Transcript:
6:20 p.m..David Eicher - Lead Minerals of Planet Earth
and we have are we're alive so far
6:45 p.m..Beatrice Heinze
[Music]
see and Martin eurn this first one to log in
7:20 p.m..Adrian Bradley - Nightscapes
here
8:45 p.m..Jenni BeDell Shelly
for
9:00 p.m..Maxi Falieres
that sounds like we're waiting for that
Expressway to collapse again that was really some kind of a day
wasn't it wasn't that something I'll never forget that you could never make something like that up and believe it
the way that happened you know especially that girl that on the bicycle
and and I think they called out 45 seconds or something like that and she came flying p passed right down toward
the explosion site
yeah good evening gentlemen good evening hello Adrian
Bradley hi Adrian so I apologies I wasn't able to
make it uh for the was meeting yesterday but I'm here today with my Summer Sky
Milky Way shirt there's absolutely nothing else on the side of the shirt but in back is a
beautiful signis region which I may or may not be able to show off because I can't tell if I am so um yeah it trust
me it's a it's the signis region and uh beautiful rendition of it that is a good
piece of Milky Way signis yeah and I think uh I think sometimes overlooked by
the um if you look at a lot of the the beautiful nightscape artist it's the milk Northern Hemisphere Milky Way
rising or Milky Way core standing up or you know slightly fading um then it gets
cold and that's when I think maybe more attention ought to be paid to the um
what the night sky does and changes you've got the Orion region which a lot of folks are starting to discover and
use astrophotography uh deals with because they're taking a lot of multiple images
of the sky to get all of that ha data and all the nebulosity in that molecular
cloud out and then they're lining it up with the um with some beautiful
foreground mountains or a uh
Lighthouse and I've done similar um so so I think it's it'll be
time to evolve and show off signis a little bit a little bit more um with
some of this photography and you know just show how beautiful each part of the region you know of the Milky Way is not
just uh not just uh the core and lerta I
think is where a lot of you have cassieopia lerta and signis in that
area can be beautiful and where I went in Alcona it was very
visible so it was uh that's one one of the goals I have is to do that but I also the Core
is coming back so prior to Sunrise the core just gets up over the
horizon so I have a goal of uh shooting that
again hey everyone hi Kareem this is really wanting
to congratulate you and your daughter on what you're doing with the
um with that upcoming lecture that she's going to give this weekend thanks we're
excited uh it and the club is really starting to form um Nathan and Bella and
uh Vince and they've really kind of got they've got good ideas they've got some really good motivation which is great to
see and Scott's giving them a lot of support which is amazing I think that's wonderful
but Dena wrote To Me Dena wrote to me that she says that
bring you on board is possibly the best thing that's happened with this group awesome oh that's so nice of her no she
got the ball rolling I'm just trying to help with a little bit of the organizing
yeah and David young people young people from around
we'll join in you know yeah do know was saying that we've got some good uh numbers coming into the registration now
and it seems to be coming from all across uh not just North America but even a few from Beyond so
nice great I I'm looking forward to that it is the 13th isn't it or is yeah it's
on Sunday the 13th Sunday the 13th yeah and I'm planning to be there when are
you going to start us off with the small reading a very small reading you know as
possible now what time it's only for youth unfortunately
Adrian and and it's not for young at heart it's for the actual young so I don't even get to
participate okay well in here in the States you know that's also Super Bowl Sunday so well this is this is our
thought right this is while the adults are tailgating the kids are drawing aliens that's right I done before the
game starts so it's perfect oh that works that works out perfectly
then I think it's a great idea and
um I think this is going to work out very nicely I'm looking forward to
it looking forward to seeing how some of it turns out we're hoping to share it on
uh either next week or the week after's Global Star Party maybe not next week because we've got
Galileo's birthday and we're going to be having lots of fun with that but maybe the week after that's
right and uh as well uh Scott has kindly agreed for the kids to have a section in
the next Sky up for their Club so we're actually gonna have a kids section coming out in Sky up
[Music] now that is a great
idea I think that's GNA going to be a lot of fun we're going to come up with a few different things for
[Music] them so the regard command has been
accepted and we are fuing to the burn
attitude 24 minutes uh
duration and confirm BL Target
is8 I'll face until off two minute warning two minute
warning one minute until burn
execution ACS has enter Del
mode and burn is underway five minutes
remain C hamers have been disabled yes is 299 and 385 over
temperature monitors are active and an insulate
state
under two minutes
remain about one minute remains next we'll see the update to the
ephemeris table and uh termination of SF 299 and
385 10 seconds remain we should see all of those items executed and then will be
in a relative time delay of 200 seconds waiting for rat to settle before it transition to normal
mode and burn complete
suis has been
updated SS 299 385 have been
terminated hello John good to see you El stations we have
entered normal mode uh valves have been
disabled all right all stations we are in currently in a three minute hold and
we will begin uh fuing back to our intermediate attitude uh via SCS
422 that's was expected to take uh 24
minutes one minute out from starting our slew
via SCS
422 and we've uh started our flu standby for duration
estimate
23 minutes for the
duration SPS 421 has been terminated and we are currently executing in 422
[Music]
[Music]
hey everybody it's Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and this is the 82nd Global
star party uh with the theme of orbits and uh we have a great lineup of
speakers we have three new presenters that have never been on global star party before so we're real excited um I
am uh uh always happy to introduce uh each and every Global star party with uh
uh David Levy um David is um and all of
us that uh here at explore scientific are preparing for something called the Arizona dark sky star party which will
happen in September of this year the 21st through the uh I think it is
September 25th um and I am supposed to go out this month uh to do kind of a
survey of the area and check it out and just make sure that everything is in
place for this very important star party it will be a hybrid event meaning that
we're going to do what we normally do for Global star party but with a real star party set as well so we're going to
have speakers uh that we normally couldn't get because you know flying all
the way around the world to go to a star party is not possible for a lot of
people but uh we're going to bring it on for uh this very special GS
I will also tell you that next week's Global star party is going to celebrate the birthday of Gala which is February
15th so we're really excited about that as well but um uh I want toh turn this
over to uh my I'm I now have this lineup
of very very dear friends which is awesome you know to to
uh uh introduce each time uh but they're each and every one they very special in
their own way uh they give their all for educational Outreach and astronomy um uh
some of them have been doing it for most of their lives if not all their lives so
um and one of these people uh that's near and dear to everybody's heart is David Levy uh very special friend one of
my very best friends and uh I'm GNA turn it over to you David well thank you very
much Scott and it's a pleasure to be here pleasure to be here with all my
friends and uh people all around the world who are at this 82nd star party we
have some birthdays to celebrate this week February the 4th was Clyde tomba's
116th I believe birthday sadly he's not around to uh discover to uh celebrate it
with us but um but still that's February the 4th was
his birthday and February the 18th will be the 92nd I believe anniversary of the
discovery of Pluto also by Clyde Tomba and so that's kind of interesting uh Scott asked me to show
this book that I have and um here it is it's my
autobiography it's called the night watchman's Journey if you're interested in getting it you can get it if you're
living anywhere in the world except the United States go to
www.c roal Astronomical Society of canada.ca
Canada and um in between watching the Canadians get their gold medals you can
get a copy of this book um also want to mention that like
David and uh Mike I'm going to like David and his friend I'm going to
be public coming out with a book meant for children oh Adrian has a copy there
already I'm going to be coming out with a book for young readers it's called Clipper and the reason it's called
Clipper is that it's about a magic beagle and
um uh as John just mentioned I'm very very much hoping I oh yeah right thanks
thanks Wendy um I'm very very much hoping that it'll be out in time for the
astronomical League so that people can get it there and get it signed at the astronomical League
meeting this summer in Albuquerque anyway for my quotation of
the week I wanted to quote to you this week from ver from homers The
Iliad but depending on what translation I use it's kind of a different um oh I
forgot to say this so before I get to the quote um if you you want to if you live in the United States and there is
the possibility slim as it may be that some of you may actually live and may
now be in the United States you can get a copy of the book from starizona
www.arizona.com and they are the I think the only distributors in the United States that
have it and uh anyway back to the quote depending on what translator you use
it's a completely different work of art um Chapman George Chapman did a
beautiful translation centuries later it inspired John keats's most famous sonnet
on first looking in the Chapman's Homer but later on there was Alexander Pope's
translation and that gives me the quotation for the week a peaceful guest
he s vini's Towers armies he asked and armies had
been given no we denied but Jo forbade from Heaven while Dreadful comets I
don't understand Dreadful comets but let say it Dreadful comets glaring from afar
for warned the horrors of the fean war and so now we'll go away from the
Dreadful comets to magnificently beautiful comets and give it back to
Scott Roberts thank you Dreadful what is can you imagine
can you just imagine living in that those days and and uh um you know seeing
a comet and not just being filled with awe or something miraculous or something
incredible but being filled with the feeling of impending doom and Dread I I
just I I I don't understand that you know um I can certainly I can certainly
understand it these days every time I turn on the television said I have that feeling except this week watching the Olympics
I'm really loving the Olympics the Olympics are great watching skating the downhill skating I can't believe how
steep that uh Hill is and uh they don't fall off and down into the valley never
to be seen again but usually when we turn on a a television set we get the
same feeling that the ancient people did when they saw Dreadful comments but nowadays comets are to be
enjoyed not to dreaded that's right yeah don't dread uh get out your telescope
and and uh and look and uh and then maybe take some images you know because the images also are just amazing if if
you don't have to go very far into social media to see some beautiful stuff maybe we'll be able to see a comet at
the star party this fall I don't know of any bright ones that are going to be around then has his fingers crossed and um
Kareem's going to be be uh heading a very very interesting
session for children this Sunday on the 13th of February just before the Super
Bowl and during the Olympics but uh so uh Kareem's daughter
is going to be giving a um a presentation this Sunday and we might be
able to have it on one of the gsps in the future I was supposed to keep that a
secret I think but I'm sorry about that k it's all out anyway back to you Scotty
before I say anything else before you say anything else huh okay well um uh we
uh we also have uh uh you know other dear friends and amazing contributors to
uh amateur and and as well as inspiration for professional astronomers
uh David J AER uh he is the editor-in chief of astronomy magazine probably the
world's most read uh publication on astronomy um uh uh David can uh can give
us more details on that and and I wish he would uh what is what is the uh what
is the latest data or or stats on how well read
the magazine is today the the circulation of the magazine in print the people who were old like me still wanted
in print um and that's about a 100,000 and the wow visitors the UN it's called
in the business unique visitors who go to a website each month is what gets
tracked and that's about 1.3 million these days per month to the website and
and by the way this is kind of a secret but not really there's a very new and
fabulously better website that is going to be rolled out soon for our magazine and uh which is astronomy.com
of all original names you know but um it works and then the social media reach um
is about 1.5 million you know with Facebook and with Twitter and with Instagram so wow so it's by far the
largest community uh of astronomy enthusiasts in the world and it's the largest uh
American publication on the subject by more than a factor of
two and has been for a long long time actually which not everyone realizes in
amateur astronomy but it's been the case for about uh 25
years Y and so it's it it's always exciting to get to get an issue of astronomy magazine and uh uh great
articles uh beautiful illustrations uh and uh you know extremely uh informative
information about where the planets are going to be uh what's up in the sky um
you know it's a great source really uh if you didn't take anything out uh observing with you a copy of astronomy
magazine would do the trick for sure you know so um so we're we're very fortunate
to have that publication uh but I think also people are very fortunate to have David ier at
the helm and um you know you've been there for a long time uh you know and I
know it's a labor of love at the end of this year Scott it
will be I will have been at this magazine for 40 years Believe It or Not wow you're not even 40 years old yet
right well I they put me to work when I was you know six but no it's been it's
been a long time but I've really enjoyed it wow that's amazing well maybe one day we
can get a tour of uh astronomy magazine so we'll we'll absolutely we'll see what
we can do there we're we're two weeks into actually going back into the office on some days now so so we'll uh open the
thing up and do do a tour there eventually here yeah that's right so
today uh you told me that you have a you're going to show your collection of
leads and and ioke that we're going to get the lead out but but are some of
these leads also minerals uh uh are classified as a mineral yeah they
they're I'm grouping minerals in in uh so that we don't have to go through all 5,000 of them and drive you crazy but
but we're doing some planetary science looking at some of the popular minerals and these are all minerals today that
have lead as a sort of a primary component of of the chemical formula and and with other elements in there too
most of them uh but but lead is is popular because it produces colorful
minerals uh often with the the color scheme of of what happens and I'll show
some images of them it's it's one that you have to be careful with though because of course lead is very poisonous
to to breathe or ingest so you don't want to have these specimens at your breakfast table playing with them you
know and throwing them around or under your pillow or something no it's it's dangerous stuff you know you don't want
to be grinding up particles and breathing it or eating it you know ingesting it it it plays havoc and you
can read about you know uh really amazing historical stories like the Franklin Expedition if you'd like you
know and what happens when they didn't quite realize that lead would poison you and it's not a good outcome uh but uh
but uh you know what it does is it actually interferes it it interacts with
and interferes with among other things with enzymes in your body and so it uh
uh has all sorts of Nefarious effects on cell structure structure and and composition and so it's not good so you
you want to stay away from be careful with lead but it produces some beautiful minerals uh which I'll talk about and
show a little bit here great and how how rare is lead as a as a mineral it's
relatively rare I'll show some native lead and it's relative which is you know primarily just lead atoms it it's
relatively rare as a native element because it likes to combine with things and and so it exists as an element in
lots and lots of minerals but native lead samples are are pretty
unusual okay well we're gonna let you take it away all right so I will again
see if I can share my screen and see if I can put uh my PowerPoint on the shared
screen and do you see that now yes and I will start the slideshow
and this is not lead but I've been leading off with another as pretty Crystal as tanzanite which is a
complicated silicate mineral and and a beautiful to cut and in lots of jewelry and so on since the 60s it mostly comes
from Tanzania the great specimens of it but I will talk of course about how the
universe is a universe of order a great hero of mine and of some of us here
Thomas Jefferson used to say I believe in a divinely ordered Universe even beforehand Isaac Newton said truth is
ever to be found in the Simplicity and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things well the universe is ordered not
by Supernatural design but by the principles of physics and and of chemistry minerals demonstrate that in
that atoms are assembled in not randomly or by Magic but in precise ways uh
because of their electrochemical attractions and that's what creates these crystals and these minerals and
the stuff that makes up planets um and it guides them into what minerology call
a specific crystal lattice that allows the material to come together and form
these substances in the right way so lead minerals as we said stay
away from eating them uh the the it's a native element the symbol is PB it's a
soft and poisonous metal native lead is pretty rare it's most often found in
Galina which it forms with a lot which is lead sulfide lead and sulfur uh like to link up a lot
and form this mineral Galina um color is gray but it's often coated white with
other minerals like a hydrocerussite it was named uh originally by plenny the
Elder plumon nigram Black Pencil but named as a chemical element and not a
mineral native lead was discovered in the early 19th century in Sweden uh it's
a member as gold and silver are of the copper group group Romans renamed the
soft metal plumbum uh and used it for water pipes again not a good idea but
they didn't know unfortunately we still have some lead pipes as we know plaguing
Us in this modern world which is a terrible awful shameful situation and
and is still harming people because they're ingesting some lead um without
really having to so this is a problem we need to clean up by this point we're supposed to be having a civilization
here as Jerry Seinfeld used to say you know right so we'll hope we can get this
taken care of in the meantime it is interesting to study it's also like gold
and silver um cubic in its crystallization a fancy word is
isometric uh and you can see the basic crystal structure here it's just a cube and now we can just look at some
examples of lead minerals which you have to be careful with but not as careful
say as you do with radioactive minerals of course but which we'll get to eventually here but uh lead is is you
know you you you simply don't want to ingest or breathe it uh if it's uh ground up or or if it's near food it's
big trouble of course this is native lead with an Associated mineral called tremolite uh from the uh type locality
in in Sweden here on Del and so you can see it just looks like a sort of a
silvery metal here in Native form this is an example of the really common stuff
the way lead likes to form with sulfur and and produce these Galina crystals
the these are these interesting sort of uh uh warped hexagons here are
crystallization that's called twinning of crystals that happens when crystals repeat in a pattern it's called spanel
law twinning here and this is an example of it from Bulgaria and again it's sort
of this silvery you know looking uh metallic Sheen however lead forms with lots and
lots of other things and there are some more complicated and more attractive uh colorful minerals that it produces one
of them is pyromorphite which is lead chlorophosphate this is from a very F famous uh mine in the west kog uh Idaho
called The Bunker Hill mine that's a very famous mine for collectors of this lead
mineral here's another example of pyromorphite and you can see the very different colors and Crystal shapes you
can get from the same mineral here but these are sort of long barrel-shaped crystals from Bulgaria with a sort of a
chocolate uh color to them here is another lead mineral that's very popular because it
comes in all sorts of bright colors for collectors called mimetite lead chloro
arsonate so there's you know just to make it even safer there's a little arsenic in there in this one this is
from the Black Forest in Germany that's a a very old and popular site for this
