the uh well it says F2 so no that would be the Sony it actually says it right here
so I did use my Sony and for those of you that swear by Sony over other
products it's a good camera you get good focus you can get this you can
also come over here and look for the area where Voyager 1 is it would be
over in this region i would have to look a little closer for those three stars
so that's how we can connect to the pale blue dot and that the
easiest way I know how is to look at the core and then look over
here for those three stars and see if you can you triangulate them you are now
looking at the area where Voyager one is and where few
million What was it how far away 15.4 billion
lori how close was it when it took that image something like four
it was looking at my slide it was uh 4
billion miles away so 4 billion now we're 15.4
so you know well over almost four times the distance since 1990 that it has
traveled in space and so it's Can you imagine what it would be like if we had a more modern
camera on that thing probably still couldn't see it though yeah you're
talking billions of miles and we're we were barely a speck of dust here it's
uh you know we're we're even more of a speck of dust
um even with the resolution of some of the modern cameras I don't think you're going to pick up um I don't know that
would be an interesting homework assignment for me to get stats on Voyager's camera because I know they're
there the megapixel rate if that there may not have been megapixels it may have
just been pixels um and it was it was actually a 02 pixel in size
yeah so very very very small um two things one older cameras still do work
and two no matter what you have you can get started in taking images this is an
image and were it not for Carl Sean saying "Hey turn this thing around let's
take a picture i think he had a hunch he might see Earth i think he was hoping
that Earth would still show up even if it was a small pixel it made his point
all the more poignant and the fact that the sunbeam went through it that's a
lucky break that you interplanetary selfie yes
and uh now we've tried it before um because I didn't plan it out we've done
the selfie thing with the Saturn images um I would have had to have downloaded
those i don't want to you know have folks watching me crawl around the internet looking for it just to say "Hey
it's not the only time that we've done it." We've got pictures in our inner solar system of the Earth and the Moon
you see two dots you've got pictures for Mars of Earth and the moon you've got
pictures as spacecraft are flying away or are on the far side of the moon
you've got pictures of the moon and then of the earth at distant and we got our
first picture of the solar eclipse as seen from the moon where we have a
diamond ring phase it was not a very detailed image which is to say not
all of your images need to be super detailed to get a point across
um this one for instance where I framed myself this was only a 10-second image a
little eerie and a little different from what you might expect to see um in Milky
Way images but if you look at the sky this is what that sky looks like naked
eye it it really is outstanding it's the
the camera as long as you know how to use it you gather the light and the
photons and you can take image images after that it's about creativity we've
all done the whole those of us that have been able to travel Milky Way over a rock formation and of course with Bryce
Canyon there will be more where that came from but um as always
we we try and expand our ability to rec recreate a scene the
way we would see it if we had slightly better eyesight and I can see with this
image I'm going to point at the three stars because I was able to the way that
I was able to process this image these three three stars pop out there's the uh
where Voyager Voyager One is so not only do we look at an image like this and you
know we're in awe and wonder we're also learning things from it and we're
able to connect you know go back to the pale blue dot few other notes um before I
um I go ahead and uh end the presentation
um looking at some of my notes I am a member of uh RAS even as a US citizen
you can become a member of RAS and you can participate in RAS meetings general
assemblies um you can submit images for um for potential awards depending on
what you would like to do um so you do not have to be a member of um you don't
have to be a Canadian citizen as long as you would like to contribute to RAS in
science so as a member of uh the astronomical league that comes from my
uh statewide clubs um that I'm in and of course I'm a
member of astronomical league um we talked a little bit about we lost our pope
um brother Guy Consmanio gave a talk and uh he mentioned as I show this image of
Orion that I tried to take there's the witch head right there um you looking at
the cosmos you may think of different things and one of the things was brother guy talked about the
prevailing scientific beliefs were very much intertwined in religion in religion
and so religion and science had not yet you know kind of we'll say separated
um you know the goals of the Vatican Observatory is to show how faith and
science can indeed work together not everybody listening to the global star
party may believe that but it does offer an a way of
sharing our thoughts and our views on science and you know understanding one
another this is sort of the thing when you're on a pale blue dot you think about understanding one another as
opposed to setting up divisive you know ways and trying to
combat each other it's the internet has shown us that general generally people
like to belong to a side they're either in the astrophotography camp i only use
pixight i only chase auroras i love auroras oh there's a Milky Way there um
but I chase auroras um this picture it's just full of stars you know
there's M33 there's NGC762 um there are some imagers that
may not know what these are they may recognize M3 but not know that this is
NGC762 and not worry about it um it's up
to those of us who understand astronomy to teach and to share the significance
of what's going on up here and there are plenty that would
like to know well how do you marry a beautiful vista with these night
skies they're only interested in you know how pretty can a picture be
but to me it's also the frame of the of our of our planet Earth kind of cradling
the sky there uh yes and I do that a lot is beautiful and um really uh it gives
uh you know such a a wonderful perspective I think so yeah and I think
I shared these global star party before you have when you do the wide angle view
of objects in space you get this sense of floating there and this
matter is a part of it as well but it takes many more hours of integration to
actually see detail in that matter this is this is what 5 minutes of good
tracking can get you with a with a kit camera
kit that you might use to do wildlife photography but of course I had it
modified for the hydrogen alpha pieces now we've seen the horse head and we've
seen much more detail but to take a wildlife
lens and be able to tell which direction the horse head is facing I found that to
be a major stepping stone for me sure and so even though Milky Way photography
is my favorite thing I don't shy away from other objects capturing the lunar
eclipse how it looks in the night sky with Leo Virgo Corvis and Crater crater
is a few stars you can hardly see mhm um what is it uh the sombrero
galaxy is in here i forget if it's closer to Corvvis or if it's closer to
Virgo over here i believe it sits up here not only seeing the night sky but
knowing what's in it and um seeing our lunar eclipse moon among a
sea of stars this is not only how I took the picture this is how I viewed it and
so my goal has always been to view it hopefully you got a chance to see the zodiacal light the spring zodiacal light
was out there um we had some aurora again it you know interrupted my imaging
but there's aurora the dol light and the winter milky way oh darn your image got
interrupted by Aurora yeah I so sorry get rid of this look you got the
Andromeda galaxy is setting over this pavilion next to the house this was a
bonus this is to me is cool you I don't know now I missed M33's behind the
rescue house here mhm and beautiful you you've got all sorts of things and and
after a while I had to learn and oh that's actually a tease for an article
in Astronomy magazine that um I've been sent an advanced copy in June you're
going to read my um quote unquote disdain for uh Aurora Chasing um but
Astronomy Magazine treated it very well and the the article title is beautiful
aurora and um that's great for the longest time depending on your
location this if you've never seen Aurora and you take
pictures there's an article out there and I do want to say this in Global Star Party there's an article out there that
says this is about the best you can get and that the Aurora chasing is no big
deal and you got to have a camera to see it and this article tried to really
downplay you know the beauty that Aurora it tried he tried to say it is beautiful
but you know it isn't as uh you know it isn't what you think it
is and I think he's wrong um and the reason
why I think he's wrong everything I saw in these this I'm
actually going to a different time of May 2024 but we had an outburst we had a
couple of outbursts last year and the colors are more enhanced here with the
camera but the pulsing and the moving of this light and the red and green colors
were very much visible over this field and over these trees this was visible if
you stopped to look at it you would be mesmerized we heard swear words coming
out of people that uh you may not expect you can't judge a book by its cover
right but when the sky lights up it was mostly red and you're looking at it
you're you may your natural self comes out wonder of the night sky this is to
the southwest there's the moon setting framed within these trees and we had
these red streaks of aurora to the southwest i wish I had framed this
against a against Sagittarius for instance seeing you know this was not a
particularly dark area um I've got pictures of what this
area is like this is what the area is like under a full moon there's a comment this is that same park and this is
looking out over the water and me oh clouds are everywhere this is the park
where that aurora daytime shot almost yeah it is the moon is so bright this is
um a great book end to um uh your uh presentation uh uh Adrian and uh we are
Thank you uh we are on on time on schedule right now so I really appreciate you guys uh helping us uh
move through that that was great uh our next speaker is coming live from his new
home personal observatory and that is uh uh Dr daniel
Bar you guys will know him from the how do you know series here at on explore
alliance and um uh so we are uh we're happy to have you on and u uh so this
must be your uh your library that I know that you were working on your house and
all the rest of it but to an astronomer the house is not done okay until the
observatories and stuff that's right that's absolutely correct um hi Scott hi
Adrian my goodness you just blow my socks off every single time and just
props to you brother my goodness astonishing photos i appreciate it i
mean the focus is always on showing people what's there i try not to focus
on the technical so much or this is how I do it i focus more on how do I make it
so that people see the beauty that I see that's right that's absolutely right and
uh uh Scott um I went out and tried to uh set up but I was having connection
issues with Okay i saw you pop in and then kind of pop yeah I could I didn't
know if you could see me i did but I couldn't I couldn't uh hear anything i
couldn't hear you guys or myself and so I decided well I've got to come in it's
too far away from the router I assume yeah uh my observatory is now uh pretty much
done and uh my big Apple refractor is uh
restored and working once again all the electronics are up and working adrien I
got to say I take we have the same mission to bring the night sky to people
but I take kind of a very different approach from you my friend uh where you go out and you capture those lovely
images and bring them back uh I have a different approach i've always been an astronomy teacher uh 40ome years in the
classroom thousands of students and so my passion has always been to take people out catch some photons with your
eyes and yeah nothing wrong with that at all i actually started as a visual
astronomer and have continued to try and continue doing that and telling folks
see it with your eyes before you try and capture it with your camera yes yeah i
see so many people online now who say "Oh I've just bought this great astronomy rig and I'm ready to jump into
astronomy and astrophotography." And I'm like "Wow that's the deep end of the pool." Um I've always recommended people
go out and learn and experience the sky i I see people who uh post online oh gee
I programmed and I captured this and I I programmed this and I went to bed and I woke up and now I've got this capture
like yeah okay but for me a lot of the fun is going out in the dark
and so when I wanted to set up my observatory uh I wanted to set it up so
that I could have other people join me and I considered a lot of things and I'm
going to go ahead and uh share a photo here here's the screen and let's see
let's go ahead and share this uh here is and I think you're seeing it now this is
a uh a photo of myself standing in front of uh my Apple refractor um that is a
beautiful refractor what's that sir that is a beautiful refractor it's a love it's a piece of art it really is and uh
I often hear the comments when people see a photo of this wow what a lovely
telescope i wish I had one um maybe you don't
i've got to say a refractor like this it is I feel like sisipus sometimes pushing
the big rock up the mountain uh this lovely instrument was made for me by
Fred Morose who was uh I believe head optitian up at Yorky's Observatory and
in the '9s Fred decided he wanted to try telescope manufacturing and uh he built 20 to now
this is if anybody has better information don't clobber me this is my best recolleation uh recollection uh
Fred told me that my scope was the last one number 23 of 23 he said he wasn't
wasn't going to build anymore i don't know if he ever did but he told me that this was he said "I what color do you
want?" He said "I've made red white and a couple of blue ones but I have some green metal flake paint I'd really like
to try." And I said "Wow that sounds amazing." And so as far as I know this is the only green Apple i've never seen
a photo of another green one and this bad boy is 133 millimeter aperture
that's 5 and a/4 inch and it's an f12 so it's a 1600 millimeter focal length
