Global Star Party 102

Transcript:
it is possible that we will be having peter cheddar nice but um not definitely
how's peter doing these days i haven't talked to him he was just at the adirondack astronomy
retreat and he was doing very well there [Music]
diane seem to be doing great good we're hoping to get him
and possibly as a regular participant excellent for tonight or
for me okay you mention his name and he shows up he
shows up like a genie david is second in power only to god
apparently that's right hello peter
hello everyone give me a few minutes to get things settled here i'm listening
we're listening to you we can talk about you while we're yes you sure waiting
it's been a while david since you've seen your husband it's been quite a while yeah yeah
we had some good times long ago at various places didn't we yeah
we reminded her hey peter how are you i'm pretty darn good how are you guys
still getting your lighting set up here hang on
that was when we were even sillier than we are now i think in our yeah is that even possible well you know it's
close measurement probably but yeah
all right we did we lose david uh oh he'll be back
i don't doubt that where are you right now dave iker
i am in the astronomers paradise near milwaukee wisconsin that is if
you're an astronomer who never needs to observe never you just do a radio astronomy
right you don't need clear sky i do a lot of observing when i travel you know i'm not kidding
this is not a joke you know the old saying at the office is milwaukee is a wonderful place to live as an astronomer
if you can travel enough that's right you know yeah
i do have a question for you uh david eiker yes sir how did
how did scientists arrive at the idea i know it's an incorrect idea but how do
they arrive at the idea that space had this ether in it
that is made of an ether that goes way back to the earth to the greek times
actually because the earliest models of of the cosmos which had this multitude
of concentric spheres within each other included an ether to explain things like
the atmosphere and otherwise unexplainable things like meteors and so on and things like that
so that goes back um all the way to greek times
the sort of vague philosophical hangover of an ether existing and explaining
various atmospheric phenomena which they didn't understand correctly i see and
then it lived on a long long time even you know as a relatively logical idea
before some of the crackpot ideas came up on top of it like you know
um earth is you know hollow and that kind of fun stuff that persisted all the way up into the 19th
century some of this lunacy you know before it died out even today
even today wait a minute there aren't any crazy people today are there all you have to do is watch msnbc plenty of
lunacy when you get to all those moon observer guys for three seconds yeah yeah we still haven't gotten rid of the
crazies but we're working on it
what a world we have yes
get rid of all the crazies or at least keep them out of running
things you know would be uh running i know we don't want to get political
here but jeez
you know i was in this last historical trip i took it's a good thing scott you
don't want me to talk about history because on my just on my last trip i took you know 3400 images but i was in
the room you know what one of the most important rooms you probably don't know about
is james madison's study at montpelier which is near orange virginia you know
madison and monroe also to a lesser degree were sort of adherents to jefferson so they moved and built houses
near relatively near monticello but this is the room in which it's a small
ordinary study about the size of this room with a couple of chairs and bookcases and so on and a table a work
table and that's the room in which madison supplied by books
mostly in english but some in french and other languages sent back by jefferson who was in paris at the time studied all
the law books he could and created the core of what became the u.s constitution and the bill of rights
wow you know and what they would think of what's happening recently here
with respect to what they designed holy mackerel yeah
our global star party to talk about it i think every one of you
yeah and shakespeare would be with them so david what do you think is the most
important historical moment in all of astronomy
oh i don't know i have a feeling it would be uh perhaps when galileo
looked through his little spyglass and saw jupiter and those three little stars next to it
it might have been when gersonitis invented the um jacob's staff which is a 14th century
answer to the web telescope yeah uh i think it might be when uh
a young shepherd boy named david looked up at the night sky and wrote a poem i think
so i've given you a few choices there your first statement is exactly what
came to my mind david the in the autumn in the october uh 1609
when galileo who lived near the church in which he's entombed now
um moved his newly invented telescope which he was horrified hearing about
telescopes simple telescopes being for sale on the street in paris and of course what does an academic need all
the time just ben has now more money you know so he was thinking of inventing
this himself someday rushed home and made his own first telescope in a weekend and moved
from looking at the steeple of this church in padua over to see the moon
that was his first astronomical observation yeah i would go with galileo on that and the
within the next six months he had discovered that the milky way was composed of innumerable stars the
galilean satellites the crescent phases of venus
um i'm going to interrupt for a second peter i'm going to ask you to talk about
the genesis of the stars go nova because you know the fellow that came up with the first line
and then you and i are going to do it together if that's something oh wow
we've been working on this for a couple of weeks now we've done everything except practice it so
i have no this will be this will be a historic night here yeah
this is very very famous scott have you heard this before you must have no
oh you're in for a treat maybe we're gonna see
i'll know it when i hear it
all right we are going to do
we're going to go ahead and get started here guys so here we go
for the first time ever scientists using nasa's fermi gamma-ray space telescope have found the source of a high-energy
neutrino from outside our galaxy the neutrino came from the eruption of a
supermassive black hole at the center of a type of galaxy called a blazar the eruption jetted out particles moving
near the speed of light collisions inside the jet produced gamma
rays the highest energy form of light and neutrinos ghostly particles that
rarely interact with matter 3.7 billion years later
they reached earth on september 22nd 2017 a single high-energy neutrino struck an
atom in a water molecule in the antarctic ice the crash produced a particle called a
muon it raced through the ice so fast it emitted a faint blue glow
when the muon reached the south pole it was tracked by the ice cube neutrino observatory
ice cube scientists found the original neutrino likely came from beyond our solar system they alerted astronomers to
be on the lookout for cosmic outbursts possibly associated with it
nasa's fermi gamma-ray space telescope found the source a blazar he had been watching for some
time when the neutrino arrived fermi saw the blazar was brighter than it had been
over the previous decade it's the first time a neutrino could be traced back to a black hole or to any
source beyond our immediate galactic neighborhood and it's an important step forward for a
growing field scientists called multi-messenger astronomy which combines light with new signals
like gravitational waves and neutrinos to provide new insights on the most
extreme cosmic phenomena
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hello everyone this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and you are watching the 102nd
global star party the mind cosmos connection tonight we have some very special guests
some people have never been on before including ron and teresa from the badlands
observatory uh joining us after a long hiatus is jerry hubbell and
i think wes mcdonald will be joining him as well but first we're going to get started with david levy
and his pal peter jadaki and for a very special start to the global star party
david you want to come on well thank you thank you scott and hello everybody
in addition to all the friends that i have with me hi adrian and david
uh we have one who has been a good friend of mine for many decades but uh has never been on this global
star party and i was going to tell him that this is the first global star party we've done
but that's not really true uh this is actually the 102nd
and it all started when the scottie called me and asked me if i wouldn't mind
appearing on these is over a year ago and a couple of years ago now
and doing a little poetic quote and i've done that for all but one of the global
star parties and today we're going to do something a little different i'd like to introduce you to peter
jedickey uh who is right there and who's going to tell us we're going to do a song for you