kind of mineral this is quite a rare mineral this sort of Electric Sky Blue Mineral
called lead hilite lead carbonate sulfate hydroxide with a little white cerussite
as well and this is from a very famous mine that's now closed called the mammoth St Anthony mine in Arizona
that's a quite a rare mineral here and this is a piece that's about 3 in high
here well here's more memati and you can see you know lead often gives you this sort of red and orange and yellow very
you know showy mineral specimens uh this is one from a relatively recent find in
Iran and there are old old minerals that have come out of Minds for hundreds of
years or or dozens of years at least in the American West many of them and then they're also minerals that have been
around for a long long time of course but they've only come out into the sort of Western Market pretty recently and
this is the case with these Iranian specimens here the last 10 or 20 years
here this is suus site and it shows a sort of what minerology call aular or
needle like crystals here it's lead carbonate and from another very famous
Arizona mine called the flux mine in the Patagonia mountains
here here's memiti again and and again you get sort of these very orange yellow
very bright crystals that are Barrel shaped here hexagonal uh and this is from a famous locality in Thailand
that's also been sort of uh producing specimens out into the market for the
last generation or so um here's another memiti this is from
a very famous old older mine that the Germans went down long ago and started mining in Namibia uh called sumb that is
a huge very famous area for producing all sorts of important minerals for the
last SE couple of hundred years here's another very bright yellow
there's an example of mimetite that comes from San Pedro coritos Mexico
that's a very famous uh region of lead and other minerals here as
and here's an old old specimen this is a an area that was sort of mined out a
long time ago this is pyromorphite back to the lead chloro phosphate that should
be phosphate that's an auto correct there I think um trying to screw me up
and this is an old old area of mining uh in Chester County Pennsylvania so this
specimen was probably mined you know 150 years ago or so an
oldie here's another interesting lead mineral called lorite now this is lead copper
sulfate hydroxide and there's a very famous area the Blanchard mine and
others in Bingham New Mexico very dry Aid uh uh region and it produces this
so-called famous Bingham blue of a couple of different minerals both liner
right here and also fluorite that it produces uh in in h very Vivid blue
colors here is an oldtime German uh fairly
large pie about the size of your head here pyromorphite crystals and again just showing the kind of range of color
that you can get from Little impurities that that push things toward being brown or yellow or red or green or I see is it
does it also have to do with pressure and temperature and stuff that it does and you're right exactly right Scott so
so minerals crystallize over differing Peri periods of time and with differing
pressures and with differing temperatures and all of those affect um
the the crystal habit or or shape or structure as it's called minerology call
it the crystal habit um and also the coloration is usually from impurities
sometimes it can be from radioactivity or other aspects as well but usually it's from uh a small number
of atoms that sneak in there and there neither lead nor chlorine nor phosphorus
here but another little and I didn't didn't prepare uh what the what the
contaminants were with each of these pictures which I probably could have but some of the the coloring uh atoms that
that change the colors of different minerals are not known well yet it's kind of like you know what are the
parent bodies of different meteorites well we don't know in most cases because of running the puzzle back
backwards and and it's very difficult in some cases to know exactly what the
coloration of minerals is caused by that this is a an area that's fairly young in
in its uh scientific analysis here's another lead mineral
this is a fairly simple one lead sulfate uh and this is called angle site and it
produces these usually translucent or transparent uh white white or or
transparent crystals here this is a from a an important Moroccan mineral region
that just shows you the the great range of of what lead can do in in different specimens
here and here's another memati and this is again going back to the black forest in Germany which is a good lead mining
region and it shows you these little tiny rosettes that can form as well with
various shades of yellow and orange and red so that's kind of a quick showcase
case of of the kind of range of different lead minerals and again David
has his kids book uh coming out and I didn't want David to be alone so Michael
bck My Pal and I also wrote a kids book which is coming out in in the in the
fall in September uh uh and it's a a chill a children's introduction to space
exploration which is a very exciting thing for all of us these days um and you don't have to just be a billionaire
we will show that in the future here to go to space so this one's coming out and
and we hope it will be a nice pairing along with David's book as well that's
great I have a comment I'd like to make if I may yes sir
um uh I'd be interesting if one week you could tell us a little bit about what
God you interested in meteorology my interest comes from uh taking geology
at aadia University but while we're at it this is not a lead mineral I'm going
to show you yeah this is trinitite oh yes trinitite was formed on
only one day it was formed on July the something I think it's July the 6th
or July 6th yep the 6th 1945 yep during the first atomic test in
New Mexico yes and that site is now a National Historic Monument yeah and it's
open twice a year and Wendy and I and a friend went there a few years ago just
before the pandemic pandemic started and we were able to see it we were able to go right up to the thing and it turns
out that um my our son-in-law's
father I guess has a collection of gentite and it's all in CED in
Lite and uh still a little bit nervous getting close to it but I think it's okay to show the picture of it but
anyway that's showing the picture of it is perfectly fine and you know that most
all you know mineral and I'll show some radioactives someday but David youve set me up perfectly and I'll try not to drag
this out but to very quickly talk about how I got into minerology and and please
do I really would like and so on um I've got some TR in the basement and just
very quickly you know uh it's fairly weakly radioactive but there are some minerals that are very hot you know if
you will radioactively but if you get uh at a distance uh of about 20 to 30 feet
from radioactive minerals the uh C the inverse Square law means that you're B
you're essentially dropped down to the background radiation you know so so that's a fairly safe distance from most
all radioactive minerals you wouldn't want to carry those around in your pocket for six months certainly you know
um but but if you're that far away from most radioactives you're generally safe
again you tied in the story perfectly David of how I got it interested in this stuff because it was through my Father
John who when I was young he was a professor of chemistry and and organic
chemistry and and uh not surprised to hear that and he he infected with all of
this stuff taking me around on Long Summer trips when I was a child to uh
Western mining sites and Western history and Civil War sites and American history
and astronomy and got me interested in all this stuff and who cares about that
kind of stuff you know when you're a young teenager well it comes back you're infected with it later if you were
exposed to all that stuff so he got me into it and he actually I think as you know David um was was one of the
Manhattan Project scientists in New York at Colombia with Harold Yuri who
invented the atomic bomb you know and it wasn't the Trinity bomb the plutonium
bomb which had to be tested it what my father worked on in New York was the
uranium bomb which was a simple triggering device a gun bomb so they knew that would work and they didn't
have to test it that was the first bomb that was made actually um and the plutonium bomb was what had to be tested
which became the first one to be detonated even though it was the more complicated bomb to make and it was made
last you know what I mean so anyway it was none other than a trinity trinitite
related uh uh producer of of science who got me into all this stuff to begin with
by taking me around to all these sites and he also gave me his collection of
minerals which were mostly when he was self-collecting collecting out in the
West in the believe it or not as early as 1926 but up until the time when he
worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II you could collect stuff at the mines then well you can't do that
anymore they're all closed so I became a collector going to things like the Tucson gem show you know which is going
on now uh which is the way you have to collect things now but once infect once infected with
this curiosity be careful for science because you it's hard to get rid of as
you guys know once you're really into this stuff right so do David do you have
like a a room that's just devoted to your collection of minerals I I have uh
you know some of you know the problem with books and with minerals and with documents and with other things is that
you know watch out they multiply you know so I have the core of my collection
in lighted cases in our house which is kind of the best of the best stuff and I
thought I'm not going to do well of course it happens this way so we have a lot of stuff that's boxed up as well
because I have about 3,000 specimens Al together and about maybe
about a little less than half of those are are on display right now I see yeah
a little less than half that's still impressive yeah yeah that is impressive
oh Dave Dave I have a question for you yes sir and in one of my previous lives
I worked quite a bit with lead glass and Lead glass is
heavy really dense now look at the minerals that that youve had on display here are when you pick these things up
you get the sense of of denseness don't don't you absolutely right John yes you can the the heft with these specimens is
impressive you you can feel that this is not ordinary Rock stuff you know they're
really dense and heavy for the size that they are so you can you can appreciate
that there's lead in this piece exactly right yeah the very same thing with with
your Leed blast exactly thank you yeah yeah one of
our people in in chat are this joke and he says David must be a [Laughter]
beginner that's very cool I'm a beginner at everything but I keep working on everything you know and eventually I'll
be slightly beyond the beginner you know for 40 years I've been a beginner yeah
awesome well to have The Beginner's mind is very important and very zen-like you know so oh and Scott I promised you I
wore this shirt last week I promised you you asked about this meteorite bracelet
that A friend gave me so so I promise so this is Brian May guitar shirt here that
he gave to me wow wow and this is a can you see this this
isine and gold and you to see beautiful
that the there's a BM engraving in there and that's Brian's bracelet which he
said I have enough gold meteorite bracelets Dave you take this enough so I said okay you know if you insist you
know so this is you ever have enough gold meteorite bracelets I don't know this is quite heavy as well but there's
a lot of gold and a lot of so lean in that one well that's very cool that is very very cool well Brian May thank you
for helping us to share this kind of stuff that's that's awesome thank you
David uh great presentation uh now uh next Global star party you're going to
be at your own star party right for astronomy magazine be at astronomy Magazine Star party next week in of all
places David Tucson Arizona at Puma Community College the Eastern Campus no
kidding if you can come to that anyone who's in the region of Tucson Saturday
night 630 Tucson Pima Community College East Campus there are a lot of people
who are going to be the tlea the Tucson Amur astronomy Association will be there
Michael Bach and Holly Bach will be there Ray shabinsky and his wife will be there Jim null of the tlea and and club
members will be there with a lot of telescopes and the observatory there at the college will have their telescope
open as well so we'll be looking at all sorts of stuff in the sky uh before we sneak off to the Tucson gem show as well
well that I mean I I think I need to put the kabash on that for Wendy and me right now because we are still being
very very careful with Co it's not quite over yet it's getting better yes but
it's not over yet so I will be there at your star party in spirit I will see you
the next time I get to Tucson after this then David okay
thanks okay all right so uh our next speaker is um uh is uh uh um John Goss
from the astronomical League uh John has given many many presentations uh he will
be I I think are you the uh featured speaker for the next uh astronomical
League live is that right John that that's the rumor yes yes I uh no
actually yes I am and I do have something prepared at least halfway prepared right now and that'd be the end
of next week so yeah tune in for that EXC and I'll try to make it as as
controversial as possible of course
controversy absolutely that's right that makes that makes it always exciting um
John you are former president two terms one term three terms how many times
twice wow y so a great uh you know stward of
uh of astronomy of the astronomical League um uh you know every every time
you guys come on I do like to talk about the uh astronomical league and what you
guys do uh it is the world's largest Federation of astronomy clubs over 30
member clubs are part of the astronomical League Federation uh they have over 20,000 members um and they
have members all over the world uh if you're not able to join an astronomy
club that is an astronomical league club which would make you an automatic member
uh you can join the astronomical League a as a at llarge member uh from from
anywhere and so uh you only have here I'll put the website in it is astr
league uh.org and you can join up today um and be part
of this uh huge organization the astronomical League also is well known
for its award programs uh it is um
extremely well known for its observing programs uh so you can you know whatever
level that you want to go to in astronomy the league is there to support you to teach you and to uh uh inform you
especially with their reflector magazine that members all get so and um so anyways the league comes
here on global star party every time uh they rotate the officers uh of the
league uh and they present questions uh that uh uh members can answer so if
you've never tried this before you're going to want to try to answer some of the questions you then get thrown into a
pool of people people that they pick winners from so for all the people that
uh that answer those questions correctly so I'm going to turn it over to you thanks oh well thank you Scott um you
said quite a bit there so I don't have much more to add to to to what you said well you can talk about the next Alcon
okay okay I'll well there are there's another thing i' like like to bring up
it's something that you were kind of alluding to about everything that the astronomic league is into the the the
league is 75 years old and it has grown obviously it has grown in in its scope
as far as members and what it does but it's also been it uh it it remains
technologically uh relevant um as time goes on we try
change times uh right now you know the big emphasis is on Imaging so a lot of
our efforts are looking at to recognize Imaging and trying to get people out there um with telescope and some type of
camera at least and see see what they can do so the league isn't really a stagnant organization uh this summer
we're having an Alcon every year we have Alcon which is the astronomically League convention National Convention someplace
in the United States two years ago well will be two years ago for the first time
we didn't have an Alon for obvious reasons this past summer though we we did at it was a a virtual meeting for
three days and it I have to say I I was not an organizer of that but so I can
look back and I can criticize it but I have to say it was it was pretty interesting uh there was a lot going on
and it it held people's attention from beginning to end and I I was really
pleased with it and I think the uh the officers sure were so this year we're we're we want to have um well we will
have an Alcon and Albuquerque um we'll have to see how how much of a hybrid event this is going to
be will it be all in person or some of it virtual I kind of think it there
there's going to be some virtual stuff always in these conventions now you know times are changing people have gotten
used to this and they they'd like to see some of this stuff but uh anyway and and
enough of that what what I'm I'm here for is to um go over some questions that
were asked that was asked last week and offer three more questions for for this week so let's go ahead and get started
with that okay
maybe okay oops
sorry okay we we'd like to start off by just emphasizing uh the hazards of solar
observing um if it's done correctly there are no hazards but you always have to be careful in what you're doing
because the Sun is what 400,000 times brighter than the full moon so it's just
not a little little bit brighter than the moon it's a whole lot brighter than the moon and you never want to look at it without without the proper uh
filtration and filter devices U so make sure you know what you're doing uh if
you have the the correct filters that'll do that and you you have the uh your your your H finder Scopes all sealed off
and all that you know the sun gives a a very rewarding View and there's always something going on it especially now
since we're headed towards solar maximum in another couple three years or so but anyway so always uh be careful when
you're looking at the sun question number one where' it go question number
one from last week who is the founder of the the Greenwich observatory in
England um very famous guy because he has a star catalog named after him John
flam and places like this if you're ever an astr tourist go to places like like this it's always extremely interesting
to to see how how it is or how it was back then question number two which
planet in our solar system has a year that lasts 80 approximately 84 earth years uh so for me I'd only be what nine
months old now so if I was on on on on this planet well youness everyone's
favorite planet Uranus question number three another
planetary question what is the fastest rotating planet in our Solar System Jupiter is pretty fast what it
like 10 hours something for it to go around and maybe it's a little bit less than that but the um it speed causes it to flatten out and
it's throw out its atmosphere so it's not really round it's it's a kind of a fat oval interesting to look at through
a telescope small telescope um so answers from last week
we had a number of correct answers and these people's names will be added to the the door prize List Cameron Gillis
Paul and Kathy Anderson Rich King Josh kovic Rich Eubank excuse me Billy Becket
Don NAB Andrew corkill and Neil Cox so thank you for for sending in your
answers now let's let's go on to this week see what we
got okay question number one this planet shines at its brightest
four weeks before and after it reaches inferior conjunction it reached inferior conjunction on January 9th tomorrow
morning February 9th it again attains its brightest this planet is a Venus B Mars C Jupiter this
question is really designed for you to start thinking of of what's in the sky what you can see what you can go out and
find this would be pretty easy to do morning if it's clear I think it'll
be where I am I don't know question number two tomorrow night the excuse me one moment tomorrow night their near
first quarter moon passes in front of the fourth magnitude star citari this can be seen by observers
North of San Antonio Texas uh so Mo for most of the country people can can can
see this and it's a it's a binocular event so go outside and take take Bas
with you this type of event is called a an occultation B an eclipse C the
transit so that would be tomorrow
evening
oops sorry it's not
responding question number three this is a tough one the value of
the moon's gravitational pool on an observer depends on how far that person is from the Moon following the inverse
Square law that's something we've all learned back in college in physics the further from from the Moon the less the pole makes sense an observer on Earth
experiences about how much more pole when the moon is nearly overhead than when it lies on the opposite side of
Earth okay um a about
0.5% B minus 0.5% C 6 to 7% depending on where the
moon lies from its Apache or parag Point all right so on on those questions
uh sure to write them down correct answers and send them to secretary at astrol league.org
uh next Friday night this is little ad for some some some some clown there is
going to be T talking about astronomy but uh I have a a presentation called all has changed which is a little bit
more of what I was just saying about how the astronomical league has uh modified itself over the years and um how things
things are changing for us all okay and on that note I'll turn
things back over to you Scott okay all right that's great stop share there John
okay buddy okay all right well thank you very much um uh up next is uh uh
Professor Kareem Jaffer and Kareem is from uh John Abbot College uh he is uh
uh an Outreach uh Ambassador extraordinaire for um uh the roal
Astronomical Society of Canada the Montreal Center and I would class him
now as um someone that's very instrumental in Global Outreach uh he is
