Transcript:
6:05 p.m..David Levy – Intro and Poetry
i want to thank a very important technical aspect of broadcasting this to
vivian white at uh night sky network um i was trying to figure out how to
6:20 p.m..Astronomical League Door Prizes – John Goss
switch from scene to scene uh and include two people that i wanted to on the scene
where you know if somebody spoke up it didn't like steal the camera right that happens in zoom
6:30 p.m..David Eicher - Earth's Universe of Minerals
and she taught me the feature of spotlight it was like magic [Laughter]
so we'll use spotlight
6:45 p.m..Karim Jaffer
it should be uh it should be fun to see this new feature maybe maybe you can always
use it
7:00 p.m..Adrian Bradley - Night Scapes
now david you met carl sagan right yes i've met him several times several
times spent quite a bit of time with him during the impact week and he did washington for that week as
7:15 p.m..Ed Siemenn - The 2022 Northeast Astronomy Forum
well no that's awesome david eiker you you met him knew him right yeah i wrote him at first when i
was 15 when i had started deep sky monthly and struck up a bit of a correspondence with
7:30 p.m..Ten Minute Break
him and and then got to meet him and hang out with him and spend time with him at several meetings that's cool and
you know he was more impressive i'm sure you found this david as well you know he
7:40 p.m..Jerry Hubbell - Live from MSRO
was more impressive and warm and intelligent and caring and and relatively tall
um than he was in person than he was on television
7:55 p.m..Russ Brick - 2022 Winter Star Party Update
you know he was just a very generous guy with his time and his knowledge and
8:00 p.m..Jason Guenzel - The Vast Reaches
glowing and very positive and incredibly smart i remember the first professional meeting i i was able to
sit next to him with a bunch of other people chris chiba was there as well one of his important students
8:10 p.m..Maxi Falieres
it was a meeting about comets and and and life and organic molecules in fact
um and you know he shot out questions uh for basically
every paper that was presented you know he he knew he was so well read in areas
8:30 p.m..John Johnson - Nebraska Star Party Recap
that weren't his immediate research that i was blown away with that
you know all this stuff about well you know he's a popularizer and he doesn't know you know
hogwash you know he was brilliantly well-read
8:45 p.m..Libby in the Stars
across the spectrum
9:00 p.m..Nicolas Ariel Arias
uh oh are we gonna have a session where we're gonna sorry guys i had a uh
i had a customer call me and uh that's all right people are still
searching for telescopes they've been so scarce you know like ken's teeth
9:30 p.m..Ten Minute Break
hello kareem good to see you [Music] i david just uh trying to get a few
things set up here how are you you were amazing yesterday
9:40 p.m..Cameron Gillis, Pekka Hautala, and ?
thank you thank you i enjoyed that interview very very much
so you gave you had your uh program yesterday um yes it was a it was a two
and a half hour long interview on public radio with a whole panel of uh
people who need more than i did no no they're they're all outreach uh astronomers who
are mostly hobbyists and they just they loved talking to david and having somebody who shares their
passion in not just astronomy but also how it connects to culture right
yeah so my david hey jerry our question was are we going to have a
chance to do sega impressions [Laughter] i don't know
hi kareem hey how are you i'm gonna bow out from the impressions unfortunately
it used to be if you just said billions and billions people knew what you were talking about so right
today it would be trillions and trillions wonderful
his impression of sagan was so so good and so wonderful do you remember wendy
oh he loved it and then carl said he had never said billions and billions and that's right
at the end of his life he did he said okay i'm gonna say billions and millions
you also popularized the uh the term google which is now the most commonly used search engine
and uh one of the largest businesses in on the internet
and so that's one other one of his contributions which he introduced on
cosmos
what if you had a google of galaxies instead of a gaggle
yeah
[Music]
but i did talk about earlier how difficult it was to find uh video of carl sagan that's not
copyrighted you know yeah and uh so i was able to find a segment
from 1981 where he's talking about the hubble space telescope so that that will
oh excellent here in a minute um it's pretty cool
all right he makes about what it's going to do i mean pretty much all came to pass
so but he didn't say they're really going to screw up figuring the mirror did he
did not say that all right yeah they didn't say that
he was you know prescient but not with everything right
it would have been impressive oh yeah did he say anything
did he say anything about james webb no no not then
that would have been uh really prophetic james webb was living at the time
exactly
people were always criticizing people based on our modern civilization
and um you know they're looking at people like king's web through the lens of now
we're yelling and screaming at thomas jefferson because he owned slaves and the only screaming at webb because
he was a little bit uh sexist in his hiring practices that these were
the people that in one case founded the united states and in another case
uh founded uh one in astronomy and uh funded space
modern space travel so we really owe a lot to these people
that's true well everyone has its their fall abilities you know and um
not you oh yeah
you haven't seen the party photos so yeah yes
yes that's right the yet to be the unpublished ones yes
it's very easy to judge things uh with perfect vision in hindsight
yes it is that's true and not the things some morals aren't
absolute but you do need to you're right now you need to view things with the lens of the current
time in which they took place well it makes you wonder how people will view us 50 years from now oh god help us
yeah that's right [Laughter]
well i'm very happy to see a number of people already logged in uh for the show
we've got martin e spurring lisa anne fanning says hello from new jersey
uh sam p edward murray says hello dave how you doing
the space telescope due to be launched in the 1980s will be hoisted into orbit some 500
miles above the earth by the space shuttle fitting into the shuttle's cargo bay the
telescope will be latched to a tilting mechanism and rotated into a 90 degree position
for checkout it will then be placed in a vertical angle released
and its power and communication systems deployed
the periodic revisit of the shuttle will allow for the replacement of components and routine maintenance
every five years the telescope will be returned to earth for major ground refurbishment
this ability to service the telescope through human care will extend its lifespan up to 20 years
it will orbit above our murky atmosphere and obtain images of objects that are
incredible distances away perhaps of galaxies 14 billion light years distant
so far away that when the light first set out towards us there was no earth
no sun no milky way galaxy we will be probing the time of the earliest history of the
universe space telescope is in a way a little like galileo's first telescope
wherever galileo pointed his telescope he made major new discoveries look at the moon you find mountains and craters
look at saturn you find rings look at the milky way you find it is littered and composed
of stars every one of these discoveries things that people had not known before
i think it's going to be very similar with the space telescope it will illuminate celestial objects
that we know about it will discover celestial objects never before guessed
it will provide insights into the most important questions such as stellar
evolution such as the search for planets going around of the
stars and the grandest cosmological questions of the origin nature and fate of the
universe space telescope is a kind of grand intellectual adventure for all of
us which will cast light not just on the cosmos but also on
ourselves
well hello everybody this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and welcome to the 72nd
global star party uh in knowing that november 9th was carl
sagan's birthday and that so many of us were have been inspired continue to be
inspired by carl sagan i decided to uh call the the theme of this program
the the inspiration of sagan uh carl sagan uh
uh i think the the most uh amazing piece that i have read and something that continues to inspire me almost every day
is the pale blue dot where he convinced the uh the voyager
mission team to turn the spacecraft around and photograph uh
planet earth is just a 12 pixel wide uh dot against uh
you know the the glare of the sun and so it's just it's an iconic amazing image
uh and his words about uh treating each other more kindly
um is uh very profound and so you know the you know sagan was an
astronomer planetary scientist uh someone that was is world famous for his
cosmos series popularizing uh science and and astronomy and space
exploration uh the uh his work on extraterrestrial life
uh the messages sent into deep space with um uh you know the voyager spacecraft and i
think the pioneer uh spacecraft as well with a plaque um you know it's uh
when you read all about what carl sagan did in his relatively short life uh he
was in his early 60s when he passed on uh it is really amazing and it's it's
wonderful that that we had someone like carl sagan uh here as part of the uh you know the canon of
humanity you know so um tonight we have some uh amazing
astronomers uh that will be talking about their inspirations of of sagan uh
including uh david levy and david eicher both who knew carl sagan got to meet him
and uh you know so i i'm uh i'm very uh uh fortunate to be you know this is a
very special global star party and we're fortunate to uh you know rub shoulders with and and hear
directly from um uh people that uh that continued to be amazed by carl
sagan so i'm going to introduce david levy up first um
david uh as i i always mentioned that david is is a great friend to astronomers everywhere
he's one of my best friends um and uh you know every time that i do a global
star party and he talks uh about his experiences uh
selects his poetry um i'm just always amazed because i'm learning you know more about david levy
each time so it's it's a real blessing and and that is that happens to be true of all the people that present on global
star party so uh david i'm going to turn this over to you man well thank you scott and it's really
a pleasure to be here today especially to celebrate the lord in the life of carl sagan
i met him a couple of times the first one was at a division for planetary science conference in tucson
and carl was uh sitting there they were having a break and uh they're all sitting by the hotel
pool and there was carl and uh i got to meet him that day he was a
little bit quiet but and subdued but it was really quite interesting to meet him
i met him at several dps meetings but not more important than
the time that we spent together during the impact week of shoemaker 89.
carl was there and we had a dinner sponsored by the planetary society
and this was carl in his prime it was his most famous
uh crime of his life and he was at the table
and i was sitting across from him and my mom who was with me was sitting next to him
and uh she i think uh carl asked her
what her career was and she said she is a retired geneticist and that's all carl had to know
carl was my mom's friend and they talked and they talked and i got to uh to do a little bit of
conversation and i said one sentence to carl i
told him that i thought that vice president al gore's lecture about the impacts was really pretty good
and i had enjoyed listening to it and carl stopped and he said how could you possibly say such a thing
are you stupid or something how could you listen to the dribble that al gore said came up with
and uh they have truths and inaccuracies and dare to tell me
that you liked his talk you don't have the right to say that and i said well carl i'm sorry i just
like to install it that's all and uh he kind of looked there and after at the end of the dinner
i said to mom i think he really was pretty impressed with he was pretty taken with you
and he really got you to reminisce about your years in genetics
because you were there in the time of watson and prick you were a medical student
when watson and crick discovered the structure of dna one of the great discoveries of our time
and one looked at me and said besides carl is awfully cute
anyway so i'm going to do my quotation my quotation for this
this meeting today this um global star party is
and he said these words around 1980 modern radio telescopes are exquisitely
sensitive a distant quasar is so faint that it's detected radiation amounts
perhaps to a quadrillionth of a watt the total amount of energy from outside
the solar system ever receives by all the radio telescopes on the
entire planet earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake starting event
and now back to you scotty thank you very much david thank you
well um i am uh i am
you know i think i'm in awe of anyone that's uh actually uh had a chance to meet carl sagan i i
i know that um i think sometimes scientists can be uh
somewhat uh confrontational um maybe uh they're used to being uh
not afraid to to uh speak their mind and you know that's that's part of being a
scientist you know to get out the truth and and i know that that is something
uh that carl sagan uh you know was uh yeah he didn't want to believe uh in things he wanted to know
and so that was uh you know that that's uh that's you know part of the paraphrasing a great quote
from him but uh you know it's um you have to be brave to uh to follow science and and and to lead
in that way so and make that part of your life well up next is um uh
our um astronomically door prizes john glass
is uh former president of the astronomical league he's on the uh exec he's part one
of the executive officers of the league and uh the executive committee uh creates
uh questions and challenges uh uh so that you can
uh if you're if answered correctly you can get uh special door prizes uh supplied by explore scientific so
john i'm going to turn it over to you but please tell us about the astronomical league live program that's coming on
monday and also the 75th anniversary event
um right uh thank you scott uh yes i will but but but first
let me say a few words of my experience with carl sagan okay i was i was 22 at
the university of university of washington seattle and carl sagan was there visiting to give a lecture series
and i was of course i was nobody and i was standing there in the physics building uh talking to some friends and
he came walking down the the hallway with some of the higher-ups in the physics department who i i didn't i didn't know
who they were but i recognized him and um
that's it i guess he's on me so i feel the best way but that that's
it but i've i've always liked carl sagan uh for for for one reason for the for the big
reason is that he tended to deal with the why
we like astronomy why we're into this why we study the heavens and he spoke somewhat on on the
how and the what how things were done and stuff but he inspired people with the why
always talking about why we're doing this why it means something special to all of
us and to me that kind of addressed inner feelings and helped
inspire me to look at the stars and continue with the stars
enough of that um because i'm sure other people will have something much more eloquent to say than i could ever do you
know i think that part of the important thing is that you are someone that's been inspired by
someone like carl sagan oh yeah i know there's other people who've inspired you but you're someone that has been
involved in astronomy and amateur astronomy for the better part of your life
and that's that is yeah so yeah and i i i've often said to people that i
think as you mentioned the the pale blue dot yeah but to me that is the best essay
ever written by anybody it really hit home and as you said you
can read it every day and it you kind of walk away nodding your head going yeah
that's right okay but anyway um uh astronomically astronomically live is
coming up on this uh this coming month monday night um and it's sort of a special event in that
monday that must be the exact date uh or exact day of the 75th anniversary
of the astronomical league founded in 1946 way back uh
long before my time and um so the league has progressed quite a bit and we're going to be
talking a little bit about that stuff but but you know how it is you don't want to
have a whole program to people you know slapping each other back saying how great the league is and all that so uh
we'll have a little bit of that of course but uh what we want to do is also have a discussion uh a presentation on
the upcoming almost total lunar eclipse uh the following week on the
19th then i did the overnight of the 18th and then into the 19th yeah
yeah so we're going to have a little program given by alan dyer of the rasacc about
this so uh if you want to find out more about these clips please please tune in on monday night um
same bat time same bat channel as as this so uh see there i just dated myself but anyway
but all the rest of us as well so uh what we're doing tonight is that
we have um we like to issue ask uh three three questions to people and they're they're
welcome to answer them uh let me pull this up and we can you'll see what i'm talking about
maybe
okay we have three three questions uh about trivia questions something about
this guy but before we do uh we would like to emphasize to people about observing the sun to make sure you use
proper solar solar filter solar equipment which are pretty common out there but you got to have it
you know squinting really tight tightly just doesn't work on this you got to have the right the right filters
and if you don't um severe eye damage is a distinct possibility
uh but one reason for bringing this up this time is we do have a total solar eclipse coming in another uh two or
three weeks three weeks of course you got to be in antarctica to see it but if you know if you're down there
you're pretty lucky you're in the right spot but as you also know in another two and a half years is that right two and a
half years we're having another one sweep across the united states so we're all we're all looking forward to that
you won't be able to escape the fact of that anyway let's let's move on uh answers
from last week's questions uh posed by carol org our uh president of the astronomical league
let's go through those uh question number one who describes
seven springs the years of the teacup well you know that's the famous galileo he as a scroll sagan was
just saying you know about galileo seeing all the first stuff well there you go
uh number two uh vesta is which type of celestial body well i hope we all got this one right
asteroid and question number three what is the sound sun excuse me sun's outermost
atmosphere called and it was the corona when we asked these questions we asked
the people to send the answers not to me or to scott but send them to the secretary at astral league.org and
our secretary is terry mann and she will gather all these and and i i think she
does a drawing and pulls out the uh the winners so for this
week oh excuse me uh the winners from last week well you got the whole list of them there i don't i shouldn't read them
all because there's a whole bunch of them but i do recognize a number of names on there and thank you
for participating a weekly okay this week again send your answers
to secretary at astroleg.org i don't know why the s on secretary is a special color but that's the way it goes
question number one venus currently lies in the southwest 60
minutes after sunset for observers at mid northern latitudes venus returns to about the same location in the november
early evening sky every eighty eight years b
120 years or so because it's tied to transits of the sun see
19 and a half months 584 days because of its synodic period
so which of those three is the correct answer well also on the left hand side you'll
see a bunch of logos that the bottom one we're having our alcon this coming year icon 2022 in albuquerque at the end of
july so you're all welcome to come to that ought to be good because we haven't had it
three years well we had a great icon last year but that was all virtual but this will be in
person question number two the great squares and asterism comprised
of stars borrowed from what two constellations a altair and fomolo
b pegasus and andromeda c the pleiades and the hyades
kind of a trick question number three
uh here we go with our lunar eclipse we have our lunar eclipse coming in ten nights our eclipses can occur only when
the moon is full and when the moon a crosses the ecliptic
b reaches the first point of aries c lies above the horizon
so compile your answers send them to secretary astro league.org and we'll see
what happens uh one more slide for you before i sign off here i'll talk about the
astronomical league uh birthday coming up on on monday night uh alan dyer will be talking about how
to photograph the lunar eclipse remember this is not a total total lunar eclipse
but it's almost 97 97 uh for me one thing i want to see uh
watching this eclipse is since this is during full moon you probably know during the full moon you
cannot really see the the pleiades or any of the stars nearby but as the moon
slides into their shadow things get darker and i like to see about how much the moon is covered before the pleiades
pop out you can see this will be pretty close excuse me the pleiades will be pretty close to the moon but it'd be
nice to see uh what time that they pop out and you can actually see them um i've just uh received a challenge for
an image to try and take so uh thank you for that yeah yeah it's uh you know
there's not many times you can see the pleiades during a full moon but this is about as full as it gets but yeah it
won't be very bright um that's all i have and i appreciate you letting me ramble on like
this something about carl sagan because i um i think he was one of the greatest and as i just said i think the pale blue
dot is i think it's the best thing ever ever written pretty cool so thank you and i'll stop my share
maybe yeah i can do that for you yeah please do for some reason my instagram oh okay
great um so that uh uh you know i
i can only imagine i mean seeing such a luminary as as someone
like sagan come in uh just to hang out with with uh with the guy for a few
minutes would uh probably be a memory that almost anyone that's uh interested in astronomy like
we are uh that would be burned into our minds for a lifetime for sure so very cool very cool we had um
we had uh a uh someone in chat carlos hernandez
who has presented on on global star party before and has contributed some of the space art to some of our programs says i
was fortunate to have met carl sagan in 1995 at the jet propulsion laboratory
for the galileo probe entry into jupiter's atmosphere i was invited to attend the probe
excuse me i was invited to attend the probe entry at jpl by astronomer glenn
orton uh we were reviewing the data from the probe then decided to take a break and
get lunch we sat down at a large at a large round table outside and all of a
sudden a large group of people showed up and then sits down at our table sitting
next to me is none other than carl sagan he started to talk about amino acids in
the rings of uranus uh he was very pleasant and is greatly missed
so excellent great memory um up next is david eicher david has been
running a series he's on his beautiful minerals and crystals
and uh he too is someone that has uh had some time to spend with carl sagan
david i'll turn it over to you man thanks scott um i'll say a few words about carl if i can before i go into one
of uh my favorite subjects and it was kind of a subject of his
he was essentially one of the founders you know of the field of what was called what came to be called cosmo chemistry
his background was in chemistry and also in physics and astronomy originally so he he liked the chemicals and the
minerals too um i was fortunate enough to strike up a
correspondence with carl before cosmos it was when i was just starting to get deep sky monthly as a little amateur
publication going in 1977. i was 15 years old when i started up at
the time and i wrote him and sent him copies of it for career advice which i ended up ultimately not following um
because i bailed on becoming an astronomer and and liked writing about it so much that you know