and the uh the tube there uh the tube is over 7 foot long and you see me standing
in front i'm about six foot in my boots so the center of rotation I think I'm
hoping you can see my mouse here center of rotation is about seven feet off the ground
and so when you when you set up a big scope like this um it really is a
challenge to get it properly mounted so it tracks accurately and uh know you're not taking this out in windy conditions
because scope that big is just a sail uh and when we set this up here we go uh
I'm hoping you're seeing a photo this is um this is uh one of my neighbors and
his two boys and I invited them out and uh the two boys are about 9 and 12 years
old and uh set it up for them on the moon and their uh their reaction was
just wow and that's the uh that's the reaction I've got with almost everyone
who's had a look through this this is a very specialized instrument uh Adrian I
know the stuff you use is going to be wide aperture short focal length so you can get you know rapid uh exposure times
and uh you don't have as much trouble with tracking and all that this is exactly the opposite instrument i can
imagine yes sir what's the how much of the moon is in the field of view and I
know it depends on the eyepiece you use but uh the end of the focal train but when I when I put in a uh I've got a
very nice uh explore 68 degree series which is a uh inch and a quarter
eyepiece when I put that in I've got the full disc of the moon okay with the uh
I've got an Explore 30 millimeter which is uh Scott help me out here it's one of
your big ones is it the 92 degree series i think he's I don't know if he's back
but that certainly sounds like it would be a great kilogram monster
yeah that sounds very immersive when I put the uh when I put the big explore 30 mm on here I actually have an ankle
weight belt which I strap to the front of the tube to balance the it so I put a
couple of kilos of weight out on the tube with a with an ankle belt which looks kind of funny but it works um and
uh the nice thing is that this scope will easily support uh as much
magnification as the sky allows uh I'm able to go 250 300 power that's nice
with excellent resolution i've tracked 11 moons of Saturn you can see structure
in the rings the crepe ring is no problem and looking on the moon the
resolution is just just stunning uh you want to see a dust storm roll across the surface of Mars this is the scope for
that on the other hand things you can do double stars yes you want to do clusters
oh Hercules is brilliant in this you want to do planetary nebula amazing you
want to do the Orion you want to do Andromeda not so
much this is not a a deep sky telescope i had it on the Leo triplet the other
night i got the two nice ones the hamburger galaxy i could not I could not pull in even though where I'm at I have
about Mortal 3.5 skies uh the Milky Way is a naked eye object so are the Dark
Lanes andromeda is a naked eye object and so is Orion uh the great nebula and
are all naked eye objects uh in my backyard as long as the air is clear and
uh the moon is favorable but this is really a high resolution
high magnification scope and so a good tracking mount is necessary um when I
post pictures of this thing uh here's the uh here's the scope and this is
pointed up at the Leo triplet i was thinking I was on Algeba and so that's
about 75 uh degrees uh above the horizon this night when I was looking
yeah you managed to catch you managed to catch Virgo and Corvis in your shot oh
yes oh yes the beehive is is just stunning uh the galaxy clusters you know
my my explore 12inch do is a much better weapon for that this is really high
resolution stuff but one of the interesting things I I get often is why did you mount it so high off the ground
you have to have a big this this is my uh little chair i actually have a big custom chair I built which helps if I'm
looking closer to the horizon why did you mount it so high with the tube 7 foot
long when you go vertical that uh you know you think about this here's your 7
foot tube and here the eyepiece is 7 ft off the ground but you go vertical and
now the eyepiece is less than 36 in off the ground so if you tried to mount this
to where at say a 6ft height then the eyepiece height at zenith is going to be
less than 2 feet you are literally uh either squatting on the ground with your
legs crossed under you or you're on a little uh roller creeper like you used to maneuver around a car so yeah you
have to mount it high and you have to mount it big and uh you can see here you see this
lovely dolly and I think I've got a there we go here's a nice picture of it this is a Pyfinder plate solver up on
top because the uh my CGE Pro mount this whole scope is circa 1996 as is the
mount so the scope is 30 years old doesn't hurt the optics but the electronics are 30 years old and 30
years ago Goto was not what it is today the Goto technology was not that great and this tracks wonderfully but when I'm
finding things uh I often use my piefinder uh to help me and then I just
I don't know if you're familiar with plate solvers do you like that pie finder i love it uh the nice thing is it
mounts into a standard cinta shoe for a finder that most manufacturers use that
pattern and uh I can switch this from my do to my binoculars to my big
scope and uh it works lovely and uh it's a the plate solver in case you don't
know is the idea that it has a go-to map of the sky just like many many go-to
scopes from different manufacturers but the difference is it doesn't connect with your drive system and it doesn't require a drive system it knows where
you're at it has a GPS in on board it looks at the sky you give it the the
time of date from the internet and then it says "Oh I know what I'm seeing uh this is part of LEO." And so from there
you say "Okay I would like to see uh a messier object or an NGC object." And it
will just give you directions on how far to move the scope and as you get closer
it refineses the position and I found it very accurate very easy to use and the nice thing I can take this off of my big
refrator i can put it on my big do my DAB is now a push to with a I don't know
30 40,000 object catalog i can switch it to my big binoculars same it's really
nice for when I'm out with the big binoculars and I take those out in
public because even if I'm out in the parking lot I can use this thing and I can go directly to objects and find them
it works very very well i've been very impressed with it um you can see down here on the bottom this is the new dolly
and this is one that I designed and built myself uh a lot of people have looked at this and said "Oh my gosh
those are teeny tiny wheels." And yes they are they're uh 3 and 1/2 inch uh
polyurethane wheels so they're hard and they're little and people say "Oh my gosh how do you roll that across the
lawn?" The answer is you do not no you do not my observatory is
actually a 10 by6 shed with a rollup door that's eight
foot wide and seven foot tall at that size it's just right for me to put this
scope i park it in a horizontal position and then I'm able to uh these casters I
think you can see there they're called workbench casters you step on them and it raises the dolly by about 1 inch the
dolly sits on three vibration absorbing rubber feet and then you just step on it
and it raises the dolly about an inch and then you can roll it into the shed
set up and take down for this this rig with all the counterweights on it 250
270 lbs something like that certainly with the dolly it's over
300 roll it out line it up five minutes
end of the night roll it in arc it 5 minutes it's so lovely and uh the shed
is on a 36t long slab so I have 26 x 16 ft i can put three scopes on it there's
room on the lawn for more if friends come over so you all know uh I've now
christened it the Western Arkansas Observatory and uh that's a lot of fun
but the dolly here you see has internal red lighting so people don't trip over it the uh casters have glow-in-the-dark
tape because nobody wants to stub a toe on that on a 300lb monster in the middle
of the night and then you can see that uh I have tension straps here on the legs to make sure this is absolutely
rock solid on the dolly when I transport it um part of the reason for this dolly
uh years ago and uh I won't mention the name uh the company is closed now and I
don't think the founder is with us anymore but I had a commercially produced dolly many of you uh are
familiar with company it was a steel dolly it was nicely made it had big uh 10-in pneumatic wheels and little screws
so you could take it up off the wheels but it it wasn't up to the weight and
that dolly collapsed would this have been JMI and Jim Burr it would be sir it is a JMI doll jim Burr is actually still
with us is Jim Burr oh my god yeah yeah i talk to him sometimes so oh gosh okay
and all props to Jim Burr i mean really his products are lovely and
is there would have been ways I could have the way he's not making this stuff anymore so no he's not yeah right the
nice thing about this and somebody said "Oh you should have used AI." I'm like "No no i taught intro to engineering and
physics for 40 years and I used my N3 slide rule." So my picket slide rule the model that
went to the moon was good enough for Apollo it's good enough for me i designed this dolly to be stable with
a,000 lb load and it's holding less than a third of that so my uh safety margin
is excellent the other thing is these workbench casters only lift the dolly one inch off the ground that's all uh
when the JMI dolly collapsed fortunately my wife was there and the two of us as
this thing fell and the counterweights 50 lbs of counterweights are swinging through the air the scope is 45 lbs
that's swinging through the air that could knock someone out for sure we managed to wrestle it to the ground a couple of paint chips but apart from
that no damage the 50 lb weight didn't take either of us out of this world which it easily could have and uh I
decided I needed a dolly that would not even if it collapsed it drops that far
and I put in internal red LED lighting mhm and a nice supply the whole thing
worked really really lovely i'm pretty sure I would still trip over it but
you've done your best to prevent that from happening so I appreciate that no
well you know if you want to bring people out and you want to bring basically newbies out to your and you
want to say "Oh here have a have a look at my scope." You know what you've got to you got to realize people who aren't
used to looking at a scope they get fascinated with the eyepiece i want to look in there and um yeah you got to
take care of people the other thing I did and you can't see this in any of the photos but I went ahead and uh one of
the problems with the I had with the mount for years is that basically it's designed for a
C-14 or a C11 or or a C a C8 and so the
cord on the hang controller is about that long and so uh I had a heck of a
time there's nowhere in the documentation that tells you what kind of cord you have it's an RJ12 if you're
interested so I got a nice extension cord and now I can actually take the
hand controller all the way back to the eyepiece when I'm aligning you know centering the finder centering the
eyepiece yeah I can actually do that now uh so this is this is a lovely
instrument and uh uh the observatory is open if you all are in the FortSmith
area anybody on Global Star Party you're welcome to uh email me at astronomy for
educators@gmail and if the weather's clear and you want to come out and have a go at the Appamax all y'all are
welcome uh currently in the process of reaching out to some of our local schools and saying "Hey guess what's in
your neighborhood?" So I'm hoping that by next fall I'll be having regular groups of uh
local students and faculty uh from our local schools coming out to visit the observatory and uh kind of upping their
astronomy game in the local schools i really think when I think about Earth Day I really think about the Earth Moon
system when I look at the pale blue dot I'm always reminded that there's a double planet there there's a binary
there the earth moon system is really uh classically well described as the binary
and uh for me one of the ways you love the earth moon system on earth moon day
is you go ahead and study it and you share it with other people you inspire
their love their desire to wonder at it to study it because when we know
something well we cherish it all the better and my mission has always been setting
hearts of fire for astronomy and with the big Appamax I really have no trouble
doing that uh the consistent people don't utter swear words at least not often but wow comes
out of their mouth i've had people literally burst into tears looking at Saturn or the moon
now the flip side of course I've set this up and had somebody come up and go
"Yes the moon i've seen it." All goes to show when you bring a
little more knowledge to the eyepiece you take a lot more value away but in
terms of an outreach mission this big bad boy is not really a portable
instrument not for me anymore there was a time 30 years ago when I was much
younger uh when I would actually pack this thing up in the SUV transport it out to Joshua Tree
transport it out to uh star parties on uh school and college campuses for
students for my astronomy students but um that that just got to be problematic
the other reason that I did the observatory the rollout design you think about this you say "Oh wouldn't that be
better in a dome?" Yes I suppose so and Scott and I discussed this uh last year
and I looked very seriously at a 2.7 meter dome 2.7 meter dome with a 2.1
meter telescope means you've got 30
centimeters 1 foot if you're anywhere within about 30° to the horizon you
can't really sit behind the scope and look through it comfortably so that start you start saying "Oh well what
about a three or a three and a half meter dome?" And the prices just go through the roof
the other thing I have three main scopes there's this one there's my 12-in
Explore Scientific Dove which I love but you think about those two scopes the
Appamax center point of pivot is 7 ft off the ground the Explore Do it's about
12 in 12 to 18 in is where the center of of rotation is and so you're like hm
those are very different uh I considered a rolloff a rolloff would work okay for
the Appamax not so well for the do the other thing I have is a pair of big binoculars that are on a Manfrotto
tripod those mounted about chest height so I have one that mounts with a pivot
point about 7 foot off the ground one about four foot off the ground and one about two feet off the ground walls are
not my friend walls are not my friend i thought
about a clamshell dome so I could have everything in a dome and still but again