uh uh making use of all the tools and all the venues uh possible and inviting
I mean the guy just like mixes it up and invites uh uh people and gets people
involved uh uh you know to take advantage of the way that we're able to interact with the world today uh
especially our world of of astronomy and um uh Kareem uh invited me on Monday to
be part of a program uh that is podcast and they had like 250,000 live listeners
something like that so I was very very impressed with that um H how do people
find that program Karine so it's on astr radio. Earth it's a volunteer radio
station based out of the UK but broadcast globally and if you actually just go to the website astr radio. Earth
you'll see the link to listen live and they have programming throughout the week but the Reach Out And Touch space
panel show that I'm on records every Monday and then replays a couple of times during the
week so thanks Scott and I I have to say um I saw the topic for today orbits and
I thought for a second there that Scott's kind of looking over my shoulder because that's what I talked about today in class so I'm going to take it some
time to go through orbits and talk to you a little bit but I'm not going to take the hour and a half that I do with my students I'm going to kind of boil it
down as best as I can into about 10 12 minutes of digestible material but I do
want to thank Scott for coming on to our awesome show yesterday it's available
currently on um mix cot you actually have a link on explore scientific I have
a link on my web page we have a link on the Astro Earth Cafe on Facebook it was
an amazing show and we had such a good time talking to Scott I was just on our Forum a few minutes before we started
tonight and the panel is still a buzz because Scott talks all about his
passion for outreach the story that brought him to the point where he's at with explore scientific and with explore
Alliance and it's just a wonderful discussion with people who have a
similar view to why it's important to share what we get to see with the night sky so speaking of sharing what we get
to see I wanted to do a quick checkin with the Montreal Center and tell you that uh we have our next citizen science
series coming up next Wednesday on February 16th uh during our regular
Clubhouse time 8 o'clock we're going to be discussing a small bit on quantum entanglement and then we're going to be
diving into some of our members observations of double Stars including the double star program that we do at
our own Center and then later on this spring we're going to have a speaker
talk about the double star program from the rasque national so we're going to get to share a lot about double Stars
it's an area of emphasis for us in the Montreal Center and doid is actually one of our certificate holders for the
double star program and it's a challenging program so if you're interested please do join us next
Wednesday during our clubhouse for the citizen science series I also want to mention what doid was talking about uh
earlier which is we have been working with the Denver Astronomical Society on
setting up an international club for Youth and the club now has taken shape
they're calling themselves The Cosmic generation and their inaugural event is this Sunday at 2 pm mountain time which
is 4 pm eastern time for us and it's my daughter who's actually going to be doing the workshop on drawing aliens and
the idea of what are extremophiles and what do aliens look like and how close are the aliens that we have in pop
culture to the aliens that we actually see my daughter was a little upset that I chose this particular picture but it
was the last time that I got a picture of her drawing one of her aliens so I wanted to use it in the poster and since
doid mentioned birthdays it's her birthday tomorrow so an early happy birthday to my daughter and I hope if
you have if you know a youth between ages 10 to 17 interested in astronomy
interested in space loves looking up loves drawing or just has an imagination
that you want to Foster please do recommend to them to join this event and
after the event there's going to be a discussion of possible future projects for the kids that are taking part in
this International Club we're really lucky that Scott has sponsored the club and he's actually providing a door prize
as well of $150 so thank you Scott we really appreciate that thank you uh
Nathan who's one of the executive is going to be speaking later on tonight uh in today's GSP and so I'm going to leave
it to him to talk a little bit more about the club itself what I wanted to talk to you about today was a little bit
about our evolution in trying to understand orbits and when we think back to ancient astronomy or to the
indigenous peoples of our different countries one of the things we recognized is that early on they saw
that there was this set of stars of bright points in the sky that seem to move in a relatively predictable pattern
something that we refer to as the celestial sphere and you have the constellations which have stories that
connect the timing of when those bodies of when those those those asterisms or
those shapes that appeared to them uh match what's happening in nature and
they also recognized at that time that there were these other objects that seemed to wander along the same line
that the Sun and the Moon seemed to appear on and those Wanderers those planetar as the Greek called them were
our first understanding that there were other objects that were closer to us than these distant distant stars now the
Ancients thought these stars were stuck on a sphere that surrounded Earth and that because we didn't really feel
motion on Earth therefore Earth must be stationary and everything else must move
around Earth so when they followed these Wanderers they tried to match the pattern of what they saw for their
behavior how fast they appeared uh what order they appeared in and over decades
and centuries of observations they came up with a model with the Earth at the
center and these different astronomical bodies occupying orbits around Earth
with the celestial sphere at the furthest point so you had the moon closest to the earth followed by Mercury
and Venus and then you had the sun which clearly had some sort of a different
relationship with Mercury and Venus than it did with the other planets which is why the Mercury and Venus Wanderers came
closer to the Earth than the Sun and then you had Mars Jupiter and Saturn which were the other visible objects for
us but as they tried to understand this and picture this model observations came
out that were clearly not consistent with the geocentric model and one of those observations was the retrograde
motion of Mars where we know that at some points in its path in our night sky
it actually reverts backwards in Direction compared to how it normally
goes this is something that the Algonquin people in the cre would call the Moose spirit because when a moose is
frightened kind of runs in a circle to see what's frightened it and if nothing frightened it that it has to be worried
about then it keeps going on its path so this was something observed by all the ancient peoples and they tried to find a
way to adjust their model of an understanding of this of the world
around the universe around them to match this retrograde motion and so what they did is they introduced this idea of
epicycles where the planets these Wanderers weren't just moving in a circle around Earth but circles upon
circles with the idea being that if you had these epicycles on the orbits
because of the relative motion of these two circular orbits you would see
retrograde motion occur at different moments in time now now unfortunately
it's not a precise centering of the circles upon circles and so you have to
actually move them off center and so you have a defen you have the equin which
moves the cycle and it just became incredibly complicated when we try to Picture This geocentric picture all of a
sudden these objects moving around the earth start to attain these incredibly complicated circular circular inside of
circular patterns and you realize that this really isn't the simple universe
that we were striving to understand and so the other models started to become
popularized which had been brought up by the Greeks and the Arabs and then cernus brought it up again which is the
heliocentric model this idea that you have the sun in the center and all of the other planets around the sun and the
heliocentric model would have been fantastic because one of the things the heliocentric model immediately does does
is it explains retrograde motion because if a planet is further out than earth like Mars is if it's moving at a
slightly slower pace which is one of the ideas that cernus and others put forward
and we now know mathematically fits you end up with this crossback of
the motion of Mars in our night sky and our view of it compared to the celestial
sphere behind it so retrograde motion came in naturally in this type of a
heliocentric system but when you tried to predict the positions of planets
using this heliocentric system it was just as bad
as the geocentric system in trying to predict where the planets would be the next year five years later 10 years
later so there was something missing from the picture and we've heard previously in in other gsps about Tao
brah and the amazing observational work that he did and he was hoping with his
observational work over 20 years as well as the reams of data that he had compiled from ancient observations that
it would be possible for somebody with a better mathematical Bend to find a model
that fit hopefully the geocentric and if not the geocentric at least find an understanding of this and Kepler came
along and was able to do so by determining that the heliocentric model works as long as they're not perfect
circles but they have a little bit of eccentricity a little bit of an elliptical orbit now I will point out
that whenever you look in books whenever you look online at diagrams of Kepler's orbits the ellipse is incredibly
magnified it's not that much of an ellipse for any of the planets within our solar system it's not that much of
an ellipse for most orbits but you can take advantage of the ellipse when you set up orbits of satellites and we do
that with the Juno probe around Jupiter as well as the molia satellites here on Earth but what Kepler's Law were were
the idea that there were three fundamental rules of these elliptical orbits the first is one of the focuses
is the sun the other Focus we don't worry about but one of the focuses is the location of the sun and the orbit is
actually a center of mass orbit most objects orbiting around the Sun the center of mass between the two the two
the two masses is within the Sun so you don't see the sun really Wobble the second was really ingenious
it was this idea that at every interval of time the same area has to be swept
out by the object orbiting what that means in very simple terms is when
you're closer to the object that you're orbiting you move faster when you're further away you move slower and we make
use of that in a lot of communication satellites that we set up for the northern and the southern polar regions
we also make use of that often in terms of understanding the reason why the
motion of the planets in our night sky is slightly different for us in January versus in June because in January we are
closer to the Sun so we're actually moving a little bit faster in our orbit and then the third one was this
incredible mathematical fit but it didn't explain why this was the case but the mathematical fit was this idea that
your distance from the Sun and the amount of time it takes you to complete
your orbit have a beautiful relationship the time it takes you squared equals the
distance you are along the major axis cubed and that was a very
straightforward relationship that seemed to fit for all planets in our solar system and in fact next week my students
are going to use an observations of the moons of Jupiter to figure out the mass
of Jupiter using this observation that Kepler made now Newton came along and
explained a little bit more of where all of this came from and Ein Stein has advanced this with an explanation of
gravitation we're not going to go into all of that what I want to talk to you about is what this means to us for what
we see when we look up at the night sky so this is our sky tonight this is where
all the planets are when you go out and look tonight right now and what you see
is first off we're at the first quarter moon the moon the Earth and the Sun make this nice right angle so if you go
outside you get to see the first quarter moon you can even zoom in and see that phase beautifully see some of the
features see the mares and really kind of pick out the details of that moon now if you look on the opposite
side from the earth through the sun you see Saturn blocked by the Sun so Saturn
is in conjunction with the Sun so we can't see the planet Saturn in the evening or in the morning at the moment
Jupiter is incredibly close to sunet Mercury Venus and Mars are on the other
side so they're there in the sky Before Sunrise and that's actually what we see
if we go out right now and we use stellarium to try to figure out what's visible Uranus is the only planet that
would be visible for us now Jupiter has set and is really close to the Sun
Saturn is blocked by the Sun and in the early morning hours before Sunrise you will see Mercury Venus and Mars now one
of the impetus that I had for putting this together was actually John Goss put for a really nice handout for the
astronomical League talking about the orbit of Mars versus the orbit of Earth
and specifically what he was pointing out was because Mars orbits about twice
or once every time the Earth orbits twice we catch up to Mars every couple
of years in opposition so our opposition of Mars when the Earth Mars and the sun
line up and we can see Mars throughout the night sky that happens about every
every two years plus a little bit so in 2016 2014 2018 and last year 2020 was
one of the best because we actually had Mars at its largest angular size in our view this
year on December 8th 2022 we will again be in opposition with Mars and then the
following time will be 2025 January just more than two years
later this closeness happens because we're all orbiting around the Sun
counterclockwise and because Mars is further out it's orbiting slower so the Earth laps it a couple of times and
that's where the retrograde motion comes in when we see each other close to opposition but what's really neat is we
use this in order to plan the most efficient way for us to actually explore
Mars so we set up our missions in order to go to Mars when it cost C us the
least amount in fuel to get there so when Mars is closest which is opposition
so in 2016 the first part of exomars the Orbiter and the Lander went and unfortunately the Lander wasn't able to
survive but the Orbiter is there and this year in 2022 in September exomars
Lander with the the Rover itself is going to hopefully launch from Russia
and is going to go to Mars and enter Mars in early
2023 so that it has the least distance to travel to get there and we know that
this works really well because we use that for Mars 2020 for sending the perseverance Rover so the understanding
of the orbits allows us to really safely and efficiently explore the solar system
so to end I'll actually invite you to join us in a couple of weeks on Saturday February 19th to celebrate one year
since Percy landed on the surface of Mars learn a little bit about the goals
of the mission what we found so far and what comes next and I hope you enjoyed this little Excursion into What We Now
understand about orbits and what it means to us in terms of solar exploration Scott back to
you thank you very much um uh that was a whirlwind of
epicycles and uh orbits and I think have to watch
get all of it and digest it but an hour and a half would have been better but I figured you know let's just
touch on a two highlights there I think do had something wanted to say about the ancient
astronomy yeah I I didn't really want to talk about the epicycles of the ancient astronomers but I did want to
congratulate you on a wonderful with a capital W and a capital l presentation
clearly clear to everyone to understand I'm sure that even the children watching
us tonight understood it Kareem you were absolutely wonderful thank you so much
you are a gifted You're A Gifted educator that's for sure Karine thank you so much for doing that well I mean
it came in my wheelhouse I just finished chatting with my students about it all day so I figured you know let's just bring it in here let's do it let's bring
it on that's great that's great okay so our next speaker uh will be Adrien
Bradley Adrien uh inspires us with um his amazing
nightscape uh photography one of David Levy's favorite uh night sky
photographers um Adrien lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and uh no
it's actually lower Peninsula but is it lower Peninsula okay all right you're always talking about the up but yeah if
I go there I definitely do um but actually I need to launch my
presentation layer self so uh that won't take long I'm launching it right now and
uh what we'll do is I'll talk on this screen this is my screen that
works and um and you're hearing me come in now I'm going to
join I'm just going to continue and I'm going to share my screen from um
I'm actually in the I'm in the middle of um doing something so I'll just show you what I'm trying to do I am I am running
into a technical problem here let me see if I can fix this okay let me see so I just yep I
just added a uh you want me to go a and share my screen Scott yeah why don't you do that so this
is the screen I'm gonna share um and while you're doing that
that's a great picture of the eclipse right behind you thank you so this is me
trying to reproduce a realistic picture and it's got a lot of work to do
because I've got glow here um this image plays into what I wanted to talk about with
orbits as how they relate to nightscapes because
um you can actually learn a you can actually learn a lot about how watching
planets over the you over the a couple of years of Imaging say the Milky Way
which is also the core of the Milky Way which is where um the planets Jupiter
and Saturn are near and you can watch them in motion as you
image um these things this happens to be an image where I had this Crescent Moon
and this is what it looked like as it was setting and I'm working on cleaning up this area with uh the healing tool in
Lightroom it's going to take a while to get it just the way I want it but the idea was we had a moon in the sky and I
was yet able to get some Milky Way detail at this park here you have
Jupiter in front of the um or in front of you if you're going from left to
right Jupiter over here core the Milky Ways there and it's it's possible to
image the Milky Way even when there's a light source a reasonably bright light
source in the sky such as the moon uh most of the time when it's image it's
dark and you know what you see is um you generally see just the
Milky Way and here are some other images and I will go to some of these to
illustrate the difference over the years as as we watch Jupiter is now here
and Saturn is here um I have images where Jupiter is where you saw it in
that other photo and Saturn goes here and you can see
where as we continue to image the core they move
this was as they were getting closer together for uh 2020 the great
conjunction they began drifting in their orbits to a point where Jupiter and
Saturn would become closer together this was an image taken a little bit before
that but um that was 20120 and this past year if you went to
Oki text um or you took any image of the Milky Way you notice that Jupiter the
retrograde motion so to speak that um um
Professor kareim just mentioned um you kind of saw it in
action over the last couple of years now this is Jupiter and this is Saturn so in
imaging sometimes it's not about just the pretty pictures that we take it's
about capturing what's going on in the sky the sky has ever changing and it's
ever moving and one thing that I I've discovered just through doing my own
Imaging is we're capturing a point in time with photography we capture a point
in time and we're doing the same thing with the night sky and it's not stagnant
it's though we can we may not see changes over our lifetime to this part
of the Milky Way we do see changes to our own solar system as it appears to us
and um that can make it a little more exciting than just trying to create a
pretty picture um for me it's a lot more than that this is the original where I'm
trying to the Moon uh when I took this single image the Moon
kind of did this sort of thing where it was in half but it was a it's a wax and
Crescent which we've gotten beyond that point um really quickly for those that
uh celebrate Valentine's Day this is a part of the Milky Way as well every once
in a while I attempt my hand at Classic astrophotography where we have the uh
double cluster the uh heart nebula the fish head nebula which is just above the
heart in this photo and the Soul nebula and um all of the Star clusters that are
part of it there are countless objects here and um a lot of times with an image
like this the these two nebula will be separated maybe they'll leave the double
cluster in and a lot of these Stars will be stripped or minimized but this just
gives you an idea this little section of the Milky Way contains that many
stars all of them of course orbiting that galactic center but it you know we
we don't see any different part of this galactic center in our lifetimes because
to orbit the galactic center it takes more years than I can
count um one other thing I wanted to do in this quick little presentation is
highlight the fact that the galactic core while it is beautiful and I'll just
throw it up here so while the galactic core is indeed beautiful and a lot of