um but uh but i i i had an association in the correspondence that went on with him
um and i was uh electrified when he sent me a copy of the book cosmos that was inscribed to me as a
friend of the cosmos and i eventually got to meet him and spend some time with him at meetings and one of them that
comes to mind most strongly uh was a meeting it was of all places you
know claire wisconsin it was called comets in the origin of an evolution of
life um and of course this was right up carl's alley and he had a very brilliant
student at the time who became an important professor uh called chris chaiba who who's a great guy
um from cornell and they were there presenting and i got to spend time with carl and sitting next to him and and and
chris and hear him and you know he struck me as just a very very generous warm guy he was taller
than i anticipated he was from seeing him on television he was immaculately
dressed at that time you know and had a pulled out something to give me something out of his cards out of his
quality you know he he looked like a star you know by then um uh and but he was very nice and very
generous with his time and listening to you know a kid talk about this and that
um so he's really a wonderful guy and you know all this business that he took for a while
later on that he was just a popularizer and he was you know glomming onto the spotlight and this and
that he asked questions in that room in a
huge variety over the course of most most of a week i think it was
all over the the fields uh from all the presenters and he
knew the details of papers and and the intricacies of questions that he was
asking like nobody's business he he was so well read and so well
uh um established in his knowledge about everything it blew me away so this
business well he was just a popularizer back in those days it was kind of a dirty word you know for a true
professor of astronomy to be spending time with outreach you know god knows
you know if they'd only known then what you know they came to know over the last generation but he was a very warm very
caring very nice guy um and one thing thinking back on it
by 1996 my predecessor as editor-in-chief at the magazine was there but i was the
managing editor and we were putting together an editorial board and i knew carl was out on the west coast
and that he was ill but i had no idea how ill he was and i called him up
at the clinic where he was and talked to him and said you know carl we really would love to have you on
this editorial advisory board you know it would mean so much to us you know we won't
you know make too much of a demand on your time we'll try on it and after we
talked about that and what the magazine was doing and so on and some science topics he said well david nothing would
make me happier than to be on that board two weeks later he died
i had no idea how incredibly ill he was and for example to
say such a line as that knowing that he was critically ill and
it just blew my mind afterward you know so he was really a wonderful uh brilliant very warm guy and of course
ann is still around and is very nice and and uh
articulate and and sort of um doing a lot to sustain carl's vision you know
with the things that she's working on as well so anyway uh as i mentioned one of the
things that carl sagan originally got into uh was chemistry and that and
essentially uh helped to found the field of what became known as cosmochemistry
so i will look at a little bit of that if i can share my screen again
and talk about a few more mineral specimens if you'd like
and can you now see my screen yes yes we can and you see a slideshow
even better yeah and again this is talking about earth's
universe of minerals uh this is a tanzanite crystal that is a rare
uh mineral from tanzania and and is very hard silicate and of course is cut into
this gorgeous blue gemmy blue purple jewelry stones
um i'd like to talk about mineralogy in in terms of how it represents order
the order of the universe thomas jefferson our founder one of our founders of this country of the united
states like to say i believe in a divinely ordered universe isaac newton even before his time like
to say truth is ever to be found in the simplicity and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things well the more we
found out uh over the centuries and the decades uh in part because of isaac
newton leading on up to carl sagan and successors the universe is not ordered
by supernaturalism but by the principles of physics and natural
science natural philosophy as it was called originally minerals demonstrate that in that their
atoms are assembled in precise ways by electrochemical attractions inherent
properties of the atoms that make them up and guide them into assembling in a
specific crystal lattice so this is a good lesson of how we learn about how the universe really works not through
magic or superstition or dreams but through the properties of science
so i've been accused and rightly so by many who i've talked about minerals with
of being fluorite centric this is one of my favorite minerals fluoride and i'll
tell you what a thing to be accused of you crazy person you're fluorite centric
i'm sorry okay but but it's a good mineral when i was starting
to get into this i inherited a collection of stuff from my father and then i started collecting my own things
at shows and here and there and everywhere and fluoride is relatively inexpensive compared to some of the
minerals so it also comes in a huge range of colors purple lilac yellow
green blue pink champagne etc etc it's a primary mineral uh that that
comes along as a so-called gang mineral not particularly valuable in these hydrothermal veins
hot mineral-rich fluids that are that are coming together and over time crystallizing it's calcium fluoride
caf2 is what it is chemically it was named in 1797 by an italian mineralogist for the
latin word to flow because it's used as a flux even to this day
in smelting iron to control the the the viscosity the thickness of the
molten iron and it comes from countless great localities it's a common mineral
and it comes in lots of forms and colors so i really like it and you can tell me
scott no right now if you'd like to but i was planning on doing a part two on fluoride
too if you don't like tonight you can scrap that and i'll go on to say i too like
fluorite so there you go man all right so here's what it is it's a very simple
crystal structure for this is as simple as things get practically mineralogically it has what
mineralogists call an isometric crystallography that's a fancy word for cubic basically and you can see the
calcium and fluorine atoms here in a crystal lattice example here of the of a
cube fluorine is an exceptionally poisonous gas
but when it's a solid and locked up in things like fluorite crystals or um
sodium fluoride which we brush with i hope twice a day i do i need to i don't need to call your
dentist doing okay um it's very helpful and it's not uh poisonous at all so
um so now i'd just like to show the first of several hundred examples no no i'm just
kidding the first uh of maybe a couple of nights of fluorites and just the
incredible variety you see and even though the basic crystallography i say is cubic here you can see there are
variations on it a little bit this is a sort of a a desirable by collectors this soft sort
of pink fluorite which comes from a couple of localities in peru
chiefly among other places this is a good hand-sized specimen here's a sort of a glassy ollie of green
with tinges of purple english fluoride there's a tremendous
variety in number of localities of fluorite coming from england
and this just kind of shows you a bit of it there's another from england from the famous hilton mine with this sort of
very uh vibrant honey yellow color uh you can see the intertwined cubes there
of uh there's a property of crystallography we won't go into it now called twinning in which crystals can
grow and be twinned in various ways together that's an example of that
here is uh this sort of uh weirdo you know kind of space eye um
uh bright green fluorite from namibia that looks a little bit strange and
sci-fi like in some examples this is one that's from the rock candy
mine which is in british columbia in the greenwood mining division in canada and
you can see here often as minerals crystallize which sometimes they do very quickly you can see if you if you
control it in the right way you can see salt crystallized almost in real time if you set things up
the right way but a lot of minerals take uh thousands or tens of thousands or of
years or longer or uh hundreds of thousands of years to crystallize
um this this is an example that uh uh changed its chemical uh fluid makeup
as it crystallized and that is reflected in the changing color here of the
impurities that give it its coloration ditto here with this uh from namibia
this uh this bit that has multiple colors with little cubes here
there and everywhere um here is an interesting uh uh kind of
crystal habit of these tiny fluorite crystals uh from france from the famous
lerock quarry in france and you can see interesting colors there as well
here's fluorite with chalcopyrite or calcopyrite you can pronounce it
from the famous annaberg district in old mining region in germany
and you can see a sort of honey colors and yellow again there as well with it this is uh from the black forest
in another german location and and that's uh some some sort of staining or
impurities of iron down there the orangey stuff you know think of mars
iron oxide uh but the the mineral itself here the color is of this big whopping
big cube is is sort of this sky blue [Music] here's a grant county new mexico the
famous pine canyon deposit there and you can see these uh not cubic but sort of triangular
[Music] variations on cubic crystallization and a very rich uh deep purple
color here and we go back to south africa for some sort of sea green
uh coloration this is from reems south africa then there's a very famous american
color and it's called the bingham blue from this is just a stone's throw away from
our favorite radio one of our favorite radio telescopes now still going the very large array in
socorro county uh comes the famous bingham blue and this is very very rich
uh bright blue color this is coahilla mexico this this sort
of intergrown overgrown cubes of this uh dynamic purple
you can see here uh here's colorless uh fluoride of which there's lots this comes from dallagorsk
russia these sort of clear water clear cubes
and i will finish with a very bright very vibrant purple from the navidad mine durango
mexico of again these triangular crystal variations on the cubes
and so that is all i have scott tonight um other than to remind you about
special surprises coming up especially in january in astronomy magazine yeah
we'll stop sharing now and
thank you for putting up with the fluorite yeah i recommend more fluorites uh
for our program so i think we definitely need it right dude i could do it one more week
of fluoride and then after that you'd say stop it okay so one more time i'll do fluoride and then i'll move on
they're so beautiful uh i don't i can't imagine anybody would say no to a fluoride you know and remember not
calcium fluoride but sodium fluoride is what we're helping in our water and
in our toothpaste to remineralize our teeth essentially made out of what mineral
from last week calcium hydroxide hydroxyapatite which is a calcium
appetite mineral the hardest things in our body they're made mostly of hydroxyapatite and we can
re-crystallize that mineral by using fluoridated water which is which is
sodium fluoride um unless you're aaron rodgers and then you
probably don't use it what you say you do [Laughter]
aaron rodgers did so well on the jeopardy episode apparently he's decided he's above the law now so i'm sorry our
our local favorite quarterback we learned is secretly insane after 15
years oh well money does that sometimes he's not the first uh
athlete to go insane after having a good career so right right
that's uh it's almost to be expected nowadays so is this an argument for why
astronomers aren't paid much money as they need to keep us sane um yes because uh
after a while if you begin to have lots of money and you forget that
it's the night sky that uh drives your passion you go around and
start to present the night skies if you invented it carl sagan never did that and from what i know of carl sagan
um what i'm struck with is that he always asks the hard questions i know we
have another presentation to get to my fellow rascal but um that is one thing that
you know you talked about carl sagan looking all the part of a celebrity but um he
always came across as someone who deferred to the grandeur of the night sky
the um the fact that we're made of the stuff that's in the night sky and his i i think his main goal to those
that concern themselves more about the things aaron rodgers are doing
we should humble ourselves and realize that we're we're just a tiny speck here in a huge grand
universe that um that in part created us so absolutely he
stayed grounded which is amazing and he also kept the context of what's happening on earth and solar system
exploration and then that really kept him in touch with
what was like what the priorities were and the reason why like he talked often about the idea of
curiosity pushing the human bounds of knowledge and that's why we shouldn't just look at the problems on earth but
why you do need to keep space exploration in mind and pushing the boundaries of knowledge
you know what uh some some scientists and our deer departed pal stephen
hawking was a little bit this way are still with us great friend and
wonderful guy avi loeb is quite his way some scientists like to push buttons and
test things and see how people react and say outraged you know carl was about the most
centrist grounded rational guy you would ever talk to
you know he did not vary at all from what some mainstream science and
empirical experimental results were returning not at all
he didn't and he also grew up in that environment where he had a certain amount of prestige to be able to do that
to be able to communicate those ideas and he was he acknowledged that he he acknowledged the fact that he had that
level of authority when he speaks and that's something that not everybody
had at that time and it's one of the things that we're fighting for now is the inclusivity so that no matter who
you are wherever you come from if you have the merit and you've done the work you should have the voice or the
audience yeah and not to belabor this but there's a story for another time but when when
he started out at the university of chicago he was at yerkes for a while he got bounced around and not taken
terribly seriously by a number of people and he had to going to and ending up at cornell was a reaction to
the early treatment that he got and cornell benefited because they
already had the experience with feynman they knew the importance of having somebody there who's willing to talk to
the public and talk to young students and explain to them the ideas i mean we
talk about standing on the shoulders of giants but the giants stood on the shoulders of giants as well yes
absolutely yeah well uh uh
this is a nice segue to our our next speaker which is uh um
uh kareem jafar and kareem is a professor at john abbott college he is
one of the movers and shakers of outreach at the royal astronomical society of canada
montreal center and he has been on a number of global star parties which is wonderful
you know a great educator and uh you know someone that is inspiring in himself uh uh as well at least inspiring
to me in the way that he brings across his material and so
uh green i think your presentation is uh sagan in the classroom yep it's uh
talking a little bit about what inspiration he's given to the way in which i cover some material but
specifically the way in which i bring some of his knowledge and his teachings into the classroom
but i do want to talk a little bit about the rasc because i always do and the last couple of weeks i've been bringing in some guests and i actually have a
whopper lined up for next week where we're going to get a tour of an observatory in victoria bc but we're
also going to meet one of the youth members out there who's doing some incredible work including publishing some cartoons in our sky news magazine
and nathan is going to join us and talk a little bit about his experience as a youth member of the rasc out there on
the west coast what's happening in montreal well this weekend we actually have our annual
general meeting but we also have this wonderful initiative that our outreach person russell has been putting together
which is to start focusing a little bit on citizen science and so since we're talking carl sagan i wanted to talk a
little bit about citizen science as well because one of the things that that i feel is
kind of a legacy of sagan is this idea that it's important to
be a part of an understanding as well as an exploration into the night sky into
astronomy into science in general and citizen science gives everyone a window
into modern day research and a way to collaborate and actually contribute to
some of these cutting edge areas of research so if anybody wants to come as a guest just
email me montreal rasc at gmail.com and i'll send you the information it's going
to be on wednesday november 18th at 8pm eastern standard time because daylight
savings time has ended now and we've got our very short days here in montreal the other thing i wanted to mention and
david levy just yesterday was our guest on astro radio reach out and touch space panel and thanks to those of you who
joined in from the explore alliance audience as well as from the rasc audience
reach out and touch space yesterday set a record for synchronous listeners now
this is a volunteer radio station and their panel show has a ton of listeners
with the repeats of the show throughout the week but synchronously we hit 295
000 listeners for david lee wow that is awesome it was it was incredible and it was all
over the world we had people from australia from iran a research station in the arctic from russia from china we
had people sending in questions from south america from different regions of africa from
chad it was just it was it was fantastic to see the response and
david was just open to sharing stories and talking about his experience and it was it was just an incredible incredible
program and this thursday we have dr natalie willett who at the moment is giving a james webb space telescope uh
outreach session with the canadian space agency and on thursday she's going to be on our reach out and touch space show as
well so everyone's welcome to attend the other reason why i wanted to mention this is because the person who runs
astro radio and who hosts the music side of the show is pete williamson who is a
fellow of the royal astronomic society a member of our montreal center albeit a distance member like chuck
allen but also pete is the one who presented for us on the international astronomy today on
using remote telescopes and solar system probes and so one of the things he's been doing is actually sharing a lot of
his images with me to share in the classroom and just today he image comment 67p term of uh gerasimenko and
he not only imaged the comet but he also went back and reprocessed one of the
rosetta probe images and i've shared i've shown the rosetta probe to my students a few times and so getting to
see some of these images in more clarity being able to see the actual ridge detail on some of this rock is just
incredible but i know whenever i talk to the students about the rosetta stone there's some that are just astounded by
the fact that we actually had a lander land on a comet in space in the solar
system as it was going through its orbit and that astonishes them the whole orbital trajectory the way in which you
have the gravitational assist as it moves out that's inspiring to the ones who want to be aeronautical engineers or
who just really enjoy seeing the complex mathematics involved in space exploration
but then there's some who are just captivated by this idea of what it might look like on the surface of another
world or of a remnant from the creation of the solar system and these little video clips that were put together
that look like you know you're in the alps and it's a snowy night or it looks like you're you're mountain climbing
somewhere in the laurentians or the rockies these things capture our imagination
and i love bringing these into the classroom because the students connect so much to the visual
and this is something that i feel really carl sagan brought especially through the cosmos series is he brought these
visuals and these artistic renderings of the data to share with people why
this captures our imagination why this inspires us and we talked at the start about the
pale blue dot and the pale blue dot is one of those iconic images
voyager 1 was 60 million kilometers away it was at 40 astronomical units from us
past neptune's orbit it was finished its primary mission it
had looked at the outer planets it was on its way out of the solar system and we now know that it's actually past the
heliopause it's no longer under the influence of the solar wind it's now in interstellar space
at that time we had no idea whether we would ever hear from voyager 1 again we didn't know how long it would last we
didn't know what whether or not it would even survive the passage through the kuiper belt area
and whether or not the kuiper belt really was flat or whether there were objects that we just hadn't seen on an incline so there was about 30 plus
degrees above the ecliptic leaving the solar system and carl sagan proposed taking a picture
and they said yes nasa said all right jpl university of arizona they worked
together and they worked out the actual mathematics of taking this picture and this picture was taken
with three colored filters the image exposure time was uh 0.72 seconds for
two of the filters in less than half a second for the third filter and it was part of a series of images and i'll talk
to you about the series of images in a few moment but here's what's astonishing and i just i do have to correct scott a
little bit on this but this image is 640 000 pixels
that pale blue dot is less than 12 of one pixel
it was saying 12 pixels so no it's it's less than 0.12 of a pixel okay
and so in 2020 they actually remastered it to try to draw out just a little bit more detail and so you can just see it a
little bit more clearly with modern techniques but still it's so humbling and it's so amazing to
see this tiny little blue dot everyone you've ever known everyone has
ever been has been on that little blue dot and i i remember michael collins writing
about this when he had moved to the far side of the moon in in the command module while neil armstrong and buzz
aldrin were down on the actual surface of the moon the idea that everybody else
was on the other side of the moon and he was there alone in the far side of the
moon separated from all of humanity and here is this little thing we created
that's now so far away that this is the tiniest tiniest little bit that we can see
now one of the really neat things about this is this is not the only picture that was taken that day but it was actually
valentine's day 1990 and what sagan proposed was actually a solar system
family picture now mercury was way too close to the sun so they weren't able to get a picture of
mercury but from the top left to the bottom right you have venus you have earth you have mars you have jupiter and
then you have saturn and uranus or sorry uranus and neptune you've got saturn there i
believe mars is the one that's missing if i'm not mistaken um uranus and neptune are both a bit
blurred and the reason for that i'll show you momentarily but it has to do with the angle with which voyager was
taking those pictures but the earth is in this little strip of light which is actually an artifact
because of how close the earth was to the sun when that picture was being taken that you actually have this
sunlight that's scattering off of the lenses the the the cover of the lens on voyager
1 which is creating this this dynamic central maximum of light and that's
exactly where that pale blue dot was found now this is kind of a schematic to show you
where voyager was in terms of an angle above the ecliptic and where all the different planets were and the actual
images that were taken were all of these specific snapshots of the different planets and then this strip of shots
were done for uranus and neptune to try to capture those with as much detail as possible