the price was out of my reach this was very very affordable and
I have a very large observatory floor i can roll out three instruments and have
people there's room on the lawn where I can have people set up and just step off
the observatory floor and help them or they can step right up onto the observatory floor and observe so really
I kind of built this yes for me but also for the community and I'm hoping uh now
that I have the Appamax fully restored the next part of the project is get the dollies made similar dollies made for
the Explore Scientific Dove and for the big uh Overwork 127 binoculars so that
I'll be able to just roll out any or all of those instruments in just a few minutes
time and away we go it's really It's faster than a rolloff roof putting the
Appamax away is faster than buttoning up a roll-off roof it really is so I'm very
pleased with my very non-conventional observatory design and uh I'm really
looking forward after a really uncomfortable hiatus getting back into
welcoming the public and educating people ultimately and I've always said
this education is an extraordinarily intimate act that occurs between two
people in a very public space you think about that when you learn from anybody a
teacher you respected honored loved maybe they were tough on you maybe you liked them because they were funny but
that education happens between you and them it's a one-on-one event it's in a room full of people same thing here the
best work that I do is when I step back from the eyepiece and I said "Here you
go you want to see sunrise in a crater on Mars you're looking at Capernacus you
see that dark circle that's the crater floor that's 2 km deep you see that point of light that's a central mountain
that's three kilometers high and you're seeing the first glint of sun you ever
seen El Capitan or the Alps with the sunrise just touching the peak that's what you're seeing from a quarter
million miles away and as you watch over the course of the evening you come back
wait it's different that's right the sun is rising the light is flooding the crater
floor and people when they watch the celestial
clockwork and they see it happening in front of them wow it just it awakens them to the idea
that we live on a planet it's spinning rotating us at 1,000 miles an hour into
the east we're seeing the sky and the constellations and the moon rise and set
we actually connect to that clockwork of the cosmos and you cannot be more
connected or more intimately tied to the earth than when you're outside and actually watching it spin through space
and you get an awareness that I'm on a planet this isn't just a place i'm not
just at the Western Arkansas Observatory i'm on a planet oh look Jupiter that's a
planet too mars that's a place we can drive there we can drive rovers there
that's the moon people walked there the whole conspiracy nonsense of science
deniers and flat earth and all the silliness kind of wilts and withers away
when they take a look at an eyepiece and you can show them over the course of an evening wow the Galilean moons are
changing position how come some are and some aren't some are closer and move faster
ah why is the right spot not in the same place it's a sphere and it
spins and that really brings home to people how precious how delightful how
wonderful the earth is and you can't really be inspired to cherish or protect
something if you don't really love and understand it and you got to set hearts of fire first
and this is this is my matchick this is my torch and this is what I use to set
hearts on fire and oh my gosh can't tell you how thrilled I am after uh well the
Appamax has not been in regular use for 10 years that's why it took a lot of TLC
to get all the electronics and everything working again uh but it's up it's working now and uh it's a beautiful
thing and I'm looking forward to inviting more people down and I will make some some videos uh when I have
people out so I can share them with my friends at explore and on the global star party and you know we'll get these
these Zoom issues worked out to where I can figure out uh what's going on and I can go ahead and have
uh have a conversation from out at the observatory because there's something
about seeing somebody walk around a big telescope that just it's it's so
inspiring and uh uh I just want to bring astronomy to everybody i want everybody
to go out and get their their dose of vitamin D every day vitamin D yep we'll
have to uh get out there with you Daniel and maybe do a broadcast live from uh I
would love that observatory so that's great i call it the Bar Observatory but I know of your humility so Arkansas West
is you know I I always said if I if I won the great big lotto you know like
hundreds of millions of dollars I would indeed put a planetarium observatory somewhere up in Northwest Arkansas and I
would let them name it after me after I was gone but this is the Western Arkansas Observatory and that's good
enough for me and uh absolutely you know what um I have gray skies and uh thank
God uh my wife uh supports my little idiosyncrasies and uh she loves strange
old men who like like to go out and play in the dark and uh she's so supportive
of of all my my endeavors and and Scott has been too scott and I have been friends for long
decades it's very important i wanted to comment you mentioned how when you show
somebody looking through Oh there's a Magelanic cloud um when you show somebody looking through the um
telescope and how a lot of the things melt away about flat earth or
about did we ever land on the moon i've seen that personally happen in a uh at a
college campus where everybody what I remembered is everybody kind of came
wearing their personality if there were young men coming through they came through cool it's a good way to put it
you know they uh whoever they were they brought it sacheing up we had a large
scope there about a 17 and a half what's 14 inch no 14 inch still very good views
of the moon i had a couple of smaller instruments um we had instruments pointing at the moon and it didn't
matter what walk of life they came from the moment they looked through that
eyepiece everything stopped the facade dropped you could see you could see all
of a sudden the focal point became you got to look at this you you got to see this and ego fades everybody's ego
washed away it didn't matter what they believe nobody's uh self-importance or
sense of cool uh stands up to the blast of light that comes out of an eyepiece
when you're looking there you go that's right yeah just that that flamethrower just it's kind of like what was it the
scene in the uh Raiders of the Lost Arc where they open the chest and the blast wave comes out and all the all it all
melts away all pretense melts away that's right you cannot you cannot be
pretentious or foolish when you're standing in the blast of moonlight from
a big flying thrower like that 14inch or this refractor just walking up to it
people have a sense of amazement is that real that's not real sure it is no that
would that would have to be NASA owns that i'm like no no no come on up oh
you're gonna let me have a look you know yeah what will it hurt my eye no it hurt
your heart i am going to uh I'm going to have to uh
switch over to our next speaker yes please cesar Brolo is on with us right now uh he is uh he is going to be
talking about uh a recent star party he attended down there in Argentina and um
yeah um but uh that's a beautiful shot that you have of the uh melanic clouds
um yes behind you and uh a sky filled with stars sure from from the third
party from the hotel where we we are um I remember a time that we
uh some years ago from the Patagonia uh uh with Daniel Bart uh we talk together
and you Scott h um I remember that I have a whale bone in my back in a in a
place h because I show I shown pictures of
um uh of the eclipse in Patagonia and I remember that Daniel was uh so good
explanation about something about the solar uh sorry the moon shades
um well three maybe three years ago I don't remember uh or more yeah
and well I returned from Mendoza from Los Moses This uh was an
amazing star party with a little less people that the last year um but was uh
full was full of uh talks and a lot of
different things uh about uh how people made uh beautiful
beautiful pictures of the sky um was full of smart telescopes like a
dwarf telescope sisters and the regular telescope too we
call it regular telescope we are crazy when this change everything about talk
between smart telescope and well the regulars yeah yeah yeah it's crazy and
well I show you I have a presentation with pictures with dwarf with pictures that took many people but unfortunately
I I I couldn't put in the presentation all amazing pictures that the people
took in the store party but maybe in the next uh global s party I I'll uh be
presenting more pictures because it's a lot of productions of of pictures uh
because now you have the smartphone the smart telescopes the reflex cameras and
the telescope with CCD or reflex camera and you have a lot of um beautiful image
of the sky erh we had um we had a beautiful
uh mid 10 inches uh classic telescope and 127
uh explore scientific refractor that uh one of uh different customers of of
our store they bring and we really thank you to Fernando
Ricardini and Emilio that they bring from Wenocide
their own telescopes big telescope because a 10 in telescope in the car and
a 127 mm APO refrator from explore
scientific is not an small telescope and we light uh with beautiful beautiful
image of the sky my father used to 9 millmter refractor that he made his own
mount for visual visual uh visual use uh was amazing because um
really all people is going to make pictures and we appreciate when somebody's put an
eyepiece in the in the in their own telescope my father had 86 years old and
um well it's amazing how he returned to
the star party from from 10 years ago and was really happy to to be there in
in Lushes uh you know it's all an adventure if you
think that uh you know uh he um had 86 years old and well it's
a something that for me was very very important uh really well I show you the
presentation okay I share my
screen here share
the presentation okay
well uh this is um the anume of star party vasha grande 20
26 in l moes we call it the start party bash grande because we started in Bash
Grande that is at only 200 100 sorry 50 kilometers but um we we
we don't change the our brand of bash grande because lo is a bash maybe it's
bash grande too and we are in three different bashes in this area because um
we have
Sorry another another valley sorry we call it Bashes Bali um in the area of
Sado um you have a canyon it's a beautiful beautiful incredible place going into
the into the mix between the cordisher
de loandises well this is the first day
where we received to the people Saraku our company it's a it's a is a sponsor
we make this with Institut the the president of
uh of Institute with Hime Garcia my friend and Cecilia Luraki is all that
she attend all reference uh to the hotel logistics
you know and it's amazing how every year we made this from uh
2004 um together um it's uh
really an amazing experience well this is the first dinner
the people coming not all people because the first night
uh we received the first the first uh um middle of people and uh it's um so
amazing the people is happy the the foods are are incredible the prices are
really good really we love the this American style
to go with a caravan or a tent to an star party but uh beside
this we in the number of people that came to the star parties in Argentina is
much better use um yeah some campus if not hotels
more um like places uh where the people maybe
don't use a tent but um the prices between tents and hotels we reserve an
entire hotel when we make this star parties because it's the best way to
have um to use much better say um the
place with um with the use that you need because
you need to connect your telescope you don't need uh people running or you know
and this is the the best thing for us is that uh really uh the hotel is entire
for us and this is amazing great and well you have my son
um and
uh this is the the first things Adrian Noik
um my song Brolo Brolio and they are preparing the things for the night
connecting the telescope or connecting for example you can see in a in your cell phone an image coming from the
telescope uh or well everything that is is uh about uh connecting erh things is
is great because Uh these guys are are totally working in in
this this is my father talking about mechanics
with the uh talking about the things
about uh and this was a design of a dome
this was this was excellent for him because you know he he know a lot of
mechanics and he helping he and today he helped us a lot of things about designs
for mechanics like uh uh things for doms or uh you know well all about mechanics
uh using for astronomy uh this is the the the parking area that
is for use on the telescope too it's a it's a um you know it's a it's a bad
landscape not this is the front of the hotel
too well the people connecting and assembling their own
telescopes different different configurations uh like uh Schmidt CR or um Richie
Graier CR yes all the entire hotel if for three
nights is for us this is the best thing and anybody
anybody is uh outside the amateur
astronomy well this is the explore scientific and sarako corner inside
the inside the the lobby of the hotel
uh something that I show this because it's a this is a old next
uh mount of Celestron that we repair something that we made in the star Paris
uh we are uh uh we are totally how do you
say supporting the people if have the problem this m had a problem uh with
juggle or something like movements bad movements of course and we repair and we had ready
for the night well this is the night the first
picture is Orion going down in the horizon this is going to the
of course to the west this is Scorpio
uh in uh the first night we had a little of clouds in in one moment and was a
picture that I took uh with my father because he was interested in learn
astrophotography he uses u he teach for me Scott when I was a kid to
develop and copy in papers the black and white pictures because in my home we
have a a copy how do you say we call it ampl room in my home enlarger and the
paper and all of that yes sure totally and develop the the paper in the in the
bath wonderful yeah yes we are talking about something mixed with smart
telescope and it's incredible and this pictures was we made together h because
I um I was very very rewarding for me can
teach something uh for him because it's uh you know something that um is
rewarding is you can teach something you have the opportunity to return something