photographers will throw this against a an impressive foreground
something along the lines of you know a river a waterfall a um a large building
a rock formation um lots of things that um night photographers will put this Milky
Way up against um there are other areas of the Milky Way That We ought to be paying
attention to and going in order
um the lerta signis region here's signis and
the lerta region there are some dust Lanes here that you can look
for when Imaging and this is as The Milky Way moves along and the core
recedes to the South there are other Treasures in the Milky Way that if
imaged can be quite beautiful um this is this is more of the
um as you lose the galactic center you
have um Al and Ted here and my favorite
thing to try and capture the the uh coat hanger sitting in this
region um where Sagittarius is now gone scorpion is now gone
ucus and here you have um Vega as part of Lyra the harp Ted of course is a part
of out no aled and Ted um Al and tared part of Aquilla the
eagle and trucks is above and not pictured in this particular
shot and then you come down
to as the northern Cross or signus sets
now you have this region within lerta with its
nebulosity and here you have [Music] Andromeda and unfortunately in this
image I didn't image high enough to show the double cluster um region of the Milky Way that
I had yeah you would have missed all that foreground um you know so that yeah
that composition is very nice yes thank you and and then you so
you have to make some choices in composition when you're marrying it to a uh a foreground and there was there
was Aurora it was faint it was on the horizon um I thought it was Sky glow
this is a bort 3 Zone and it was it was transparent but then a little bit of
haze came in and then this green that I had captured and I'm thinking oh it could be Sky glow and I think I may have
done this at the last Global Star Party real Sky glow is this
color so no that was that was very likely
Aurora and then we come one of Scott's favorite images now Orion is rising oh
yeah look Ates and this data here I
would love to see it more um with the Milky Way and nightscape imagers the California nebula here looks like a bit
of a chili I'd love to see this paid a little more attention to because it's a
beautiful region um if you can get the dust Lanes to pop out and then you
combine it with the nebulosity within Orion I even had the witch head I believe that's what this is
right here just barely uh some of it popped out here in this image so it's
uh it's a fairly complete image
and now taken in a slightly lesser bordal Zone here's the other side of that uh the other side of that River the
alabu River on one side I had the um facing the north we had the lerta region
and on this side you've got uh m44 The Beehive shows up
plainly Now tracking issues yes that's why these stars are a little flatter the
larger Stars remain round here you have um bits and pieces of the um
we call it the winter hexagon with the bright stars that make it up and uh
there's still some dat there's still details there and uh so one of the challenges of
doing nightscape photography is presenting something that looks the way
that you would see it and it brings me to the final couple of images just shows
the progression from signis here copia is a little warped because we used
the 14 mimer uh lens and things got bent up so
copia unfortunately suffers um Orga suffers a little bit
here and then you have Orion you have the pleaes barely makes the uh photo as well as Al debran from
Taurus barely makes the photo and here you have and the Delta Comet makes the
photo plane coming coming in right here uh put together stitch together this
Panorama um Kareem May recognize the university low brow astronomer sign
because that's uh when we went out there um for okex uh my first attempt at a
panorama of the Milky Way as it was rolling towards the north here you have
the North Star and you can just follow along the Little Dipper here the pointer
Dipper uh pointer Stars I think duban mirac of the AV Versa major pointing
towards the North Star Earth some major drags and a part of it disappears below the Horizon and the rest of it
disappeared below here um so that and final
image um I keep showing this image at the global star parties and um every
time I look look at it I'm reminded of what I actually saw which except for the the Hal Alpha
regions that I pulled out using a modified camera here um this is
essentially what I saw um you would have to darken this out
to kind of get the naked eye view but the zodiacal light Crossing with this
part of the Milky Way we don't tend to go any further because down here you
actually be coming into more of the uh southern hemisphere regions of the Milky
Way that you can't see in this particular um
View and I'm always curious sometimes you pick you can pick some things up
without realizing it I do believe light from m41 is somewhere in here because that is
uh Canis Major and of course the Rosette their other objects here it's the
Beehive again um with the type of lens that I use the the uh outside stretch a little
bit more than the um corner or than the the center pieces do and you've got Sky
glow here as of course we're out you know light pollution is not a thing and
because of that most of this was visible naked eye just nothing but stars and
it's something I would wish on anyone who does Imaging I would wish for you
all to be able to just [Music] see with your Naked Eyes what's out
there and just enjoying that and then then take the image bring out a few
things that you know are there that you can't see and add to it as opposed
to um transforming it into something completely
you can transform it into something fantastic and you know that some of the
some of the elements may be real but then you end up with a you end up with something that's so surreal it doesn't
feel like something that you would see with your own eyes and I do like to try and keep it to something that you know I
could go outside and I could I'd actually see something like that or it would you know that adding in things
that we can't see but every all the other elements would be there and would
would be at that sort of um you know that the the sizes would be
correct so so that's my uh Spiel on
watching planets orbit and um watching their positions in the
sky and as far as Milky Way Photography taking pictures of different parts of
the Milky Way um it's it's always a good idea to observe
as you take your images I come from a visual astronomer background and so seeing it seeing it with
binoculars and then seeing what it looks like if you take the camera to it that's just sort of the approach that I take so
thank you again Scott I enjoy sharing images and you caught me in the middle of trying to fix one up eventually I'll
do a uh my process video but uh you know Gary Palmer always puts me to shame so
I'm not sure if I want to do it or not but Gary puts all of us to shame don't worry right adri ad all right Adrian I
would like to reserve my highest compliment to the Beauty and the magic
of your pictures your images are Mozart congratulations I am going to try and
put something together using a Mozart piece one of these days that that's on my list
along with a book that I would like to write about some of the favorite places that I've imaged and um it's definitely
on the list thank you that high compliment just triggered me to say you know maybe I can marry a Mozart piece to
some of these images and uh and you would be one of the first to see the um
how that comes together I know I can't show I've got a slideshow with some uh music on it you've seen it de and I
don't know Kareem if you've seen it yet but uh I won't I won't show it on global star party so that you know we don't
lose the we don't lose the the uh streaming due to the uh you know license
materials even though I bought the songs um I don't want to take that chance with Scott
but we will yeah but I've had I've run into more than once where someone
claimed uh uh copyright uh when in fact you know they don't
really have it but when they when they claim it their the algorithms just immediately stop some of these streams
so but uh uh thanks Adrien okay so we got our schedule mixed up just a little
bit here but uh I do want to introduce uh beatric Hines uh uh she is someone
that often follows us on global star party uh and um we always love to see
her greetings and everything uh beatric is this is her first time on on the
global star party and so uh beatric um let me put the spotlight on you and I'll
be here with you as well um uh maybe being the first time on
you're a little nervous but uh uh we've seen your astrophotography and we know
that uh you you do a fantastic job and we're really really happy happy to have you here um before we get started yeah
before we get started what got you interested in astronomy in the first place that's a question that everybody
has but yes actually uh when I was a little child already and then I had a small encyclopedia I got it from my
parents um at my eighth birthday and from then on I um yeah I I wanted to
learn everything about planets and astronomy in general
wow and yeah yes I had I several several Hobbies actually but astronomy and music
was they were always my biggest passions and and what kind of do you do
you sing or do are you playing a musical instrument uh no I had a guitar and a
keyboard but I never um learned to play but I want to in the future maybe when I
find some time yes sure yes and and what what do you
find the most interesting U uh objects to make astrophotographs
of um I love the Moon and the Sun and the planets but um a couple of years ago
um I was so intrigued actually by um deep Sky objects in the first place but
I still I love the Moon and the Sun and the planets and yesterday I realized
that this week Friday on the 11th of February is actually special day because
uh 5 years ago my first real telescope was being delivered at my home and my AG
in a Newtonian yes so and that I realized yesterday because it wasn't
2017 that I started there with uh the purchase of this telescope uh with practical astronomy
and with astrophotography the same day I was already learning how to colate the 8 in
Newtonian oh wow okay great that's wonderful well I'm so happy
really very happy to have you on global star party and get to to get a chance to
see you and uh yeah and so we're gonna let you go ahead and get started with your uh with your presentation thanks
again okay thank you for having me yes I have some pictures to show um well I will share my
screen um this one okay this is then my first setup how
I purchased it just my 8 in uh Tes neuton telescope on a skywatcher
nq5 and here at this day I was solar Imaging and um V we can see we are see
you right now you but not the presentation oh yeah you okay very thought I thought I was
sharing my screen yeah we we have our first time okay
every one of us all of us do this yes and when I push the button
share screen it doesn't share screen and then you're going to see little dialogue boxes uh when you hit the green share
screen button you need to click which which uh which screen you want to share
and then you need to commit to it yeah there you go yes here we go oh
because I don't see I don't see anything on the on
YouTube okay okay delayed it's delayed you're gonna see it about 15 20 seconds
later okay yeah this was my first setup my uh skywater 8 inch Newtonian and on
the skywatcher nq5 and here my journey started there and I was solar Imaging at this uh this
day and with a a regular deal LR Canon EOS 750d and Prime Focus okay and then
um I have some other okay Pi just to
share if for for example here yeah I break it later to a real uh hash Alpha
telescope a COR solar Max I think you you share the some
window of the of the picture of the Newtonian and now you have to unshare to
share again oh here we go okay there we go yes now okay now I
understand um yeah here are my two solar setups uh I upgraded uh in
2019 yes also I here with the ioptron cm60 my
workhouse and my favorite Mount yeah nice yeah and here the Coronado s solar
Max 70 mm with um um how a double stack
and here I have my guide scope but I also use it as a acromat telescope for
lunar IM Imaging or he f for the sun with just a regular Thousand Oaks um
glass solar filter and here I was observing I always try to observe first
and then after that to image the Sun or the Moon or deep Sky objects here you
see s eye pieces that I was testing out it a very impressive setup thank you now
I'm going to unshare this and then I
have yeah okay
where is this picture actually
okay is it okay now no yeah you need to the share screen button at the bottom
a share screen ah here here it is okay yeah you'll get yeah you'll get swing of
it right this was my my actually my second deep Sky object uh William
zenitar 61 the first generation yeah and later on I installed the ZW electronic
automatic focuser an off access a guider and here my ZW 294 MC Pro but uh today
till today I still can't um get the off access guider to work on my William
Optics so I always use my Orion sd80 actually as a a guide scope but in a
side by side setup so and next
one uh chare screen okay and on the next
up I have
um yeah here I okay does everyone see uh the next
image okay this is my um yeah latest edition actually um for deep Sky
sorry you see the folder yeah folder you share the the folder
to to get to to to show to to us click yeah you can just un share and
then go back and pick the right okay yeah or you share screen you when you
share screen put the the first one above it the first one okay window and then we
that will share everything that you show okay take
the this one above and then share screen by the way you have a great
internet connection all the way from Belgium yes awes I pay a lot of for it
you do um oh no I can't find
it okay yeah
sorry no it's okay it's
okay um chair but then I'm going to share the whole
for scheduling made e I think you're on the
zoom now yes this might work here you go okay okay um I was any I was um showing
the the other one here my latest setup actually oh this yes this is the also
for deep Sky yeah I use it primarily and then here with the Z w533 MC Pro and
this is a TS Optics um 86 as you as
uh D cret Apple a four elements lens and
uh with this one I made actually my uh pictures from the adoma Galaxy and the
triangulum but are actually very popular on social media and here's my second ZW
ASI and because yeah this scope is not that heavy I always use the skywatcher
and Q5 and then on the other setup is always my by 8 in
Newtonian and then I wanted to just um this
one does it come a good through is it
shared yeah we get see there oh yeah ah okay yeah I wanted also to show this
live video um on social media I have already the a picture displayed at this
still but because I've got so much positive feedback from this Moon picture
I also wanted to show the live video it's with the eyepiece projection method
and here you can see create a tle and yeah even among non
astrophotographers and non astronomers I get a lot of positive feedback because
um a close-up from the moon seems to Fascinate a lot of people I think yes
it's awesome and you yes I like it also the closer because you can see very clearly the craters also
here and then my latest um picture is actually one from m42 the or
nebula it's really um actual at the moment and for the first time I managed
to get the trapesium more or less oh wow because that's tough yeah yes it is
tough because I did a HDR composition with exposures from yeah 3 seconds for
the core especially then 10 seconds 30 seconds and 60 seconds but I
Overexposed the Stars unfortunately during processing but yeah that you can
all always arrange later on yeah or repair it and the the thing was
not so great so it looks a little bit yeah how do I should I say it dirty
there's also a lot of nebulosity out yes it doesn't stop you know so yes and the
rolling man nebula yeah that's great about the AR nebula because of Olden ability around it yeah what we may think
is just you know not clear or noise may actually be nebulosity that you captured
in your you yes also also yeah yep you've got the I would call
this very well done and very accurate you what everything we're seeing there
is actually there yes and especially with your you you you'll see a lot of
really beautiful shots but the trapezium that core completely blown out because
of the aim was to make the Orion Nebula
is you know as Grand as possible and those are beautiful images
um accuracy sometimes for those that love visual astronomy accuracy is
everything in it like this yes and I was so happy that I finally managed to do a
proper C because the other ones I will show you uh from earlier days
um here for example um because this is already the new one is already my fifth
or sixth attempt this was my first of arania and it was always Overexposed
here I also forgot to use anti-light pollution filter that's why it's so
brownish and at that time I couldn't process a picture so I became a help
from another member of my astronomy club I was very thankful for that because
that was my biggest frustration in the beginning and the processing it was so hard and now yeah these days I trained a
lot and now I get I think some decent pictures out of it and this was my
second Orion n also Overexposed and then you see also here
my third one maybe a little bit better and more 3d effect but also
Overexposed yeah but the Running Man is very visible you know so and this is with the a William Optics and the Canon
750 D diesel but now yeah I'm finally happy that I uh
managed to get a proper trapezium that's
great uh do I still have time or do you have the next guest uh after you it'll be a break
we'll go to a 10 minute break so if you have a couple more images sure yeah I can show some images if you have some
time sure um yes
for example also the more recent ones like this one uh people uh seems to uh I like a
lot also the star coloring of this image and if you look closely you can also see
some nice tiny galaxies in between like here oh yeah and here yeah with the also
I think yeah that was actually difficult because from my previous um CL star
cluster images I wasn't always happy with the with the star color it was always
so not a proper yellow or blue or Al so
cool white but this one I was actually more happy with this image than my
Andromeda galaxy or my triangulum galaxy from before and I I love star colors also I
think they are underrated among as photographers right I agree yeah here
you can see I had the triangle and what I was talking about oh yeah but it came out a little bit yes purple
purplish I wanted to get it more blue but that's a learning moment for the next
time and then I have yeah let me ask you a question beatric what is the um you
belong to a club in uh in your in the city you live in or yes I first I became
actually a club in it's in uh Centurion also in Belgium about uh
yeah 40 minutes drive from Han um they were specialized in
astrophotography but later on I become I I used to be earlier in my younger years
a member of the local astronomy club in the city from where I live and at the cosmo drum in yank but um I think in
2017 I joined the club at the club again and because I was starting my journey
into ASR photography and later on I became also a board member and yeah
volunteer etc for the club but due the pandemic yeah the
public outreaches are not so yeah common just like in the US as they used
to be yes but in the future who knows well hopefully um hopefully your
uh uh friends are watching in Belgium uh and uh you know enjoying uh you know
this presentation of yours it's great yeah thank you I'll share the our audience loves it yes I thank you I'll
share the show add to my club members then they will uh get to know the show
also a little bit better maybe some of them do already yeah yeah
because YouTube is now yeah very popular medium for astrophotographers yes and
astronomers that's right yeah wonderful uh thank you very much
thank you very much I think we will take a 10minute break uh it's time to go stretch your legs and get a cup of
coffee uh we will come back with uh um
with uh Nathan helner mestman and uh uh his uh always engaging
presentations and uh beatric thanks again for coming on global star party I hope you come back every time so okay
enjoyed it I will now I'm a little bit uh less nervous yeah yeah yeah you'll
get over it okay thank you thank you well done all right so
so we are going to transition to our intermission right now we'll see you in about
10
hey Norm hey Harold hey Martin good to see you
all
N Norm we're gonna get you on here one of these days maybe it's going to be during an after party thank you Harold
it's good to see you too albe it virtually exactly you all have to have a
go at presenting taking turns we love seeing you guys there and Maxi's coming up later definitely I think he's still
here I think everybody took the coffee break seriously this
time I'm still here still working on this but yeah I'm I'm hanging out for a
little while long I have to say I was curious Adrian when you started talking about including mozzart uh what
instrument you were going to use because I'm really hoping it's not the kazoo no I I just plan to
find one of his uh a piano I want us to call it kerto but I'm pretty
sure um it's something it's I wanted to find some one of his beautiful piano
ceros and run it as a background to
um some you know in image here so that was that was the
goal hi Cil hey Jeff that would be awesome what are you gonna present we're
looking forward to it uh anything you like the topic you know it doesn't have to be directly with the topic it can be
whatever you want to share that you've done in the night sky that's how most of us got started right it's just sharing
something that we found interesting that we managed to get out and observe or take a picture of just even just what we
what we went out and looked at oh hi
nine it was great having you on last week solar Imaging oh color me