this amounted to a very small amount of data about 60 frames in total
those 60 frames could not be sent by voyager 1 to us they were stored on a little tape deck on voyager 1. and they
couldn't send them right then when it was taken because the galilean and the magellan spacecraft
were actually occupying priority on the deep space network so it had to wait to march to may over the span of three
months the data was slowly slowly sent to earth and then reconstituted into
those images this gives us a view of just how small
our home is in contrast to the size of the solar system
but that's not the only view you've had and so i feel that this one was inspired very much by carl sagan doing that solar
system family day on valentine's day 1990 and this is the day the earth smiled and this was taken when cassini
went into the eclipse shadow of saturn with the sun behind and i love the rings
on this image but what i also love about this image is if you zoom in you actually see our little pale blue dot
and it comes out blue simply because of the scattering of the light off of our clouds in this image with the color
contrast that you have now at the moment cassini took this picture
nasa went above and beyond and they asked all astronomers on earth that had
a view of the night sky to look up and take a picture of saturn and so they constituted a picture of the
earth from all of these images from the amateur astronomers
and they asked everyone to smile and wave so this is the day the earth smiled july 19 2013. so cassini actually took
another picture of our pale blue dot but this time we were all looking back
that just moves me that is very cool now the biggest moments that i find bringing
sagan into the classroom come from the cosmos show and i talk to them a little bit about cosmos we do the eratosthenes
experiment together in class and i show them his little clip on eratosthenes and these days for some i even showed them
the neil degrasse tyson version of the eratosthenes experiment clip on cosmos and a lot of them asked me sometimes why
i bring the old carl sagan clips in when there's the new show or when there's all
of these awesome youtube celebrities who do these these videos as well and i talk to them a
little bit about inspiration and the groundbreaking nature of what carl sagan was doing
trying to bring astronomy to the masses and one of the ones that i love is this the way when we talk about life in the
solar system you know we talk about a stream of vials and we talk about looking on earth at the different types
of organisms that exist in incredibly extreme climates and then we talk about what we might find in europa under the
ice with the europa clipper or what we might find on ganymede in the underground ocean or what we might find
in enceladus if we actually get through the plumes into the actual area under the ice crust there
but what sagan brought was this imagination of what if the actual
life we see is different from our own if it's something different if it's
constituted in a different way and then artists put this together into these renderings of floaters and hunters and
an entire life cycle of organisms that could then sustain themselves
and what i loved about the theatrics at that time is bringing sagan to a window where he's looking out over jupiter and
watching this sort of an ecosystem that he's imagined and bringing it into knowledge
and this is something that cosmos the new one has done very well bringing the spaceship that that
theodograph tyson sits into and even diving into droplets of water and driving into the underground
geysers under uh enceladus and it really starts to capture your
imagination and sagan often said that imagination will carry us to worlds that never were
but without it we go nowhere because our imagination really has to drive our passion and drive our ability
to look beyond what we know and actually start to probe into what we don't know but as we said sagan was also incredibly
grounded and so at the same time as you have that quote you have this one as part of the pale blue dot and this is
what i want to leave you with today the earth is the only world known so far to harbor life there is nowhere else at
least in the near future to which our species could migrate visit yes
settle not yet like it or not for the moment the earth is where we make our stand
so at the moment i'm working with my students on actually trying to put together projects on remote sensing of
the earth to try to detect environmental impact on different areas of the earth to try to work out whether our current
environmental policies match what we're actually seeing happen using our space-based satellites
a lot of me wonders now that we have all of this capability and all this instrumentation who's going to be the
next visionary to really make us recognize not just the context of what we're seeing but also
the importance of all of the knowledge not just select parts thanks for your attention tonight and
please if you haven't ever before watch some of the videos of carl sagan and
cosmos because they are inspiring beyond belief wow thank you very much
um as always a pleasure uh kareem thank you my pleasure
well up next is uh adrian bradley adrian has been on uh global star party a
number of times he's a regular contributor uh he is someone that also inspires us with all of his incredible
nightscapes and um i think he has a thing just or two to
say about yeah as well but uh you know um but it's uh
uh so far this has been a great show yeah and my video apparently caught back up for a
while was behind remember i'm having that issue but um all right yeah it's
so now everything works so a brief introduction um adrian bradley
um david saw a few of my photos
really liked them and i'm forever grateful because he i started doing widescape um
astrophotography or nightscapes as they're called due to a simple image that uh david put
up when he was down in the southern hemisphere and he shot the uh southern cross i believe from outside
the hotel room or something and um there those four stars sat for
some reason it dawned on me that um you can catch starlight
in with the camera and it took off yes i am 50 years old my
birthday was yesterday so uh i've made 5-0
let's hope i make a few more um many more and so that kicked off the
now obsession of doing night sky photography and what i've learned over the
time that i've been doing it is um there's always the imagination uh kareem that you just
mentioned goes into the uh nightscape photography maybe more
so than uh classic astrophotography if you try to shoot the heart nebula and it
doesn't look like the heart nebula you know you went wrong but in nightscapes whatever you shoot is
in front of you and you know you're free to interpret it some things should look a certain way
but if there's a little more of an interpretation and how you frame things becomes a bit of an imagine imaginary
thing now tying this to carl sagan for me looking out the universe and seeing
all of the pale dots in the night sky um
i think of it sort of in reverse to what the pale blue dot was that you have voyagers out there
and i often look at the big dipper because it's generally the direction that voyager i
believe voyager 1 is heading in that direction voyager 2 i believe is heading toward
uh canis major and towards sirius so looking at those areas in the night sky
and you're sort of watching as voyager joins the stars out there and um
so it's you know and being uh admittedly catholic carl sagan challenges those of
us who um you know have our religion to take a deeper look within ourselves
reconcile our beliefs with what we know to be fact which is the stardust
you know we we learn every sunday god created heavens and earth and we were we
challenged some of those things in our mind not to say well our beliefs are completely
you know baseless and false and we know the catholic church has had its share of uh
you know russians against science but then too the catholic church is trying to come
around to understanding the true science behind things
and not so much just pasting everything with theology so
sagan has made an impact enough to where even those who those of us who go to church on sunday
even recognize that there's truth to the fact that we are made from stardust
it isn't magic our latest pope is that god's not a magical a magician such as
the way um many of us may have grown up believing so
science and astronomy has generally has opened my um
perception to well what's really out there and we can understand this stuff it isn't
just magic it's it is real and i think carl sagan represents searching for
what's real um i remember an eclipse picture and somebody in our club saying
and there were like 50 people watching something that's real and it stuck to my mind and then
in this era of covid you've got a lot of different things going um a lot of a lot
of social media that you know opinions are then made fact
um the uh i'll comment on something here adrian uh
a famous quote by carl sagan is that science is not only compatible with
spirituality it is a profound source of spirituality
i would agree with that wholeheartedly and before i go too far off into the weeds
i actually want to present some of the images because i went out recently to one of my favorite places
which is point o bark lighthouse uh park you're seeing it from
a year you're seeing it from earlier this year in march um there are two
favorite images of mine that i took but what i'm what i want to
show you is then and now march 2021 i was able to take this image
um it's the fall to my left aurora is going on but i stopped to take this
picture because i wanted to capture the lighthouse and the milky way so i went back to do it again this time with orion
rising that's now they've installed lights here oh bright yellow lights and this angle is now
ruined oh and that's it i can't do it anymore
um there'd be nice fall coloration and everything but the lights they came out
um so what do i do i take a picture and i just use those
lights to create a shadow and i still get the milky way over lake huron
and uh so you just have to use your imagination if you you can't do the type of shot you
wanted to do you just you find another one with what you've got
and so there's uh like i said there was aurora so if you turn to your left this is what you saw
on that same night you go to you took a shot and you saw these colors of distant aurora from the
uh spring equinox you're sure that's not the chicago lights right chicago is
further i'm just teasing you man that they're not the taoist lights either the
this this location is in the thumb in michigan and it crosses uh saginaw bay
into taos and there's a different like this this little town right here if you can see my cursor there's a little town
right here so they're yeah they're getting to see the aurora too so it's so it's a
beautiful sight so as of uh so the night that i went that was that
shot and now there's something red on the horizon but i believe it's more of an artifact and
and looking at the bright light just lighting things up behind me so
nothing to see moving on but it didn't mean that i didn't
give it a try to get some good pictures despite all of this lighting no i was still able
to produce some photography and here are some of the efforts that i had i had
both a [Music] sony non-modified camera and a canon modified
camera all of you doing astro photography work or even nightscapes you
can incorporate the uh nebulosity the aha regions in your
nightscapes and really set them apart there was some haze in the uh
sky that night but i was still able to get this the sky here at its best is around the portal three
so it is a very nice sky so these are a few of the uh shots that i
tried to take despite all of this lighting going on i uh i did my best
and let's see there's a couple that i like this is
so i was able to cut the light off in the uh photo here and i ended up with this it's a little
bluish this was the unmodified camera and
and you can see the progress that they've made in turning this what
they're doing is they're turning it into a place more friendly to visitors so there's walkways and more paths and
people camp here in the summer all the time so so it's becoming a walkway it'll be a bit of a challenge to try and get them
to uh leave it dark yeah adrian i think that if
you're able to share those images with them and other people that are important that
that facility they may change their mind on uh on on how much light they yeah and i'll
have to see if i can find out who to tell i may have to travel there in the daytime but i'm sure
there's uh i'm sure there's someone there that could uh
yeah those images are definitely testimony to how beautiful and wonderful
it is at night absolutely if this loads um
yeah so without you know without a modified camera you can still produce these scenes here's the winter hexagon
rising again i i like shooting at the winter hexagon and
i like seeing these dust lanes in this part of the milky way i learned about that when i was in
oklahoma um just how pronounced those dust lanes can be
and so i now that now i shoot for them and now i shoot to um
process them so a couple more before we go the moon is
coming this isn't the moon now but it will be in a few days so get out there and shoot the moon i
like to shoot them handheld with a large lens a 600 millimeter lens and a camera
and get as much detail as i can just by hand holding the moon and then doing a little processing
to me it's always a challenge i will be doing the um i'll be sharing my images of the
lunar eclipse in a few days i agreed to share those images here's back there
with the solar eclipse i shared this and a few a few other images
with someone from italy who presented a live real-time gallery
of images that we were capturing as the event was unfolding
there's a bird scott you know i like to do birding oh yeah there isn't much time
um i believe i've shared most of these images at a prior
star party but interesting enough to me this simple
moon and venus shot from a couple nights ago i didn't uh layer in the earth shine i
wanted the detail but important enough here is
and you might be able to see it um it's a little fuzzy but you've got a phase
of venus that shows up with a handheld shot and that just imprints on me that the
the planets are distant but we can photographing planets isn't as
far-fetched as you as many may think um it's it's actually just a testament to
one how large they are um how far away they are in a reach that even a 600 millimeter camera camera lens
has in capturing things in the night sky so so with that i'll turn it back over to
you scott and um thank you all for
looking at these images i see jason gunzel has joined you want to see some even better images
wait till he shows you uh some of the work that he has um but uh
like doing the uh wide field photography um
for one it allows me to compose as many you know different scenes different shots and find a way to incorporate the
earth with the night sky and i like the night sky to be a little more detailed
not just a background to show off something that's on the earth i like the two to work together and that's what i
go for with all the images i take so so there you have it great thank you so
much adrian thank you well up next is ed seaman uh ed is with the
rocklin astronomical uh astronomy club excuse me not astronomical society astronomy club a
very old organization that has hosted uh for many years the
northeast astronomy forum and ed is here to to talk about neif 2022
so we're really happy to have you on the program well thank you very much for the
invitation scott i i appreciate it and i'm happy to be here um first i'd like
to say that i have to agree with everybody here carl sagan was a
huge influence on me growing up and especially obviously on my interest
in astronomy i most vividly remember his appearances i
think on the johnny carson's show which probably all of you do
i think that's where the uh the billions and billions uh really uh
became uh a well-known saying to america
right well uh the i i know that um
uh i think that uh carl sagan um you know
still i mean to this very day uh really uh inspires us uh
i i did not realize the amount of impact at the time that carl sagan was uh was
doing all this stuff the amount of uh impact against um
how do i say it you know i mean he the the idea of astronomy outreach to the public you know the so-called unwashed
masses okay uh was meeting such uh you know friction with the professional
community you know and researchers and uh i had heard
uh you know when he tried to when he proposed the pale blue dot photo and the
the family of of uh you know the solar system uh back at that time that uh not
everybody was really in favor of it because they were saying look this carl this is not science
why why why are we even doing this and he he was visionary enough to understand
um that uh you know such an image as the pale dot could change humanity
i i i think that's true and i i think what carl gave us in the way that he did give it to us is
probably so much more significant than if he if he had purely stuck to
[Music] you know pure science straight up science closed doors and you know in a
laboratory somewhere yeah i think his his influence on the hearts and minds of america is just in the
world is just incredible um yes i'd like to give a quick shout out
to dave iker i loved your mineral love presentation my son was a huge mineral collector when
he was younger and now he ended up at mit so i i have to say that it's uh probably been
a good influence on him well thanks ed and it's good to see you again pal thank you i hope you're doing
well oh yeah good so um
scott graciously invited me to uh attend this event
and uh i'd like to say that this is going to be the first major public announcement
for neath 2022 and the rockland astronomy club is very
pleased uh to make this announcement that neife will be back live at its uh original
venue at the rockland community college in suffern new york april 9th and 10th
of next year 2022. so uh we're really excited to be
bringing the show back live um it's it's been a stressful couple of years as i'm sure it
has been for for everybody um but uh we were
fortunate enough to be able to uh
present uh two virtual needs uh this year and uh in in the previous
year which i think were very successful and
very well attended by the astronomical community
you know even in light of the difficulties of the of the pandemic
we did have some fantastic guests for those two virtual events uh
such as uh charlie duke which was uh amazing for us
uh tom stafford as well alan stern um and uh thomas zubrichon also
uh gave a presentation for us during the uh the two virtual events
um so they were successful they were a lot of fun but uh you you can't beat the
live event so we're we're very very pleased uh to make the announcement that
uh we're moving forward uh uh with the planning for uh
2022 and it's going to be our biggest event yet we're really uh planning a uh
a huge spectacular event to uh kind of bring us out of this uh pandemic
phase and uh we look forward to it that everybody's gonna be able to uh
you know really enjoy yeah that's awesome uh it the uh uh
just going back to some of the history of neif how old is the event at this time uh naval is founded in 1991
and um it was a very different event back then it was founded as a uh
an outreach program an astronomy outreach program and
it it only had about uh i think it was about eight or ten
vendors which uh is an interesting comparison to
the level that it is at uh today but but even even then we did uh we did have
some great uh uh guest speakers for the event uh i recall we had uh uh fred hess
who was the uh then director of the hayden planetarium which was was huge for our first um neef
event um john bortle we had uh paul uh phil harrington uh the author
so even dating back to the uh to the first show um we always um
put a lot of uh emphasis on on having great speakers for the event and um
over the next couple of years uh it started to grow tremendously
and uh we were bringing in more and more uh vendors uh to exhibit at the show
and um when it first started it was actually in the uh in the lobby
outside of the theater that we were using at the rocklin community college same
location it still is but as
the amount of uh interest grew in it we we actually made the decision to move it
over to um the hotel um which we also utilized for the event
uh just because there was a more space available to us at that point
we weren't ready to move into that 90 000 square foot exhibit space
so it went on for a number of years at the hotel
in their ballrooms in various lobby areas uh continue to have a great
list of speakers um
and uh eventually it just got so big we decided that we needed to pull the
trigger and go back to uh the community college and take the 90 000 square foot space and the rest is history yeah
that's right yeah and for all of you who have not been to a northeast astronomy forum event
uh it is it is really there's nothing else like it um it's it's been
it's been copied a little bit a couple of times but no one has pulled it off as well as uh
ed and his team at rocklin astronomy club so really
an amazing event you'll see vendors from all over the world uh uh attendees from all over the world and
uh you know so it's it's something that you got have to do at least once
i think what you do at once do it every year scott
you'll keep coming back so um so i i'm really looking forward to it
explore scientific will be there of course and um uh you know we look forward to uh all of
our competitors to be there too and uh you know we'll be looking forward
to uh letting you experience what neith is all about from the vendor side but uh
you gotta listen to the uh the talks um
also they have amazing door prizes uh they have uh impromptu uh talks right in the vendor
area which is also very interesting and it will be the friends that you make the
people that you'll meet that you can't meet anywhere else you've got to go to neath so
yeah scott is my paid spokesman thank you very much
so uh yeah we're hitting the ground running um the uh uh
registration for vendors is going to open up in just a couple of weeks uh ticket sales will uh officially open up
on january 2nd uh we have a brand new website that is definitely worth
checking out it's [Music] neatexpo.com uh definitely take a look at that
there's a lot of information there's the list of our current speakers that we have confirmed
we have eileen collins coming the first female shuttle pilot
uh we have uh jerry griffin the apollo flight director
and megan cox from the jpl they're talking about the
mars rovers and so we've got uh quite quite a lineup and a lot of exciting
stuff planned for uh and this is jerry hubbell is uh
is there any news about the imaging conference uh for next year yes absolutely the imaging conference is uh
in its planning phases and we've got uh speakers booked already and that'll be
the two days prior uh to neath as as usual um
and we're very excited about that also there's a link to it on the underneath
website so you can check out what's going on there as well i've been fortunate to give a couple of talks at
the imaging conference over the past years um that's a great it's a great conference
absolutely yeah so we're happy to be able to continue that as well so we're very excited about uh next year
okay well great um i've posted the neffexpo.com
website and chat so please visit that uh and you mentioned when can they sign up again ed
um the vendor registration is gonna open in about two weeks and uh
ticket sales for the general public will open on january 2nd great
um you don't have to have that commercial queue don't do you scott uh i do not um
but uh let me let me see if i can do that for you hold on for a second
it's also on youtube you can just google it yeah let me go get it 2022
there it is whether you're building dynamic network
models or forecasting real world behavior neo4j's new graph algorithms book will walk you through hands-on
a commercial on top of a commercial yeah i heard you hit the skip uh skip this
button right yeah it's a big giveaway isn't it okay
uh here we go let's share that and play
[Music]
[Music]
[Music] do
[Music]
excellent thank you thank you for getting that on there scott let's play a lot smoother when you uh do
it directly though right yes i i will make sure that we start to do that i'll in fact i'll start running it in all of
the rest of our programming so awesome thank you very much thanks ed thank you all right so we are going to go to a
10-minute break and we're going to come back with jerry hubble from the mark slater remote observatory so give us
about 10.