um he was really happy and I say "Wow yes the issue is the AAC or okay I can
make this." Um we took together this pictures of for example this is Scorpio this is
the the large melanic cloud this is the roof beautiful of the
hotel yes yeah beautiful so easy only 30 seconds a single picture beautiful
really beautiful sky this is another part of Alpha and Beta
Centauro and well the Milky Way this place is
like a Disneyland for everyone i thought many times with in Adrian Bradley my
friend that say oh my god this is place for for all for Adrian come on next time
in October we are making another one yeah yes um and I show you one more this
is the Milky Way little more ups over our our
Karen let's see the Karina Karina so I can recognize you have uh
it's a the Karina Nebula you have Krooks and the Cole sack sure totally and sack
yes you've got the pointers um right here um the jewel box is around there
somewhere i just it may be a bit too small to see but I think you there's a
bright spot that represents the jewel box somewhere by here
here I wanted to mention I wanted to mention to you that you got a number of friends watching you on uh Yes I know
i called to everyone to to come watch this global star so there's the jewel
box okay yes and alpha beta centi the
the salt um sorry
the question is where would we find Proxima Centtory in this picture would
it be between the two oh my god i know it's a much smaller star but I wonder if it could if
it shows you need a big telescope to Yes to make a Yes to to to make the division of of
this um this is another a first I'm going to
look a single picture of ETA with my reflex camera and my son took the the
pictures and make and made this uh with m maybe no more than 20 20 30 seconds
wow single pictures with a objective of my camera my old reflex camera
um yes it's is a is a place that is beautiful to make this well this is the
picture of Aguil M83
with the setup of Richi Graier 8 in telescope um beautiful you can see when
use the cross mhm you can see maybe Yeah uh some some
stars with the crust because uh it's typical of this kind of telescopes
maybe you can see here and here far far away galaxies
well this place has got to be very dark uh when I when I uh query about the u uh
the dark skies of Patagonia it they rank amongst the darkest in the world and so
uh it's really um you have a an incredible treasure there and you're uh
not quite in your backyard because it's quite a it's it's a big drive out that way but um uh you have a great group of
people caesar do you go to this star party every year
h yes um this year this year we are starting to make in the same place two
star parties by year this is the first time uh we made in Katamar
u two editions yeah but now we choose to
go um again to loes and in October we are
making um an
astrophotography dedicated star party oh I see um of course that we are thinking
in in uh the typical cosmologic uh talks
uh with Gabria or a lot of people that they can they can uh bring a lot of
different things but we are centering the October the October saries in the
same place in Moses going to to center
uh for kids and adult people uh in astrophotography because it's it's you
know it's is uh something that is a is a big moment for that uh talking about
smart telescope new cameras new telescopes um something that
Aguin Brolio and Juan Pablo Pato they
work together in use the 80 APO
um explore scientific telescope with the new with the new
um comma corrector 0.8 and they use
different setups in cameras agotin use in this picture of Orion Autin use uh
use of the um Sony 605 camera with an
square uh square CCD sensor yes uh and
he took this beautiful Orion was a you know that Oreo was really low in the
origina and Juan Paulo they took beautiful image uh with the setup with
the comma corrector um it's a beautiful picture of Orion
this is another picture that he took with a another another with a rigier of
eight inches wonderful this is to say wonderful
my son is great really much better than me taking picture yes yes
caesar we are we are going to have to cut you it looks like we're gonna have to cut you short here a little bit uh so
save some for the next Global Star Party uh because uh there should be a part two
to this I think and yeah absolutely I thank you very much uh we are we're
going from the pale blue dot uh uh to um Robert Ree's uh pale gray
dot and so um we are um we're moving right along here
caesar thank you so much for Oh thank you to you Scott and next global s party
we are showing the things about the the our sur party and we have a lot a lot of
uh pictures with u dwarf telescope well I have maybe 50
pictures more for the from the people and I'm happy to to show again different
things about this star party great thank you very much okay thank you so much thank you Robert thank you very much for
coming on to uh Global Star Party here always my pleasure yeah it's wonderful
to uh have you on and uh when I first said I was uh I I called
Robert and asked him if he would join us and and he said "Well what's the theme this time?" I said "A pale blue dot."
And he says "Well mine's the pale gray dot." So yeah that little gray dot right next to
the blue dot right next to the blue one that's right well wonderful it's great to have you on what What uh what
astronomy adventures have you been on recently oh well I've been having a lot of fun with the uh Celestron Origin
telescope uh I'm beta testing the u um wedge option for it to allow it to
operate um um equatorally and um I've been having good results uh three-hour
long exposures um um running equatorally with the thing i don't have one of the new wedges my
wedge is the original 1975 wedge that I got with my very first
Celestron uh Celestron 8 that I still have after 50 years wow so um uh with
that particular wedge the uh uh straight end power connector will strike the east
side of the um of the wedge if you go down below about 45 degrees elevation in
the east so I saw that with a a 90° power adapter from Amazon and then tie
wrap the other end of it to uh the fork handle and it's out of the way and it works just great so but the the new
wedge does not have that interference problem uh that's just the very old original wedges but like I said it's a
very quick fix with the 90° u um angle adapter and um like I said I've been
having a lot of fun with it um one of these um global star parties i'll have to show what the origin can do from the
middle of a city i'm in the middle of a city of 2 million um there's a major
highway just not too far from me if I am lucky and I strain I can see the Big
Dipper that's how bright my sky is but uh I am doing as good a work with the
origin from my backyard as I used to do from the Texas Star Party under very dark skies oh wow so u I'm going to show
that off next time but this time pale gray dot the moon and um I've been
writing a article for the um Elpost Lunar Observer about the volcanic
modification of various areas on the moon so I says to myself self self why
not drop two anvils on the same foot and use that theme tonight so we're going to be talking about uh
the volcanic modification of certain areas on the moon about a dozen areas on the moon all right and uh let me uh get
real brave and try the screen share here okay and uh it's going to work this time
big drum roll here we are kaboom boy we're cooking along now all righty well
postcards from the moon my trademark so the first slide I show is to remind
everybody that on the moon there are only two landscape forming processes
either everything you see on the moon is created by an impact of an asteroid or a meteor or a comet or uh it was uh
modified by volcanism and uh that volcanic modification is what we're going to be talking about tonight we'll
look at about 12 different areas on the moon starting with this uh uh I call this my my spacecraft view out the
window the port window of the capsule as we're drifting along in in a polar orbit
heading south and now we're seeing in the center Indon Crater the dark lava
flooded crater and in the foreground Hercules and Atlas craters
and all three of these have been modified by volcanism in one form or another now Indimeon up at the top um
it's completely paved over with dark basult kind of like like very familiar Plato crater uh but Indime is near the
the northeast limb of the moon and people don't pay it much attention but it is as big if not bigger than Plato
and has the similar uh interior lava flooding that u completely paved over
the interior of it you can't see the interior the uh the central peak anymore
uh many of the uh terrace walls are covered up with basalt so this crater
has been extensively modified it doesn't look like your traditional um bowl-shaped crater and getting closer to
the foreground um we see Atlas Crater kind of looks like one of Grandma's
oatmeal cookies the interior of it is all cracked and crumbled um this is
another form of volcanic modification where uh subsurface volcanic pressures
push up the floor from underneath and uh and crack and stress the floor and we
call these floor fractured craters there's quite a few of them on the moon and then the Hercules crater right next
to it um is about a billion years younger so it didn't quite get the same
volcanic forces that Atlas did but nonetheless it still flooded its
interior with a good degree of basalt and paved over its interior uh before it
was struck by that second asteroid creating Atlas A within its in its floor
so all three of these craters extensively volcanically modified after their formation now the volcanic
modification isn't necessarily limited to um craters uh the lunar seas that we
see the dark regions that make the face of the man and the moon those are all volcanic lava fields and
um not all of the maria are created equal we're used to
the maria imbrium and serenitatus tranquilitatus being completely paved
over like a like a a grocery store parking lot all smooth but um here we
see um Maria Ostra down on the lower um uh lower right hand side of the moon uh
near the limb um doesn't look like a traditional Maria at all uh it's a
collection of lava filled craters instead of one smooth continuous bissol
field and um the question well um Mario wraps around the edge of the moon half
of it is on the far side of the moon you never see it from Earth so it's the proximity of Austral to the far side of
the moon that limited the amount of volcanism that flooded its interior the
far side of the moon has a thicker crust and that thicker crust restricts lava
flows uh if you look closely at the back side of the mode there's perhaps only onethird the number of Maria basalt
basalt patches like there are on the near side that's because that thicker crust restricted the lava flows and that
did the same with uh Mariel Stra so instead of a smooth continuous lava
field we have this collection of individual lava filled craters each crater still retaining its identity we
could identify each and every one of these craters separately yet uh collectively they create this this
modeled basalt dark region on the southeastern part of the moon and we
collectively call it Maria the southern sea uh moving up toward the north
um traditionally we look at the round bullseye feature um in the upper half of
the image uh lacis mortise the lake of death now I'd like to know what was
going through Ricoli Richioli's mind back in uh u the the mid7th century when
he dreamed up this name but uh uh Lake of Death is what it is but uh lately my
attention had been drawn away from this volcanic modified feature and I look below it look at the southern rim of uh
the Lake of Death there are the two craters Plat and Mesa side by side um
they almost look like a pair of granny glasses staring back at you but now expand your field of view below and
Mason and notice the faint obscure outline of a large ghost crater uh you
see the rim of it going down uh the right side of the image and arcing back up very faintly um toward the middle of
the image um this ghost crater is almost um almost obliterated but there's enough
of it that you can see its eggshaped below Planet and Mason and now you're
looking at the lunar owl planet and Mason form the eyes of the owl and the unnamed ghost crater
heavily modified by volcanism so that crater is hardly recognizable anymore
but uh that's the body of the owl so once you see the lunar owl you can't
unsee it every time you look at this region of the moon you'll see those two owl eyes staring back at
you and moving on to another one oh the uh u sea of serenity oh excuse me a sea
of tranquility uh Mari tranquilitatus uh we're looking only at the northeastern part of it now uh
tranquilitatus named the sea of tranquility for a reason it's fairly smooth um not a whole lot of action
going on it but there is an awful lot of subtle vulcanism if you know what to look for now um two obvious features in
the um upper right of center um the upper feature Rhyma or lunar reel and
the bottom linear feature is Rupus Couchi which is a a sloping cliffike
structure and both of these are created by volcanism um volcanic uplift
fractured the surface uh in the case of Rhyma
um two parallel faults formed and the land slumped in between them creating uh
the shallow reel it's only about 40 m deep but it extends for almost 200 m 200
km across the lunar face now south of Little Couchy Crater um equally long uh
Rupus Couch is a slope that descends maybe 300 400 meters over the space of
several kilometers so uh it's uh land that sloped down slumped down on one
side of a fault line uh created by volcanic pressures now um the volcanism
didn't erupt through these fault lines but there was still a lot of volcanic pressure in the area so look below both
of these linear features and notice the little dots the little volcanic domes
these are little pancake volcanoes on the moon only several hundred meters high uh but um about 10 kilometers
across the one on the right you can actually see a tiny caldera in the in the center of it little tiny volcanoes
on the moon and moving along to the next one
though one of my one of my favorites because I claim naming rights to the uh dark feature in the middle uh notice
it's basically if I get my cursor to work basically heart-shaped so this entire dark region
I call it the heart of the moon because it's very near the center of the moon's visible disc you know why is it dark
darker than the surrounding area here we see the hygienist reel another um
another linear uh reel created by volcanism except in this case look at
the little tiny volcanic vents all along the reel um and hygienous crater itself
in the middle is not an impact crater it is a 9 kilometer wide volcanic collapse
pit so this was a very volcanically active area um a long time ago and