together and the song is called the stars go nova peter tell me a bit about before we do
this tell me a bit about the genesis of the stars go nova um sure
if you'd like me to talk for two hours i can do that without preparing anything
but if you want me to talk for only five minutes i will need a week to prepare something
well let's compromise about a couple of minutes for sure i think we can do that so um
i think the thing with songs started for me at the
1976 ariac general assembly when the ottawa center members
had um some songs that they sang on a bus tour and i thought what a great idea
put astronomy words to popular melodies since i can't write melodies but i sure
as heck can throw together some rhyming astronomy things so i started working on
astronomy songs and we sang them at general assemblies and cellophane and
all kinds of other things like that so that was the basic idea behind them and um
i love the idea of singing in the middle of the dark you know a dark star party because nobody can tell who you are
and you can just sing away and no one knows who you are because it's dark out that worked out fine for quite a while
okay so now this one in particular we're sitting around having dinner at a restaurant one night and a young man
named david bigelow who was a member of our rac london center in those days
we were talking about songs that we could do and david bigelow just up out of nothing
he just said the stars go nova one by one kaboom and i thought there's a song right there
so in fact david bigelow i've always given him credit whenever i uh
report on this song whenever anybody asks me about it ask me for the lyrics or whatever and a
couple years ago i did look him up he's now a teacher at a college in nanaimo
british columbia and when i told him he was famous in the astronomy world for being the co-creator
of this song he was pretty amazed because of course he hadn't heard any of that all his career
as a math teacher there at this college anyway so he was thrilled so there we go david that's the background and of
course i do like to try and put a little bit of current research in things so i
did add a fourth verse after the original three verses came out back around 1980 and um
there was actually an online version of this a group i think they're in kansas of all places a group called the big
bang band oh my gosh you know you've heard of them and it predates the tv show it predates the big
bang theory tv show so they reached out to me and said they
wanted to do this as part of their shows of course i said fine and they are available on youtube that doing this
song which is kind of cute because they kind of do it like a minstrel thing with uh pipes and little dancy things
well i'll do the first three verses with you and i'll let you handle the fourth one yourself you okay
sure okay
[Music] and from the stellar cores
do galaxies in space collide kaboom kaboom it seems they must because
they're so wide kaboom computer simulations show 500 million
years or so is what it takes for galaxies to merge
as years go by the remnant spreads but the universe is far from dead
the tedium in the interstellar medium come the molecules that make up you and me
and on that note back to you scotty wow that was awesome
i loved it i loved it maybe next week we'll have another one
well that's great so um look you're not going to hear this song on any other channel except for
the ones who listen to it right now okay so but uh that was that was wonderful
and peter and david thank you so much for sharing that uh that great tune so thank you
yeah look on on every global star party we have the
astronomical league join us you will see
different members of the executive staff that come on to
ask questions and ask questions for the upcoming door prizes and answer questions for the
winners of the last round of door prizes and
you know it's it's wonderful to have these guys on the astronomical league is largely run by volunteers
as it has been done so i guess for 75 years and
they every year have an event called the astronomical league convention
there was some pause that happened during covid but
nevertheless they still decided to keep it going virtually and then this last one we were at
was a hybrid event where you know i got to go in with them and we ran part of it
streaming part of it in person so it was pretty cool to see all that go
down and they had an incredible lineup of speakers like uh the likes of which you can't imagine so
um so i'm looking forward to the next one which will be down in um
in the uh in near it's not new orleans i don't think
baton rouge baton rouge okay there you go louisiana
so anyhow i'm going to turn this over to don nab don thank you for coming on to the 102nd global star party here glad to
be here and i'll start my slides in a moment but first i want to show you know the first
slide will be about solar observing the astronomical league and all amateur astronomers and professional
astronomers take safety very seriously so there was this article
i think i may have shown this last time along with in the current reflector which all astronomical league members get so we really take that but seriously
so let me uh let me start my my slides i will find it here and share my screen
which would be this one and i will start my slideshow
coming through okay it is at that yes okay so again we
always start with the warning that the sun has to be properly filtered you can't can't shortcut this
and you can't use welder's glass or a filter on an eyepiece it'll melt right through many
times uh you can't leave it unattended you have to use the right kind of filter
on the objective lens and uh uh or where eclipse glasses to view it
just naked eye so you know if you're not sure don't do it ask for help okay
you can go blind immediately all right so here is from august 11th
the questions that were asked and there you can see up here in the middle this is the new
emblem for the uh the baton rouge outcome 2023 that is put up there
so perseverance recently spotted mars moon phobos eclipsing the sun
watching such events help scientists do what and the answer was watching this event helps them understand how the
moon will spiral into mars in the distant future and there's the image of uh
phobos eclipsing the sun what is this we've been all over the
news this is uh the black hole at the center of our galaxy sagittarius a
and what's another name for v v where's that w no it's vb6a9
and the answer is angel wing so these are the uh the winners
cameron gillis shaw corey and dave knew
normally my name's up there too but uh my wife and i were camping last week we were off the grid with almost no
internet service so i couldn't even watch the show but uh i'll probably get on next week
so questions for this week and i'll take my time here because we always hear that we go too fast so uh
number one what are the only two planets in our solar system without moons
is that venus and mars or jupiter and saturn or mercury and venus
and always we want you to send your answers within the next day or two to secretary
at astrology.org send them to uh to terry mann so the
only two planets without moons the nurse and mars jupiter and saturn are mercury and venus
of my favorite clusters in the uh the summer night sky who named messier 11 the wild duck cluster
this is up in uh upper left of sagittarius
and it's a it's a very small open cluster it almost looks like a globular but it's not it's an open cluster
uh was it admiral smith charles messier or edwin hubble
who named the wild type cluster i don't see the wild ducks in there but somebody did one of these three did i'm not sure how
admiral smith charles messier or edwin hubble
and thirdly uh won three celestial bodies align what's the term used for
the condition when three celestial bodies are arranged in a straight line and here's an example a solar eclipse
sun moon and earth so what we call is that a triplex
an apparition or is that syzygy which are those three triplex apparition
or syzygy so uh again send answers to secretary askwith.org
as soon as you can the day a day or two and uh then we'll see who came up with the right answers
next week and lastly is this uh announcement about the uh september 16th
i think it's a friday usually they are i have to check uh the next astronomical league live
brett maynard doing preparing for a night of image capture and usual a lot of the contributors
carol or terry mann john goss scott roberts and david levy will be there so uh
they're always wonderful so back to you scott
okay thank you very much don that's great um okay i think let me
remove the spotlight here there we go um our next speakers here
well our next speaker will be david eicher from astronomy magazine david has been uh
taking us through uh the universe he's taking it across us across uh our own planet with uh crystals and
minerals and um uh we didn't have a lot of time to talk about his program today but uh
david what what uh what what do you have in store for us
and you are muted sorry about that can you hear me okay hear you now yes okay okay
i looked i took a look at the schedule and what we've been talking about and it suddenly dawned on me that for at least