[Music]
here we go okay
[Music]
mike weinbach and jonathan
i do not know where this audio is coming from hello everybody how's everybody
uh well let's see i'm mike that's jonathan hi so we know who everybody is um i'd like to set a few expectations
for the talk if i could first of all be coming from that's one of our uh it's one of our
talks playing it's probably yeah it's probably the youtube is still sharing i don't know still open yeah
yeah probably most of you have heard about it's a tragedy in america
by history the loss of our space shuttle columbia and her seven-man crew how long ago was
the talk from is a very inspirational one and that's i'm not sure how this is coming across
to you all that that even though we lost the orbiter and our astronauts uh the
end result it does show americans coming together and doing what we do best is
reacting in a time of crisis and helping each other out and getting over getting over the emotional part of the
of the reaction to the accident and really pitching in and doing what whatever needed to be done in east texas
and uh that's the expectation that we'd like to get across jonathan yeah i would think one of the things that always
appealed to me as a as a light it's not playing on your screen right now is it scott great thing about amateur
astronomy is that contribute to the body of knowledge
and uh one of the things that's really appealing about this story that you'll hear as we go through here is how 25 000
wildland firefighters and volunteers from east texas well those of you that are watching
during the break get well you were getting a pretty good talk
so strange you've got until we figure out where it's coming from enjoy
you have to just shut your browsers down scott everybody they are shut down oh really here we go
there we go it was a hidden browser yeah
yeah those things happen those nasty things those little brothers
well if you want to hear more you got to go to youtube and find that talk yeah that's right
yeah it's the neath talks channel on youtube uh we have all the i'll have to
thoughts from recent years uh posted up there yeah i guess i'll have to uh favorite
that and take a look for myself [Music]
you
okay
um
um [Music]
okay
okay
okay
[Music] so
so
you
okay
okay
new analysis of archival hubble data revealed water vapor in the atmosphere
of jupiter's icy moon europa europa's icy smooth surface scarred by
cracks and fissures averages minus 275 degrees fahrenheit but researchers
suspect a vast ocean lurks beneath that surface the hubble space telescope previously
detected 60 mile high plumes of water vapor erupting like geysers
these new results show water vapor over a larger area suggesting a long-term
water vapor atmosphere on one of europa's hemispheres
this discovery lays groundwork for missions that will explore jupiter's icy moons
understanding the formation and evolution of jupiter and its moons helps astronomers gain insights into
jupiter-like exoplanets elsewhere in the universe
[Music] well we are back um
and uh up next is uh jerry hubbell who's uh
uh appears to be outside at a star party at an explore scientific event somewhere
but uh actually is at home in uh his man cave um
remotely connected to the mark slade remote observatory so i'm going to turn this over to
jerry and um jerry what was your what has been your inspiration by carl sagan
well carl sagan i remember reading back in the 70s about him
that's when i first got into i had my first telescope when i was like
12 years old actually i used a telescope before then in 1969 my school had
telescopes to hand out the students to take home with them it was a little three inch i think a
three inch or maybe a four inch newtonian you know
that was like f10 probably it was a real long telescope for a newtonian
oh yeah but i remember the first my first uh experience with that was uh looking outside the apartment we
lived on the third floor of an apartment building across the way to where there was some construction equipment working
so i remember doing some daytime observing but but i remember in the 70s
riding to nasa to get photographs and things from the space program and
learning about jpl and uh learning about carl sagan and the
first really really thing that i remember about carl sagan was in 1976 when the viking landers landed
on mars that was really my first experience learning learning uh information about
carl sagan and i just that was an awesome i just still remember seeing the first
photographs from mars on landing on the landing pad remember the first photograph was the landing pad on the
viking lander oh yeah that just that just blew me away i just could not believe that and uh
aren't they the viking landers aren't they they uh i don't know if it's viking one and two or just one is named the
carl sagan um lan uh observatory or not observatory but
station i guess a carl sagan mars station or something like that seems like i remember something
like that i may be wrong
it could be a memorial station yeah memorial station right a monument not
far from from the terraforming va verteron array
um and and so nasa renamed the mars lander
in honor of the late carl sagan yeah i remember the reading that so that's great
so and it's mars pathfinder lander it's right carl sagan memorial station a
pathfinder okay i knew it was one of the landers i couldn't remember which one it says
but i know he was i'm sorry no on the uh when they honored him they
said carl sagan was a very unique individual who helped young and old alike to dream about the future and the
possibilities it may hold carl always liked to push the boundaries too and the mars pathfinder mission with
its rover named sojourner or sorener okay clearly has done that
even in its very first images contain an array of fascinating scientific questions that he would love to debate
we will love we will explore the area with this memory in mind
yep so um it was interesting you you had that
video about uh europa because i right now i've got the mark slade remote observatory trained on
jupiter oh okay so it's kind of cool and there's an interesting it's an interesting
configuration right now let me go ahead and share that i want to i want to share something else real
quick um before the show started we were talking
about arizona and different and i was talking about my trip out there in 2017
and one of the one of the best places to visit is meteor crater and i just wanted
to i want to share this photograph real quick with my family
you see that oh yeah look at that what's that big hole behind you yeah there's a big hole
there so that was really awesome day visiting the crater that's the first time i've
ever been there so that was cool you ever get a chance to go to arizona
that's where you want to go right uh so let me let me get the desktop here
and uh this is going to be a live view of jupiter um
you see that yeah so let me let me go to the chart here so
the the satellites are the moons are callisto europa ganymede and io in that order
so this is this is again this is europa right here and and i took a picture still photographed earlier this is from
sharp cap this is a live video right now this is a picture i took earlier about an hour ago you can see
how the moons have shifted position just over that period of time
see here how uh i think it's callisto
has moved out let's see
it's ganymede ganymede has moved closer to uh or
europa has moved closer to ganymede one or the other you see here
which is pretty cool to watch i mean the solar system is a dynamic place
and even over a short period of time you can see changes like this so this is a this is being exposed this
is a one second exposure i'm going to move it down to like eight milliseconds and zoom in so you can see jupiter there
um let me uh
center it a little bit and we'll zoom up on jupiter just a little bit um
so there's jupiter and you can tell it's a live view because it's jumping around
and you can see features come in and out of focus right so our skies are a little bit noisy
tonight the scene's not the best but again you can see quite a bit um
it's kind of cool uh just a decent viewing like this i mean it's kind of like looking through an eyepiece in some
respects but uh i like looking at the moon's
circle around um
and let me go back to the longest 1979 july 9th 1979 when voyager 2 made
its closest approach to jupiter and it falls oh okay 350 000 miles of
the planet's cloud tops so one of the neat things one of the neat things here is that we're crossing
the equatorial plane of jupiter's uh satellite or moon because they're all
lined up in a straight line which i thought was kind of special you know everything's falling into in a straight line basically
which is kind of cool i think during this time there's a there's a opportunity to see
the moon's eclipse them you know the other each of the moons eclipse the other moons as they
circle around the planet uh which is kind of interesting
and then uh over here you can see the telescope pointed up through the
shutter through the dome shutter um
but i thought that was cool to train the telescope on jupiter i was i was doing uh some asteroid work the other night
when i was given a talk i guess it was last week i was showing how to track down
asteroids with the mark slate remote observatory
oh and then uh let me let me leave you with one other thing
i can get it up here in time uh
if you're interested in the mark slade remote observatory
you can you can visit our website at uh
here's what it looks like at msro science.org
and [Music] there's some information about us
and our contact information uh
so i got i do have let me see this for those that don't know that's
what the observatory looks like um and yes it's up against a bunch of
trees yes it is but it's beautiful
but it's it's kind of nice yeah it's a it's it's a nice facility we do have other stations
we have two other stations also that are in the that have a better view of the sky than that one than station one but
uh so we do a lot of research and other work there and in training we do a lot of
training there also with the students well the good news is you know a part of
the sky if it's behind the trees just wait a couple hours it'll roll it'll come to you
yeah it'll roll up uh as the year goes on you'll have you'll have different parts of the sky that are above the tree
line so that's always good and you always have a good view of the ecliptic which is uh for me that's important
to have that line of sight
excellent excellent okay um uh
right now russ brick is not online so we are going to go to uh
jason gonzale the vast reaches um he has made um
amazing images that uh uh you know really not only i mean just shocked me
with their detail but um but you know jason is also a guy who
does uh a lot of outreach uh through his astrophotography on social media
he but he's also kind enough to show us uh at times his beginnings you know um
and to show us his uh his journey on how he was able to make uh you know ever
improved images um and so i'm you know i wanted to invite him onto
the show today because not only because of his inspiration but uh you know um
he is uh he's just someone that uh is great to interact with
on the shows and i'm always a little surprised he always
surprises us with some new uh images and details that uh in those
images that you know always delight so
jason yeah well thanks for having me scott thank you thank you talk about always being
surprised my computer has crashed pretty much
pretty much locked up completely
i um trying to share my screen but
there we go okay we're getting somewhere i know you can't see anything but
i reached the milestone here all right so um yeah so i wanted to um
taco you know the programs about the sagan um
as in the carl um i you know that quote that you had written
scott in the announcement for this meeting i thought was one of the ones that always kind of struck me it's the
the classic star stuff quote um you know the uh i'll read it here the nitrogen in our dna the calcium
in our teeth the iron in our blood the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of
collapsing stars we are made of star stuff and i myself enjoy
taking pictures of stars and you know solar photography is one of my um one of my big things and and also um you
know deep sky objects we had the opportunity to kind of observe this
process happening of uh stars collapsing or otherwise exploding and uh spreading
their stuff all over the cosmos so i have just a few pictures i can share
um kind of shows some of that stuff
i'll cross our fingers it worked
it did all right yeah yep we're looking
we're looking right at the sun that's right yeah so um
you're sure that's not like carpet right yeah put on your sunglasses or um
it's amazing that uh this is um this is an image of the sun i took um just two days ago so about
just over 48 hours ago i guess so this is a large sunspot that was
transiting the disc of the sun facing us and um
you know i know it's hard to get a sense of scale when you look at an image of this you're looking at the solar chromosphere
of the sun but this sunspot that's central to this image could swallow the earth whole
um you know the earth can pass right inside the dark region within it so
that can give you a sense of this scale of our star and just how much material is out there and
when you look at the chromosphere you're looking at the emission of hydrogen
so this is just above the photosphere of the star which the
photosphere is what people typically would visualize as the surface of the sun it's the it's the ball of
light but the hydrogen floats above that some thousands of miles or kilometers
and because it's somewhat opaque it's um
it comes up as as as dark in front of the the photosphere below
so you're seeing it silhouetted and i think the the analogy that a lot of people make is the dusty light bulb
so the hydrogen chromosphere being the dust on a light bulb we use that special filtration to be
able to see this layer in the atmosphere of the star hopefully that gives a little explanation into what you're what you're
seeing got one more view
[Music] and this is similar in nature as far as how it's
taken but because we're shooting the sun
in narrowband light
that means it's a monochrome image and um because it's a monochrome image we can
colorize it after the fact so this these colors are slightly arbitrary here
where i just um try to you know give a representation of what maybe the sun looks like in the sky if
you had the most amazing eyes that anyone ever has ever possessed but
the um again you know you see the details in the chromosphere here and um and out
into the to the the limb of the sun you can see then this this thin layer of the
chromosphere hanging out above the photosphere so that gives you an idea of the thickness
of the layer that we're observing on this on the you know just floating above the surface of the sun
so this again was shot two days ago this is another active region that's rotating into view
um so in this orientation the surface the sun is moving to the right
so this had just come around the the corner and it's it's now
fair fairly close to central on the disc i think facing the earth
beautiful yeah so that's that's our star um you know it once the star reaches the end of
its life cycle it can go a number of different ways and that just kind of depends on the mass of the star
and perhaps some other properties of it but the um
the larger stars end up exploding into into supernovae and and i've got a
couple pictures of these out there
this one here is the spaghetti nebula which is an enormous
supernova remnant uh hanging out there in the sky and this is shot through
narrowband filters you're looking at hydrogen sulfur and oxygen filaments
spread out through a field of view that would literally dwarf the
the full moon i can't remember exactly how
wide this is um in in the full moon unit wow i'm guessing probably 10 to 15. that's
just an enormous uh structure out there in the sky and you know it
it's almost baffling to think that these things are that huge sitting out there they're just too faint for the human
eyes to see so that's the spaghetti nebula and then moving in closer um
once these things diffuse out into the background they actually
become this background layer of hydrogen gases that permeate some of the milky
way so this is bernard 175 and it's a dark nebula which means it's a
it's a collection of dust and gases
which basically or that column you see in the middle
and then the the filaments of hydrogen the red behind it is actually an older supernova remnant
so this is another example of a of the star stuff that's you know spread
across the cosmos um it's just these expanding shells from stars that just um
just basically permeate the background of our galaxy and any other galaxy
that's really cool stars that don't go supernova go the other way into and tend to form a planetary nebula
and this is one such planetary nebula where the central star collapses into a white dwarf which you can see at the
center but still these outer layers of atmosphere
that the red giant sheds when it's near the end of its life
those shells also expand and uh similarly you know permeate the cosmos with the
with the gases that were once uh the atmosphere of the star so that's just another example this is a cool one
because you can see background galaxy is actually through the central part of this nebula there's a couple
galaxies down in here yeah i was gonna comment you had the
galaxy above the uh remnant that looked like it was actually pretty
clear too yeah this this group of galaxies a couple hundred
million light years away think of that with detail yeah
that's incredible that's sad i mean you know kind of two two ways that
you know the star stuff gets to get spread around and uh ends up collapsing into a
new star system and you know in our case our solar system
you know it can it can come from these supernova remnants where the star violently explodes and throws you know
those type of explosions carry the heavier materials um you know and heavier metals that we end
up having in the earth's crust but these smaller stars that form planetary nebula
they mostly contribute lighter elements hydrogen and oxygen and sulfur carbon things like
that yeah you know
the image you always show me something new jason it's something i've never seen in astrophotography before
and that i mean it's just such a delight it really is thank you
this is uh this is the last one i'll show the uh crab nebula
messier one and this is a supernova explosion that happened uh roughly
a thousand years ago it was actually notated by chinese astronomers early
at the the turn of the first millennium and
they had reported seeing the star eliminate even during the day
and in the ensuing thousand years to present day this thing is slowly
expanded over time and these outer
shells are the hydrogen gases and then within
is actually a pulsar which the the internal
the progenitor star collapsed into and it created uh what's called the pulsar wind nebula in the in the center
area so that's what you're seeing in blue and if i fade away the hydrogen layer
you can start to visualize incredible the pulsar wind nebula
in the center so this pulsar is rotating rapidly it's got a a
disc around it of material which is what you see here and then it's got
some polar jets coming out the top and the bottom which are what you see there so this
this uh shot of messier one was shot in infrared
to kind of strip away all the uh the hydrogen and oxygen gas that you normally surround the crab nebulous this
is also you know kind of a different way to look at it
yeah i don't think i've seen the crab presented in that way with the uh with all those elements
stripped out and you're seeing seeing it as just the uh pulsar and then
the nebula it creates so you've sort of uncovered a nebulous layer we're all used to seeing the tendrils
and the and the um that outer part of the shell
but yeah i wonder how many other um images are out there
of this inner part that's uh yeah that's not that's realized it's really common to see it in optical
ranges i would say yeah but it's infrared um
so it's outside the visual spectrum but uh right the best example of this
if i could turn it or pull it up if the uh my computer works
um it was done with the chandra observatory and uh x-ray
okay and uh you can really see that pulsar nebula you know what it's not gonna let me open
this yeah i wouldn't the computer doesn't seem to want to do it tonight so i wouldn't push it yeah we
got you we got your image which is good enough good enough for us i mean
we'll go look it up on our own we'll go look up chandra and google and we can find it if we really feel like it but i
think i got it here you got it pretty good here no i got it i got it oh you got the actual image yeah your computer
decided to cooperate all right so can you see this
yes yeah okay yeah look at that yeah this is uh with the chandra
observatory in x-ray i can't make this bigger i apologize so this is a composite image we're
looking at here but it's got these several different wavelengths you can observe
okay yeah so this is x-ray now it's turned relative to my image
let's see if i can oops yeah i
i can see where theirs is turned in one angle yours is sort of angled
oh we'll get this right okay i think that's it
yeah so there you go yeah can you see the resemblance yeah yeah so this is an x-ray oh yeah
a little bit more expensive equipment yes just a little
only uh only a couple million dollars more you know what's that to jeff bezos right
yeah so you know some of these are uh
i think this is hubble optical range and this is the x-ray and so they