volcanic ash that blew out of all of these vents dusted down across the uh
this hilly area and darkened it and it's still dark to this day so I call that
the heart of the moon and moving on ah here we've got
Cassini crater um Cassini is another one of these craters that started out as a
rather common looking you know bowl-shaped crater central peak but then uh it was volcanically modified until
today it looks like a bird's nest now um in the old days before the volcanic
flooding that created Mari Imbrium um Cassini Crater had a ray structure like
uh Tao does today had radial streaks of ejecta extending out from it but then
Mari Imrium flooded with a basalt and the basalt lapped right up to the to the
rim of of Cassini at the same time volcanic eruptions crowd came up through
the cracks of the floor and filled the crater interior with basaltt and then
later uh Cassini A and B the impacts that created the two craters within it
uh made it really look like a bird's nest because now there's two eggs in the nest
and cook it along to another one uh our old favorite Plato it doesn't matter if
you're a novice lunar observer or an old hand if Plato is is visible you're going
to be gravitated toward it uh Plato just does not look like your average crater
um completely basalt fil uh in fact the basalt within Plato actually uh is
rising 600 meters higher than the basults of Mari embrium down here in the
south whoops I didn't mean to do that um the interior of Plato the basalt floor
in it 600 meters higher than uh than MariM so a very volcanically active uh
region at one time and then of course uh next to it gashing through the Alps
mountains the al the the alpine valley um another volcanic feature created by
land splitting open by subsurface volcanic pressures and then uh running
right down the middle of it notice a very thin sineuous reel this through
this molten lava used to flow and empty out onto u Mari Fragorus in the north
you would think that it looks like um the the channel of uh the alpine valley is emptying out on a marimrium through
these two massifs that we call the guardians at its north end but no the uh
the territory on the on the southern end of the alpine valley rises up about 200
meters so the flow is actually toward the
north and moving on again now jump down to the south side of the moon here we
are on the southern shore of um Marinubium the sea of clouds and uh
again evidence of volcanism everywhere of course Marinubium itself was flooded
by uh repeated episodes of volcanism to create the lunar maria but uh here
Patatus crater we see as another floor fractured crater it's interior completely filled with basaltt and you
see the uh the cracks and reals running around the rim um next to it well we've
got Hessiotus crater right here the the smaller one also basalt flooded and got
the uh the chance center impact of that bullseye crater in the middle right below it Pesotus A notice that it
appears to have a second wall inside its outer wall uh this was built up by
volcanic pressure from below uh there's about 150 craters like this that have a
second interior wall and they're called concentric craters and that interior
wall is was pushed up by subsurface lava pressures um seeping up through cracks
in the crater floor created by the impact that created it so uh uh if a
crater is small enough it will create these concentric craters but if it's larger it will become a cons a a floor
fracture crater like right next door and of course Rhyma this 300 kilometer long
uh real also volcanically formed by uh uh the splitting of the land by volcanic
pressures underneath and uh these ghost craters like keys over here circling my
uh my cursor um flooded with basaltt uh when uh the the maria formed and
obliterated in the crater except for the very crown of its rim so we call these craters ghost craters because their
interior is gone we only see them by the the surviving rim oh and then finally
down here on the corner besides keys notice the little lunar volcano keys pi
the letter the Greek letter pi about a 15 km diameter volcano little caldera on
the top um we don't have tall vuvvious steepmounted uh steep-sided mountain
volcanoes on the moon like we do on earth but uh these uh
shallow broad um volcanic domes are quite common um on the mari areas of the
moon and uh moving on up in the northwestern part of Mari
Imrium the man in the moon's uh left eye we see sinus aridum another basin that
formed on the edge of the um embryum basin and when the embryum basin flooded
with salt and created mari embrium that spilled over flooded into whoops flooded
into sinus aridum and turned it into a horseshoe bay and then notice the
wrinkle ridges arcing around down to the south here these were uh created by uh
volcanic activity in the form of sheets of basalt shifting and slumping toward
the middle of the basin as the uh as the lava fill within the basin depress the
center of the basin and made everything slump toward the middle um these sheets of basalt would buckle up and uh form
these ridges the ones outside of uh Sinus Aridum look very much like uh oh
frozen ocean waves washing into uh into the horseshoe bay of Sinus
Aridum and another volcanic feature that's that is subtle you have to hunt
for it but it's very long but narrow uh the Cersalis reel 300 kilometers long um
springs up here and extends into or submerged under the uh the shoreline of
Oceananis Proeram up here but uh you can see that u some features are older some
features are younger right here we see the reel splitting through an existing crater yet go up here and we see a
younger crater overlaying the real so uh you can tell the relative ages of these
things uh uh the real is younger than this crater but this crater is younger
than the real and then of course here we have Krueger crater a kind of a Plato
wannabe smaller than Plato but same thing interior completely flooded with
assault paved over smooth as a parking lot and moving on to um what is this uh yes
our next to last shot um more evidence of volcanism in the
form of ghost craters now I mentioned ghost craters are craters that were um
obliterated by uh the Maria basaltt the lava flows that created the the Maria
yet uh the craters are are big enough that just the very tips of their crowns
now protrude above the basalt floor now um this 100 km round ghost crater here
is called flamsteed P and it didn't get that designation until 2006 i have many
of these lunar orbiter prints that I inherited uh from that region that are
handmarked as flamsteed ring we used to call this the flamseed ring named after
flamsteed crater right here but now we call it flamsteed p a letter designated
satellite crater of flamsteed and then over here another um satellite crater or
flamsteed I forget the letter designation and then uh here a ghost crater Witchman
R and down here Latrone didn't quite become a ghost crater instead it's
another horseshoe bay only partially flooded so jumping to our last shot uh
hopping up to north uh northern Ocean Proarum um here we see volcanism in two
ways one you really have to look hard to see it and know what you're looking at the other one's kind of obvious um the
latter uh Monz Rumpker here this 70 kilometer wide volcanic mound that
protruding upward uh the scarp protruding upward from the plains of
Oceananis Proaram and has a series of volcanic domes on top of it these little
shield volcanoes that uh once he erupted very viscous lavas and uh Rum didn't get
the respect that it deserved back uh in the early telescopic days for some reason it was classified as a crater
although anybody can look at it now and clearly see that it's a bump not a hole but uh nonetheless today we recognize it
for what it is we call it Monz Rumper Mount Rumper now the other volcanic feature I mentioned there are no
steepsided u volcanoes on the moon you know like on earth you know mount
vuvius mount sel and so forth but there is one crater I mean one volcano on the
moon that fits that description but it's very small right here my cursor is
circling Marian T the letter T and this
is a 600 meter high volcano about uh 3 km in diameter and that's the closest we
get on the moon to terrestrial style uh tall
volcanoes so um uh no particular rhyme or reason for the reason I chose these
uh I just leaf through a bunch of images that I had and yep that's volcanic that's volcanic threw them in the pile
so uh took a look at him tonight and uh I hope you get an idea that uh uh the
moon isn't just created by getting whacked by a lot of meteors and comets
uh the moon modified itself through extensive periods of vulcanism over a period of of of maybe two billion years
and good thing it did or it'd be a very dull place uh just a white ball of the sky but because of the vulcanism we see
the man in the moon and it has a personality and it attracts us to the
vision of it when it's rising on a on a warm summer night so uh I've enjoyed
chatting with you i'm going to uh go back to uh full screen
and turn it over to you okay okay that's great well I'd like to say something
Scotty here at this point please when Robert when you started your lecture
just now it was as if a door opened for me oh yeah
it was as I walked through the door listening to your lecture and watching
the images you so carefully selected the years fell away and there I
was standing next to Jean Shoemaker telling me a lot of what you just said
just now about the moon and I've come to the conclusion that you and Jean shared
one thing you don't just you don't just know the moon you feel the moon you are a friend
of the moon you know no matter how bad the light pollution is going to get in the future
we may not be able to see the stars or the planets at all we will never ever
give up looking at the moon no matter how bad light pollution gets yep the moon laughs at light pollution and uh
yes I am indeed friends with the moon and my goal through these presentations is to get you to be friends with the
moon as well to understand it you sure succeeded in that and Robert thank you
so much god bless you it was a wonderful wonderful lecture thank you very much
great that's wonderful well um uh our
next uh speaker David is Marchel Soua uh and um he comes to us from uh uh Brazil
uh he's been on many a global star party and um
uh so uh and he just had his uh his international event um uh that uh runs
pretty much concurrent with the Northeast Astronomy Forum during around that same time uh but they're tremendous
events that he does down there and uh hopefully one day uh David you and I can
go down there together and and attend one of them so Marello I'm going to
include you here thank you so much for coming on to Global Star Party and uh happy Earth
thank you very much for invitation nice to see you also Dr dave Le David is a
great pleasure to be with you both here and it is for me is a wonderful
experience here to participate in this program and I have a information from
our last event here to share and I hope soon you can visit us again you be very
welcome here and we until today remember the
special moment with Dr d here with his presentation
yes it's fantastic it's just fantastic i I will share now my screen
okay i think that everything will work well now i am in a new computer
then and I I will begin to show some activities that we are doing since the
eclipse but we I don't know why it's not available
for me to to change the screen oh sorry it worked
this are the images of the eclipse observation here this year we had more
than 400 people that were with us there oh wow and here the the observation
began at 3:00 a.m 2 and a half a.m approximately and
they stayed with us until the morning and we had a lot of people
there and it was a great experience we have the uh TV that
show what we are planning to do and helped us to
invite people to come here i don't know if you remember this telescope here you
donated to us oh yes event we are using to today we are using to today nice
that's great a lot of people and they're using this special event the observation
of the eclipse is in front of the river and we asked the mayor of the city
and the municipal government to turn off the lights near us and we had the
opportunity to organize this special event here and it was fantastic experience for us ever that we have the
opportunity to organize an eclipse observation have a lot of people that participate and for our surprise this
event happened during the night until the morning and a lot a lot of people
participated with us and we continue visiting schools and talking with the
students and this I will show some of these experiences here in some public
schools in our city we are talk with the students looking for a new talents and
we found a lot of students that are motivated to participate with us in our
project to be involved in our project this is another school that I had the
opportunity to visit and this is another experience with students and the stu the
schools are helping us inviting all the students to
participate in the presentations and with this new talents
and motivated students we are beginning new projects here in our in Brazil
and this is one of them we are sending experiments in atmospheric balloon
united States is here we are participating again cubes in space the
students have the opportunity to send experiments we are going to test if
something different happen with the samples that we are sending to these
bubbles and this is a a special room that we create in
inara that is a protect forest that is located in front of the ocean we call in
Brazil this kind of forest of a very small grease near the ocean and we
create a special for this presentation for the public and for students and
teachers that requests a special presentation about astronomy and this is
the home that we create for them and this is now a short report
about our seventh edition of the international meeting that organized
here this year we had the participation
of speakers from South America and Central
America and we learned a lot about what they are doing there here we have
here from Guatemala Alejandro Leon Castella from
Costa Rica Alejandro sorry sorry Fernando Fabani
from Uruguay and they have a speakers also from north of Brazil that
participates that expert Danielle the expert in exop planets we have also the
the former director of the planetarium of H Janeir that also was one of the
speaker and planetary Janeiro is the biggest planetarium in Brazil they have
anniversar that's fantastic has 20 m of diameter is a big
one and also had participation of speakers spirit son that is a a expert in
cosmology and also an expert in asteroids you two experts in our
event these are images of the theater this this person that's here in the
middle is the owner of a hotel here that is Vicar that was recognized