jealous excellent presentation last week definitely he put
a lot of work into that one I love seeing that yeah we're
we're getting uh the young ones coming out and um sharing their uh love of
astronomy and their knowledge of astronomy which all I knew is those were stars and that's the Big Dipper um I
haven't featured it enough in any of the uh nightscapes that I've taken so I take
each of these things as challenges so actually curious if you've
ever or if you're planning on trying to catch uh retrograde by following a
planet over a few weeks and catching its orbit that would be kind of neat to see
a time lapse of not just the Stars moving but The
Wanderer yeah and when I looked at some of the Milky Way photos I had it was a
little the time lapse the time in between was a little too much um so you
had Jupiter here and then the very next image boom it's on the other side of the uh galactic IC plane and then boom it's
you know even further away so that's a that's actually a pretty
good idea as far as you know capturing motion but one thing that uh doesn't
help me is that we just we have too many cloudy nights in between those times
that's exactly our problem here I'm glad to see I don't know if you read but naen is coming on next week and Norm says
he's ready he's going to join us one of these days that's gonna be would be fun to watch definitely getting more more
and more people involved so Kareem I'm going to send to you the
final edit of the image that uh I was working on or at least for
now um I'm going to be sending uh sending it to
you um I think this was a uh crescent moon and Milky
Way um the one with the uh with the Earth shine as well yes yes that
is on its way
and maybe I'll send it to the uh the r did you get it published in the did you
get it published in the sna newsletter or in uh submitted for a photo of the week with the Sky
News I haven't yet definely have to start putting some stuff into the photo of the week at Sky News I think I think
you'll be uh up for voting at the next GA for some of your pictures if you do
yeah so I just need the I just go to a website and do it or just do it yeah
it's uh it's on the Sky News website I will send you the link um I I'll email it to
you or remember to do that tomorrow I'd be happy to I'll
submit a few of these photos this one is ready to submit it's closer to what I
saw with my own eyes although I couldn't quite get the glow from that Crescent
Moon down the way I like it I I wanted to blend it in a little more uh with the
[Music] background but
uh yeah attempting to
with a setting waxing
crescent I think uh I think images like these
are I'll call it evidence that yes you can capture the Milky Way if you have a
particularly good evening um you know that the data is
there and with uh with decent processing you can actually you can capture a
lot and um this is I've made the Milky Way a little brighter than my original
image fact I'm going to look at my original I have my original
image and the the stars look a little better in the grass I think looks a
little smoother there's more texture there's more texture to the
grass now and this isn't smooth at all but yes is mentioning that your
microphone is overdriving uh oh I think it's a bit
choppy is what's happening but I'm not sure okay and I do hear an echo
somewhere it might be Scott nope sounds like Charlie Brown's
teacher talking yeah in the background
wow but U as long as as long as he doesn't pull a Lucy uh during Super Bowl Sunday and start pulling the ball away
or anything like that that's right you know I've seen a Robot Chicken
episode that uh took care of that
particular case I I will say I would absolutely love
some psychiatric help for a nickel though myself included you're only a nickel
yeah well isn't that isn't that what the gsps are they they're our way of just kind of giving ourselves a little bit of
a mental break that's right yes absolutely that's what it's about it's
about connecting people around the world but it's about um uh you know certainly
in this uh you know uh in this time of covid uh for us to still do Outreach and
um you know and for all those people that were otherwise just couldn't get out of the house you know
so I can't believe Jeff is out bidding me for for this uh for this help I'm
getting out bid on the on the
chat well here we are we're back um thanks for uh thanks for giving us a few
minutes here to um to get started but uh we are going to uh
uh bring in Nathan helner mestman he is a master of uh science punis and uh uh
he is I I wish in in in high school I knew someone like Nathan uh because he's
he's so uh comfortable and uh in his skin I I I felt you know I would have
classified myself as kind of a a geek a nerd type of person I don't think of
Nathan that way at all but he kind of pokes fun at himself for him his uh his
vast interest in science and um he has a really amazing way of explaining uh
science with humor uh accuracy and uh in doing so he gives you new insights to
understanding the universe so um Nathan thanks for coming on man
thank you so much for having me again I heard the theme was about orbits this time so I decided to put together a bit
of a presentation on uh orbital Dynamics and um a bit about Rockets too wasn't um
wasn't too hard not not rocket science then again um so yeah I'll just
get this uh set up um so I'm calling this one alternative
Rockets because this was also a bit of a um a independent project um because I
just was wondering about a um a certain aspect about Rockets I was building as a
kid uh so just a bit of backstory to that uh when I was 11 I made a lot of
rockets at home um and not uh anything that made it to space obviously but you
know just stuff like uh water rockets uh like those things that you pump up with an air pump then you I mean you fill
them with water and you shoot them off and they fly and like baking soda and vinegar or Coke and Mentos was a
personal favorite of mine um they uh people have said oh that's not actual
rocket science um but despite the fact that homemade Rockets can't really compete with regular rockets that
doesn't mean we can't compare the two and uh I don't think I ever actually considered how well uh these homemade
Rockets would work if someone used them as a legitimate propulsion technology um
so uh the real question here is obvious uh if you were marooned in
space um specifically in low earth orbit and you had um just a homemade rocket
with you say like a soda bottle or something um the question here is would you be able to produce enough thrust
with that to bring you back to Earth safely um or if not how big a rocket
would you need uh so to make any kind of approximation about that um I need to
bring in the half Greek half English two-letter long word that is the core of
all rocket science um so yes pronounced Delta V or
Delta V by enthusiastic rocket scientists uh it's defined as how much a
rocket can change its velocity um and it's pretty important um
because it allows people at Nasa to make extremely accurate determinations about how much fuel they can use um it's also
the only way to get really good at the game Kerbal Space Program uh so that's pretty good
too um Delta V basically means uh yeah how much you can change your velocity if
you have um zero meters per second of Delta V that means you have no fuel you
can't go anywhere if you have 100 meters per second of Delta V that means if you used all your fuel you'd be moving at
100 meters a second um so first of all some rules before um
I imagine this scenario uh we're assuming you can survive atmospheric re-entry that's not something that can
actually happen but for these purposes it'll work and also you just have a homemade rocket you don't have anything
fancy so no thrusters no guidance systems no control panel that means it's
not as straightforward as flying a spacecraft and I'm not saying that flying a spacecraft is straightforward
um so calculate how well each rocket would work I just uh watched some videos of some of the old Rockets I'd built and
then um measured how fast the fuel um or most often fluid from uh baking soda
vinegar or water uh was leaving the rocket and then I used the a modified version of the rocket equation and just
imagined everything for a homemade rocket but just bigger um so here's the
equation oh and one thing I should mention physic have a bad habit of assuming that everything is spherical I
don't know if you guys ever noticed that but it's like assume this is spherical
um so I'm assuming the rocket is going to be spherical uh and this is the equation you'd need don't ask me why I
just decided to accept it and so with this equation uh here are some homemade
rockets and how they may save your life one day if you happen to find yourself marooned in low earth orbit
um so uh baking soda and vinegar so the first rocket I ever built was when I was
in grade four and it was a um little canister um and I poured um it was
filled with vinegar and I poured the baking soda in sealed the end put it down on the table and ran for my life
um and if you had a larger version of that in space it could actually save your life um so to get back to the top
of the atmosphere which means just to lower your orbit enough that you SK the top of the atmosphere where air friction
can do the rest you need to slow down by about 60 m/ second um using a baking
soda and vinegar rocket you could do that with a spherical rocket 11.25 meters wide which is about the same size
as the Russian soy capsule and the newly created SpaceX Dragon capsule I want to
see a space program fund that because that would look absolutely awesome
um so it it's not imp plausible but yeah you should probably opt for better
propulsion Technologies um so uh the next one that I thought of
was Coke and Mentos um it's a lot like a liquid rocket booster now that I think about it
um because it's it has um Fuel and then it has oxid it's not really oxidizer but
it's as if it was oxidizer remixing the two together they react um it's much more efficient than baking soda and
vinegar so you'd actually only need a bottle 3.22 meters wide um to get back
to Earth and a mechanism to insert thousands of Mentos per second uh so if you can develop that Tech then then
you're good um so these techniques work for saving you if you're stuck in low
earth orbit but they don't really work that well if you want to go further than that for example if you wanted to
accelerate by 535 m/ second second which is about how
fast um you'd need to go to raise your orbit by 1,300 kilometers your Coke and
Mento rocket would expand to nearly the size of Earth um which is
Impractical uh having a rocket the size of Earth is not easy to build or um control
and there are better ways to get around in space um my personal favorite was water rockets because I did a science
fair Pro project on it last year and I I really like just launching water rockets some of them have gone maybe 100 meters
none of them have made it space So I was interested to see how this would work out
mathematically um so to get uh to save yourself uh and travel back to the
surface of Earth from low earth orbit you'd need a water bottle 80 centimeters
wide I was surprised at how uh small a water rocket you'd need
um but I guess that's the you don't need something bigger than that to accelerate to 60 MERS a second um given how well
this would work for getting out of low earth orbit it made me wonder if it could take you further than that and I
started thinking maybe Apollo mission style using a water rocket um so to
leave Earth orbit and intercept the moon you need 3,940 meters a second of Delta
v um unfortunately this uh water rocket 8
ctim wide could only accelerate you 60 MERS a second to reach the moon uh you'd need to add more water to move faster
and more water to push the water to move faster and more water to push the extra water to push the extra water to move
faster and as you can tell that is the tyranny of the rocket equation eventually you would reach a rocket that
had enough water to push all of itself to intercept the moon the bad news is it
would be 3, 92,000 not meters not kilometers but light years
wide which is slightly less practical than even a cocen Mentos rocket the size of
Earth um given the density of water uh this container would weigh significantly
more than the observable universe um ignoring the obvious
inconsistencies with a container of water this big it would cost a fair bit more than many space agencies would be
willing to fund um uh given the cost of transporting water to orbit it would
cost something like 3.7 time 1075 to ship everything up to orbit to
supply the ship uh that's enough to fund 10 to the 65 complete lunar Expeditions
using regular rocket fuel um the container of water would also immediately collapse into a Ultra
massive black hole consuming the entire universe destroying absolutely everything so I think it's best to say
no go for launch for that that one um if you happen to be in a situation as bad
as this I would just say the moral of the story is to get yourself home if you're stuck in space with a water
rocket and not to try to go to the Moon with a water rocket
um so um my next idea was uh using Nerf
guns because I used to have Nerf gun battles with a friend in grade eight and
um for this we have to change the equation because um the equation before
assumes that the liquid takes up 100% of the available space and it does because it's a liquid uh Nerf gun darts are not
liquid so you have to add a section for packing efficiency and that just means Nerf bullets don't pack 100% efficiently
there's air left over once you put them all together um for cylinders which is
approximately the shape of a Nerf gun Dart uh that happens to be about 0.9 so
90% pack efficiency um and with that you are good
to go to keep doing the calculation as usual um so foam dart guns they're
popular kids toys due to the fact that dart guns shoot foam darts and certain children enjoy the satisfaction of using
foam darts to hit certain people while they're uh writing scientific articles
um but in all seriousness I was wondering if these could be used as Rockets um so if you were marooned in
lower orbit but you had a Nerf gun I don't know why you have a Nerf gun but just suppose you do um you would only
need a container of foam darts uh about a meter and a half wide um that's not
totally implausible but it would be pretty hard to shoot them all at once uh Nerf guns they only hold like I mean
I've seen some that hold like six that you can just pull and shoot pull shoot pull shoot and um only six and then it
takes like a minute to p put them all back in CU they're kind of finicky um you'd probably want to um if it takes
you a few minutes to reload you'd probably want to only shoot during the uh I think it's called a home end
transfer window so uh you'd want to shoot all your darts one you're at the same point in your orbit so you have to
like uh shoot your uh foam darts and then wait until you go come around again and then shoot again uh given that your
container about a meter and a half wide would contain about a 100,000 darts you'd be stuck up there for several
weeks just shooting until he got back to Earth um but if you could do that well that's
fine but you'd have long run out of uh darts by that point so shoot would you
say um my last um type of rocket that I
looked at was about popcorn now a popcorn rocket would definitely look
popping um and I have to say something about corn puns they're pretty corny but
um about popcorn Rockets popcorn is a great fuel intuitively because you can
store it in a small space and then once you activate the fuel it suddenly balloons up and produces a whole bunch
of thrust um so popcorn I mean it sounds
great but it's actually uh not as great as it sounds because popcorn is really heavy when it's in its seed form um and
even though the seeds explode you still need a container 36 meters wide to get
out of low earth orbit um uh that's that's impractical and if
you made it a cylindrical rocket it would be a little larger than the Saturn 5 just to get out of low earth orbit I
mean soed spacecrafts can do that with a container like a fuel tank two or three meters wide so popcorn's uh not the best
fuel to use but I mean it's still fun to think think about um and it also made me
think about uh maybe you can go further than low earth orbit too so if you wanted to go to the Moon an Apollo style
Mission using popcorn um of course the tyranny of the rocket equation the
Rockets get really big and for popcorn it's really really big um yeah if you
wanted to reach the moon using a popcorn rocket your rocket would need to be
about 6.97 time 10 200 68 times wider than the
observable universe to reach the moon um
that it's just crazy um I I don't think this is a good idea um but it comes with a plus side
you could actually save considerable PopCorn by not landing on the moon but
simply intercepting the moon's orbit and uh performing a flyby maneuver uh
landing on the moon actually requires uh a huge huge amount of fuel um it uses up
almost half of the fuel that you'd have at that point so if you decided to forego the landing and just pass the Moon by it would significantly reduce uh
the size of your rocket from well like I already said 6.97 time 10^ the 268 times waterer than the observable universe and
reduce it to only 4.6 time 10^ the 186 times wider than the
observable universe which uh it definitely doesn't sound that much more
convenient um and unfortunately it comes with a downside all of these
calculations are based on the assumption that uh you aren't losing any fuel in
the process and this cartoon portrays how you may lose fuel in the process um
so if you eat any popcorn along the way sorry you're you're
screwed um so in conclusion I wasn't surprised that homemade Rockets didn't
work as well as um rockets that are built by the United launch Alliance or
NASA and other engineering companies um it also makes sense why NASA does hire
Ula or the United launch Alliance to build their fuel tanks and not soda bottle
companies um so yeah since many space agencies feature scale comparisons of their Rockets to Showcase their
achievements I decided we should do the same here um I was a little let down that none of Rockets mentioned
throughout this chapter could be used to get to further places like Mars okay well actually I I did run the
calculations for places like Mars but as you can probably tell they're so
ridiculously obscure they don't really help to add Clarity um which is why I didn't include them of course now you're
just dying to know about getting to Mars so I decided to add them anyway
um so getting out of low earth orbit simply requires you throw a bunch of mass in the opposite direction you're moving in then after that you reenter
the atmosphere and well die if you're not protected but you return to the surface if you are um and from what
we've just seen using water rockets or even popcorn Rockets to do this while in Practical it is plausible um getting to
the Moon requires getting out of orbit intercepting the moon getting into low lunar orbit then deorbiting from there
and as we've seen from this homemade Rockets sometimes become larger than galaxies in order to do this getting to
Mars is much much harder getting to Mars requires entering low earth orbit leaving Earth's orbit entering solar
orbit performing a homean transfer once to get to Mars's orbital velocity and a second time to re match Mars's orbital
speed then intercepting Mars's gravitational sphere of influence then entering Mars's orbit and then
deorbiting from there then decelerating to reach the surface then you've landed
to get to low earth orbit Escape Earth's gravity do a home and transfer enter low Mars orbit and decelerate all the way
down to landing on the surface you'd need 9,510 m a second of Delta V and in
order for a water rocket to do this it would only need to be 92 billion times wider than the observable universe I say
only because when you think about how huge some of our other Rockets got just to reach the moon a 92 billion Universe
wide rocket is actually quite plausible um if you wanted to repeat the
same maneuver with a spherical popcorn rocket packed full of popcorn kernels you'd need a container 3.9 7 * 10^ 449
times wider than the observable universe um sure it wasn't convenient before but this is really pushing it um and
just just for the heck of it if you wanted to do all that and return to
Earth uh you'd need 15,220 meters a second of Delta V and that's assuming
you use Arrow breaking to slow you down uh to do all that with a popcorn
rocket have you ever heard the number um a milon or something I don't know U well
this is close to that your um popcorn rocket would need to be 3.98 time 10^
718 times wider than the observable universe a number so unimaginably mind-bogglingly huge that the only thing
that comes to mind is that error one that you get on a calculator when the computations just cause it to overflow
um except there is one use that you could find um so Nasa uses specialized
fuel pumps to quickly drain the fuel from a rocket um if they need to abort
the mission to prevent a what they call a rapid unplanned disassembly or an explosion if you want to use technical
terms um similarly you could use one of those pumps too and if you took one of
those pumps and attached them to your rocket you would be the guest of honor at any movie night and with that I end
my presentation thank you so much for having me um just a reminder I am on Instagram and I have website nerd
anomaly. where I post my cartoons as I've included in this presentation thank you so much for having me thank you that
was hilarious that was amazing it's hard excent
presentation anyways it was awesome awesome and I I love I love the um that
can get to these giant megga normous U numbers Nathan it's U uh I but on top of
it as you're making these presentations I don't I would be in fits of laughter the entire time
so but thank you thank you very much and uh uh we look forward to having you