compile this composite image uh check that out yeah that's the best i could do for my
backyard though uh pretty i think it's darn good yeah you you've got
the same shape that's pretty amazing yeah you've got all you've got all of that in yours just uh
imaged in slightly different color um but
all the details there yes just uh yeah with with a couple more billion dollars you can you could split
a few more you get a little more detail with a couple million dollars in no earth atmosphere maybe i could talk them
into giving me a little time on it yeah yeah well i hear the rask has something like
that so maybe that's something i'll just look into
i know our one of our clubs has access to slu we were granted i
think a year's access to slu so we might be able to we might be able to do something with
that as well we were talking about the cost difference here you know uh
uh jason gonzale versus chandra okay uh chandra's mission total price tag is
around three billion dollars okay
i'm sure you gotta throw that in so
they spent it well absolutely yeah honestly you could you could use what you've got and
take the other million and upgrade the house or upgrade the observatory itself put
some uh central air in it and central heating i don't think we
he said billion billion million billion well that's an even better
move yourself down to a better spot and take it and i think we take your uh
results um well your results are very inspiring jason
for sure you know and uh it's great to see i mean really how close you've come
uh uh to you know the best professional images that there are so
yeah well that's really amazing um the cool thing about this nebula this this pulsar wind nebula
within the crab is um this thing changes visually over time you know
it's not very common unless you're looking at planets or the sun or something like that that you see something in
[Music] in the cosmos that that changes on a human
lifetime scale but if you look at this year after year um and hubble's even imaged it um over
the course of a few weeks you can actually see this disc spinning you can see material being ejected out of the
pole so that's you know
something that's definitely worthwhile to go after if you know if you have the means
if i could comment i noticed in this image of chandra you've got
the the jet coming out appears you know whole in yours i think you've captured where
there it seems to be splitting splitting up a little bit toward the end so
i think that maybe that's some of uh what you talk about it changes in a human basically in a human
span of a year or so enough for us to notice
um you know each time each different time you take an image you see something a little different well there's a and i
can't remember the name i'm sorry but there is an astrophotographer who took a time lapse over 10 years of the crab
nebula and you can actually see the expansion of the nebula in his image
oh yeah there's a 10-year time lapse that's out there but if you look at um there's a hubble
sequence where they you know took the uh the close-up of the interior
over the span of just a few weeks you can see this thing spinning so wow you know like my my i agree that the polar
jets on my image don't look the same as this genre one and i i don't honestly know if
it's because that the nebulous changed between when that image was taken when mine was taken or
if uh you know i'm just looking in a different part of the spectrum and had a different structure it's hard for me to
say [Music]
thank you so much uh jason you never disappoint it's really amazing i kind of stumbled over my words
trying to explain uh you know what it is that you do in imaging but
really i mean the communication the the real communication of that is the is visually what you can present and um so
they're really it goes beyond words and i really thank you for coming on to the global star party thank you thanks for
having me thanks man okay all right so up next is uh russ brick he is the
president of the southern cross astronomical society and those are the guys that do the winter star party and
uh russ is coming on to uh give us a update as to what's uh
what's happening with uh with this amazing uh star party event that is held in the florida keys
hey scott how are you good real good so um
well our star party is a go dates are january 31st to february 6th
a week down in the keys super clear skies nice steady air
the opportunity to photograph southern targets that most people never even get a chance to see
that's true and uh he did mention that it's warm when it's pretty much freezing
in the rest of the country so yeah it's pretty nice uh the temperature will be um
it'll be pretty temperate you know 70s high 70s low 80's and maybe uh the 60's
tonight i've been there with uh when it's t-shirt weather at night so it's it's really
really amazing um uh the the steadiness of the sky is remarkable uh
we i remember uh on a couple of occasions uh looking through telescopes that were pushed to a hundred power per
inch and so um you know just where you know the planets
are just rocks solid you know and uh that's always a treat
down in the valley of the dobs with the uh the 28s and the 30s yeah yeah you get
some pretty crazy images it's almost like looking at a photograph that's right i would say better than a
photograph at times so uh you know so go ahead let's just say so speaking of
the photographs is there uh is there a bit of separation with i know the astrophotographers will go down
so have you do you separate in a way you know the astrophotographers
this land is over here visual astronomers over here or is that kind of mixed in together
together across both campsites okay yeah uh winter star party used to be
held just at the girl scout uh campsite which is called uh camp wessemke
but they have expanded to the boy scout area which has
has showers uh you know flush toilets i mean it's it's very nice very very nice
well we didn't have a whole lot of choice after the hurricane destroyed the facilities at campus anki
right so we rented the boy scout camp as well um they've been doing a lot of work down
there they have a brand new bunk house for um their staff
and also they have uh what they call glam tents
they're these canvas structures they have air conditioning and uh
electric while we're renting those out they kind of replace if we had been to the store
party before the hurricane we used to have chickies that's right over on the west side of campus umke
and they all got wiped out so the glam tents are sort of taking the place of the tikis oh
well uh if you stay at a winter star party i mean it's just such a delight they're on a very thin strip strip of
land on the florida keys and you can see amazing sunsets you can see amazing
sunrises and you know to watch the milky way almost touch the horizon is
really incredible and you're going to see southern hemisphere objects that you really have a very
difficult time seeing anywhere else in the united states so this is this is the place to go
to see anything further south i think you're going to have to travel to the southern edge yeah yourself right um
yeah eta carina we can see um of course uh mega centauri
right um the southern cross our namesake right so you can see the southern cross
from down there that's oh yeah that means you might do you get quite low enough to see 47 tucana
the two and the two can constellation yeah nice
well now i gotta now i gotta save my little pennies and drive down florida it's the best
vacation it's the best that already i'd already planned to head down to argentina with maxie over here and see
it then but maybe i can get a little preview by going to this star party
well yeah it'll just be a preview um myself i would really love to see the large and the small magellanic clouds
but that's where the that's kind of where it cuts off they're just below horizon oh
yeah yeah you don't get to see the magellanic clouds all right
well great well thank you this still sounds like go to our website
at www.scas.org and click on the winner star party tab
and click registration i put the link already in chat and uh
um you know there's still spots left uh you know this star party can fill up
very fast so if you have any uh inclination that you might want to get out of the cold do
some great observing and see some southern hemisphere objects you're going to want to check into this
it's it is really a bucket list star party that you need to attend
absolutely yeah i'm great we'll have some good speakers this year too yes you will i'm sure
all right all right well thank you russ thanks for i know it's getting a little late for you up there so or over there so thanks
for um uh coming on and uh and we'll see you soon we'll be talking
about our door prizes that we're going to have at winter star party so
exciting that's always exciting from scott to our prizes all right
we'll take care thanks guys thank you take care bye-bye bye-bye all right so uh so up next uh speaking
of magellanic clouds uh uh we're we're going down to argentina to uh visit with
maxi fellaries uh who always shows us some beautiful treasures of the southern
hemisphere skies maxie how are hi you
do you hear me yes we do now i think you turned up your volume a little bit
oh yeah we're here i i had some issues with my phone on the computer and
i think i i can solve that but well uh first of all adrian happy
birthday yesterday so like i thank you i hope that you enjoy your your day it
was it was very enjoyable we even did we even went um we had a little bit of a star party a
fellow uh astronomer set up his telescope in his backyard and we had neighbors come over
and we showed the night sky uh to him so it was uh probably the first time in a long while we'd done
that oh great well that so it was spent very well thank you for your well wishes it
was very appreciated you're welcome well
the topic of tonight is the our our biggest
person that we enjoy how he teaches the astronomy
uh and with it with a to to to everyone to
the a to everyone can understand what it means to see the skies to understand what's
around us and obviously spread
that word and acknowledge to to a generations you know
uh of course i'm talking about carl sagan uh that well
my experience uh basically of course when i was a kid
i i learned from my father he he
told us about the cosmos series that uh here in
argentina i think it came too many years ago that
in north america goes live so
well um he he starts to buy
some magazines that comes with vhs videos
of every episode of that theory and
we with my uh with my brother we start to to see that that program maybe i think i
have for five years only and my brother was bigger
so then we start to to know to know
what it means for example a light year uh
or what it means uh the the solar system that's frowned us and of course in the school
uh we we we
we we went with that
knowledge before the teachers uh in i don't know fifth grade uh when i
was a boy a tell about us about that and
well basically i when when we started to talk about
space in the school i was very excited but
you know the teachers was kind of oh yes the the sun the the planets
mercury venus earth mars and let's go well let's go on and you do the the solar system
and that's it you don't that's that's the what's the sort of
city but what happened what what about the planets what what's the moons
surround surrounded planets what about should be there um you know uh because in one year
we have only a nature science uh and was more kind like biology
and no more like astronomy but uh well
i i i still love to to watch the sky when i was a boy and i have my
little telescope to be amazed to to see what is the moon or maybe
jupiter but well the years passing by i have
started to to to work to to get a job to live my for my own
and well you know you i i was thinking about this and a couple
of days ago and i think it was really inside me but i
never in that time realized that i you know when some
people say oh no it was the the transition of venus that
happened maybe it was in 2016 i think
uh and i i lost it because i i i don't i didn't well i know that
also some comments and well um
what i want to say is that the experience of seeing cosmos and
start to sing again and read the book that i have here
this is the my father's book the of course is spanish but
you know i i saw uh the pictures and the illustrations
and for example i think i i i showed
before that for example i have here the um
oh i i turn off the the background so we
the closer to you it is the more we can see it okay we have here
yeah there it goes centaurus a and i could
take a picture of that galaxy also m42 and another places that
i only saw it in this book and you start to comprehend and
understand that you can do astronomy with everything
not for technology of course but now today the technology helps a lot
and i i felt that feeling
that my work here but not for money or anything you know
to to give uh to another the knowledge to how to do astronomy
of any kind of way with simple observations with a
cameras with i don't know droid i don't know draw but you nico knows
how to do it and well and and i think that that spark that we
have inside of us maybe to another person
it can to start to to get a flare in in that area so
uh you know i feel very grateful of that work
of carl sagan and well i'm now talking in english to another
person's er of astronomy i never
thought maybe five years ago or three years ago that i was talking with adrian with scots
with john and everybody and now of course the technology helps
us help us but of course i i never thought i will when
i met nico and now we we are very good friends
we talking almost every day we wake up and
talk of course astronomy but another things and and i feel very grateful for that
because the astronomy and the powerful that has
brings us in in this so
uh well i today i want to say that they say these words and
and show us what we did this weekend uh
we we met with nico and another person jose sanchez
to maybe do some observations and try to do some pictures in alberti
because uh well i asked marcos that he's the director of the
the the starting new observatory and [Music] uh to to when the it were
to go there and well we we have the
the we we knew that that the weather it wasn't going to be very good
and the expectation was maybe at the midnight it would be clear sky
and well let me show my screen for a little while yeah
i think the the universe and that includes the weather is not obliged
to help sorry i i'm still having this cough
yeah yeah from the last weekend but you sound better you sound better this week yes i feel better i feel better
well first of all this is the the old vhs videos originals that i have from the siri
cosmos i want to do to get digitally uh
big but you know this kind of little retro
but i have the 13 episodes and also this 14
that this is chatting with carl sagan and well uh
okay a lot of vhs yes
awesome well this is uh these are pictures from marcos that he
started to take us and you know it was very cloudy we have some
uh clear areas the sun goes on and then does go by
and well this is in the alberti in the farm area
of course we have mate
dried chorizo bread and then we do some sandwich
our star clubs need to do that at our uh our uh when we do our open houses and
star parties we we need to put the spread out we we don't do that for some reason we need to fix that
maybe sometimes a you you have that
uh you know that the the person that doesn't know much of astronomy
feel that fear that uh oh no they they have that those
equipments maybe they're surprising and they are working on that i know if you want to
see come to see it that's and maybe
you can give mo a little
shy off of that person yeah so exactly you
making this a little less shy open more willing to engage
for uh it's for another person not for you i i think you are a very good person that
talks about astronomy but maybe the regular person that it doesn't know much
how is astronomy maybe that people will kind of
shy or have a little fear to oh no they are doing astronomy i don't understand
anything if you don't understand that we we want to
we want to help you to understand it and well in this case he came well
he's marcos the director of the new astronomy observatory sorry
and well uh here's a friend of him and also that evening
they called to the mayor of alberti and he was
traveling with the family and then goes here we didn't take pictures but
the the the mayor of the city of alberti come here to see what we do
because he's of course supporting all this uh of the new structure you know
you can see the sand and the materials of construction
but for this restoration and of course to a spread astronomy
and of course tourists and well to
invite everyone to want to come to alberti so this is another selfie
here's nico preparing his uh fan i'm here
i don't know why what i was doing uh he's well i'm
a get the wire the wire to get a
light and then well we went we spend this time uh chatting because we have
too many clouds and we are laughing telling jokes you know very
we we really miss this kind of things and we having a good time
and well then of this starts to get rain
so we have to cover up the equipment uh with this uh well uh this is when we
found we we found what we found
for you to find it's really amazing we finished setting up all the equipment
at the third rating it was a murphy's law i i was taking pictures to the moon and
nico said maxi is starting to rain now what
and we cover i inside here we have uh
three telescopes and the table and well and what then we put something because
it comes a little windy but it wasn't a very
strong rain it was a maybe one hour and a half but
the the ground it was dry in a second so
then before this i put my cell phone and i started to do some master photography
pointing to the south and this is only a single picture
of course we have here the grey megagenia cloud and the small magazine cloud with 47 to ghana
uh this is a 3002
eso and with 30 seconds it was very very exposure
but you can see some light pollution from alberti
but it is a window of clouds you can start to see
the darkness of the sky and the perfect window to let you see the magellanic clouds yeah that's a great shot yeah
it's a very simple shot and you know this is with my dcr
camera and here here i'm pointing to the north west
because he's the city of queen he is the city of chicago i think these
are from uh 100 miles from here and
we are starting to see this place this close but you know we when i saw this you know i
say okay we have maybe half hour and then we have clear skies and we're
going to start take pictures and everything okay so
uh i did this picture with uh this is marcos jose luis and here's nico
looking up to the the cloudy sky but to the well this is alberti and this is bragado
but this light here this is venus you know it was very very
low and it was shining like some
yellow orange star was pretty strange
and well the clouds started to
go south but unfortunately the water
and well i was here when the the rain goes out i started to
to to get the the wires and the notebook and start to put on the the scope and
everything but i the only thing that i
could do was do some live stream
and we saw a m33 we saw
a little bit of andromeda galaxy because it was very loud to the north
also m42 uh some
there we are clusters but well the nico
saves that knight because he grave he goes with his dobson
and you know he said okay let's go to see you in
this open close windows uh maybe what we can see okay and
we enjoy that moment and then we we went to to get asleep because it wasn't going
to to open so it wasn't a
a good night for a photography but yet for astronomy for having a good time
to to be with friends to to know each other and
well i hope maybe i don't know if this week and i will go
again because i have here maybe 40 kilometers from my city but
i don't know i have now to the weekend the moon and i don't know if i
i can do some pictures but let's see what we have
so well thank you everybody this is my little presentation of course my gratitude for
mr carl sagan and of course scott uh thank you for the opportunity to be here
and thank you for the audience thanks maxi thanks for sharing your your passion and inspiration thank you
very much that's great well um up next is uh john johnson john johnson is uh
affiliated with the nebraska star party which is a
decades-long running star party that they actually had a in-person event this
year and uh i think he's finally caught his breath and can
give us a recap of um of the event itself and uh john you've
been on our programs before and i thank you for coming on again well thank you scott uh so now is
everybody can everybody hear me yes okay uh my video on my little laptop i'm i'm
actually not too many miles away from where scott is tonight
we come down to arkansas my wife and i twice a year to a condo over by eureka springs uh just and this is a lovely
time of year to come down here because oh yeah the autumn colors of the trees this year are really spectacular
but uh and i also always try to stop by to see scott and and the gang there
explore scientific what a great bunch of people i cannot
begin to express my appreciation and support for his organization
they are a class act and i'm not saying that just to make points with scott but
it it truly is um so anyway yeah we're going to try to realize i have high admiration for you
oh well thank you and and nebraska we're going to try to get together here
uh this week and see each other but uh but you know i talked to scott and he said well hey you