by the Dark Sky International as the first hotel outside United States that
is protecting the Dark Sky and this protection is recognized by the Dark Sky
international now we have six hotels in United States and outside United States
the only hotel that was recognized by dark sky international is this hotel
near us that is the pos that's located in the city of Santa Maria Madalena and
our group that was involved in this process of the recognition by the dark
sky international we are very happy Now that the first hotel until today outside
the United States recognized by Dark Sky International as a special place that
protected protects the dark skies is located near us here in Brazil and in
the city of Santa Maria Madalana and this couple here in the middle they are
the owners of the hotel Mr mario and Mrs
christristiano and we are developing activities in this city in the next
program I will show images of this hotel that's a very special
place here is a presentation from Ed about the the astronomy of
theas that why is a fantastic because they were a fantastic
civilization and for I don't know the reason until today I think that few we
have idea what could happen at this moment but the the fantastic Maya
civilization that now we have informations uh in from what they did in
the past they for they disappeared
and the Mayers already exist they have 10 10 million people that may in the
central America most of them in Guatemala but we don't have we have a
few registers about what they did in the
past but with this few registers that you
have we know that they knew a lot about astronomy they knew the phase of V is
the they have the county of the year that was with a correct idea of duration of
duration of the year they knew a lot of things and Edar showed us some
informations about this during the present his presentation here our events
that we have more than 400 people in the three days of the
event and again it was for us a fantastic experience here that involved
many students of our region in Brazil and from other states Brazilian states
And I had the opportunity to look to the sun with a special telescope donated by
Charlie Bates project he sky that he looks from every day he take picture of
the sun he look when possible when we don't have clouds and he a special round
table about dark skies with the representative of this country that
we're here in our event and this is has avocad that is a special place where we
develop our activities at night and Here we have something very special because
when uh we began contact with them they invited me to
begin activities at night at this place h they already h had did out protection
uh of the lights for the night for a special reason because is a very big
place now have a protect forest there and why they they need to to protect the
lights they don't have the light pollution they don't have light the
lights all the lights are covered they have minimal lights that's necessary at
night to protect the uh sea turtles because they have sea turtles there they
create they have the eggs of the sea turtles in
the ocean that is located in front of the headquarter of this park and we have
a laws here in Brazil to protect the sea turtles from the light pollution and
they already did the out protection and when we began
activator that we have that is not the equipment belongs to the our sky that's
a network that's quite that uh introduced us to that and it's working
until today this observatory that's a remote observatory and this is the
telescope that we have there and we are using the UNAF for the
activities a lot of people ever they see the first image
from this telescope They begin to be marvelous about this because we show all
the amazes in tablets in smartphones and something fantastic
here we showing them the image of the
sky here in the southern hemisphere you have your fantastic objects here
like the omega centi atarina the enable of karina many fantastic geob box see
many fantastic object that's possible to see
with is not so big telescopes and here
our group here after a trip inside the
forest at night And everybody here is wet because rained a lot this after we
had opportunity to see the sky we begin to walk inside the forest and for in few
minutes we have a lot of clouds and begin to rain and when we returned everything finished and we could see the
sky again this is what happened here in the summit near the summit and this is
the last day of our event in Brazil all the participants here that made the
presentation were here and Edo wrote an article about the event that was
published in a magazine in Pakistan about his experience here in
Brazil is a magazine that is this monthly international culture and art
that's published in Pakistan is a this is a image of this
event that I Hope you and do you squat and Dr dev visit us again to participate
in our events in Brazil and we had the opportunity also to talk about
astronomy in the spirit of events in a Brazilian TV channel here located in our
seats is a special podcast that is transmitted here it is a special one
with the Latin America friends that were here and with us talking about astronomy
and about the results of the event and in in this period I also had
the opportunity to use telescopes a telescope in in Hawaii with two m to a
diameter of 2 m these are some of the image that this is a color image edited
by us of NGC
5792 and this again uh espro galaxy NGC
6118 this is a fantastic experience and before I finish I wanted to show
something that we were very curious about that happened in April but many
years ago in in 1561
1561 that was a celestial phenomen
that we were very curious about this and I will show here some information i
don't know if you read read something about this event this is the Oh sorry it
is in Portuguese i know it's in English but is a I will try to translate here what is
this it was published this report in a newspaper in April
his a newspaper in April
1,561 and described a celestial phenomena that a lot of
people saw this phenomena as it is written in this report and this document
is h now you can access this docu document in Swiss
Switzerland because the this document is there that is a monthly newspaper from
this period and here is the image about showing what they saw in
the in in a a presentation made by the person that wrote this
article about what they saw in the sky and I show now what they say that they saw in
April 14 at down between 4 and 5
a.m there a terrible oper apparition in the sun in Nuremberg this city in now is
located in Germany they said that they saw something very different anuzo
according to this report have the sun two semicircular ars
of blood red color like the moon it's light last quart and in the sun above
and below and on both sides the color was blood there was a round ball of iron
color partly opaque and partly black likewise on both sides and like a Taurus
around the sun there were blood red balls and the others in great number
about three in a row and for in a square some isolate isolated I don't know if
this report is something that the person who who wrote this article
h received from other people or if he
saw this it's Not clear here but some you can see here they saw broad red
stripes become thicker and at the black and playable in front like rid
roads they saw in this report something fantastic that they saw in the sky
h the people that stud on the U ofus say that sheep that was there were there but
maybe we have a explanation
from many different natural phenomenas that
happened at this day but he ends the this article
uh talk about religion and this is something that nowadays have people that imagine
that maybe is a report that didn't
represent really what happened something that is in is not maybe he intensify
what happened this day using maybe some religious problem of
the period and this report was written by Hans
Glazer then it's a newspaper from this
moment is a historical report I don't know but these are what we
Every the opinion that you have in internet about this and some scientists
and historians they imaged maybe you have a combination of many different
natural phenomena that happen like some dogs auroras or solar halos meteor
showers and maybe a mass confusing somethingological effects about the
people and that solves many optical illus illusions
and this also you have also combination of religious fear typical of
the six six cent exaggeration misinterpretation
of visual phenomena I don't know but also we have
theories but they don't have any scientific support and when I saw this I
Remember this image that I know that you know better than me because this part
come from United States in 1833 that was
less shower in the period of this in this
year I I saw many parts about in the period from 10 to 13 November 1833
But the the most
strong report happening in the night from 12 to 13 November and you have this
kind of of images that they're all representing
what they saw they say that was possible to see more than 100,000 of meteors
during the night many people I saw other reports about 200,000 of meteors in one
night that was something that changed the idea from many people and
that's a surprise observation sky and they say also many people consider
also that's a moment that motivated one kind of church the beginning of this
kind of church after this special event that I saw in United States that until
today you can observe it i saw a special shower le shower h begin before the 2000
I don't remember the exact year but from uh in the beginning of our astronomic
group uh almost 30 years ago we were in
a special place here dark place and I saw
I count 30 50
meteors in 10 minutes and many of them was very big
one abolite that when they exploded we saw shadows in of the trees that was a
fantastic event many people saw here in our seat and this was the
biggest meteor shower that I saw until today I don't know I can imagine what
these people in this these moments so and this may be a combination of this
kind of events not so strong as this and and other natural phenomenas that
explain the part made by this guy in
1561 in back and I'll finish with this image i
hope we not only see enemies and we can h in the problems
that we have here now in the world we also can have people that find try that
looking for friends and I hope even with
divorce we have a moment of peace in the near
future and is a special moment also that you mention Pope Francis that is a a
very special person for many people here in Brazil that died yesterday
thank you very much Scott for the opportunity thank you so much Cesar it
was fantastic interesting this um this uh um you know uh celestial battle over
Nuremberg yes and I had never heard of it before so uh but uh I think that uh
after seeing um one time at the Peach State Star Party uh you know a circular
uh halos that went across the entire sky around the entire perimeter of the
horizon and there were sun dogs and many um amazing things um you know I could
see that if it was maybe low in the horizon uh you had refraction going on
uh uh perhaps uh in 15 1561
uh maybe also there's u uh you know coal
burning or or wood burning stoves and stuff uh chimneys and the smoke in the
air perhaps it turned some of the uh images really deeply red so very very
interesting i'll have to read more about it and uh but um yeah I think that a lot of uh
UFO believers think that um you know this was UFO activity perhaps so but uh
but those of us who have seen lots of really interesting uh solar effects in the atmosphere
um probably would would attribute it to that so I I agree with you
and if someone that is is now is with us here with this program if they have any
idea what any difference that have another idea what happened it would be
fantastic if they can share because I made a research and we have many
doubts no one has an explan because you have only one report that is this from
from this newspaper very nice very interesting okay um uh we
are uh now heading over to u
um uh professor Kareem Jeffer uh he is going to be talking about
uh the 170th global star party which will be at the David Dunlap Observatory with
the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and uh so we're real excited uh to be
part of that and um uh I'll be attending that event right after I get back from
Stararmas so I it's um uh going to be I may be a little tuckered out but I think
it'll be fun to hang out with uh the Rasque group and um and to uh
tour that facility because I'm I've never I've been up to Toronto several
times but I've never been to this observatory so and that's the case for a lot of people they come up to Toronto
they don't even know that the observatory is there and uh you know with Scott coming overseas and coming
straight in I think we're going to have to have little shots of maple syrup lined up for him at every There's some
energy that's right that's right well that's wonderful um I uh uh we have
already taken some of the promotional videos uh for that and uh if you're if
you're uh a follower of Instagram and our uh you know our Instagram uh uh uh
page um so to speak you'll see Kareem uh beckoning you to come to uh the
observatory he's standing right in front of us is very beautiful very very iconic
looking and uh so thank you for coming on uh Kareem i know it's late you know
uh for you right now and you've been working hard all day so my pleasure i've
uh today's been a quantum mechanics day with my both of my classes and then I ran a quantum computing workshop uh this
afternoon with a guest speaker from a nearby university and uh it's it's good
to get back into space after working with the really really really tiny things for the rest of the day
absolutely great as Scott mentioned I want to talk a little bit about the 2025
International Astronomy Day program that's coming up uh GSP 170 uh on next
Saturday May 3rd uh from 6:00 p.m to 10:00 p.m central time before I do I
want to talk a little bit about the Pale Blue Dot because I've always enjoyed that reference to the Pale Blue Dot and
the looking back at Earth from so far away but I also realized that you know
we look at Earth not just from so far away but also from close by and we watch some of the connections that we see with
nature and I always try to start my GSP talks with a little bit of an
acknowledgement not just of the land that we are on but also of the sky and
so at the moment we are at the flower moon so we are at the end
of the flower moon the end of the pink moon as the settlers called it or the uh birds laying eggs moon as the Mikmma
call it on the east coast and we recognize that you know the spring has come and we can see that in the grounds