two years i think we haven't talked about meteorites so this week and next i was going to talk in two parts again
about rights and and show some images there wonderful
so i'll take it away take it away and thank you scott and i will share my screen and i will see if i can start a
show and you should be seeing oh something yes beautiful palette let me see if i can
start the slideshow and can you see that okay yes that's an
incredible specimen look at that well everyone loves meteorites in the
astronomy field and this is where we've been talking for a long time about all sorts of classes of minerals on earth
which is how the universe builds planets planetary geology but here's where geology and astronomy merge with
meteorites and and we can hold pieces of the solar system uh that are not from
earth in our hands and look at them and talk about them and talk about chemistry and and all that
sort of thing and meteorites are mostly of course pieces of asteroids but some of
them come from other uh somewhat more exotic places as well this is an interesting palestine here which i'll
get to later but tonight i was going to talk about the relatively plentiful and often ordinary ones which are the
stony meteorites next week i'll talk about this the somewhat more complex ones
so how did we get going with this whole concept of stones falling out of the sky and hopefully not hitting us in the head
well in 1492 a stone fell from the sky in what is now enzysheim france and this
was one of the most famous early meteorite falls but the problem is that
no one believed that rocks could be falling from the heavens and we talked earlier about these concentric circles
and the idea of what was up there above earth's atmosphere that lingered on for
many centuries from greek ideas of not understanding the
distance scale and the enormous uh size of even the solar system so the idea
that rocks could be falling out of the sky onto earth's surface seemed crazy for a long long time well
that famous early fall led to an another major one that
was really hard to to ignore because it was witnessed by many many people
and that happened also in what is now france in normandy at a place called liegelei
which is the french word for eagle that happened in 1803 and it converted
many skeptics because uh three thousand stones fell into the region there and
that was a little bit harder to uh justify in in another uh non-magical way
so and then just a few years later in the united states in 1807 there was a
a fall that convinced a lot of people that this had to be really occurring and especially the american scientists at
the time there were three very loud booms and then a shower of stones cascaded down centered over what's now
western connecticut and that changed many people's minds that this phenomenon
had to be real and it wasn't a hoax or something strange going on and this was uh studied very
meticulously by a chemist and a professor of natural philosophy as
they were called at the time at yale university benjamin silliman who became a very famous early american scientist
uh and there's a mineral jumping back to minerals called sillimanite that's named after him uh now and and he analyzed
them carefully and then the sort of traction that meteorites were real and there could be stones falling out of the
sky uh was generally pretty accepted now we know of more than 40 000 falls or
fines of meteorites and they're broadly classified in three types stony stoney
iron and iron and there are many many complexities within those categories of course of
classification we won't get into all that stuff tonight or next week but but we'll look at some examples of
them and talk about some of the interesting kinds and it's really a neat thing because you can hold pieces of the
distant solar system and even some uh atoms and compounds that are older than
earth that we're on here in your hand with some of these so it's pretty cool meteorites of course for the most part
are pieces of asteroids and the most exotic of them uh are lunar there there
are more than 370 lunar meteorites known now
and that's the best way to have a moon rock in your own collection is to get a lunar meteorite unless you're willing to
break into the johnson space center which i don't recommend um and there are
175 falls now that are known to be martian meteorites and of course the lunar and
martian exotic types uh are we'll get into this next week in more detail but
but they're known their origin is known because of the analysis of the
flavors if you will um the the isotopes of oxygen and other elements that are
locked up within these crystals and comparing them to the apollo samples that were returned or in the case of
mars to the nc2 analysis of martian rocks by the
vikings and later spacecraft
so just very very broadly the kinds of meteorites you could do hours on
meteorite classification but to keep it very simple here the broad classes are stony meteorites which represent the
mantles of asteroids the outer part of parts of asteroids and they're in two
big general classes chondrites which have so-called chondrules in them which
are little grains that you can see of melted and solidified droplets from the
early days of the solar system overall they're not modified as a whole
by global melting or differentiation achondrites however the other big class
do not have chondrules thus the name and they are differentiated and reprocessed similar
to terrestrial basalts or plutonic rocks and they're a little bit rarer
types then there's stony iron meteorites like the palestine we looked at uh
on the first slide there and they represent the boundary material between
the mantle and the cores of asteroids so they consist of nearly equal parts of
meteoric iron and silicates usually a mineral called forsterite uh which is it
comes from a it's the most common type of a mineral from the class that's that's called olivine broadly uh the
olivine group and jewelers often call this beautiful yellow greenish
jammy mineral peridot uh and it's typically it consists of a
spectrum of impurities if you will of other elements but it's typically broadly magnesium silicate
and what happened is that these olivine crystals uh in within the asteroids uh
sank to the boundary of the core and the mantle uh and rafted there do what
geologists call rafted and and that locked them up uh in a sort of a co-equal balance with the iron nickel
that's in these very beautiful mineral meteorites that can be cut and worn or
displayed and so on then we have the somewhat common uh but not nearly as as
common as stones iron meteorites they're they represent the core material from
asteroids the very dense iron nickel they're metallic they have roughly
this varies a good deal more than was thought years ago but they're generally
speaking about 90 percent iron and roughly 7 although it can be greater
nickel and there are other trace elements as well and as far as meteorite collecting goes we'll talk about this
more next week but there's a warning with iron meteorites and that is what does happens
to iron stuff oh david has one here he's showing us an iron meteorite ring
and the only danger risk there to collectors of course meteorite collectors have to have all
types of course but iron meteorites over time require some maintenance
because what does oxygen which is very valuable to us like to do but to react
with things and so eventually over time iron meteorites rust but there's a way you can get around that we'll talk about
that next week and then there are the exotic kinds even though they're stones we'll talk about them next week as well
because we're going to look at so many other types of stones tonight and those are the lunar and martian
meteorites which are very valuable and very rare compared to ordinary stones so there's a
huge spectrum you can go to the tucson gem and mineral show in david's backyard
every february there that happens for several weeks you can go to the munich
mineral show or other places as well there are many many good and trustworthy and reliable
meteorite dealers as well and get common simple meteorites for five dollars for a small specimen
all the way up to i've seen it tucson lunar large lunar meteorites uh
hand-sized lunar meteorites for sale with a marked with you know not with
don't ask unless you can afford anything which is sometimes what they say price on request but a marked price of two
hundred thousand dollars so the range of collectors here is is across a big
spectrum which makes it easy to get into this stuff regardless of your
uh level and depth of interest so we'll look at some stones tonight this is a slice of a very
common stone nwa is a very common abbreviation which stands for northwest
africa because so many of these meteorites are found by locals and it's not known exactly where they're found
often in northwestern african deserts so whether it be morocco or algeria or
elsewhere they get an nwa number usually this is a pretty common one but a good size piece and you can see the
chondrules the bits of what were formerly in the early days of the solar system uh molten droplets of material
that then cooled and solidified within this meteorite this was one that was found in algeria in 1999.