know we never did do a a wrap-up for our star party last summer
which indeed yes was i think one of the first major star parties that attempted to have a uh in-person event and ours
was a spectacular success uh we had more attendees show up this
year than we've had probably in almost 20 years i think our final count was somewhere around 380 people showed up
for our star party which for those of you that are not familiar
with it we we hold it up in the north central area of nebraska in
an area it's called the sand hills although uh most of it is covered with lush grass
native prairie grasses that especially in years when we've got good moisture
and uh and this year was one and so this year it was it was beautiful up there
uh the weather was really pretty decent other than we were plagued with the smoke and haze
from all the the forest fires and prairie fires out from uh the west you know all the way
from oregon washington up into british columbia and areas in canada
uh there was two or three days where the wind shifted and it blew through and
it was it was beautiful but uh but uh the the folks didn't seem to mind
and just like this russ was i mean part of the fun of going to a major star
party like ours or or the winter star party is is seeing the people that you've made friends with over the years
and it just becomes one big family um and you always look forward to seeing people that you know maybe you
hadn't seen for a couple years or especially with with the uh the pandemic yeah uh
absolutely i don't think anybody really had any official star parties last year so it was great to see a lot of our our
uh folks and uh so all we we had a great time and uh
as a as russ mentioned about this one you know we have great door prizes too and
explore scientific is one of our major contributors and we very much appreciate what they do for us um
and uh we're hoping maybe we can get them back up there next year we'll see all right john um it's
an amazing event it really is and um uh you know so uh we will we'll
definitely have some discussion about that uh tomorrow over lunch so yeah i want to try to get over there tomorrow
and uh let's see i don't know any other questions uh i said we had what a great time um
what does it cost to go to the nebraska well and that's the one thing we're going to have to say and we've had our
kind of our first kickoff meeting meeting uh but one of the things we've got to
resolve is we haven't raised our prices for probably oh at least five years and
uh with the cost of things going up so we may have to raise them some this year we we're still
probably one of the the least expensive we we've been charging 50 uh per person for adults um
that's and then for uh twelve with its uh
you know ten dollars and you know we very nominal um yeah but uh with the expense and we we
too we try to bring in uh some fairly well-known speakers from around
the country so those costs are going up too to to bring people in and put them up for a few days so
we may have to raise it uh 10 15 but i think we'll still be one of the most
economical ones to go to um he will going going past you a little ways into
oklahoma i think it's double that too yeah i think were you down the skies of okay
yeah i ended up going to oaky because that's where our club wanted to go yeah um so yeah okies a hundred
something for the nine nights i think you i think you're getting almost 200 bucks
and then you know you gotta you you end up camping there and you're in middle of nowhere so uh you know
you know accommodations are clayton new mexico if you really wanna or boise city
uh well though yeah and we're the same situation that's part of the the the the uh well that's why you go to these
places because they're way out in in the boonies so to speak now our closest
town of about 3 200 people is about 40 miles is the
straightening as the crowfish as they say northeast um but yeah there it's predominantly uh
camping rvs uh we do there is a merit resort area there that does have about a
dozen cabins uh the four unfortunate thing is i mean they're they're made you know
year to year i mean somebody most of them have already been taken already for next year so that's the trouble there uh
it's not a bad drive into town uh the only issue is i i caution anybody
that want to don't do it by yourself i mean especially if you're out there to you know 2 30 3 4 o'clock in the morning
uh you need somebody else just to poke you to keep you awake or watch for deer because there are
yeah there's a good population of deer it's a remote place and so there's going to be wildlife that you know watch more
all right okay there's a couple of notes i'll bring up and then i'll turn it back over um
i know scott knows and some of you have been on before i've talked about our efforts to try to get uh an ida
international dark sky association designation uh for that area
and uh we had submitted a package uh last may june time frame
to try to get it declared as an international dark sky park one of the issues we've always wrestled
with up there is if you're familiar with the requirements for an international dark sky park they
require you to do programming at least four times a year to have some kind of astronomy or dark sky related activity
which has always been an issue up there because we don't really have much support right in the immediate area
well we submitted the package and we got word back from the folks down in
tucson with the ida they said you know your uh unihedron dark sky measures are
so good when should we just once you shoot for a dark sky sanctuary
which has less requirements for you know doing programming but obviously more stringent requirements to
keep a dark sky area and so we're going to resubmit through our the nebraska gaming parks
in the next few weeks and we'll probably won't have it by next summer
but we're going to shoot for a what they call a dark sky sanctuary which there are very few around the world actually
well that would be a good distinction i think the dark sky it truly dark sky anything and having
seen having seen what the milky way looked like at okee text i can imagine how it shows up
uh there at your uh site in nebraska it just brightens the sun's not down yet and the
milky way is perfectly visible naked eye yeah it's amazing um
we always brag about being able to you know see a shadow uh cast by the light of the milky way and and we've proven it
um and there again it has a lot to do with transparency a lot of them this year a lot of a lot of the evenings this
year it was a little bit disappointing because of the the smoke from the fires but there's nothing we can do with that uh
that's why you come for the whole week and maybe you'll get those two or three nights that are just you know
yeah it i i can imagine you've got a river running through it too so you've got a little more picturesque i did what
i could um menoki tech so you had a lot of mesas but um the rivers i would make for just some
picturesque nightscapes oh it is yeah you can do some great nightscapes uh with the the lake the lake actually is
an irrigation like dam uh that has dammed up what they call the snake river but you there's spots further down the
snake river joins in with what's called the niobrara river which flows all the way across the top of nebraska and then
jumps in the missouri river and it's one of the most scenic areas
in the midwest any or the great plains and it's you drop down in that uh river and
go canoeing or tubing and you don't think you're in nebraska for sure yeah we
driving through nebraska we saw a lot of corn fields a lot of corn mazes and we drove by lincoln we knew there
was a college town somewhere in there that's in the big ten one quick question yeah our school
barely got by him uh this year but uh how far so we were in kearney we
kind of drove through the middle turning nebraska yeah kearney nebraska how far are you from say that location because
that was the star party yeah i'd say from kearney up there you're talking about uh
about a three-hour drive okay so not far you know
right now all right you know i-80 bisects nebraska and follows the flat river uh and
you know further west there of course the last major city if you want to call it that is
north platte uh and it's a directly north and north platte and it's less than a two hour drive up from northland
okay so yeah i have a good idea of where where it is so okay well yeah it's
definitely on my list it's closer for me to get to
you know the okitex drive was a nice long ordeal it was um you know it's
worth it when you and you see it um coming to nebraska um a little more economic and
i'd probably make the trip from kearney because kearney's a nice little town i've driven three hours here in michigan
to go to our thumb area uh take some pictures so um just some things for me to think
about but uh yeah it does sound like a um you know it's a really nice place we
have had some folks complain it gets windy or things like that it's not every single night no i mean
you gotta plan for one night now i happen to miss it this year because i had to get back early because i was off
on another trip the following week with my dear wife of 50 years to celebrate our anniversary so
i missed but you got to count on one night and that was the friday night the last night
the storm rolled in and and blew some tents over and and got some people wet but
that's that's part of going up there that's right being an astronomer yeah it's astronomy all right
all right well thank you um thank you thank you scott thank you so much thank
you um up next is uh libby and the stars libby has given over 50 presentations to the
global star party um and uh you know she is uh certainly one
of the uh top young people uh in the country today that i think will
actually step foot on mars libby uh thanks for coming on again and uh and sharing your passion with
us did uh i'm really happy to come on so um i know this talk is about carl
sagan and uh there's a lot of times where um i talk about him during the star party and
stuff because i truly find him one of like the best astronomers out there because not only did he have just
outreach everywhere in public but he had on the television and i've always thought of that it's
like you know all the way back then all they had was television right television
and they had the phone and my mom always tells me you know things are so much better back then but i'm like well lisa
i get to come on here and do the star parties because there's so many virtual ways to do outreach and that stuff now
so um a while ago i went to disney it was actually not a while ago but it was
um back in late december 2021 um 2020
and uh i was at epcot which the whole theme at epcot is like a part of disney
it's it's kind of futuristic so there's always been this one ride that i love to ride called mission planet and you're
basically simulating being an astronaut and um like i never really realized this
until i was like doing this star party because i didn't go to disney for a while and i noticed
that um there's a glass plate on the outside of the
building that's a carl sagan quote so my heart was just touched and i took a picture by it and i sent it to uh i sent
it to scott so i went back and i found it and i decided i wanted to share it because i didn't get to share it so
here it is um this is a year ago i found it on the glass
like and you can see the giant planet in the um and like the mirror of it of the glass
oh yeah all right planet and so i was like so excited it's my favorite ride
and a friend of a friend of mine i've never never known him but a friend
of a friend of mine literally has their coat up on the glass plate and i was like astonished i was like wow
and most of the other quotes were astronauts and i was so happy to see that there's
actually astronomer on there and so um as you can see the quote on the um glass
plate is the surface of earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean and i kind of like thought that related to
um john kennedy's quote uh that the ocean that the space is uh ocean and
like this our sailboat is a rocket and we're just gonna keep on watching them out until we explore like every bit and
it's just like i was like oh my gosh it's a curl swagging quote i even jumped out of line to get like a picture
i had middle bars up and i was like no i'm taking a picture of this and so um
i thought that was so cool and then um this year i went to space camp again in
july and um we did um we did um a little astronomy meeting
because most of the stuff there is about like um astronauts stuff like that you don't
get a lot of astronomy stuff but i still love to go because sometimes you do the astronomy stuff and it's all just
meaning kids who like it too um but one time we did a talk about astronomy and um there was a guy in the
stadium and he was like all right kids raise your hand if you know who carl sagan was and i was like
and i look around and i was like all right you can probably hear a pin drop in this room and so
i was like that's kind of disappointing that not many kids know about carl sagan
and um we got to watch the pale do uh pale blue dot video and all i've ever known is
like the older version of the pale blue dot which i always thought that was cool but i never saw that there was a new
version and i literally shed a tear watching a new version because the new version is so
cool i mean you don't even have to understand what astronomy is to just automatically feel connected with the
universe so i'm gonna stop sharing this picture um i know last meeting i talked about that
um i um was going to host my first astronomy meeting and i actually invited
some of my friends they are interested in astronomy but they're just like i'm here to support
you so yeah so uh-huh we had it behind the school in
the pavilion and so it wasn't my school but it's kind of like a playground that a lot of people go to visit so it was a
piv as a pavilion out there and my goal was to um come up with a name for the
club by the um end of the day so nobody showed up from like actual
astronomy but i was really glad um it was really heartwarming a little girl showed up
playing on the playground and we were mate we were coming up club names and she actually helped us a
little bit with it so we're like almost 100 percent sure um
we're going to do um constellation kiddos
okay i like that so we were gonna do constellation kitties because i um i had
a list of all the clubs from the astronomical league and i was like to contradict the sky puppies we should do
the constellation kitties and so we decided that we were going to um
make it she made a little art with us she was only two years old and she made art with us
and she said how about kiddos and she drew on her paper she drew
constellation kiddos and she drew a cat and so um we were like perfect that's
amazing and i was so happy to actually see like somebody she was just playing in the
park and she came to us and she's only two three years old and
um we played with her for a while i don't know if she's watching right now but we gave her mom the link to my
facebook page and so um it was just so heartwarming to see her
and i always loved to inspire people who are always younger than me and um
she drew his constellations and we asked her what was her favorite planet and um we decided the club name is
constellation kiddos we're um officially gonna do that so
my um i did the next astronomy club meeting i am
hoping to have more people um one person said on my facebook that they wouldn't
be able to make it this time but they would be able to make it next time because i had like a football game or
whatever and so i was like well least there's that at least i know somebody else will be coming next time and it was mostly
just fun to have my friends there and then just teaching to mt court so i'm glad my friends came and
supported me through it but it was so fun 100 and i got to um we got
to play with a little girl and it was just like oh my gosh you know it's amazing and it kind of
reminded me of sidewalk astronomy and you know you know random people can just walk
around your telescope and be like immediately fascinated like whoa space so um
i showed her my telescope we didn't get to see anything because i decided to do it really early in the day it wasn't
early about five o'clock and um we had it out by the way it was really
fun for my first meeting i um i didn't want to have so many people at my first
meeting and then be overwhelmed so i'm actually um sort of glad that it was just my friends and i and the little
girl showed up and now we have a club name and i'm excited for the next meeting soon that's
awesome that's awesome well you know uh i start i too started an astronomy club
um years ago and uh my first meeting had two people so
um you know it's it's not not uncommon to start off very very small uh the
the main thing is olivia is that you keep doing it you know sometimes you'll have a small audience which is okay and
sometimes you have a big audience which is awesome but it's really who
gets turned on by it and the more people you really get
you know get them inspired and uh start them on that you know on that journey um
you'll you'll see that you'll change people's lives so you you don't know that that little two-year-old girl you
know if she can remember back to her early age she might remember that first spark
uh that you gave her uh at your star party so that's very cool very yeah i'm i'm so ecstatic now i'm
like i hope one day she's like a science like a scientist like i'm not gonna
force her to be but like i hope one day she's big out there at least has like a spark of
you know astronomy in her head saying like you know into the universe there's many
stars galaxies that like expand every minute
and you know that was the same with me i went to outreach with which was scott's outreach
and i looked back on it um after that and i'm like that was really fun i should start doing
this as a hobby and then i just picked it up and like from there on it just sparked this
whole astronomy thing now it's like a couple of telescopes ago it was normal
right that's cool libby thank you so much for coming on and sharing your passion
uh for astronomy starting your your own astronomy club and uh
uh for uh your your uh your passion for uh you know carl sagan so
thank you for having me on um next time like once i get really good with this streaming stuff and wi-fi i decided
that one time i really want to host my star party meeting on um alive on the
facebook live so i want to see if i'll be able to do that but i'm not that good with wi-fi yet
because we literally go to pavilion ah out on the backyard of like a school
yes so i got to play with my friends on the playground so
and i taught them how to use a telescope even though they're my friends they laughed at me the whole time and i was
like stop laughing i'm trying to act like if i didn't we're probably having fun too so that's great you know so and
i hope for more friends to show up because some kind of show up but more friends
to make anna yeah so
excellent thank you very much libby thank you thank you bye-bye
okay so um up next is uh uh
nicholas arya and he is he's also known as nico the hammer he's a gifted
musician uh but uh an an amazing astronomer uh
who inspires me uh with using some of the you know
stripped-down most simple equipment and getting really amazing images uh
and um you know i know he's a he's a great friend of maxie and caesar as well
and i you know uh you can't go wrong there so nicholas thank you for coming on again
and um and sharing your your inspiration with us okay thank you scott for the
presentation hi to everyone and okay and
tonight we are we are talking about the inspiration of sagan
of the of because his birthday and uh i think
that the cards are gonna inspire us in in many different ways and
one way is is about i think a lot of the distance
and time and when i observe with or without my telescope
and it's it's really shocking when you are observing
an object and you realize that the the same components that
that we have inside are in the stars and [Music]
that moments are are really shocking and i really
enjoyed the to to make observations with my my dobson and
to to do sketches and tonight well i prepare a little
presentation and let me share my screen
okay can you see it yes well um
for my for my house i i have a
the my view of my house is to looking south so i
used to to get my eyes to this special area this is a
simulation of estellarium [Music] uh it's like
how i see from my astro patio the south and in in this time
we have the the marachani clouds on the on the view and
i think this these galaxies are really special because you can
we can observe a lot of galaxies but in these galaxies in particular you can
you can observe it in detail because they are relatively close to us and you can see
that in that galaxy yeah you can found the same object that
you can observe of all galaxies i mean you look at this uh this area and
you are looking the the myogenic clouds okay and a lot of stars
that that are of our own galaxy the milky way
and some globular clusters but this is a
it's a it's a flat view but you need to think in distances and the perspective you we we see
all these objects like it was at the same distance but they are not
uh i and i will talk about and especially the smile my mechanic clouds
and the we have a 47 to canada
that was one of the the best globular clusters to to observe
and you can see it uh if you have a a really nice sky you you see the the
cloud but here in the city i i cannot see the the cloud itself