again on global Star Party Nathan it was awesome thank you that's one of the things I love about math you can like
ask them the weirdest question like using right you just get an answer it's
great so actually Nathan um I may be able to learn something from me with
this one you mentioned that the equation is necessarily spherical and I found
that interesting I saw the uh I saw Pi in the equation and I was just curious
to know if that is the how you can tell it's a spherical equation or how you you
know how we figure that out well you can tell it's a math equation because it has pi in it because every
math equation seems to have Pi in it it just shows up everywhere doesn't it um right you can tell it has something uh
circular to do with it and if it's a four pi R cubed then it has something spherical and I I believe that equation
incorporates the sphere volume equation into it um okay I'm then again I'm not
sure because it's in the density relationship yeah
um Nathan did you want to talk a little bit about the cosmic generation before you finish up oh yeah sure um so yeah I
guess we're still working that out and I I still have to um finish setting up the
announcement on my website about it as well but um we um I guess I'm I'm
working with the Denver Astronomical Society and an explore Alliance and uh we are
setting up a international um astronomical Organization for youth that
are interested in astronomy and created by youth who are interested in astronomy um so I'm working with uh six or seven
other um space nerds such as myself to set this up and I'm really looking forward to when we can start doing uh
routine workshops um about this um and I believe
Tara's um Workshop is is the first official meeting so I'm looking forward to
that great well thank you very much thank you um I um uh you know anything
that uh can help these programs move along is uh is wonderful and um you know
at explore Alliance we'll continue to do what we can to support that so it's great thank you you um up next is deept
gatam uh from uh Nepal so we're we're we are stretching around the world we've
we've gone from Europe back to the United States and uh or and back to North America and now we're we're out to
Nepal DT um uh what time is it over there uh it's uh at 6 am 6 AM wow okay
so you're up okay so thank you for coming back on
uh uh uh you know we we love your presentations uh we love your poetry uh
uh I know that you're very much uh involved with uh Nepal at the Nepal
Astronomical Society there and um yeah you know so how are things going in
general for you um this day I'm not U involving in
uh estrom and all because of my study yes but um I'm um I'm acting I'm working
as a mentor in the asteroid Source training where we give the training to How To Source the asteroid uh with the
help of software like Asom metrica and how to detect the steroid so recently we
have given training to 30 students and from the remote area remote
area of Nepal and um like their respond was very nice they were very excited to
learn how to detect the steroid and and uh similarly uh uh Nepal asonic Society
is now involving in one research program that is milet programs milet research
and this day and just now the Olympiad is U olyp has been uh completed and so
again the olymp program is coming and the all the people are from the
Astronomical Society are involving in the research program right now and I'm
bit busy this day for my uh study uh so I'm not giving much time in so uh I was
um I was thinking about joining uh globar party uh the next uh previous
week I think and I uh I got to email this I read a email that Mr party is
postponed because you are vaccinated or for that and so yesterday um I was just
planning to email you and your uh I saw your message and I
it that moment and as our uh today as our theme is orbit I have prepared
something about that um uh is uh as we know this orbit in Celestial mechanism I
I want to go through the celestial mechanism an orbit is the corve trajectory of an object and soures or
the transit of the planet around a star or of Nal satellites around a planet or
of an artificial satellites around an object or position in space such as
planet Moon asteroid or leg Point within the planetary systems Planet Dar Planet
asteroids and other minor planets comets and space devies um SP orbit the systems
in a elliptical orbits a comet in a parabolical or hyperbolic orbits about
bar Center is not gravitationally bound to the star and therefore is not
considered part of the star planetary systems and body that are
gravitationally bound to an to one of the planet in a planetary system such as
natural or artificial satellite follow orbit about bar center near or within a
planet and there are different types of orbit such as um Geo geost orbit and low
earth orbits medium earth orbit and polar orbit and Sun Cy orbit and
transfer orbit or GE stationary transfer orbit or leg res point and Z is a z z
stationary orbit zoo is used by satellite that need to stay constantly
above one particular place over Earth and such as telecommunication satellite
uh this way an antenna on Earth can be fixed fixed to always stay pointed
toward that satellite without moving and it can it can also be used by weather monitoring satellites and because they
can continually um observe specific areas to see how wether Trends uh emerge
there unlike uh satellites in zoo that must always uh orbit uh um the orbits
along Earth equators and Le is low earth orbits low earth orbit Sates do not always have to follow a particular path
around the Earth in the same way uh their pain can be tilted and this mean
there are more available available roots for satellites in low earth orbits which
is one of the reasons why low earth orbit is commonly used orbit and
similarly there is another orbit that is medium earth orbit medium earth orbit comprises a wide range of orbits
anywhere between low earth orbits and Z Earth orbits at Z it is similarly
to lower orbit in that it always it also does not need to take specific path
around Earth and it is used by a variety of satellite with many different applications and there's another orbit
that is SSO that is s cyonus orbit is a particular kind of orbit polar orbits
and satellite in SSO traveling over the polar regions are sychronized with the
sun uh this mean uh they are sychronized to always be in the same fixed po
relative to Sun this mean that satellite always visit the same um same sport at
the same local time uh and there is a transport orbit uh transport orbit are a
special kind of orbit used to get from one orbit to another when satellite are
launched from Earth and carried space um carried to space with launch vehicles uh
and satellite are not always placed directly on their final orbit often the
satellites are instead place on the transport orbits and orbit by where by using relatives little energy from
built-in Motors the satellites or spacecraft can move from one orbit to
another and this allow a satellite to reach for examples high altitude orbit
like Z without of actually needing the launch vehicles to go all the way to Al
attitude which will require more effort this is uh like taking a shortcut and
reaching a z in this way is an examples of one of the most common transfer
orbits called Z stationary transfer of a oance point or Y point or allow for
orbit that are much farther away over a million kilometers and uh do not orbits
is Earth directly and these are specific point far out in space where the
gravitational field of Earth and Sun combine in such a way um that spacecrafts that orbit them remain
stable and can thus be agonized relative to Earth if if a spacecraft was launched
to other points in space very distance from the earth they will naturally fall
into an orbit around the Sun and those spacecraft will soon end up far from the
earth making communication difficult instead spacecraft launch to the speed L
Point stay fix and remain close to Earth with a minimum effort without going into
a um different or yeah this is um I prepar something about
the orbit and our small um poem written like the night is come but not too soon
the night is come but not too soon and sinking slightly all silently the little
Moon drop down behind the sky all silently the little Moon drop down behind the sky there is no light in the
Earth or heaven but the cold light of stars in the first WS of night is given
to the red planet Mars is it tenders star of loves is it tenders the star of
loves or the star of love and dreams oh no from the blue ttin above a hero must
CLE thank you thank you so much I love those I love those
presentations and the uh poetry um thank thanks again for coming
on it looks cold are you is it cold where you are right now yeah yeah okay
well hopefully you stay warm and uh uh you know uh and enjoy your your studies
I know that you're you're um you know a great student and uh uh we love it when
you come on that we know that you you know you certainly understand your subject matter and um you present it
very well um and I hope to uh see you in the United States at a at one of our
universities and then not too distant future so that's great yeah yeah I'll be
there very soon pretty soon okay all right let me know where okay and we'll
invite you to one of our star parties that's great okay okay all right so um up next uh is
Dr marchelo Souza uh from Brazil uh marchello is a cosmologist by training
and um uh he is a professor of astronomy and physics down in Campos and uh we are
uh so glad to have him uh marello is also uh uh a um uh the editor a senior
editor of uh Skies up magazine that our Global astronomy magazine that is
available for a free download so um so uh marello thank you for coming on to
Global our 82nd Global star party thank you very much for the invitation it's a pleasure to be here and H today quite uh
I prepare I would like to talk about something
that I live Co here then something that many people have doubts about is
about tides and few people know that the
tides are also associated with this this the motion of the system earth it's not
only caused by the influence of the Gravity from the Moon and from the sun
we have also three factors that you have to consider and I will show
this here in Brazil have a place that the tides change like this like I'm
showing here it is the North Region of Brazil I think that the second such
place in the world that you have have difference between the low tides and High Tides so intense can see here in
this image I saw this happening we in one period of the day we have a all the
boats leaving the port and six hours later you have to wait more time to have
the boat because the boat can't travel because you don't have water almost
water there is in a place that you call the state of Maron in Brazil is in the
capital of mar that is s Louis something like this happens then you have time to leave the
port wow and what what causes the the tides
this is something that many people don't know because they consider that influence is only by caused by the
difference of the uh Gravity Force from the Moon and the Sun
in different positions in on the Earth
surface then you have we know here this is something not see in scale but you
have that the op of the moon and the the op of the system Moon
and the Earth around the Sun something like this this is the eclipse
here is the equator and here is that is five five
degrees inclination in relation of the ecli it's not like we see here in this
image oh sorry this is what happens as the caes of the tides you have here I'm not
considering the sun here on the moon the Body Center between the Moon and the
Earth it's not in the center of the this is something that we need to
consider because when I have here the
Earth and the moon is not Escape but you imag here the Body Center is not in the
center of the earth it is within the earth liin the earth but it's not in the
center then when the moon moves around the earth the earth also have a have a
motion do like this because it's not in the center and we experience have the
experience here we as we are in a rotation system that is a system that's
is rotating we have this a centrifugal force acting here we feel this there is
something that my students and many people ask me when they see the m in
books that you have a high tides in the both sides of the Earth in the side that
is in direction of the moon and the other sides why that you have both sides
the reason is that is you see here you have the H the white Arrow here it is the
difference the force of the gravity of C by the moon in the in the Earth surface
in one side and the other side of the earth and here you have
the blue arrow is this effect that you feel because of the move the motion of
the system Earth Moon and what we feel here in the Earth because the Body
Center is not in the center of the earth then when you you
you H found the the resultant here the result of the two force in this side the
green you have a force in this direction and in the other side has a force a
result force in this direction then this is the reason that you have tides in
both sides in the side that is in direction of the Moon the force the gra
force from the Moon in on the surface is bigger than this influence of the motion
of the system and the other side you see that is this centrifugal force is bigger
than the force of gravity here you need to consider that the centrifical force
only need to to use this ter because it's AAL
force and the only some kinds of system that you need to consider this Force
but is only because it want to leave the Earth something like this and when as we
are in a system that's rotating then we have to consider this kind of force to
explain what is happening like also
that for and here What's happen you have two
kinds now generally of Tides now have the
this is correct I don't know if said correct that is spring
TI spring tid like C TI is when you you
have the new moon and the full moon because the moon and the sun is in the
same line yeah only for explain what's happening same
direction and you have quadrat and the nip tides when we have third and the
first quarter of the moon what is difference between them you have low
tides the high tides are not so big as you have during the C of the spring
tides as I I show here because you have Tides here caused by the Sun that is
small and here from the Moon all this is something that
is amazing because we see this is Mage now that have the water almost Le in the
earth and I saw I I had here I didn't find to show a book that he they explain
what's happening here saying like the water is floating it's flying and the between the
water and the surface of the Earth you have a vacuum there something
unbelievable that they put in book because they didn't know how to explain what's happening why you have uh High TI
in a region of the earth and allow TI in other region then when the Earth rotates
this change and this is something easy to explain I show
here this is some here is in Portuguese you have B that means L tides and PR
that's High Tides show also because you need to know
the direction of the force between the Earth and the moon the gravity force and
then you see that when you are near the equators the equator you have high tides
then you are far from the equator depends on the periods of
the the here is the period of you have C
that's spring ties here quadr that is the nip
ties and what happens is this it's like a wave is a
movement the moves from different region of the earth to other region it's only
this that happens and you have books that show a
lot of explanations I like the unbelievable explanation that I said
that I found in a Brazilian book about sty that they almost
they say that the water is not touching
the the the soil the surface of the Earth during the
the ti something that's unbelievable and here What's happen is
because the force direction of the force is from the to the center of the Moon
then you have components into the directions and one of the components is what makes the water
moves to this direction then you have a high tide here and you have a low tide
here I don't know if you see my the the mouse here I'm moving the
mouse I don't know if you can see the mouse you can see yes have low tide here
and here have high tides and the rotates this chain
that change the during the day you have this movement from up part of the earth
to the other part of the Earth according to the rotation of the the earth I know that is not so e
so here I I show something oh let me return
here it's it's more complicated that I try to to show
EAS but I think that's what is important to know that you have three causes for
the tides it's not only the difference between of the gravitational force in
one side from the other side of the Earth caus by the Sun the Earth and also
by the motion of the system of moon this is the reason of this side and CA
because the body center of the syst is not in the center
the because we doing preparing activities for the eclipse then you have
to are talking about we are studying with the students the
effects that you having on Earth caused by the
gravitational fields of the the mo and this is something that's important to
know as we are also near the post and you have tables of Tides here and I want
to remember that you have a total lunar eclipse here in May 16 we are preparing
the activities and one of the activities I show is this now to to measure
distance between the uh Earth to the Moon in the moments
of the eclipse and we are looking for partners to make the this project in
different countries and if someone wants to to also be involved you be great
because it is a experience that can motivate students in schools to
participate and we now rning our project that young starts of tomorrow in schools
well we are planning this year to visit 50 schools until October and then this
month we visit 40 schools and we we are not visiting more school
because we have Carnival here in February at the end of February that everything is closed here in Brazil but
this moment we don't know what happen because of the covid and maybe we don't
have dances in the streets but have the holiday this is very difficult to to
avoid and this is our partners and in the period from April 2223 we have our
international meeting uh we would like to invite everybody to be participated
everybody be very welcome here thank you very much Scot thank you
marel I I have a question Martel will the will the presentation the 14th event
uh will that be broadcast yes we we do both Rie in
person and the online so a hybrid event that's great yes event because of the
co right I think most meetings like that a lot of events are going to be hybrid
events so uh we're looking forward to doing our first as well so great it is
Contin difficult to hear situation because of I hope soon you have a better times now I hope
excellent excellent so much a pleasure to be here thank you okay all right so
up next um we will have H Gary Palmer from uh up in the UK in Wales and uh uh
Gary is a master of uh of telescope
setup astrophotography pick Insight name it you know he is the go-to guy uh for a
lot of people uh in the industry uh that want to get their equipment tested I mean just look at the all the equipment
behind him right now it is it is an amazing Arsenal you
know uh people have asked on our programs oh uh Gary what do you know about such and such camera you'll go oh
like this one and pull it out of his uh out of his equipment cabinet so um it is
uh uh impressive what he does but even more impressive is what he shares with
our audience about learning the craft and skill of image processing of image
capture and um uh if you want to learn about astrophotography uh you know look no
further than Gary Palmer Gary thanks for coming on Global St thanks for asking me
on um hi to everybody hope you're all well um it's been quite a while I think since I was last on um but weather's
been absolutely rubbish here that that that's the only way I can can put it the
jet streams moved up north um so we're just getting the residual of storms
coming across and I can't remember the last time I saw the sun um I'm sure it
was about three weeks ago something like that so it's been a little bit of hard work here but we have been moving
through different things and and sort of going along with stuff um in between um there's really
not masses to talk about but there's a few bits that we've been doing so I'm just going to set up a couple of little
bits um on here there we go and I'll share the screen
over hopefully you can see that image there yeah that's um little solar flare
going off but this was um a single frame from a mosaic it's created um I think it
was about the 14th of uh January something like that um so we
go across the sun we take 12 of these and this is really hard from the UK in the winter because the sun's really low
yeah and we we really sort of struggle with this thing but if you work it out
correct and you fettle with the images a little bit then you can start to create a mosaic so it ends up coming out like
that um that's 12 of those single panels joined together um and then working across
and what I've always found we're doing the mosaics is to go across the Sun from
left to right so you go across and make sure you have a good overlap so you want a good 20% overlap on each side
um then you can um crop off the edges crop off the stack lines and you can get
these together in Photoshop or lots of other programs um you can put them together Microsoft ice does a good job
on on smaller Moses um if you want to add the color into it then it's going to look
something like that yeah so that makes it stand out a little bit more um everybody's a bit different but this was
done with the double stack system that I showed everybody um probably about
September something like that um and that's basically putting the CK on the back of the lump so that it it brings
out a lot more contrast um in the images so that was that we we've got all