this is a relatively well um known famous meteorite and and this is
one that shows that complete is a complete little stone and it's really brightly illuminated here i just took
these photos last night again um because why not you know take new photos of things all day but this is one that has
a really rich black fusion crust in ordinary lighting it's called camel donga
and it's from a region in western australia uh and is an unusual type it's
called a ukrite uh this stone and it was found in 1984 and this is one that's
somewhat treasured because of its very rich black fusion crust meteorites are
not warm they're not hot when they hit the ground if you could instantly pick one up when it lands
but they do go through a very brief uh superheating through the through earth's
atmosphere and get this black fusion crust which is one way that to differentiate them from earth rocks uh
in regions where some meteorites have fallen here's a very famous one this is a four
centimeter piece of chelyabinsk you may remember the the most famous moment for
uh window windshield mounted uh cameras
when the chelyabinsk meteorite fell in 2013 and and many many stones
were recovered in russia this is a decent little sized piece of it
um and i remember at the tucson gem show the russian dealers claiming you know on
swearing on a stack of bibles at one point in 2014 at the tucson show there
were more chelyabinsk meteorites in tucson than there were left in russia i
don't know if that was true or not but that's what they claimed trying to all make a lot of money off of this recent
very famous fall this is the outside of a little stone of chelyabinsk that was recovered there and
this is the inside of the same piece and you can see the mineralogical difference of the the
fusion crust there which is pretty brightly illuminated here um but also
the inside and the the stone which is a kind of basalt like
rock in here from that chelyabinsk fall
this is one that uh the favorite meteorite of chicagoland uh some years ago in 2003 called park forest that fell
and broke up uh above chicago and uh got some famous press there this is a fairly
uh small piece but a nice slice of that meteorite showing you the internal
composition there and this is one of the most perhaps the
most studied meteorite uh that there is ian day in mexico there were two very famous
1969 was a tremendously good year for important meteorite falls this was one
of the two very important ones allende and this contains it's a very primitive early
meteorite meteorites that come from far away from the main belt much farther out
in the kuiper belt and farther out in the solar system are more primitive and
they're older generally speaking and they're called carbonaceous chondrites and this one is of the most famous of
all the carbonaceous chondrites and you can see in it these little white uh
blobs and again these are bits of what were liquid molten material in
the early solar system and they solidified and and as they cooled and these are called calcium aluminum
inclusions and are some of the earliest bits of material that we have from the
solar system that do predate earth so this is an important one that has very primitive matter
in it this is an even rarer one now in terms of a primitive
carbonaceous chondrite because of the amount that fell this is the other 1969
famous fall it was a good year for for organics in meteorites as well this is
murchison which is an australian fall this is a pretty small piece of it but it's pretty rare stuff
and it also fell later in 1969 and it was the first meteorite that was recovered that was studied and known to
contain uh about half a dozen amino acids the most common amino acid is
glycine and and there were some others in it as well and these are if you will
uh organic compounds that are uh constituents of proteins and therefore
are thought pretty widely to be some of the more primitive organic compounds that are essential for life
and we have a lot of these things in us now as well it's also some of the oldest material
the merchants and meteorite that we have on earth that predates earth
as well and the the accretion of earth so this is old time solar system stuff and then
we get even older if you want to as well this again is a pretty small sample of quite a rare meteorite called tagish
lake that's canadian this is a one centimeter very small piece but it's the most primitive
carbonaceous chondrite of them all and it fell in 2000 there were about 10 kilos recovered it's
possibly linked uh spectrally to an asteroid called uh irmantrod
um but what is known is it has the most pre uh um
it has uh atoms and molecules of the most primitive matter known uh that that are
constituents of pre-solar stellar dust grains so this is stuff that
goes back to the era of the formation of the sun before the sun's ignition wow this is really
about as old as you can get that we know of at least thus far of
material that we can hold in our hand on earth they're crazy that's
david i i'm curious how do they uh how did they know
that there were amino acids in there are they are they do they do like some uh they
cut it they measure it with like some sort of uh gas um
or or s spectrally or how do they do it yeah you have a variety of chemical and
physical analyses that now can be done to to um that's that's chromatographic
and and also looking at the elemental composition of things uh with very expensive uh lab
equipment um and so you can look at a a a an inventory of of the atoms that
make up a piece and study the molecules that are in a piece and also look at
compounds like amino acids that are fairly complex compared to really small
things uh but can be identified through their spectra and and through
um essentially destroying a little piece of it and then analyzing the result
uh through a variety of equipment these meteorites are
far rarer than any diamond i would imagine yeah they're rarer than diamonds and remember diamonds were one of the
they're rare because they're hard to find largely but um diamonds were one of the first 12
or so minerals in the solar system uh and and their diamonds are rarer subsequently
than gold gold is rare and treasured because it's really hard to find as well but there's a lot of gold and a lot of
diamonds exist although they haven't all been found of course they're hard to find um compared to this kind of material
yeah now more people are interested in gold and diamonds than having a taggish lake meteorite specimen so the market
drives the value of things you know as well but in terms of in terms of the true scarcity of stuff this stuff is
really scarce yeah incredible yeah um
so then this one milba lily which is another famous australian fall this fell in 1960 and and about a
thousand kilos it's reasonably plentiful um were found and this is something that
we're really you talk about identifying compounds and molecules and atoms that
are constituents of matter and this was something that was in its early days uh 60 years ago
but now if enough money institutional money can be thrown at it it's pretty straightforward
to analyze substances like that technologically but we're in the very
early days still with meteorites of determining where most of them come from
because we're looking at things that are broken up and mixed and heated and recrystallized and this and that over
long long long periods so it's a tremendous puzzle the origin of
meteorites yes asteroids and the moon and mars but the specific parent bodies
of meteorites that's a very tricky and difficult problem to try to eke out that we're in
the very early days of however there's a class of somewhat rare meteorites called
the hed meteorites and we'll look at some of those maybe next week as well
that have very specific properties and spectral signatures and
they match this one included milba lily these calcium-rich ukrites uh the e and
h-e-d this class uh they match the spectrum
of the asteroid one of the most famous asteroids there is and that is vesta so these are believed to be bits of
vesta that were broken off and a long long long long time later made their way
down to earth's gravitational field and ended up uh some of them in australia and in other
places so we were on the cusp of beginning to figure out for some of these
where they came from but that's a very difficult problem
here's one that we do know where it came from and that's because this is a historical first in meteorite science
this is called el mahata sita and this came from a wonderful dealer who's very
well known at tucson and in the field called anne black she had a large amount of this material
this is a again a small piece but this is rare stuff this is uh named from a region uh that
means uh um the it basically means a rail station in the
middle of nowhere el mahata sita um uh from the sudanese desert
and this fell on october 7 2008 they were about six kilos recovered of this
stuff not a tremendous amount and the thing that makes this really neat is that it was discovered the the
incoming asteroid it's called 2008 tc3 was discovered and tracked by the boys
in tucson by the way on mount lemon as it was coming in and then witnessed
the fall and recovered in the sudanese desert so this was the first time ever
that a small piece of an asteroid was seen on its way in to collide with earth
and then subsequently recovered and that's quite remarkable
this is a fairly famous one because of its kind of high iron content which
colors it green with this kind of weirdo green look these are fairly small bits
that are about a centimeter and smaller in size but these i'm kind of proud of