maybe some some bright areas but uh
again that i i thought a lot on on the perspective that okay i see
uh all these objects close but they are really far away one
from each other and a few nights ago i was observing
the that area on the left image
you can see this is a sketch i made for that night and the green circles
the the field of view with my tops and the ap the aps
and i was moving around going from the globular clusters
to some areas in the on the small marginal clouds and obviously this is from aboard the
borderline sky so i cannot see the the magazine cloud but but i can see these bright areas
that are open clusters with with some nebulosity
and they are similar uh to the open clusters or some nebulas in
our own galaxy you can see that the same type of objects
but literally in other galaxy and i really love to
to to be observing on these areas and learning and
reading about these objects these particular options you can see here
at the bottom the other global cluster
that is near that is ngc 362
and uh i made this made this simulation with a celestia application
to look the the to show you the difference of distances of these options
here for example we have a 47 took an eye and the other globular cluster 362
that they are about 20 000 like years ago and is this green point
green dots i made this here the yellow that is our sun or
some near from where where where we are in the milky way
this is the uh distance from the oh wow the the magazine clouds
yes you see it all together but uh it is amazing and and and i get
i think several times on this quote of carl sagan that
we cannot look out into space without looking back into time
we see we saw a lot of different type of objects of this kind of object
at the same time but we are looking
a difference of 200 000 light years and this is really
it's really shocking i used to observe this and start and
maybe start a lot of minutes to thinking about what are we looking for
this is amazing and this is one of the clusters
on the magazine cloud uh it's in gc346 and this is a another sketch
like observing more closely yeah very nice
that they made nice you can see you you see this you think
this is a nebula and but it's not it's it's a it's an open cluster with some
dust and some neoliberal city near but it's like another
open cluster of the milky way just in another galaxy
okay and this is one picture because this is all about sharing i cannot
i can leave this occasion to show the pictures but maxie showed that before but
we was sharing the last the this night saturday night
for the few minutes that we have the clear sky uh we were observing uh
some other galaxies we was uh several minutes with the squirtle galaxy
and shared that moment with friends i i think this this is amazing and we were
talking about there to get more friends and on the astronomy and
i think that astronomy will bring you friends uh yes you you you don't
need to to chase and they they they will come here because
uh it's it's a special type of people that we we really love
this and we like to share this so what this was my
it was very early presentation and i i was
that's great i have another sketch that i want to show and to finish
let me show you you build my mind showing the the the four galaxies of a
groove galaxy
you know you can see the the the entire core
very pointed stars it's amazing
well this is a sketch of a 47 to can i from here from
the city sky and you can see the core and it's a beautiful option to observe
but in the field in a clear sky you can see stars everywhere it it it can't it not
doesn't fit on the field in the field of view it's amazing the difference is amazing but well i
love to to show with my sketches how you can observe or what do you want to expect from that
object when you operate on the on a city so
far okay this was my my little presentation thank you scott thanks everyone you nico thank
you very nice very nice okay so uh
up next is supposed to be uh cesar brolo but uh he may have had some uh internet issues
or something i'm sure he'll log on a little bit later um we
have special guest here that hasn't been on for a long time this is cameron gillis
cameron do you want to come on for a few minutes and then we'll take a uh 10 minute break here uh
and see who shows up for the after party sounds good you bet good to be back thanks scott and uh good to see all my
friends here uh hey maxi and nico all right good to see you guys
good good stuff yeah yeah i got a haircut exactly yeah yeah it was uh i was uh
the hair was kind of getting into my eyebrows and i was like you know what i decided to just cut it a little bit and
then i cut it too much and i was like you know what i got to cut it all off now so anyhow
so um yeah no good good stuff uh you know um i i love i just want to make a shout out
again to jason um gunzel uh just amazing spectacular images i mean it's in
another class uh category and it's it's just really impressive and um
i definitely wanted to join this uh party um and uh i i wasn't able to watch the live
uh earlier but uh i saw some of the beginning and um you know carl sagan uh uh you know has
meant a lot to me um as well when i was growing up um you know cosmos and uh and of course
the pale blue dot and all that and so uh it's a really um
it's nice to be able to honor him uh by by this uh this star party so um
and uh yeah i just wanted to join in and uh like scott said i i
i kind of uh was out of uh out of touch for a little bit here i've been still following uh
all the global star parties i've been watching everyone's uh you know uh contributions here uh in the last
couple and uh really been excellent and of course all the weekly shows and including the um
photography one on fridays uh that's uh that's been uh really really really good uh and on
that note uh here in seattle where i'm at um it's been uh storming a lot you
probably have seen it on the news um it's coming out you know a lot of big systems it's that time of year
so uh but there was a little bit of a gap actually just enough um uh on on the end of
october there was a long weekend there with halloween and uh i got three clear nights in a row
that really allowed me to um to test out and and and kind of up my
my skills in um in longer exposure astrophotography asteroid missions so
uh i kind of uh wanted to share with everyone that um you know i'm i'm
still a newbie uh as far as astro imaging is concerned i've been a visual observer for many years
um but now uh kind of getting my gear and just recently i acquired um i i had
a 294 mc just a regular camera but i just got a 183
mc pro cooled you know i know it has higher amp globe but i can cool it down to minus 20
degrees celsius and really get the noise down there um so that really helps and the other
benefit of an mc of the pro besides the cooling uh you can do all the flat uh the darks and flats uh
at temperature uh calibrated um you know during the day
uh which which is really nice so that all the rainy nights we've been having here i've been kind of getting all my
calibration frames ready and uh with the with the new cooled camera
and uh and then on top of that all it has a usb hub built in
which allows me to tether um the guide camera on that without you know to help with my cable management so
there's another benefit of having the probe um but anyhow uh all that being said uh
you know as you know i've been i got my equatorial mount my uh xs2
uh it's been uh i got that figured out how to do polar alignment with my asir pro
um been really uh getting that down i got it down to six minutes now
uh so that that's really good and getting used to the the adjustments which way to turn
them you just you just keep them practicing right every night i was going out there and and tweaking them and
learning the altitude and asthma it's just you get the polaroid alignment routine nice and fast
but i can tell you uh it's really nice with the sir pro and paired with a
a digital camera because then you can you every it just constantly does play solving real time
and then as you you adjust you get that feedback on you know really quick so
that helped my skills uh get that and that helps my overall workflow and
um so when i had those three clear nights i was able to test one more thing uh
the polar alignment was one thing but then of course for longer exposure photography which everyone here of
course is doing and again i'm just going learning the ropes gradually
is you need to have a guys you got to have a guide scope right
because otherwise what you're going to have is you're going to have periodic air you might have you know you can solve the declination drift with uh
with with uh with polar alignment but you can't solve the periodic error for longer exposures so
uh and that's inherent with all drives um pretty much unless you spend tens of thousands uh or or you have a
you know a uh what do you call it um the um drive master right drive master
right we'll correct for all that and learn your mount uh nuances but um so i but i
got a little guide scope i got a little uh 242 millimeter mini guide scoop and i
also bought a little mini guide camera uh the 120 mm mini
which just fits in there and it just tethers nicely onto my uh my esi
uh it was for my zw 183 mc pro and um
and basically uh yeah it uh i'll tell you i was
tracking i was doing one hour like five minute uh subs
and i got beautiful i i gotta i'm gonna show you a couple of things um here um
on the results so let me uh let me find that i didn't get it all organized here but
it's going to be a little bit messy all right but let me
me start off showing you some pictures of the of the setup here uh
i'm gonna share my screen as soon as i got this sorted out um but i can tell you that it's nice to
be able to kind of gradually um make these incremental improvements
you know getting all the gear uh you know this is this is all um you know and i think you know you
were talking about it earlier scott with uh with jerry hubbell in earlier in today's earlier episode yeah um
basically uh what what has happened now and what you guys have done with with the industry is you've you've
reduced you've created a whole bunch of entry-level very capable equipment gear
uh that allow everyone to kind of up their game and get you know very
capable equipment um to learn the ropes at a reasonable
cost and and then you know obviously as you that's the evil plan yes that's the evil
plan exactly and of course as you get you quickly learn and say oh that's why you need
that and that's why you need this you know ten thousand dollar filter or whatever you know what a thousand dollar filter and that's why you need you know
all these amount and all that you know but but the fun part is you can have a lot of fun along the way
uh with with this with this nice very nice simple gear that can grow with you
um which which i really like um so and and uh let me just uh sorry um
there we are picks and it's going to be a little bit random let me just show my screen
and yeah so this is my setup
now and uh are you able to see my screen
yes yeah beautiful camera beautiful setup yeah nice setup huh yeah so what i've
done is uh you know part of the thing let me explain what you're seeing here because uh
i i do like to spend a little time um you know because it's part of this is the journey and sharing because a lot of
you of course have figured this out and understood but it's nice to be able to kind of learn tell you about the little
nuances that i've learned along the way so for example i had my asi air
on not on my mount at one point because
i only needed one cable between that the usb and the 294 but now with the cooling camera
um and also tethered to it the the guide camera uh what happens is that that serves as a
hub so i can have my guide camera plugged into that usb 2 port on the asi
183 and then that has a power and the usb going to the asi air the sa error has
pro has four power ports one of the power points actually
powers up the pmc8 down here uh so that is one that is has to be i need to make
sure there's enough slack in that power cord so that when you when you move it around it doesn't get cord
wrapped uh and then but the other one that comes off is this uh ethernet port but other
than that everything else rotates with this system and so i got my the guide camera also is
perfectly opposite uh so there's no change in weight distribution as it as
it rotates around the axis and it's much lighter i used to have you saw the earlier um setup i had the mac uh on 102
on here but having offset all that my ultimate goal this is an intermediate system
my ultimate goal is i'm going to actually pile on you see only one counterweight here
i'm going to pile on an 8080 and this guide scope and i have my i'm going to have my 294 i
found out i can i can plug my 294 in the spare usb 2 port on this guy so i can switch
between the main camera on the on the ed80 eventually this is what this is in the
future the ed80 and the a 183 so i can switch between long focal length and
short focal length wide field use the same guide scope on the same system so i that's my
ultimate i'm kind of building this as i go right and and the rainy nights has allowed me to play with this
uh you know during the day to kind of figure out all the connections and make sure and then i
have my ethernet running down here to my my wi-fi
now you all know that the new isi air plus has a built a better wi-fi that you can
use that would be my recommendation for anyone who's starting fresh get that and then you can
save yourself this tethered wi-fi however however this wi-fi clearly
with mimo with the three antennas is going to give you much better coverage than uh than the even the as asr plus
but at least the asir plus will make it much easier to deploy and you can you can you can use that but um but
basically uh yeah so i got this system working and um and i'll tell you it is a beautiful
system i can be up and running in like 10 minutes and uh you know i don't take it down
anymore because that once i do my calibration frames i don't want to play with the the camera orientation or
anything so i just let it let it all there and then i'm basically bring it outside and
plug it in and away i go so uh and then i can come back inside it's getting colder here at night uh in
seattle um the wintertime and so it's nice to be able to set it all up uh check you know
look at the binoculars a little bit and scan the sky a little bit get gets couple pics initially and then
go back inside and start my my imaging run and so what so what i've done is uh let
me go back to uh now this is going to be a little bit
i got a whole bunch of stuff i might have to go through this story my computer is not showing me previews of these but let me quickly
go through these so here's here's an earlier this is one of the pictures i took let me just get
this figured out here um it's not the one i want to show you probably oh yeah so this is my awesome polar
alignment i did in six minutes and 20 seconds so getting getting pretty fast at that
um and then uh oh yeah here's this one i want to show you guys so this is three uh this is 68
so let's hear this was uh i i took a snapshot of the the guiding
um and also the uh the time so i knew how long the subs were and these are just screen captures okay i'm not this
is not the tiff or anything like that so uh this was three stacks
of what is that 180 probably 20 um so three minute these are three times three
so this is nine minute aggregate so if i go to the next screen this is uh our famous you know seven
three three one with its uh companion and you can see all these neighboring galaxies nice and clear i am really
happy with this this is no processing this is just a screenshot i didn't do any
uh thing fancy and look at that you can see the dust lanes in it i am just i'm so ha i'm just so happy the point is
and a nice round star going way out to the edges too you can see yeah
yeah exactly really really beautiful i'm really happy with this and sure there's noise and all that but the main thing is
i i just wanted to say okay great round stars you know uh this is nine minutes
of aggregate did beautiful tracking and uh i'm extremely pleased
and then uh and and you can get results like that you know it was pretty pretty simple and uh i love galaxies so i
continued with that and this one here you saw earlier but i wanted to show you a longer one that was here
this was only a yeah this is a five minute sub a single five minute sub
so uh you can see what happened is uh two things uh well first of all the detail on the galaxy now you can start
to see that the uh the double arm here which is nice and the bar i love this galaxy this is in
pegasus i forgot what it's called but uh um and they the basically
uh what you'll see is you see this it's it's not balanced because what happened is i rotated my i realized my camera
orientation was was 180 degrees out so i decided i want because i don't want to flip the camera
the pictures later so i rotated it and of course when you do that your flats get miscalibrated so so that's the
reason why this is all white uh you know noisy on this side
because the flat didn't it didn't calibrate but the main thing is hey brown stars
and i can get all that calibration i took some new calibrations these
calibration frames were taken at zero degrees so i didn't push the cooling that much but i've just taken a whole
bunch of new ones at -20 uh degrees celsius so that should help everything with the noise and all that
um this is just a bubble metal nebula three times five minutes this doesn't have any filter or anything
right i mean i didn't do any processing and uh i'm just happy to see
you know the colors of the stars they get a bit bloated though clearly because as you start to have longer exposures uh
especially with seeing conditions uh you know the stars my seeing wasn't very
good uh the seeing tends to not be very good in the winter here in seattle um
the air is pretty on very disturbed and stuff with these storms coming through so whenever
there's clear nights uh even if it's a high pressure system uh it creates that and so i'm i'm not
surprised that i get large stars just because you know after five minutes
you're gonna have a lot of bouncing around right so it's beautiful camera beautiful thank
you thank you nico and then and then i have uh this one i'm really proud of um i i love this one five times
i guess this is what's that uh five times uh five minutes uh this one
is m76 from perseus the little dumbbell nebula and look at that you know i love this because you
got the lobe structure on the outside you've got some nice colors on the end of the bars see the central star
so uh but i i'm just getting started like i didn't i just this is my first round
of longer exposures uh like i said all this you can see half of it's uh blown out because the calibration was off but
but now i figure out how to orientate my my camera and everything and uh i'm very
happy and this is this is the 183 and remember 183 uh has terrible antelope glow uh i can
show you uh just this as a sample if i go to my
pro auto run if i go to my dark frames let's go to my dark frames
at zero degrees celsius and just to show you one of the
let's do let's not for 10 seconds let's do the 300 second which is a five minute sub okay so five minute dark frame look
at what happens look at the amp flow on this thing when it comes up um
but i'm learning a lot as i go along and let me just when this comes up hopefully
pretty soon yeah i'm gonna be getting a new computer
one of these days so still on a ship somewhere um
let's see here okay well while that's coming up um let's go back to the to these images
okay so that was m76 in persist then of course as you take longer exposures you have a higher chance of airplanes flying
by and interrupting your uh your beautiful shot so so here's here's a nice beautiful
streak of uh an airplane coming through photobombing my m33 so i was like oh you
know but uh but i i have better ones then i then i got some longer exposure and here
this is uh three times five minutes and uh you know look at that you know
really nice structure and you can see a lot of the nebulosity uh this i forgot this is 204 i think ngc
204 um and then some of the other uh nebular structure
none of this all this was with a um an ir cutoff filter
and so no no nothing else i hear so this is five times five so this is 25 minutes
and then uh and this is another galaxy and i think i'm gonna just get a haircare
i was on okay this was the first night let's ah here it is yeah so i remember i was telling you about the ant flow so
look at this amp flow here right so if i go but here's what you got to know about the amp flow okay so when you're taking
darks this is highly exaggerated because when you zoom in and you look at the uh
histogram you got to remember that uh you're down still in the noise right you're you're
down below 1000 here so if you if you scroll this out here if you move this
over to the right you know the ankle goes away right so it
just all signals noise as you get better signal and when you take these calibration frames and it takes out this noise you
start to learn about the math and the physics and all that and you become smarter about how you
you can use this data and so you as you cool the camera this this bell curve
distribution uh moves to the left um because basically your noise goes down
um and so so you start to learn how to how to tweak that and and the result of
all this this would if i just took a regular picture it would be like yeah you know um
you'd have this ant flow but but as you can see with the actual picture