of that up and running and working um I also showed the rotarian system which
was this system uh last year that we developed so this is all up and running
now um and these were the first sort of test shot images out this so each filter
here will rotate around um so controlled via the computer um and we will have
ascom drivers to run into the software but effectively um when I tell it what
filters go to rotates around and therefore you get no issues with the
camera rotation or rotation of a um a sunspot while we're Imaging
so that's a magnesium image um this is one of the test images coming out of it
and again it's winter time getting into Midsummer this is going to be a lot clearer uh and the system that is going
over to Spain is going to be even clearer because it generally has nicer weather than the UK so um but looking at
the same Sunspot group um we're in magnesium there we can go to
sodium um then we can go to uh Hydra and Alpha so these all share very similar uh
BOS telecentric BOS in the quarks so it gives you a very similar field of view
now they don't actually make a quark with the same bow in uh for calcium so
that is quite hard uh to work that out because calcium is the worst wor
wavelength to try and image through a poor atmosphere so generally you don't get clear images but with a bit of
playing around we've got the calcium up to about that level there so again once it gets into summer this is going to be
more or less the same field of view um for all four filters and then it
just gives you the choice if there's different activity going off that you can see in different wavelengths that
sort of works out quite nice so that that's uh coming along well um syst
behind me that is going out to Spain that should be ready by the end of this week for Imaging in the UK not a lot um
had a quick test of Ryan did that a couple of weeks back wow and this is just literally an hours worth of day so
you can see the high Cloud's gone over because it's just bloating out the Styles a little bit but um when you're
not getting a lot of clear weather this is what you have to put up with um is just literally uh grabbing an hour or
two whenever you can so that was that now apart from that um I've been working
on some other projects and I thought I would sort of run into a little bit more detail with that at the moment if we
bring up um P insight there we go this is a current project that I'm working on
at the moment this is data from one of the regular contributors
on um the star party in the sense of commenting and different other things
and that's Jeff wise so Jeff wise has taken this data wow out in California um
it's about 29 Jeff jeez um and then sent me the raw data over so at the moment
we're um working through this so this is taking quite a bit of processing as you
can imagine so if I zoom out there to the full image um it's taken on a Stell
view 152 with a zwo 294 mono and then chroma filters we
have got the full set of filters go into this but it's supped to building this a bit at a time and this is really just
getting the image together um just to have a look at the data so if we come
back down a little bit and have a look at some of the other filters that are
there we can see what's going on so I've brighten these up just so that we can see really what's happening in the
background there um and we can see the different data
like the hydro Alpha data you can see what's going on and so on so it is a case of spending quite a bit of time
processing these cleaning these all up then getting them uh ready to integrate
and then starting to integrate them into a pallet so that image there and the
other one that disappeared there we go um what you can see what you normally
don't see in a lot of these images is this generally ends up as quite a black
hole it's the center of the rosette nebula um and generally when we're
Imaging it we're not this close so therefore you don't see it and also is
having the amount of data uh that Jeff's managing to capture so there was a
little bit of High Cloud going through this you can just very faintly see it around these Styles but it's nothing we
can't correct as we move on with the data and work this out this really is a test image so if we zoom in a bit closer
somewhere around there we can start to move up and start to look around at the detail and you see a lot of this is
coming out now threedimensional yeah um it it is uh quite uh drawn out
processing something like this it's not a five minute thing um and also the
capture you know Jeff's doing pretty good job out there uh capturing this sort of data and you could take out
really any part of this image and you sort of looking at it for quite a long time and going
wow there's a lot of stuff in there that you don't normally see that that's the um the sort of key
thing so just s move across more to the center part so you
can see the detail that's in this it's pretty stunning at the moment and I know Jeff um beavering work catching some
more data because um I've got a link which is downloading to give you an idea of how long it takes to download some of
this data to send it across the world uh one of the sets that's coming over now is about uh 24 hours to get over
here um so there's a lot of files in there and a lot of uh stuff to run through but we'll work on this a bit
more over the next um couple of weeks there's also some nice vband data to
have a look at um and to add in there and then we'll manipulate the colors around a little bit more but that's been
taking up a fair amount of time to get this together at the moment so um apart
from that not a lot else has been occurring here it's all been pretty uh pretty
straightforward because of the weather so I think we're all blown away by by
those images and uh um as always car it's a pleasure so thanks it's um like I
say it's just weather at the moment can't really do a lot we we got a backlog of stuff here to test um we're
due to get some sun Thursday Friday and both of those days are fully rammed
with um solar testing yeah so it's just going to be a case of grabbing a few images in amongst
everything else but yeah um it's always good fun great now for those of you that want
to learn more about image processing uh I did put in the link uh to um Astro
courses uh let me see if I can do that again here here it is and so uh Gary
does uh does one-on-one uh tutorials and he can definitely take you to the next
level if that's what you're looking for so keep an eye up um we do some stuff
with you we also do some stuff with uh Ontario telescope so we've got courses
running out there um Beyond uh Beyond Imaging we're running some big workshops
over the next month um there's some of those still around so we're not just
sort of place in the UK there's stuff going out all around the world we've got customers in at the moment in Hong Kong
Israel Poland they're literally right across the world um so yeah it's fitting
it in around everybody's time zone at the moment that's the main thing right right well thanks again and uh we look
forward to having you on again on anytime on global Star Party Gary thank you very much thanks thanks Scott thanks
take care okay uh up next next is a dear
friend Rachel freed uh I met Rachel um at uh the Northeast astronomy Imaging
conference we did a little presentation together a little video that you can still find on YouTube and uh I um uh and
then I met her again at the um uh one of the very early the forming meeting for
the alliance of historic observatories uh at Mount Wilson uh under the 100 inch
Dome and uh uh I think that is something that that neither one of us will ever
forget it was a very historic meeting uh with uh uh George Yer hail's grandson
was there Sam hail and uh you know uh directors of of these historic
observatories were were all there and it was just incredible so but Rachel uh
today we're going to talk about the institute for student astronomical research which you're the president of I
assume you're the founder as well and um yeah so uh you know thank you for
coming on to Global star party it's your first time but it's not your first time to give presentations so uh tells about
these students and what they're doing and uh you know how how you're changing lives sure okay thank you for having me
on can you hear me okay I can hear you just fine okay great so um yeah the
institute for student astronomical research I actually am a co-founder with uh Russ Jana who is one of the first
people to automate robotic telescopes um and uh so I and I have slides to share
so I'll share my screen here um but the the main idea let me get our faces off
there hang on all right um we work with students to do basic double star
astrometry and I'll talk about that in a moment but the idea is to get students involved in research sort of as soon as
we possibly can in their young educational careers so I work a lot of high school students and community
college students and University students I also work with their teachers with University professors and high school
teachers who want to provide research experiences for their students um so
this was my first experience doing a double star research project with my students when I was a high school
teacher um and just to give you a sense it was it was really hard I was new to this whole thing but but I knew I wanted
students I could see that they wanted to get involved in the actual um sort of
the meat of scientific research and um let's see next slide
here all right so what we actually study are double stars now this is just a
little animation the Stars we study their orbits are much slower they tend to go around each other in hundreds of
years or thousands of years but this is just to give you a sense of an orbiting situation and we study stars that have
been studied sometimes 100 or 200 years ago and we'll take a new an image of where they are relative to each other
now and for example um what we'll do is we'll take an image of these two stars and we'll measure where they are how far
apart they are relative to each other um and what the angle they make with each other is currently and compare that to
historical data so here in this second diagram there's a the central star and
then the other star over a hundred years or so has been making this orbit and can
add a data point and so students are collecting original data and adding to
historical data to really create these these orbits or refine them or in some
cases show that actually an orbit that was calculated isn't correct and maybe the Stars aren't even orbiting each other but it took a hundred years of
data to figure that out um this is the only actual image I've been impressed with all the images I've been seeing um
this is one of our images of a double star system that we were measuring the um separation and position position
angle on so this is just so you can get a sense of what they look like and um I'll tell you about the telescopes we
use in a moment but yes I co-founded about six seven years ago now the institute for student astronomical
research um I realized we need to update our website to this Summer's program
which I'm really excited to run I usually run the program three times a year um but with actually and covid
isn't a problem for us because everything we do is online Co is a problem but we can still run our
programs and um use remote telescopes and collect our data um so we have a whole you know our our website we've
developed um a a sort of a handbook small telescope astronomical research
which goes through the whole process of of research how to select a Target how to collect and analyze data and um
analyzing data and interpreting your data is you know really key to a lot of this but then also how to write up for
publication and how to present your data because the programs that we run the research seminar that we run um students
write up their results for publication in the Journal of double star observations and um so they learn the
writing process while doing this uh We've also created a whole canvas course that we can just give to teachers and
say Here's all the material here you can run an eight-week or 12 week or one semester seminar and during that time
select a Target use telescopes collect data analyze data and write up your results for publication this is really
transformative very rarely in our educational careers before we're getting our phds do we actually publish papers
and here's a chance for high school students and community college students to do that um and so it's kind of cool
for me to see this process of you know I start with you know our first meeting with students and Educators and we have
these great mixes where there will be high school students college students professors all working together in teams
to collect data and they they just learn how to write papers and then this is an example from November 2020 all the
articles in the Journal of double star observations with stars next to them from that issue were from student teams
so they're really contributing to the science in addition to learning about the science themselves they're really
making a a significant contribution to this very small area of research um we
have partnered with the Las KES Observatory Global telescope Network we're one of their education Partners or Global Sky Partners so we get access we
have like 50 hours um a year which is plenty of time for double star pictures
um to their network of point4 meter telescopes around the globe so that's really exciting so no matter what double
star we're interested in whether it's in the northern and southern or Southern Sky we can access it um and that's
exciting and um we've also put together robotic telescope conferences um about
the student research and education and um one of my favorite pictures from all of these conferences where we're sort of
saying hey bringing together the telescope people the Educators the students and everyone you know what are
we trying to do in astronomy education um and by the way I wanted to tie this back to all the presentations I watched
earlier in the evening where it everyone just there's this this draw in astronomy
whether it's Rockets um and crazy water rockets the size of the universe and
whatnot or images of the Sun in the different filters or whatever there's
just this draw in astronomy and bringing this to students is really um a kind of
a way to help them Embrace science and learn the process of science um but this is one of my favorite pictures because
this is actually um the founder of the Las kumra Observatory Global telescope Network meeting the founder of the
Skynet telescope network two of the biggest Global telescope networks you
know the founders of them meeting each other and saying oh my gosh what can we do um and here we are up in this was a
conference in Hawaii which is a great place to have a conference looking up at Mona um we also have a lot lot of um
International Partners Michael Fitzgerald from Australia has been sort of key he runs a huge um number of high
school astronomy research programs and we've been partnering with him and many other people so um it's it's been really
a an amazing experience um we I personally study the impacts of these
research programs on students um and we can see if you just look at the changes in mean this is measuring selfefficacy
student sense of I can do this I can use telescopes I can learn astronomy and if you look at the increase from 55 to 65
that's a huge increase out of this was out of 80 um and and so we're able to measure these changes with students
having access to robotic telescopes and then this was giving this presentation at a conference in Australia we're
really trying to be um part of a global Community um um Scott mentioned Mount
Wilson we take students up every year every summer to Mount Wilson and they actually get to use the 100in telescope
or the 60in telescope to collect data and do research projects there and one thing that sometimes it doesn't actually
get lost amongst all of you I've noticed with the Poetry we heard and everything but the the human element to science one
of these students the first author on the paper was so inspired by Mount Wilson and her experience up there that
she made this beautiful painting of The 100 inch Dome um and so there's this
amazing connection between the science and the aesthetic of it all and and um sort of we have this human connection to
the sky that's really cool um that we can sort of touch on in doing research
um Scott mentioned we met at the Northeast Astro Imaging Forum or astronomy Forum um I also bring students
who do our research programs I bring them to these conferences and have them present their research to the Greater
Community so for example these are high school students presenting to people at this conference in New York and one of
the people in the audience is an NASA astronaut who's you know been in on the International Space Station for a year
of his life you know and he's and got to meet him and talk and he asked them specific questions about their research
so they get to be part of the actual community and then they get to go out and meet the other people in the Imaging
community and um and really great Partnerships um form from all of this so
that's really exciting um I brought students onto the Astro Imaging channel uh and they got to give talks about the
research they were doing including speckle interferometry which is a fancier technique of studying double
stars but um what an experience for high school students to involved in this Greater Community so that's really
exciting um I was then invited to bring this to the international astronomical
unions astronomy education conference so here we are becoming Again part of this Global Community it was just amazing
where I'm presenting the research that these students are doing in the US and here there's the Thai astronomical
conference talking about their student research and the Russian schools talking about their astronomy research so it's
really an amazing global global thing as you all no um and then um what's really
cool again bringing this Global thing together this is a student I have I'm in California she was my student in Florida
she was in high school at the time um she presented her research at this conference remotely in Australia where I
was excited to see kangaroos and other wild animals um but it was just this really cool thing about bringing you
know giving these students these amazing experiences and so we take them from often students who have never had an
astronomy course to um learning about double stars using telescopes that
professional scientists use writing and having their writing totally torn apart
to eventually having a paper accepted for publication this is an amazing
experience for students it's an amazing experience for me working with all the students and the Educators and um that's
what the institute for student astronomical research is about and I want to thank you all for listening and thank you for inviting me to talk about
it here that was awesome Rachel that was incredible um uh we um I think that
you're have really inspired a lot of people here watching our program uh the
inar and maybe you you already mentioned this but how how many years how how old is the organization now uh it's only
about seven years old I think yeah it's yeah it's pretty young um and it we just
sort of said we need to have an organ ganization where we can bring these you know an umbrella organization to run
these seminars um and and and and how many students have been through the seminars at this
point oh uh a few hundred a few hundred
okay yeah a lot hundreds for sure yeah yeah and what's really cool is um I'll
teach the seminar to for example teachers at a university in Idaho and a
university in North Carolina and then they'll go and teach the seminar to their students after I'm done and so
it's it's expanding it's going you know the reach is much greater than than me in the Institute incredible incredible
well I'm I'm I have some ideas that I'll talk to you offline about Rachel but uh
uh I you've made my gears really start turning so thank you so much it's great
to see you again and I hope you're doing well you you know uh your energy level is always uh you know way up here so
thank you thank you for having me on it's great okay so our next speaker is
uh uh Jenny Bell Shelly and she has been someone that has uh uh been watching our
program uh the global Star Party many of our other programs for a while we we are
so happy that she has decided to come and give a presentation uh she's an astrop
photographer she has worked with the Marx SL remot Observatory uh she's out
in Virginia uh and U uh Jenny thank you again for coming on to Global star
party thank you Scott um so I don't really have uh much of a presentation
per se but uh I'll just talk about what I've been doing
um uh I've been doing astrophotography
for like since 2018 I believe I ordered my first Mount from Explorer scientific
on um Valentine's Day of 2018 um it's uh the first Mount was exos
PMC um since then I've graduated to the G11 which I really like a lot
um pardon I said me too I have one and that's that's that's kind of my set up
that you see behind me back here so yeah I really I really like that because it's um it can break it breaks
down into different modules and it's easier for me to carry you know I'm you
know I weigh like 101 pounds so it's easier for somebody like me to carry so
uh so I do all of my Astro photography um in my off of my front porch or the
front yard uh I live in a bordal 7 uh
sky and um I have a lot of light around
light pollution uh here at my my site which I
call Astro yard um and right now I have a bunch of
neighbors uh neighbor across the street has uh their lights on and the holiday
lights still up I was kind of hoping they would take them down soon but what what can you do
um so I do all of my Imaging
um with that and
uh and I've been using the G1 my most recent acquisition is uh a me
ACF uh 10inch scope which is quite heavy um I'm still working out the Kinks