because when i went on an expedition to tunisia with a group from astronomy magazine in 2011 we went to the tata
queen field uh strewn field and i found these and we were there with the director of
the the geological museum in tata queen who blessed us looking for some small
pieces of it this fell in 1931 and so these are the only meteorites that i
personally have found and incorporated into my collection this is also by the way the origin of tata
hawine is also vesta it's also in this h-e-d
d for diagonite group this time you also chose a very good date to find
that march 23rd my favorite date yeah
david tell us well march 23rd is my favorite date for
a number of reasons it is than the day that wendy and i got married ah
it is the date that i first saw clyde tombaugh's variable star in outburst
and finally it is the night that we took the two discovery pictures of comets you make her leaving eyes oh
wow but while i've got your attention i'd like to ask you a question
um regarding the iron and nickel meteorites tending to
the one that i was showing you yes this one is a um
is a gibeon yes right and it is partly iron and partly nickel but it's been
outside in the rain and in the snow and we drove over it with a truck
and everything and it has never ever rested and they say that the nick content is
pretty high in this is that true for the given yes you're absolutely right about that
gibeon is among the the densest and hardest
and also with a very high nickel content i mentioned this business of ninety percent iron and seven percent nickel
but it actually varies a good deal in some cases up to almost 20 percent nickel
and i think you're right gibeon has a high percentage of nickel which makes it sturdier so you'll see
rings and watches and pendants and other things often cut from gibeon because it's also
plentiful and and very sturdy uh compared to many of the iron meteorites
so you're exactly right david and maybe just maybe some david levy oil wearing it all the
time maybe actually protects it from some oxidation a little bit
you know but but we'll talk next week there's a secret for for the more uh susceptible iron meteorites we'll talk
about how you if you really love your ion meteorites your typical ion meteorites that are a little less
durable than gibeon what you need to do every five years or so is bake them
in an oven and then coat them with a varnish so we'll talk about that next week when we get to irons but you're
absolutely right david gibeon is probably the sturdiest of of and most
resistant of iron meteorites and it's pretty plentiful too yeah it was a big
fall and they're all it's very very easy to get yep they're really easy to get
relatively inexpensive and this is actually my wedding ring
wow well what stories you have connected to gibeon and also to march 23rd
yeah wow that's fantastic david
even more remarkable he drove over it with a truck and yet it didn't wilt or uh break that also
i'm sure represents your marriage no it wasn't a truck adrian it was the um
the launcher that moved the apollo and shuttles oh
launchpad we put the ring underneath that and we have the launcher drive over it a few
times and if you believe that i'll sell you a brie is your timex watch also in there
yeah timex watch the hell with timex watches let's get david into a commercial
[Laughter] just kidding everyone
okay so david eicher is sharing his screen right now so we can't see david's ring uh david levy's ring but uh after
after towards the end of this uh program we'll have david show his ring up close so and i'm just about done here
scott with part one of of meteorites so there was tatahuin and then there's one
more that's sort of an ordinary chondrite but it's a night shows you a nice slice someone with a meteorite saw
you know and you can see i think probably the the little uh indentations from the saw blade here
this is back to another fairly ordinary one but it shows you what a nice uh typical stony meteorite slice
looks like this is nwa 91 which is a moroccan which is a huge numbers of meteorites have been
found uh by moroccan you know kids running around in the desert and they win the you know ebay contest of the
week and make some coin there so thank goodness for that and and that that's it and i will just quickly
mention scott if i may we're on the cusp of two big things in my world
one of them is starmus we're about to go a couple weeks from now and maybe we'll even do a little reporting from armenia
if we can yeah there and we'll have all kinds of fun people giving talks and playing some rock and roll there and all
kinds of fun there uh and then also uh we're uh about uh oh
three weeks or so away from the release of the book a child's introduction to space exploration by myself and the
distinguished fellow tucson resident david michael bockitch
there we produced this and and so that was fun for us so anyway that's part one
of dancing through the meteorite world and i'll do the final part of it next week
again if i can absolutely absolutely i love meteorites so
yeah very excited to hear about more of those uh and it caused me also to look up and
black's website um called impact
impact impact tica is in black she's in denver and of course our pal jeff notkin
is in tucson there who who has aerolite meteorites ae aerolite uh and and their
me and mike farmer is there in tucson as well many many uh great meteorite uh
dealers from which you can get great specimens yes right and they are reasonably priced
so they can be very inexpensive but if you insist on having you know you know i'll tell you well no maybe i'll save a
story for next week but okay if you want to have if you want to have a you know a piece of the moon or or mars that you
can you know hold up in your hand and it's reasonably chunky you're going to have to bring what they say when you go
to tucson every year bring all the money you can and more
and more that's the slogan of the tucson knocking off some banks on the way
right yeah it's where everyone is happy if you're a collector you know with your wonderful collection except for your
banker you know that's right that's never talks to you again
um excellent okay so let's take a good look at uh david levy's
ring here yeah you want to put that up close to the lens there
maybe go ahead and show us your ring there we go oh there it is
a true meteorite lover and his ring
yeah beautiful now for those of you who still believe that the apollo saturn transporter
ran over it um peter you'd believe this we got into the
transporter and drove it over and under and back and forth over the ring and it never squashed
and if any of you still believe that you shouldn't be at the global star party anyway
what is true is that i've lost this ring a couple of times and once
was out in the observatory for a couple of months it never got rained on but it did
was exposed to a lot of dampness and uh before i found it
and uh it has never rested i really love this well it also has the super power of
david h levy with it though that's right that's right a very impressive
superpower indeed [Laughter] well wonderful well thank you very much both
of you guys and uh up next is um uh adrian bradley with his uh
incredible uh awe-inspiring nightscapes all right well first
i will um i'll start by showing a close-up of
my rubbery not so impressive wedding ring
but as we've learned it too is made of star stuff so
uh everything ultimately is everything ultimately is so if that's what makes me feel better
about my um ring well the fact that i've gotten back into athletics i catch for hardball
um so if i have this on this doesn't impact me as much if i'm catching
someone who can throw the ball pretty good but um so i wanted to start with that because i
didn't want to feel left out and i'm going to share my screen with an
image um that i think sums up the um the words that were a part
of our star party um the cosmos is within us we are made of star stuff we
are a way for the universe to know itself and i think this image
shows that in action with a few of photographers from um a group that i'm a part of came to
another astronomy group that i'm a part of the university low-brow astronomers this is our
observatory you can barely see our telescope here as it's open i'll
find another good image of that telescope for you later
but here we are staring up and the center of the milky way tends to
represent although there's all of these stars here um
it turns out to be the galactic center that tends to draw the most attention especially for
those of us that do a lot of nightscapes so this is sort of to me it's sort of a
metaphor of the universe trying to understand itself as we look up at the milky way
really quickly i'm going to zoom into this region here um
david you actually started me on a quest through my images
when let me pull it up fades window your latest newsletter
is about bait's window and that window it's exists here
within the part of the galaxy and it's also interesting is that there's this region
called sweeps which i have to look up really quickly sagittarius window eclipsing extra solar planet search
which um if wikipedia is right then in 2006
is when they um did that survey you can see where the sweep survey was
in this region of the milky way and in this region
where this star of sagittarius is in this region is where and i don't know
if i'm pronouncing it correctly it's a german name bade or or bad or bod
there's i'm gonna go with bait but i'm willing to be corrected down the road
but within this region where these two stars are um
which belong to sagittarius you can see the main stars of sagittarius here you can see m22 is
here and m8 the lagoon and even some of the triffid