oops this is another one sorry i'm gonna i'm gonna come to that door uh if if you go to
back to the pictures
yeah so if you look at here's the ring nebula sorry you can see
there's no airflow so what i wanted to show here on the ring nebula shot here's a better picture
yeah they say i'm so i'm jumping around where's the uh here
ah there we go so this ring nebula picture four times
uh i didn't get how many minutes this is probably 30 yeah this is five minute exposures what i want to
show you here is i love catching this galaxy uh off to the side this this is a this
is a 15th magnitude galaxy you can see the spiral arms on
and another advantage is hey it will ring nebulous directly overhead right now
so this was another excitement for me you know because i was using an alt azimuth before
so it's so nice to be able to uh use the equatorial mount and these are just simple things that you know everyone
knows but as i'm taking this journey i'm just really enjoying being able to do this
with my own gear now and and then here's here's another galaxy this is like a 17th magnitude galaxy
uh but but uh but i'll get better at it and then we get oh this is sorry about
that this is my helix number nebula ah here we are this is the one yeah look at this picture
i mean why i love this that's nice this is what you can get when you get an
hour now obviously my focal length is cutting off the eye the spiral arm so it's screaming for a wider field but
with the 183 it's it's a you know it's not as big of a sensor but look at the detail you can get on this nebulosity
you know 204 you can see the the h alpha regions hide the hydrogen regions this beautiful
structure and uh this here and the significance of this picture
uh for me at least and for everyone who is watching is uh look at this
12 times five minutes okay 12 times five minutes so that's like
over an hour right of uh of um well actually an hour one
hour of and i hear all this all the time i see all of everyone's pictures like yeah i took one hour
you know everyone's casually saying that you know but you have to remember and i can really appreciate i want everyone to
understand that in order to do an hour of integration time uh
and then post-processing this is not even forced process there is a lot of effort that's put into that
and um and uh and there's a lot of knowledge and experience that comes with that so um you know as you go through
the ropes it's kind of nice to see the you know i'm just happy to share
that i've made it kind of to the next level right i guess you could say just to that where i'm just on the cusp of kind of
like okay now i can really say i can do astrophotography
you made a great step uh congratulations thank you congratulations coming up thanks guys
[Laughter]
and everything welcome yeah
you know it's uh it's uh it's it's a really fun so you know and it just gives you a lot more capabilities and and what's it just
makes it so so enjoyable and and why i i'm so addicted to
to this now uh beyond just astronomy in general is uh what
this asteroid imaging allows you to do is do exactly what we're doing now share and and and to be able to share like
it's it's one thing i i was i've been observer like i told you at the beginning for for many many years and um and i i
love observing don't get me wrong i will always be there but uh but be to be able to share this
and have this experience with you all um it's uh it's really really extra
extra and it's special it's very nice yeah thank you thank you so that's
that's my little thing sorry i i took a little longer than i well it's absolutely fine that's absolutely fine
um we are going to take a uh 10 minute break if you guys want to stick around
for a little bit uh we can have our after party and then uh we'll wrap it up
so what do you think sounds good sounds good okay all right i i will leave you now guys because uh
it's been famous it's bedtime all right yeah i need to work in a few hours so
have a great afternoon and thanks to the audience thanks scott maxie cameron have a great night thank you thanks for
seeing again nico thank you cheers yeah now you go now that's all all
right hey maxie hey you've been doing great man you're you're a real trooper
you you ever you were even sick uh how is it coming are you you're it sounds like you're recovered now right mostly
yes i have a changing season flew
and we had a little weeks summer week
and we are in spring and uh well with the air conditioner and
under the heat outside and sleeping bad
i i have a little flu that well
i never had that one before because i was waking up with my with tears in my
eyes like you know it was something pushing and yeah it was
uh awful so especially summer time for you right i mean this is this is getting or like
no we have a one month we're in spring right now so
it's a a really rare weather we have right now
and what we win almost one month and a half because the
21 of december is going to be summer here
i bet you had allergies too right did you get allergies do you think you have allergy good yeah we have this
particular tree that we
spare some spores and yeah we
we call it um
they say for some people it's very very bad because they are a
every second the um sniffing and
and and our there i don't know that
like something like that yeah there it's very allergical
but i never had before but
right now i'm having this coughing yeah because this
flu goes to my my uh my
chest my chest yeah yeah yeah so but i didn't have
issues with well um a breathing i didn't have in cobie and
something like that that's great i felt like a normal flu and okay okay
i i could i could went well this weekend outside
i i i slept a few hours in my car and
nothing happens so it's temporary
yes now that's good it's good to see you man uh on your feet and uh you know a little bit horse with the
throat but uh you know give yourself a little bit of rest and then you'll be fine here you will get back so good man
i i tell last week to scott that i have
this this large voice from the other family it was
pretty deep and
when i was at work because i i went to work i i i could well
wear it go to work and when i
answer the phone and uh hello this is sister machunian and i
have this particular voice maxi yes
when you were really sick you did that live right i mean you were doing the live show uh
i think last weekend with the last week or the week no no it was the before
and that's i was outside and we are pointing to
everywhere that's really fun yeah uh that was a really a really good
night and it was that was in that time it was like a little summer because i was with my
shirts my t-shirts and with
almost with my feet on the ground wow like how many hours of that night you
darkness you get uh in the summer for now is only
well in the 21 or 21st of december we're going to be maybe
uh less than six hours yeah yeah because
the sun goes down almost uh eight uh and
and and past eight h and half and day of night and then
the sunrise it comes maybe before the 6 a.m
maybe 5 a.m is really really shiny and then goes up so
we don't have too many hours to do astrophotography yes
what's your what's your what's your latitude again uh right now i'm a 34
34 oh that's good that's actually really good because you're not so far south that you you can
still see a lot of the northern stuff i can see a triangular galaxy yeah i can see
andromeda but andromeda is maybe 15 degrees above the horizon
so i only have it for if i have the origin
clear maybe three or four hours up
and now now it's going it's coming very early
and i think the next month it will be when the sun goes down it will be
it will be particularly at the north so i only have two hours and well
the the season for andromeda is in october here and maybe
a little in november but
m 33 we have a much much more hours uh
i don't know if i can share the script for a little while yeah
then i can i can help you awesome okay no
okay i did um this particular galaxy a couple of weeks ago
and but no this is observer yeah
here it was to the ngc and i showed
what i did well this is a this is kind particularly
a no the no this is no well what is david
no was the with the end i think it was this yeah
this is the almost five hours stacking of two nights oh you know you're you're making good use
of your beautiful newtonian i love that you know with this no no that's why you did it right because it
makes the star this uh the diffraction spikes make it so beautiful right i mean on the brighter stars that's fantastic
this is beautiful very it's it's it's both scientific and also artistic at the same
time which it's a beautiful that's what a structure is right it's a beautiful what i love about
astronomy is it takes everything right i mean you take you know what david
you know david right uh his poetry um and and the beautiful of
beauty of nature yes and and and and also the science behind it and it's it's so it's a
beautiful combination i mean really you just think about the whole thing it's such a beautiful
story anyways these you know people looking to the furthest reaches
of the universe and finding you know beauty and and
you know inspiration that you know comes out in science comes out
in art comes out in philosophy religion you know all the things that maybe they've actually stayed there
yes yeah you know uh humanity uh are there you know and uh
we're not disconnected from it we're i mean this is this is all part of us
you know so when carl sagan wrote that right i mean and looking at maxi's you know you got
the pale blue dot which bot got which is outwards looking in right towards all of
humanity on one spec and now we're looking at maxi's picture here looking out and then you see all these tiny
galaxies like all over the place around this mega galaxy yeah but they're you know it's
they're probably even bigger than this galaxy just they're so far away and there's a big there's a nice little
cluster that you were zooming that's why i said sorry maxi uh you said hold it there i mean this is like a little
cluster i'm sure that's a cluster of galaxies yeah yeah that's like a mini cluster of glasses oh my gosh you know
like this is like probably 20th you know it might be 18th magnitude uh you know 19th
magnitude you're talking about like wow i mean have you found that have you identified these on a star chart yet
i didn't find it yeah that would be that would be really interesting but this is a beautiful picture
well thank you i was fighting with the flats and because
the light pollution was really really bad and and one night i had some clouds
and the stacking was a tonight difference
but well i i wanna do some
pictures in alberti that's last weekend but i couldn't with
portly3 so i think it will going to be more
detailed on the galaxy and also in the deepest objects
so yes yes yes no sorry it's like we've got massive
field here it's awesome it's uh i love the d field
it's uh i and hey i wanted to quickly share another
two pictures here if i could um let me just uh
see your share my screen not nearly as good as that so how long was that picture um
maxie that that one you showed
how are you how many hours
oh maxi can hear me actually you're muted sorry i was muted
yeah yes i i was copying and it was a five hours almost
five hours wow and which camera uh [Music] with the um
cwo fifth a 533 mc pro
wow without features only the well the
the the comma corrector for the f4 and
nothing else a guiding [Music] the notebook
i i want maybe someday this particular software
this aca pro or plus
that i think is it's very
comfortable but uh right now with the notebook and doing
this live streaming
through the other another computer goes okay and it works
if i have a light or electricity that's okay
yes yes i i was just you can't wait yeah no it's uh
that is and and you did uh processing on that too obviously right you you got all your calibration
and that uh yes how much time did you spend on that
now i won but one and saturday night i left
doing darks pictures i have almost a 100 direct pictures of
three minutes and a and a collet in here
and i don't know my my wife went to work and when she came
back uh the morning i was a
finishing the the darks so that's beautiful it was inside of the
house of my house that's is a with a with a cool camera
is very good doing darks without
waiting to finish the the session of the pictures you know before
with my dclr camera i had to do the dark
pictures uh almost one hour before the sun goes up
and that was really stressful yeah because
you are losing one hour or maybe a little less
of information to doing pictures of that same object so
yeah well in this case i did this library
at yeah for three minutes and well i i'm still
using it but i think in a couple months i have to do it again
and then and again yes yes that's that that's a beauty and uh and what was the
name of that galaxy again or the index the htc 300
300 in in in uh is that in sculpture or
it's nearby yeah okay yeah that's that's a nice one oh i would
love that oh pale blue dot yes god yes i'm going to read the blue dot before we
close absolutely okay i'm just going to show you
i just want to show a couple more pictures just briefly here um so i was just trying to let me oops i'm
gonna share my screen oh yeah okay so i was just um
i got it um i decided to test out uh uh ngc 891
which is a beautiful galaxy in andromeda um it's it's uh
it's a it's a it's a nice edge on and uh it's it really shows up beautiful
obviously in a large aperture scope like uh like a needle galaxy right it's like a
needle galaxy but it's it's in my mind it's it's more interesting in the way that it's in a richer field
of stars uh and it also has much more structure in modeling
uh the needle galaxy you know four four five six five is is really awesome but
this 891 has its own unique beauty and let me just share
again nothing awesome but uh it's only two two times five minutes
and um and again not calibrated but look at that right it's it's amongst all these stars
not obviously nearly as good as your picture but i'll get there but uh but the point is that
um this is something that look at all those stars that are along the dust
lanes and what's really neat is visually if you're in a dark sky and you have a large
aperture scope you actually see this uh right scott i mean you you've seen this
i'm sure many times um yes you can actually see exactly what you're seeing here uh you know obviously it's
very pronounced and clear here but uh
really one of my favorite galaxies here too so yeah it's nice it's it's
and what i i just love because it's very clear and it's a very wide dust lane and
and the disc and the brightness kind of it doesn't have a the bulge is not as
pronounced and as distinct it's kind of really kind of like a really spread out
the uh the disc and the brightness goes all the way along here and and i love the rich stars and when
you're in a larger telescope um and obviously with longer exposures
that star feel just gets richer and richer and it's just like wow it's it's uh yeah it's very beautiful it's it's
like suspended okay then the other last picture i'll show sorry is um
i wanted to show uh the cocoon nebula without nebula filter and this this this is really neat because this is
only 20 this is 20 minutes i mean i'm playing i'm playing with hey
we are seeing the the the bluestack software
oh okay uh let me uh stop sharing and reality share
thank you okay so uh can you see it now oh yeah right now yeah yeah okay so
here's this one here um it's four times five minutes um and i
wanted to show you know this is without um any um
any filter just a straight shot and and of course no stretching or
anything but this is actually a very elusive object if you don't take a long
enough exposure and you don't get enough signal with the noise you don't get anything so this is just showing what you can do
when you have five minutes this is 20 minutes total exposure time you can actually get some pretty good structure
uh on this guy and again it was another example where i could point
uh overhead um and because this isn't cepheus and right now that's directly over so i'm
really pleased with this you know to be able to uh uh to see some structure some color and
also some of the dark nebulosity around it so um from seattle from seattle
exactly patio from patio exactly so uh yeah
that's amazing but now i really want to hear the the ultimate you know and the
reason why i came on i want to hear your your soliloquy uh or uh scott of uh of
um of our our famous uh carl sagan i just have to read this i i
haven't practiced it you know i don't have any special cadence or anything like that i'm not a
guy who reads poetry or anything like that but uh but i think it i think you know
this is an appropriate time to uh to contemplate um
this uh you know the pale blue dot here and we've talked about it a lot but this is
of course is the pale blue dot shot this was redone reprocessed from the original
voyager shot 25 years afterwards
carl sagan uh you know presented the pale blue dot
image in 1990 um and in 1994 i believe it was uh
he wrote this is an excerpt of what he wrote uh about the about this image and he says
look again at that dot that's here that's home that's us
on it everyone you love everyone you know everyone you ever heard of
every human being that 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 live there on a mode of dust
suspended in a sunbeam the earth is a very small stage in a
vast cosmic arena think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that
in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot
think of the endless cruelties visited upon the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on a scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants on some other corner how frequent their misunderstandings
how eager they are to kill one another how fervent their hatreds
our posturings are imagined self-importance the delusion that we have some privileged position in the
universe are challenged by this point of pale light our planet is a lonely speck in the
great enveloping cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness
there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to help us save ourselves
save us from ourselves the earth is the only world known so far during a harbor life
there is nowhere else at least in the near future to which our species could migrate
visit yes settle not yet like it or not for the moment the earth is where we
make our stand it's been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building
experience there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this
distant image of our tiny world to me it underscores our responsibility
to deal more kindly with one another and preserve and cherish the pale blue dot
the only home we've ever known that is something that i
i took it upon myself to read every morning for a month it was just it just seemed so
perfect it it uh um put things in such perspective for me
you know and um you know when you look at uh
um when you look at that image and you think in those terms
it really i mean if that doesn't uh uh give you
uh a perspective of what's right and what you should be doing with your life you know
i don't know what does so happy birthday carl yeah happy birthday
yeah it's a it's a really uh no it's a masterpiece and it's uh when i've every
time i've watched that video which you can't show which i can't show i'm sorry yeah i
don't know i understand that it would be so much better with carl sagan's own no no no and and when i hear those words
it's so moving i mean it's so it rocks you to your soul i mean it's it's it's it
speaks to you on all levels and anyone you know as you gain experience
in life and and you put it all together and you start to learn perspective and why do people fight you know what's why
yeah what's the point what's the point i mean you know this i just don't know and i now with recent
times and also with colville and all that it's like it's become even more apparent that it's it's futile
you know fighting and all that doesn't serve any purpose except
in the early days when you were just starting just for survival right there's that built-in instinct
but but now we have so much capability and so much wealth you know
we could feed the world many times over yeah there's no reason we can do there's no
reason we got to use our brains we got to use this green brain matter you know a little more and
and it's it's really nice to be able to have insight to that and and carl really
captures and encapsulates a lot of that beautifully just awesome yeah what an amazing gift
for him to give to all of us you know yes oh thank you scott that's so beautiful thank you
yeah all right well thank you on that note uh yeah i think we will say good night
till next time so our next global star party is next tuesday it is uh
uh on the uh on the occasion of the lien it meteor shower and so um
uh you know i'm uh you know that's a a great meteor shower when it's going
strong i i don't know what the current predictions are like but i'll study up on it and uh
you know i've seen uh i've seen fireballs from the leonids before and they're amazing
uh so hopefully it's clear on that you know up leading up to those nights and
uh we'll uh i'll try to get some information uh to prep you for it um
but uh you know the theme of the next global star party is called falling stars so
until that time you guys keep looking up and uh we will see you uh
we'll see you tomorrow on um you know our next our next show at four o'clock so take care and thanks for
watching thanks thanks good night
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