we can see that with the final with the first budding of the flowers and it's kind of lovely to see as you know the
leaves start to take hold on the trees and it kind of feels like nature is coming back into its own and it's a
great time to have Earth Day and so for my students today I actually made sure to share with them the
LANCSAT spell your own name in Earth observation images and I have the QR code here for anybody in our audience
who's never seen this before i also have the URL this is an amazing LANCAT
science display where what they've done is they've taken a bunch of the different Earth observation images and
identified any that resemble the letters of the alphabet and so if I take a name
like Jack John Abbott College and I go ahead and click it in I get these
beautiful sets of land satellite images where you can see a nice well actually
it looks a little bit like Santorini there with the sea but not quite Santorini it's another volcanic island
you've got a beautiful sort of an inlet of a riverbed that has just the right
shaped islands to make it look like an A in the middle and then you've got a fluoresence pattern showing up in the
depth of the water off the coast there in Eastern Asia and this is what's neat
is when you do this in the LANCAT um app as you run your cursor over the
different images it tells you where these images are taken and so you can
redo the exact same name with another set of images so on the left there we've
got a dam in Turkey in the center there we have a delta and a and a riverbed
that's in Southeast Asia and then on the right there we actually have a rock formation sort of an amphitheater in the
deserts in the US and so you can go in and make your own name and spell it out
and as I was telling my students you know if you happen to have you know a significant other who doesn't watch the
GSPs you can create the name and make a nice little you know mouse pad or a coffee cup or something for them and
make them think that you went through all the databases of all the Earth observation images that's cool and you
know let them feel like they really owe you for a huge timeconsuming present
uh we have a few cool events coming up at the Montreal Center including tomorrow night where we have a lids
night and lo and behold the weather forecast is actually favorable we have
clearing skies right around 8:00 p.m and I have one of my astronomy students from the fall is giving her very first public
talk Lily Donnoy and she's going to be giving a short talk about meteor showers and specifically about the lids and then
we're going to step outside and try to see if we can catch any enjoy a little bit of Jupiter before it sets a little
bit of Mars a little bit of you know the beehive cluster maybe even see Orion before it drops behind the trees it's a
nice evening just at the start of spring to get out there and get to enjoy the
night sky and get to relax a little bit after way too much teaching day after day after day we also have of course our
local event for the International Astronomy Day and we are really enjoy we're we're excited because uh some of
the GSP members know Russell Freighic who was our past outreach coordinator here at the Montreal Center well Russell
went chasing Aurora in Churchill Manitoba now that's in the prairies here in Canada it's slightly northern
compared to where we are in Montreal area and he got some incredible images including the one that I have here as
the background to the poster so he's going to give a talk on that and then we're going to have observing if the weather allows and we have the Montreal
Center joining us on this live stream that Scott referred to so I want to talk to you a little bit about what we have
planned for this live stream that's going to be hosted by Scott myself the Explore Scientific and the RAS team from
the David Dunlop Observatory in Toronto and this is kind of a twofold sort of
event first off it's a showcase of what RAS does for outreach especially on an
event like International Astronomy Day so we're planning contributions from
across the entire country and then at the same time we want to highlight what the David Dunlop Observatory does for
the public there in Richmond Hill just north of Metro Toronto so we have an
in-person group of sessions one from 7:00 to 8:30 and one from 9 to 10:30 and
while these in-person sessions are going on from the DDO outreach team and some of our volunteers we also will have
Scott myself and others inside the DDO library basically live streaming our
regular global star parties but with a group of presenters some of whom are new
to our GSP format so in the Toronto area we've been advertising the local
in-person event as well as the online event and our centers that are
participating go completely across the country so under the RAC umbrella we have 30 centers from coast to coast to
coast and we have starting on the east coast St john's Newfoundland Halifax
Nova Scotia Ottawa Ontario and Montreal Quebec we've got Hamilton Ontario
Kitchener Waterlue the Toronto Center Winnipeg Manitoba and we're also going
to go all the way out to Victoria Center out on the Pacific Coast so East Coast
all the way out to West Coast we're hoping to also have a contribution from the Yukon Center but the Yukon Center is
very far north and so they tend to ignore spring astronomy day because for them already at this point in the spring
we have unfortunately very very short nights so for them to have an
International Astronomy Day nighttime event would require them to start the event well past 10 p.m to be able to see
anything and that's in the Pacific time zone so that's going to be very late for us but we're hoping that they're be able
to send us something so that we can celebrate the Yukon Center
i also am really pleased at our lineup of speakers i think you'll recognize a
few of these people you know we've got our co-hosts both Scott Dovid we're hoping David Iiker gets a chance to
contribute but he's going to be also finishing off with Stararmis you've got myself there you've got Terry man from
the Astronomical League you've got Astrodoc Ron Breacher you've got Adrien Bradley who is also a RAS member not
just the Michigan Societies and then you've got Chris Kerwin from Astronomy by the Bay in St john New Brunswick who
has joined us on a couple of GSPs before and he runs the Sunday night astronomy show out there in New Brunswick so I'll
be joining him this Sunday on his show to talk a little bit about this event as well we have the president of RAS
Michael Watson who is shown there with a piece of equipment that I think Scott will find familiar and then we've got
Randall Rosenfeld who's our archivist for the RAC who is going to be giving us
a short talk on crossber collaboration in astronomy and then hopefully on the
Sunday he's going to be able to meet with Scott and a few others from the explore scientific team to show them a
little bit of the Dorner Museum collection which also hosts a couple of telescopes from our own David Levy we
have the York University Alani Carwell Astronomical Observatory that will be joining us we have John Percy who is a
professor ameritus from University of Toronto and an outreach extraordinaire he has 60 years of experience in
astronomy out and so he's going to be telling us a little bit about his journey and he has been a RAS fellow for
ages he's been a member of the Toronto Center for a long time but he also helped to set up the uh the Astronomical
Society of the Pacific the AAVSO he's worked with the local physics teachers to help develop physics curriculum and
so at the moment as a retired professor ameritus not only is he still doing research he's also giving talks to
groups of seniors to get them interested in astronomy and space so really when
the passion is in you it doesn't die we've got Betty Robinson is one of our board members and one of my EPO team
members and she has written a series of books that star this Elizabeth who's a
young lady who's just starting to get into her understanding of the world and there was a book about Mars and now just
recently last year she did Elizabeth's first total solar eclipse so she's going to talk a little bit about writing these
children's books and that specific one and then one of my favorite astrophotographers Deborah Saravolo from
British Columbia who is going to actually share with us the different apertures that she does astrophotography
through so we have a huge lineup of speakers and centers joining us and all
of this is to help highlight what the RAS brings in astronomy outreach and in
our astronomy pursuits that maybe isn't really well known outside of our own
borders here in Canada and sometimes not even within our borders sometimes we don't even know what the center next to
us is doing because we're so you know we're so involved with what our centers are doing and our activities our general
assembly is one way to learn what everyone is doing and we have our general assembly this weekend and I'll be giving a citizen science talk with
one of our local professors at University of Moral and then I'll also be giving a talk about one of the
beginners observing programs that we've been working on in the education public outreach committee we have about five
other citizen science talks as well and a couple of talks about the most recent
eclipses on top of all of that we want to highlight the David Dunlop Observatory this is the largest
telescope in Canada it's one of our historic observatories and the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory is now part of
the Alliance of Historic Observatories so we felt it would be nice to be able to showcase a little bit of what the
David Dunlop brings so I have here a short video that gives you a little bit of a background on what we actually have
as a historical walkthrough of the development and the use and the findings
from the DDO [Music]
together in the early days some of this greatly woke up
here and a lawyer and a contractor
really famous invited to help out in this whole initiative
he passed away before we actually were able to build up his wife actually
donated uh the land
create a better way to do it now the build and the process and everything
were just incredibly important at the time this
whole area was planned and undeveloped you can see kind of the scale
of the people in the class get back together this one is personal this is
the second [Music]
largest and we had openings and remind us of his
public and the prime minister William McKenzie came back in
1935 the research done at the meeting almost members came back to the
RC and they actually donated their time and their efforts including help of our
Now as Toronto grew into the metropolitan that it is isolation the video has helped me
uh
early first
now the video itself was moved out and
milder the city of Richmond
Hill program and we let Richmond Hill speak up and now we committed a lot of fun to
creating a new park so we're back to running public events and even during
co a little bit we've opened
[Music] back so you can see kind of this uh this
beautiful background because to the north of the DDO there really isn't very
much light pollution most of the light pollution is to the south east and west because it is still towards the outskirts so there is the possibility to
catch a little bit of that that ambiance of a large research observatory and even
now some of our public events will get lineups for open houses so what they do
for the nighttime events is just in order to ensure with the lands and with the work that's still being done in the
area they limit the number of people that can be there at any given time so that when you go in to see the telescope
you actually get time to see the telescope and you can see the operation of the telescope and everything if you
join us even online on May 3rd we're hoping to have a camera in there for part of the
evening the events that we do at the DDO include largecale events include star
parties and even just like answering questions that kids have about these
different types of astronomy that's done in Toronto area and then telescope
clinics to help people learn how to use telescopes we have talks inside which is one of the things we're going to have on
Saturday night of next week we also have a little planetarium star lab show on a
clean wall in one of the rooms and that's just before the the participants
go in to visit the telescope itself we make sure that they have an opportunity
to understand what the motion of the night sky is and get give them an
opportunity to see why the telescope has to move the way that it does now when
the full programming is back up in place there will be arts and crafts nights as well and they do have camps coming in
during the summertime through Richmond Hill to get to understand the historic
nature of the David Dunlop Observatory so to end off I thought uh as Scott said
there's a video to me inviting you so how about I invite you saturday May 3rd 2025 we're celebrating
International Astronomy Day live here at the David Dunlap Observatory and online
with the rest of the country and the world showcasing stars across Canada
we're going to have RAS centers from St john's Newfoundland all the way through to Victoria BC and all stops in between
we'll have astronomers astrophotographers hobbyists educators
and amazing guest speakers talking about the history of both Rasque and the David
Dunlap Observatory join us online at explorecientific.com/raskqueastronomy
day RAC Astronomy Day and we hope to see you with us on Saturday May 3rd starting
at 700 p.m eastern Daylight Time we are very excited about this event and I
cannot wait for next Saturday scott yeah it's going to be fun it's going to be fun i think that uh I'm hoping that the
weather is uh uh kind to us but uh um you know probably by that time we should
experience some a little bit warmer uh weather at this what what what's your
weather like right now uh right now we are in our high single digits to low
double digits in Celsius so we're looking right around an average at night of about 8 n degrees when we're lucky
celsius two three degrees when we're not it's a bit chilly i'm bringing a jacket so yeah you're going to need a jacket
and a sweater and David Levy is going to be joining us online on next Saturday and giving us
our literary reference and David is one of our RAS fellows as well and I believe David you've also spent some time with
John Percy in the early days as well yes I have i um John Percy was national
president when uh I went to my first GA
in 1978 and then in 1979 in 1980 in Halifax I was
there and uh he was president then and uh so I really got to know John very
well and I really appreciate the wonderful things you said about him he is you know I the more I read about him