and as i've talked about in previous star parties the longer your exposure and the more
detail you get the more interesting stuff you can find here and so it left me wondering
let's just suppose let's just suppose we're doing a pretty
picture to put on the wall something like this um these are likely satellites and not so
much um in fact they may be geosynchronous and not so much uh meteors here but even
in a pic excuse me even in a picture like this where we're going for beauty more so
than accuracy we still have a fairly visible region this bright
region here um where the sweeps was conducted
bade's window is still you can still see the area here and
to describe it it's a window within all of this cosmic dust and
um and things blocking our view of the center of the galaxy but
if you train your telescope through here um you're looking all of this light
right here you're looking at starlight that is close to the galactic center it
it forms a window of sorts into the center of our galaxy
so when uh so reading that newsletter newsletter article
by uh dr levy my who also my dear friend david
um it gave me another perspective on all the images i look all the time at um
landscape astrophotographers who focus really hard on trying to make
this as beautiful as possible and all they ask of the sky is just to be in
focus sometimes even small star trails will do as long as the composition works
for my side i tend to make sure that this is accurate and lately i've paid a little more
attention to the foreground but i'm known for taking pictures like this
where it's just an observatory and trees this is the night after all
the photographers were there and here you have the lone milky way by
itself in a panorama here's one of those meteors coming in but
generally isn't going to make it to her so we'll never know what this is unless
by the type of uh streak in the color of the streak maybe tells us what type of
meteor and that's something uh david if you're listening um i may ask about that um at a later time
but um once again now we see a little more detail
there are a couple of globular clusters that are a part of
the um updates window
and those two if i can find their names
uh i believe i can find them here with um the description this this url
right here is a pretty good description of who wilhelm heinrich walter bade was and um
and in this region there's many more things that um
that this gentleman is known for in astronomy this little piece talks about
um bade's window and one of the globular clusters the brighter one is ngc 6522
there is another one there um which i believe is 6528
two globular clusters and you probably won't believe me but
the light from those globular clusters is where my hand is that's 65 28
and that's 65 22. if this was shot with 35 millimeters
um for 30 seconds and then
stitched together in a 20 panel panorama just enough light at this location
to get light from those globular clusters as well as some of the surrounding stars and the dark nebula
appears here so it's it makes your
milky way shots go from just being really interesting to learning some using them
to learn something about what it is you're shooting at and if you can take a more detailed
image you see even more you see even more goodies here the dust
lanes that surround and that are around the window
here we zoom in and see if we can pick up okay these globular clusters are a little brighter
now 65 28 65 22 here's the area known as bade's window
this is where the sweeps um field and interesting enough when you image
the center of the galaxy this region tends to ex if you expose long enough
this tends to be the brightest part of the region the region known as bade's window is
here if i'm not mistaken it's this entire area um
so there's even excuse me i'm just not done eating so
um a lot to discover
you know i've always been a proponent that when imaging the milky way
it can be more than just a pretty picture of the galaxy there's there's things you can learn about it
things like how long the the rest of uh the lagoon nebula extends
out this way and when you can image with a small
aperture such as a 35 millimeter lens and begin to get dust lanes into trifid
you know that you're pretty sharp um and i think i've walked up the milky way
before but a challenge to us northern hemisphere shooters is to get i've seen this called the
lobster claw there had there's another colloquial name for it um unfortunately
the ngc numbers of these two nebulae um pass
pass me by i have to look them up um but getting them can be a challenge in
the northern hemisphere seeing is that there this is the area where light pollution domes tend to rise up so
these tend to be covered your milky way shots in the northern hemisphere stop at
where you can see m6 here and you can see m7 but you've got the cat's paw nebula and
the a part of the lobster claw this one it doesn't have the same form
you know it's not a definite but you can see the light here any camera modified
to allow more h.a um emissions that it'll pick up and assign it a color
within red very similar to what the james webb does reassigns rgb colors
um the visual colors that we can see basically slides those colors over to
um wavelengths in the infrared and then starts it all over with the near
infrared being blue all the way to the far infrared the most distant of things we can see
then gets the dark red the dark reddish color so the your own dslr can do the same thing
it assigned these nebulae which give out emissions in an infrared or you know h
alpha spectrum it gave those the color so then we see him in our image
and then over here the beginnings of the royal fiuki complex it takes a lot longer exposure i
believe to get the blue to really come out here the glow of antares shows up and there's
the shape of messier 4. and because of my processing
you know there's some extra lines here these planes did show up and photobomb
this image but a lot of good things still showed up
and um this this is one of the smaller galaxies i
i won't guess the number the number 6277 is coming to my mind but don't quote me
on that one but smaller globular cluster for visual
astronomers there are plenty of things in here maybe not these two but plenty of
clusters for you to look at m23 came out pretty well here
my noise reduction software is what turned from small circles
and kind of gave it the look but it also it made the entire part of the galactic core stand
out um as part of an image so there's a balance between scientifically showing m25 in its shape
versus showing you know an entire picture
really quick when you can see the shape of the swan in m17 the swan or the shape of the
omega symbol here and again 35 millimeter image you know
that you're doing a pretty good job these dust lanes here have um i think these are barnard
objects these particular dust lanes so i find it important not just shooting the milky way but trying to learn what you
can about some of the things in there now there's definitely more scientific significance to these images
and or the these objects and what they are studied for um
supernova remnant is a part of the cat's paw nebula so it's study so they don't just make pretty images
but sometimes they do and you go back and you work on your
entire presentation this is an image that took runner up i went back and
reprocessed it to make sure i could keep all of the detail but i wanted to do a
little bit better job of showing what the park looks like without halos which
despite a runner-up finish i did have some halos here this time i was able to
blend it with less of a halo and show a little more of what the land out there
looks like the milky and more natural colors to what we see with
our eyes for the milky way and here you have somebody observing and moving around so
he captured all his movements during the two minutes of um imaging
of the ground here so we um so we redid this and this is this is
another one of those images that despite all the haze you're seeing here we're still able to get
some pretty good clarity on the number of the stellar objects that are along the plane of this galaxy so it's and at
a portal one site some of these things show up naked eye like m6 m7 m8
um you can see some of these regions you may not see the bright pinkish color that my camera
puts on them but you see the bright clusters that are involved
within each of these and you can you see those naked eye at a high mortal to or a portal 1 zone
here you can barely see it at all but if you image it it shows up and it shows up in the
picture and so a couple more that i redid
interesting enough i barely got any detail here this is with an older lens
um i was still able to get some detail the uh bottom turns the the uh el saba
river turns into kind of a foreground for it more of a
more of a pretty picture here um still can see barnard's e
and the wild duck that we were just uh
talking about i wanted to make sure i wasn't gonna give any answers away um this is where the wild duck cluster
is within the plane in the milky way um so even even though it looks kind of
like a fuzzy oblong shaped star this is the actual
cluster now i can't with a 14 millimeter lens it's gonna appear just as much as a star as these others
are um but that's the cluster so
finally adrian yeah adrian zoom back there it looks like that asterism is pretty interesting
it looks like a bowl wear it jerry roll it zoom in right there where your cursor's at okay see
the asterism there with the stars yeah it looks like a bowl right here
like a string of pearls yeah doesn't this have a a name
uh jerry i think that does i don't know i think it does and uh uh again some more uh homework for me