with you know making sure everything's balanced properly and and whatnot uh and uh and this evening I've
been working with u getting the autofocus set up on that
um it it has a little focuser mechanism on it but I bought a um a crayford
focuser to make things a little easier uh currently tonight I'm Imaging
uh Thor's helmet I acquired uh about 10 images uh
last week so I'm trying to get more get more data
my uh view I only have a view from the south and some partial from uh the East
and the West there are a lot of trees so I can usually get if I'm lucky 20 images
in a night uh sometimes if I get started a little late I get about
10 um right now I'm using Nina and it is doing a Meridian flip
right now um so unfortunately I can't show
you anything because the Meridian flip kind of over overtakes the whole
program uh I do have let me see if I can
pull that I have uh with this telescope I was able to get um a picture
of a Ryan nebula um with a different
camera okay let's see let me share my
screen so this is my most recent image
uh wow with that need scope um I've been deal and trying to
get the colation dialed in as well so it's little uh the Stars aren't as good as
like but that's my most recent one with the scope
um actually the
only
we got a little bit of a fra Freeze Frame going on here it's really really cold so I'm I'm
not a fan of the cold a question um Jenny is how do you
deal with um you know that light pollution
um there's nothing I can do about it other than uh use
filters um this one in particular I used an opal along um L
extreme filter and that locks out quite a bit of it
yes we're lucky to have filters like this today yes yes I haven't um shot any
narrow band um with a mono camera with it yet I have several different cameras
that I have in my Arsenal um the first camera which is what I shot this with
that I was a is a qhy 168c I have a
128c and a 600m and a 183 M that I haven't even tried
yet I have uh so I have um the xs2 pmca G
PMC and a I exos um PMC I have a
little T little uh aser 400 millimeter scope that's dedicated to
that and with the qhy 183 M
camera um and I have an explore scientific uh FCD 100 uh 12 27 mm that I
use um also on the G11 yeah thank you that's great and
another I have a aser 600 millimeter uh that I use the uh the qhy
600m on so I use that on the exos to
mount I have yet to I would like to eventually have all three mounts running at the same time so I imagine that would
be quite a feat that I suspect I would have to use uh three different
computers um right let's see so I think you got three
different little nucks or something to run them and then Network them or something somehow yeah I use
um I have a little Dell uh optiflex micro computer that's worked
really well actually recently bought another one that I use for my image
processing um that's what I have out there right now with a little Monitor and I'm remoting into
that right I'm curious I mean when when did
all this start for you when when do does astronomy go back to your childhood um
uh not really I I I used to look at the stars when I was a kid i' lay in the
grass um yeah but that's that's pretty much I got I was interested in
it um just one day I was like well you know I'm GNA try to take some pictures of the
moon so that was the very first thing that I uh took some asra images
of and then I was like well I want to try to take some pictures of nebula so I
remember the very first time I uh took a picture of Ryan's nabila it I was just
ecstatic uh just I was just very excited about it I had my husband out there was
like come on come on come on you gotta look you gotta look it was just a DSLR and a very cheap
telescopic uh uh lens
and after that I was hooked I was like I just want to get better and better at it you know I'm still learning I had a lot
to learn um you know I don't really have any background like uh which you know
are the fundamentals which I have not uh done anything with but star
hopping or anything like that I have one eye piece so I you know
image and that's all I do I rely on plate solving uhuh uh so one of my goals
is to you know learn the fundamentals of uh you know with star hopping and
whatnot and actually I have a couple eyepieces but I don't really use
them uh mostly astrophotographer now are you all self-taught I mean did you have
you are you working with a group of people or how did you get to where you are now I it it's just me I'm you know a
loner wow not you know associated with any groups or anything i' I'd like to
eventually you know have somebody in the area come by and or me or go somewhere
and meet up with some local folks in the area but yeah it's just me um you know
I've done everything myself I would say you've done very well
oh well thank you you've done very well so uh you know and and uh you know it's
it's great that you're sharing your experience here on global star party and uh um you know what do you hope to do I
mean aside from learning some of these Basics I mean you could you could buy like a A dobsonian or something or just
start with binoculars I guess you know um but uh what's your next goal in
astrophotography uh I really like to uh go after a very
you know I got to figure out which Target but in my field of view you know
from what I have in my front yard my backyard I can't there's trees
everywhere um but I'd like to you know go after like a really small or actually a really
large object into very large Mosaic sure um I've done
one Mosaic but that was with um my Explorer scientific telescope so
that's 952 millimeters and this meat is
2032 so it's a pretty big jump um
right and you know just sharpen the saw learn new skills and processing
techniques um you I I subscrib to Adam blocks um oh yeah uh Horizons and
fundamentals that's that's helped quite a bit and you know kind of do it on you
know a little bit at a time uh but yeah that's that's pretty
much it um let me quickly share my screen okay I don't think my plate
solving worked very well oh here it is
okay see so I'm going to I'm I'm connected to
remote desktop oh so you're doing live Imaging right now yeah right now I am oh that's
cool so yeah this is a Thor's helmet I'm still working out some see my stars are
a little funky I think I have I'm a little off on my colation um the tricky thing is for me
with the colation with and this was you know the very first uh stct that I've
owned um I'm familar with the newtonians because that was actually the first
telescope that I bought was a explore scientific uh into uh
208 the carbon fiber um so I'm familiar with you
know that type of telescope Newtonian um so it's kind of similar but I'm still
learning on the the colation um but I think you know like I said I'm a little off but I'm trying to
get a bunch of these tonight so I can do some
processing right and I have all my little programs
running in the background my guiding I'm still honing in on that too I think it's a balance
issue that I'm dealing with and I actually I'm testing out um the new the
beta firmware for for Jer Hubble tonight oh for the pmca right I haven't noticed
anything different so seems like it's doing fairly well so I can report that
back to him he'll be happy uh um Jenny for other people that
are you know uh also uh learning about astrophotography and they're doing it
alone such as you have how would you advise them I mean to kind of go along that Journey what what would you would
you tell them well I guess it depends on their
learning style um or what you know what's best for them um for people like
me they're like independent and not you know don't have the need to be
around a bunch of people um you know join bunch of Facebook
groups um listen to the you know explore scientific um
streams uh there's a lot of you know good people that you get exposed to and
and you learn something from them and uh I take a bunch of notes I have I
probably have about three or four notebooks here in front of me that I take notes
uh you know don't be afraid to fail because you will sure you'll fail
learn um don't be discouraged um keep at it if you're persistent you know
you'll you'll get better and better and you know like I said I have a lot more
to learn um but you know I'm happy to share share my
images with friends and family so this is really the first time I've really you
other than Facebook friends and family I haven't really shared any of my pictures
with anybody well I did enter the one contest for expor scientific oh there
you go that was that was a step but uh this is it's great to have you on we have uh as you know Jenny we have a u
Global audience and uh you know uh we are fortunate to have you on I hope that
uh you feel compelled to come back and share often with us so um I think it was
great yeah thank you for having me I appreciate it thank you thanks everybody
thank you so much that's great okay um well uh up next uh we go down to
Argentina uh and we've got Maxie F here and I I see Nico the hammer in the
background here um but uh Maxi thanks for coming on to a global star party uh
I think the last time we saw you um uh well the last time I saw you you
called me you called me we had a video call yeah and you were doing some work
uh down there you were on vacation I think yes I was in St Louis Province
right in poo launes and I was watching the the sunset
taking pictures with the mountains and yeah it's was a
beautiful look and well that's why I call you because I want to share with
you that moment in that place and you show me that it was amazing it was the
sunet to where you been right we were having the same Sunset two different
hemispheres yeah it was cool it was cool so well H thank you again for
inviting me Ando hello how are you I Scott Maxi ni
how are you yeah it's great to see you too well the the
last weekend ER finally week we can met with Nico and another persons
in in Alberti to do some as photo to do
observations and of course having a good time chatting
laughing making jokes and and you know ER we we thought it was like a lot
because we had some bad weather that Saturday at the afternoon it was raining
and then the clouds goes back goes out then they cover up again again but uh
the the the local weather says at the night almost 11 p.m is going to get out
of the clouds so we cross our fingers and and wait for that so let me share my
screen okay okay so we have here uh some
pictures that we took well almost that it was from Alan G this is mine that I
took with my cell phone here's Marco Santa Rosa and here's the cars and you
can see there's a lot of clouds and this type of clouds they have some rain but
here up is the moon the Cresent Moon and you can see how it looks like
in the southern hemisphere when is a a
crescent it's like when you see different way and of course here is
the sunset that we have behind the trees
and uh well this picture was taken from alanin with his I
think it was with his phone I don't remember and you see I like to see
clouds and stars yeah I just I think it's cool yeah and also if you have some
City behind you or or near they illuminate the clouds but the sky is
still dark and that's the the the the kind of Darkness or or contrast that
makes makes it love that picture I think here is Nico with his telescope
I don't remember feing up the mosquitoes
yeah there was a lot of mosquitoes here's a picture of the Moon taken by
Alan gin he was another person who was in the GSP a couple of months
ago here's a picture of the team that night yeah here's Alan
the the tremendous scope of Nico the here's Nico here's me here's
Jose Luis Sanchez and here's a friend of Nico Rodrigo I don't remember his last
name um Rolo for the friends so we take the the picture for I
think was 5 seconds and you can see here here's a a little def focus of but H the
shinye Stars it shows up here's a alpha
centuri ha and then here you have omega
centri the double close it looks like a star looks like a star it does and here
you have the the Southern Cross the the Cal box I think it called in English
and well the rest of the region of Karina
and here's an an out of selfie of Alan ging with the scope of
Nico here's the place that we been Here's the the the the school we have
the letter that say is is getting rebuilding and
restoration so uh we have a really really good night where
his the hammer time with NI that's [Laughter]
right so er well this is from other pictures
taken with Alan and well for me I was taking pictures I
want to do some pictures of the of some kind of galaxies I
bring my all my stuff I have a a huge
headaches Nico was witness but uh with almost for the the
polar alignments but then I say okay let's
take a come and start taking pictures so some place that I been it was in
GNC a 2442 this is in near in the great magia
cloud in I think the constellation
was or flying fish something like that yes it's Banes right volantis yeah and
here's the stacking of the place oh wow look at that really F
really funny night because we was observing with the Dos on the same galaxies while Maxi was taking pictures
of the that Galax it was a really nice night a really clear
night and also you you can see this kind of S letter H
oh yeah is that in forx no no it's in
volantis near near of the large magia cloud and there's a lot of galaxies too
I that everywhere the annotate annotated
picture here's the same but you can see we have a lot of P
PGC galaxies of the catalog of BGC here's NGC
and here oh down here's another one almost there
and here in this place they are really really far away
really really far away and I don't know what what could be
this I because I see it in all of the pictures but it doesn't have the
annotated place I really really don't
know so I continuing ER taking pictures I want to do some black eye Galaxy but I
only did maybe yes six pictures of that
place H this is only one single shot of 3 minutes you can see the
the Galaxy is really let me reset the histogram and that
stretch because you can start able to see
the the huge Cloud inside of this
galaxy right and this is only one single picture
and well I didn't process the it's only six pictures it doesn't enough
but maybe it was practicing and enjoying the the
night and then I went to the antennas
galaxies this is near in corvus but I don't remember the
region and this is the the finally
picture that I get let
me wow this is the two galaxies that that
Crush too many millions years ago
but H you can see the the the shape that they start to to have when I showed this
to my m mother and my wife they they say it looks like a heart
and that you can see this of stars coming out I can even
imagine how many stars
and planets and I don't know there in this arm and also in this one and what
happens then maybe the they still floating in the in the vastness of the
universe or not and some kind of this is going to happen with the Milky Way and
the Andromeda galaxy and we have to to crush with
them and also you can see there's this kind of couple of
galaxies really far away and and that's amazing I I didn't annotate this picture
but there's another one and you
know um I I want [Music]
to a long time ago I want to take pictures of this place I did it with the
dclr last year but I didn't like it so I this time I
have my Revenge Revenge Imaging yeah Astro
Imaging so to to get finally I when
niiko goes to B andan two Jose 2 I stay
out having a really good time but really cold because
we have some water in the in our tables and
scope we have a a lot of humidity and the condensation was
huge but I say no I can I have to continue in taking pictures until the
the the done and I did pictures of
M83 and let me share the result well this
is here's a the Galaxy of M A3 which
telescope did you use for this image I only have right now my 8 Ines F4
telescope Newtonian I think that I have ER to to still practice the gation
but uh anyway I I went to do some
practice see the feel of view see the colors and this is only a 14 images of
three minutes until the done and and also I have the the the second secondary
mirror it was cover with er no dust um
humidity H but I bring my my dry hair
fan and put it through the telescope to to get it dry here's a lot of galaxies
too they're really far away and this two the the
the they beside of the the Galaxy is that is
amazing uh you can see structure there too yeah I this is a really huge Galaxy
that you can see a lot of gas and dust and the structures of all this place I
did this last year with the qy monochrome and some lrgb
filters but this time I did with the ZW and M see um 5
33 color camera and only like I said a a 14
pictures stacking so well this is my presentation
and I hope that you like it I yeah I I'm really glad to to came back I see
in behind you Scott there's lot of telescope and a couple a couple there's
more in the Next Room there's there's a lot morean has my name
yes so uh Nico it's good to have you on here as well uh uh we
uh uh we've had a good time uh on our 82nd Global star party uh it was really
cool to have a lot of new people on you know that uh had not presented before um
but uh you know I I love seeing uh images from you and from both of you
guys you know you're you're always uh pushing the limits of what can be done with the equipment that you have and I
think that's I mean that's really inspiring you know so um
uh what somebody exclaimed that you know man I wish I could make an image like that you know so uh you know I think I I
wish also too that ER in the past and I'm still thinking of that because you
don't have that Limit Oh no I maybe you I I sometimes I
realize what I don't realize what kind of picture that I'm doing and also maybe
they are not very perfect but you can still continuing and there's no end you
always start learning and practicing and
you really enjoy that that um kind of travel in this experience yeah that's
right and sharing I I think that sharing this patient is the is the important
thing because you you learn you share and you inspire some other people that
maybe has a a little telescope and he thinks that he can't do as photography
or some investigation and I think the sharing is
really important and that's why I I love the GSP because I love to hang out with you and
also to to share the experience with all the people absolutely well the audience
loves it as well I think that um that uh the very Act of getting ready to share
you know or the very Act of doing Outreach like when I do these programs and stuff you know I there's times I'm
scrambling I'm I'm trying to get things done I've got somebody walking in my office I've there's a zillion things
that are going on and uh but you know just uh you getting myself ready uh to
to do some uh presentation and to work with other people like
yourselves uh that's just it's wonderful you know so um you know I think it's
very cool I think it also helps uh you know us that that uh you know in our in
our own Journey that we're kind of organizing ourselves enough to give uh
you know some information to someone else you know so um so any of you
watching out there uh you know uh I I'm very happy to have you uh give uh if
you've never given a presentation before very happy to have you give your first presentation on global star party you
know so when once I read that when when
you teach something you learn more and you learn more it's real yeah it's like
you're forced to you know yes you forc you forc yourself to
learning and reading and trying something new is is really is really
good that's right well that's wonderful so Nico what what uh what's what's Been
On Your Horizon what have you been doing have you got new images or well as as
Maxi says the the weekend we went to alberty feed up the
mosquitoes but I I bring only my dubs on because I when I go to a really dark
place I I love to enjoy observing and watching the sky I I really love that
and tonight I am here in my patio but with my 6 inch Newtonian with
my equatorial Mount I am trying up a new set of LGB filters so I am taking some
images and and learning and sharing with you right
right well that's awesome that's awesome well Maxi Nico thank you so much um you
know I want to thank all the presenters that are still uh watching and you know from from uh our broadcast or or still
uh with us here on Zoom uh and um it was a lot of fun uh and we're going to do it
again of course next week uh is the 83rd Global star party and it is the birthday
of Galileo I mean so the the guy that started all of this you know uh I have
something special for that something special that's right so um he uh you
know his his life is interesting the more I I read about Galileo the more I
find out about uh kind of the complexity of of his life and what he was trying to
do and and all the rest of it he's uh um I think if we could meet him in real
life we would see that he had uh many sides to him I think you know I think he
was kind of a complex guy but brilliant and driven and so um you know he's uh he
he is uh definitely someone that we owe a great debt of D gratitude to uh for
you know p pushing the limits as he did um uh you know he wasn't the only one trying to do it and he wasn't the only
one that did do it uh but I think that uh he would be counted among the best of
uh the astronomical Community um you know not not only from a historical
standpoint but you know from uh you know if if he was alive today and the kind of
mindset that he has and the the the hard work that he would do uh to stay at the
at the top of his voice so um so anyhow uh and I want to thank the
audience for uh all the uh uh interesting chats and remarks and uh you
know for joining in and for helping us share the global Star Party experience
um and uh until next Tuesday uh you know I'm G I'm GNA wish you uh you know clear
skies uh and you know advise you just like my friend Jack kimer would always
say is to keep looking up so yeah thanks and um good thank you and H good night
good night thank you Nathan bye bye thanks for having me thank you next time
please make sure of it okay all
right and away we
go
okay
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