the more I'm inspired by his legacy that he's leaving behind but also the fact that he is still doing so much wonderful
outreach and so when I reached out with this idea of the International Astronomy Day event he was on board he's like
"Okay let's just see what's the best thing for me to bring." and he's like you know if the audience is the global star party audience I want to tell them
all the different outreach that I've done so that they can hopefully see what fits their situation and they can share
that outreach in their own local centers
so Scott I great okay looking forward to here in Canada yep my uh unfortunately
my camera has somehow died but my audio is still working and I can still see you
so that's very good um that's great temperatures has made
you too cold to be able to just the thought of it it froze the camera that's right that's right so we are going to
we're going to segue here to our final presenter uh John Schwarz and u um it is uh it's
great to see you again and um Kareem thank you so much for taking the time
tonight to do this uh before I head off to Stararmmas so my pleasure okay i
don't have a 74 but I'm with the 60 tom gave me the keys so I'm able to hang out
tonight that's awesome that's awesome so um we'll see what we can look at later
okay 74 in is awful big though that's got to be a beautiful scope yeah and it
just is such an elegant looking instrument as well you know so is it to
similar the focus as the 60 and the 100 or like a I have no idea i'll tell you
i'll tell you if we get a chance to look through it so yeah you gotta do a a comparison a shootout
it'll be phenomenal I'm sure great you there well you you've got the
stage John okay so good anyway I'm going to get this thing started because I know
it's getting late what time uh are you at right now here
it's uh 9:34 okay good so how uh how many pale blue dots
do we see tonight i I had to come on a little later i see them all the time
i've had a lot of fun with this one because um I created almost every bit of
content in here from uh my art uhhuh except Sorry about the shaking i'm a
little nervous right now are you no not really it's just my I have my my uh my
computer set up kind of portable right now so I see it's a little strange if it
uh wobbles please forgive me it's okay i'm going to try to minimalize you know I I was so excited
about this one that I put together a real nice
uh hope it's not too long okay so the pale blue dot you know
oh wow look at this the picture was the pioneer looking back from literally
interstellar space almost out of our heliosphere in uh I think it was 2016 was it they
took the pale blue dot picture uh the pale blue dot picture actually
got I I can't quite remember but this is my own interpretation that I created from that pioneer shot yeah so you know
they had these streamers of light and the beautiful blue dot which is our planet
uh much like Huville you know back from um Dr zeus
where a whole world lived on a little speck of dust and literally that's about
how big we are compared to most of the universe now this was uh uh looking back
about a hundred thousand light years or something crazy 100,000 years ago and
they're looking back miles I mean and they're looking back at the Earth with
the moon just two little dots absolutely undicernable from anything
now this was the picture from that would be the Osiris
Rex you know that one that landed on the asteroids from Goddard Space Flight
Center and this was uh Robert Levy no relation to David I don't think but um
he he took this picture and this was at six million miles away
wow this is my own interpretation getting closer so I painted my own blue marble
in my virtual space and then boom here we are our
beautiful blue dot up close just floating through the Milky Way very
vulnerable and you know isolated from a lot of things but we do have our sun and
our other planets to protect us jupiter as you know our moon is very
very important that we have which stabilizes our earth and keeps our blue
dot nice and cool and nice and warm and even temperatureed and very nice for
life to form and not too crazy with the wobbles so if you go back to the
beginning how these things actually came about our solar system you have to look back millions and millions of years ago
going back to the cold dark depths of the vacuum of space right in this huge
molecular gas cloud there's all these little spirals starting to accrete on a
disc because there's so much gas and matter which is now starting to coalesce and that's how these things
start to form and there's many different nurseries that was Orion this is um the
Eagle M16 another really amazing nursery and uh James Webb shows all the baby
stars born behind the gas which is obscured because you don't see in that wavelength
so here's how it begins the cloud slowly coaleses into a a big gas spiraling glob
of gas and matter then it starts to accrete and it gets hotter and hotter as it spins and
coaleses and more and more matter collects in it starts to collapse on itself and build
pressure boom a star is born it starts to accrete so much and eventually it
just creates our own solar system which is a a beautiful thing for us and a star
is born our star our very own sun and it has many other
um children so to speak the planets but these are all pictures I did of the
solar prominences through my scope this is called the candle prominence because
it looked like a candle i've never seen one like that so I thought I'd record that
one this one is a a huge huge I called it the dragon prominence i mean it's
probably 20 25 Earths big absolutely amazing our star that it
gives life but it can take life if it exploded of course
this a new prominence I just sketched and uh this was a couple days ago
another beautiful example of of uh the solar activity we're experiencing in our
solar system right now which is causing a lot of beautiful northern lights in
places we don't normally see kind of messing with the with the
magnetic field and we have to be very careful so let's move back into the other
planets the inner planets they got most of the carbon and all the stuff that was
burned up and left over the solids so they formed into the rocky planets this
is Mercury our first planet that orbits the sun definitely hot don't think you'd
want to live there this is Venus it's even too close
and the atmosphere is very bad it's acidic and um greenhouse gone arry so I
don't think that planet would be very habitable this is a uh conjunction
sketch I did some time back this is another beautiful thing that our solar system gives us is um conjunctions and
wonderful groupings of planets and lunar uh occultations and different you know
just once in a-lifetime views so this was a real amazing one of Venus the
crescent moon and Mars sketch this was my Mars now Mars is
probably one of our good chances of getting off the planet and potentially
stairstepping or leapfrogging to the stars potentially if it could be
possible it may not be that easy to do but it's
possible out to Jupiter our savior the planet that got most of the gas left
over from the formation of the sun and Jupiter if it could have gotten just a
little bit more quite a bit more but not by star terms it could have been a baby
twin to our sun and been like a red dwarf or a brown dwarf potentially
it's very hot and very temperate the weather's insane on that planet i don't
think you'd want to fly your kite there for sure um this one's Saturn this was
another sketch um Saturn's the most amazing planet because of the rings it's
surreal and when you see it for the first time it definitely will get you hooked um I say for me it was probably
the first object that really got me hooked when I saw that in a 12 and a half inch
Newtonian and I'm used to looking at Sears Robuck telescope this thing was
absolutely just hooked me that was it so I'm uh
grateful for that moment now we have to move out a little further but say goodbye to Jupiter and Saturn
now we go to Uranus which is another gaseous planet very cold and
icy i know that the new probes that they've sent out they've learned a lot more about these outer
planets they're so far it's really hard to observe with a telescope they're just little pale dots from our perspective
with most telescopes even in a 30-inch telescope you really don't resolve much
surface detail or cloud detail neptune another blue pale dot a
beautiful blue dot I may say and uh I love this planet just because the color
it reminds me of the Earth and the sky and the water and my eyes because they're blue
so as you go further out the comets in the orbit belt have been traveling an
ellipse around our sun for eternity literally and they come to our sun and
eventually start to warm up and all the elements of that comet come in uh to our
atmosphere and become meteor showers uh those are actually relics of the
beginning of the solar system they have the actual elements that when the solar
system first formed those elements were you know locked into those
little containers and just floated out there for eternity only to be warmed to
by the sun when they come through and uh go through our solar system without
killing anything it's beautiful site these comets have been very nice to see
uh very intriguing i mean I never really was into them because they're hard to look at and they don't come around too
often but seems like lately we're getting a lot of
comments you know this is my iris and um the beauty is as I look out and I see
just the the creation and and the amazing things that have led us to where
we are right now here on this planet with life and you know plants and
animals and oceans and our little blue marble that is our home that we're safe
and protected here and then when you look into my eye my iris you see the
divine design of the universe within the eye the iris how the filamentary
structure and just the elegance it's just amazing the universe how it makes
things so amazingly perfect and mind-blowing and you know our eyes we
see with and everything we look at we see with our eyes and this was my latest sketch which
I posted on cloudy nights uh this is Gassendi crater and the thing that was special
about this is um I just by random went out to look and I saw Gassendi just
floating on the Terminator suspended between light and dark and uh the way
the sun was raking across the plains it was morning and it was sunrise and it
was just coming up on that crater so those hills the rocky hills you see in
front of it the boulder field that never really looks like that this was just that one moment when the light hit it
just right and it popped it out and it gave it just such an amazing
look so I was very happy with this sketch it's probably my best cassendi
yet then I've been doing a lot of moon sketches because I was getting ready you
know for for these events that are happening but they're clouded out of
course most of them but this was a morning sketch the moon was just poking
through the clouds i I love these you know the the sky is so blue and the moon
is so pure and white shining through it's like a beacon of light and it gives me hope that it'll
clear and I can look at the stars these are all my my latest series
of uh sketches that I've been posting on cloudy
nights this one was unique because um I called it the moon in the sea of
clouds and literally you could have this view if you were at the beach and you
were looking on a a full moon lit night and it was reflecting off the ocean you could see that kind of a view as a
reflection but that was actually just looking up at the clouds and the moon at
the right moment blessed this was another one um it just
clouded up again i was uh trying to prepare for the
eclipse is what it was and I was practicing you know practice makes perfect and I've been trying to churn
one out a day you know if I have time but that's not always easy to do
so as I always finish I love to um do some flowers and you know just give you
the note that when you're down you can go out and just look around and look at
the flowers and the trees and everything is like reaching for the sun for life
and the clouds and the blue sky and the air and it just takes away all the
stresses and you know you're going to be all right because you have this gift and
when you see this stuff it just you know you're going to be great
i I always just see the most amazing flowers and and scenes just on my walk
with my dog my best buddy and uh reflect and
uh that's when I say I'm grateful and I and I just appreciate the universe and
and our planet and our home and everything in it it's just it's
a miracle it's amazing and of course my little buddy wanted to say hi and hope
we didn't catch him at a bad time but we're going to be turning in
real quick so we just wanted to say thank you for coming tonight and um participating with
us in this great topic of the pale blue dot which is our home and we are
grateful for this speck of dust in this big universe just it's amazing to have
what we have here keep looking up and thank you Scott thank you i
appreciate it thank you very much thank you everybody all
right okay and that is uh that is it i
got my camera back so very nice to uh to do this um you
know we are uh something I did want to say I've been lots of people have called
out of concern uh for um companies like ours and our industry
uh with the rise in uh you know challenge and rise in tariffs and all the rest of it um but uh we are able to
respond we do have uh one of the things I can tell you um you know if you called
me and asked me if we have such and such in stock the answer is likely yes um and
uh you know that's from a business side but uh I did want to thank everyone who
has called and checked up on us to see you know how we're doing and uh you know
we want to be here for you uh to continue to do things like global star
party and to do these outreach events that we do as well uh we really like to
go beyond um uh selling uh uh product
and to uh you know help you along with your adventure um so uh we're we have
brought back uh through the explore alliance a benefit of our uh the member
benefit that you can get is a forever transferable
uh no fault um uh protection for your products and so if you have bought stuff
in the past and you are not yet an Explore Alliance member contact us in
customer service um and uh we'll get you signed up and make sure that all your uh
gear is protected uh you know from Explore Scientific so thanks again
everybody and uh we will see you probably I'll try to do a live uh from
the Canary Islands with Stararmmas and also of course we're doing live
presentation uh from the David Dunlap Observatory until that time uh you guys
take care and uh keep looking up
[Music]
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