to look up i think there's a name for that asterism and yeah it does look like a bowl so when you're visually observing
and if it's wide enough you can look for that bowl and then you'll find m11 right here
where my hand is now and if i leave it there this gives you an idea of how high up
along the plane of the uh center of the galaxy here how high up
you should go to try and find it and then this great rift right here
which includes the cygnus rift is off screen oh look i think it's yeah we just missed
the cygnus rift i think but here this is a great rift that shows up pretty nicely
in this image um it's a dark area um along the uh plane of the galaxy
just blocks everything except the coat hanger which is always
one of my favorite and favorite star clusters to see if i
capture as well as this little dark nebula which we call barnard's e
in most if you have just enough precision in your milky way photos this shows up
next to tarzad the star i do remember the name of this star um real quick story i think i'm running
low on time so i'll hurry up but the star tarzan we had somebody named whose
daughter was named tara that wanted us to come and show them the uh stars i showed him a picture like this
pointed at this star put the name tarzan on it and said this is your daughter's star it carries your daughter's name
and we can't come out it was during during the height of the pandemic so we
decided not to come out to their personal party but we did send them this image and said this is for your daughter
so milky way photography isn't necessarily for awards
or likes on facebook or instagram you can use your images to make someone
make someone happy who um is interested in the star stuff that we are made of
and so it's it's one way i like to use the images i definitely love sharing them here
in global star party i believe this is the well the last of two images i'll show you this one which was a reprocess
of the milky way over this heavily lit area
just to let you know even if there is a lot of light in your area as long as it's not shining
directly in your face it's still possible to get detail in a milky way photo
it does not have to be pristine dark you just have to this was a single shot you aim at the
sky um and you use your processing to split out
some of the light that bleeds in into the sky here um this area is pretty dark i would say
somewhere between a high border four and a and a um
portal three um maybe i should say low border 4 to high
border 3 like 3.8 or 3.6 or something so the sky this was visible although i couldn't see
any detail um the structure of the milky way was visible and it was visible as a white
ribbon and once again this area a little brighter than the others bait's
window shows up in any milky way shot even when they
blend all of this out as a part of their processing to where you can't even see these nebulae you still see
babes window as a part of those images
and quick note before i turn it back over to you scott
this picture as well as another picture of the aurora will be in this brightly lit house over
here that's the gift shop for the point oh bark lighthouse park okay and they
they were happy to see pictures like this of their park at night yes and
probably uh probably might encourage them to turn off more lights more often so
they did they actually said they except for the lighthouse they they kind of need that one but they gave me a way to
turn off these other lights and they were open to an astronomy night where they would turn
off all of the lights except for the lighthouse fantastic and let people look at the night sky so i will be pursuing
that and updating everyone on when we can do that if we can't do that this
during this camping season we'll look to do it um sometime um next year
so definitely in the works to have a night sky star party here at this park
and very happy to report that i was glad they loved seeing the images so yeah
it's great so once your work's inspiring people to do that so yeah it's fantastic
okay all right so um at this point
we're going to bring on jerry hubble who has not been with us
for a while there were people hearing jerry's voice out there and really excited to hear it
jerry thanks for coming on to global star party with us i see you're still at that
star party that's right i live here i live here at the at the almost heavy star party it's a
perpetual thing it's amazing yeah the shadows haven't changed anything i mean
the weather's always the same it's like california it's always the same weather that's right but we're also going to
bring on um ron and teresa from the badlands observatory you two you three
have been working together uh along with wes mcdonald so four of you uh let me let me bring you all on let me
get out of here myself all right so i'm gonna pull myself off and wes uh you
are now on okay and uh it's great to see everyone here
so um uh i think that uh
uh you know jerry and ron and teresa and wes have gotten to know each other pretty well
but uh um jerry why don't you introduce them and uh
give a little background about badlands so this is this is oh yeah i'll let the
teresa and ron talk but this is ron divig and teresa hoffer of the badlands observatory which is
located oddly enough near the badlands in in south dakota
so that's that's not a coincidence by the way so um so yes so ron contacted me last
at the beginning of the year to do some work with them on the observatory and i'm going to let uh ron and theresa talk
about that and talk about their observatory but uh we basically did an upgrade for
their mount control system on their big 24-inch newtonian and it was a really good project for us
at explorer scientific and for me personally it's a good challenge and wes uh was heavily involved with it
wes mcdonald my buddy there right uh he's in the shadows um
he uh he helped a lot i mean he i i don't know how many people have heard but i've had some medical issues over
the last few months that i've been working through and and wes helped me tremendously on this project and
helped to get it done so uh from that i'll i'll turn it over to
toronto teresa to uh to explain about the badlands observatory and let them tell you more about it
hi there thanks for having us and it's so good to see you jerry really you did such a terrific job for us both you and
wes and we so appreciate it thank you uh we took to pick up on that part of it
uh yes we had contacted jerry because um our uh the the mount uh control system
that we were using was horribly outdated uh and required some really obsolete
hardware and software to to control the telescope and so we really needed to get modern
and we really needed a really fantastic system and and they were able
to custom design the pmc their pmc8 system to fit the
26-inch newtonian reflector that we have at badlands observatory that's sort of
our flagship instrument and um i think i'll uh at
this point uh i'll let ron talk about uh the observatory which was his
his um project what is
um it was his project that he built the observatory uh and saw first light with
the telescope which he also custom designed uh and uh fabricated the optics
for um so uh that saw first light in 2000 and um
and he did a lot of research with that instrument and now we're on a new mission that's that's geared more to
public outreach so i'll let ron talk about that yeah the uh
the original telescope control system that uh teresa was referring to there
uh actually was kind of state of the art when we put it in about 22 years ago but as technology goes these days
it doesn't take very long for something to become outdated particularly
anything that requires on current operating systems use with computers
uh but anyway my that original system was uh a console system that was uh
basically designed by dave harvey uh in tucson arizona that that system was
originally designed to operate the uh 90-inch bach telescope on kit peak
and then he came out with other versions of that and that that particular system became
available for other uh instruments and uh when i started
that language laboratory that was the system that i elected to go with
but anyway the the mechanical aspects of the system were still working fine but it was just
difficult to keep uh modern technology going when using a a
dos based system in windows 95 if you know what i mean so uh anyway that's where uh
jerry hubbell and the uh explorer came in it's it and it's been an entirely uh
uh wonderful procedure going through this upgrade and uh and dealing with uh with them
we did have a few challenges i i was just going to say we did have a few challenges on the startup but nothing we
couldn't work through and it was really interesting you know to be able to do this remotely with ron
being our hands and eyes directly on this on the system and teresa also so
that's that's kind of uh what wes and i did when we started up the system we did
the initial commissioning of the uh of the control system yeah it was so enjoyable
that at three in the morning when we finally got done having a complete terrible evening on the first night
teresa said well that was a disaster we heard that
and we were struggling you know trying to figure out what the uh what the actual scale factors were for the amount
you know and and once we got over that actually the next morning that got cleared up very rapidly and the way we went
so it wasn't all it was pretty good you're not always muted when you think
you are i know it's a dreaded open mic
gary and i jerry and i appreciated that comment we understood where it was coming from
if we could have been next to each other we'd have been saying well that was a disaster that was good yeah that was
really good yeah it was really fun working through all that especially when we have had all
of us online at the same time and you know i should mention too uh
in this program particularly i noticed tonight there's a there seems to be somewhat of a common thread that seems
to run through tucson it seems to me like uh almost everything uh astronomical
eventually runs through tucson and that included me because actually the seats for badlands observatory uh
kind of took a big leap forward 1960 i guess 68 through 72 or so
i had the pleasure of being employed at the university of arizona their optical sciences and
steward observatory it was kind of a joint position and uh it was my experiences down there that
kind of planted the sea for some day putting together my own uh
observatory with a research-grade instrument that i thought might be kind of fun to uh
do some serious work with and that's actually what's happened for the last 20 years or so
and teresa and i have been been teamed up on this throughout that period of time
and uh just within the last few years we've kind of changed horses just a little bit
and uh we've gone more towards the public outreach and educational
aspects and of course living out here in western south dakota by the badlands and the black hills
uh it's a quite a big area for tourism and uh we have noticed that in recent
years that the focus of tourism uh is taking a quite a change where a lot of people are
choosing their destination indications along the lines of dark skies
and uh as as many people as there are that come out here for the badlands and for uh
uh for mount rushmore and for the old west town of deadwood uh
they're starting to uh be just as interested in what happens after the sun goes down at night in terms of the skies
and so we've decided to uh explore that aspect a little bit with our observatory
and so far it's really become a cake it's we've really enjoyed uh
sharing this information with the general public
if i could uh share my screen scott here i'll just show you all a little bit
about uh what we do here um
this is just from our website uh badlandsobservatory.com
um and as you can see we uh we have several links here uh
and one of what what we do here is that we have um
we actually have two levels of tours uh we have daytime tours where people can
come visit and look in our look at our galleries we have a couple of galleries uh
that are dedicated to the history of badlands observatory and are also dedicated to
amateur telescope making which uh ron did for 35 years and we also booked
night tour so we have we set out about um we set out about uh eight instruments on
our back observing deck uh and we have night tours where we
invite people to make a reservation and come out and stay with us uh we give them about a two and a half hour
uh tour of um different objects through the through the telescopes and we have a
mixture of uh of commercial instruments as well as homemade instruments which is kind of
unique and we're kind of proud of that we're able to to have people look
through those and they really seem to to really uh
get a kick out of that during the day this is the outside of our facility we
have daytime tours as i mentioned and we um they're guided tours
uh and people can come and and go through our galleries and uh also we do solar observing during the
day we have a hydrogen alpha filter that we put on the 26 inch newtonian and we
also have a white light filter that we put on an 8 inch
celestron out on the back deck
let me just if i can get up here um this is our blog post and we try and
post what's going on at the observatory this was from an open house that we held july 1st we had television coverage
because that was the day we kicked off our daytime programming and uh
so we were very fortunate that uh it was so well received by the public and we
had a television coverage for that this is a radio telescope that we're
currently building at the observatory this is as
you come into our facility we have a case where we sell asteroid
south dakota t-shirts because 25 main belt asteroids were discovered here at the observatory and one of them was
named after south dakota these are my images i'm a photographer
and with the badlands nearby there's plenty of of uh subject matter
um this is looking out to our observing deck from the front entry
uh so uh and these uh galleries this gallery
uh is on telescope making and uh this one is on the history of the
observatory and the research that's been done here uh including participating in
nasa's near earth uh near earth object program to map
to map asteroids
so great
great that's awesome let's uh uh are you uh able to show a
view of the observat the telescope and the observatory itself i
think i can yes
yeah somebody's got their mic open because we can hear that rattling in the background i wonder who that could be
oh actually i looked everyone was muted jerry everybody's thinking i think it's just uh yeah it's just it's
just a mouse [Music] microphone yeah oh really oh okay
yeah if it's near the mic that you're using it's just picking it up so it's no it's definitely no big deal those
pictures are awesome yes
there's a while she's doing that there's a terrific uh uh
television report that was done on them and theresa do you have a link on that on your website people should watch that
that was a great piece they did for you yes the link is on the website uh with
our blog of our uh about our our uh our open house
we have a we have a webcam that's uh located on the telescope where
we can kind of monitor the motion of it okay from our computer room down here
that's why you guys are doing that i'll find this um i'll find this
right video was that in one of your blogs as far as the uh uh television
program link uh boy you know i'm not sure i believe
i believe that probably was yes okay pertaining to the uh
the grand opening grand opening okay
so wes just just we can talk a little bit more about the upgrade i guess what the process we
went through a little bit she's out there working with the camera so i i'm a little bit distracted uh yeah
pretending to the upgrade jerry go on yeah so so basically
um we ran into a couple of issues that we worked through uh some
you know until you get into the project you don't really know the full scope of what changes you need to make to the and
we made we modified our existing firmware and software to make it work with your fork
mount it's a fork mount system it was the first fork mount that we had done with the pmc8 so we had
to make some adjustments the home position is different than on a gym mount
it's on the uh on the meridian at zero deck instead of at the
north pole and so that was a change and then wes what else what else did we have to
modify we had to do some rate changes also yeah in the process of of
fixing things around so that it would work with this massive telescope ron wanted it to run only at
about well something under a degree far under a degree per second when we first started
our our because of various constraints we with the motor and the gear ratios
you know we're going to be able to operate the thing very fast at all but in the end we managed to we had to
alter the firmware around to make it able to run faster than it ever has which allowed us to operate the mount at
half a degree per second which is a very stately beautiful movement on this big big telescope
yes and it it's it's it's it's i i one day i'm gonna be there and watch it in
person it's gotta be a beautiful thing but it is uh it is different than when
zooming around on an x02 at three and a half degrees per second uh it's quite a bit different running at
half a degree per second right but that required they required quite a bit of upgrades and it's beneficial to all the
users that will be we're working on a uh another release which will allow all of
the mounts to operate uh in a with a different kind of potential
uh top end we're still not sure what that will be because we run into torque limitations
so we're but we do have firmware now that can support a much different in a much better
motion on account of this project you know we wouldn't have done it probably if we hadn't had if we hadn't had to do
it on the project right nice to work on projects like this i mean it's a little bit like uh
you know when ford wanted to go to le mans and uh and when those races they
had to build you know these uh you know superior race vehicles and uh i
think that uh working on something you know like this really stretches our uh
you know abilities and engineering prowess so yeah i was excited about this
project for that reason scott that there's just another challenge to help help me learn more about you know
building the system to fit different different types of amounts sure
yeah the the uh the system has improved in so many ways on account of this uh there were many
things in it that were uh they were they were hidden in terms of
they worked okay but they they were hidden in terms of being actual not the best implementation or actually even an
error for anything except the exact application we had them in and so those things were all found and
it forced us to find those and correct them and so everything is much better and
tighter and beautiful uh as a result of this project um it was and so that benefits everyone that uses a pmc8 i
guess is that right yep yep absolutely the last release had had very many things in it that were
corrected and made better because of this because of this work with the badlands that's awesome and you know
from the standpoint here one of the issues with that slower [Music]
slow speed is because of the mass of the instrument uh it's a 30 000 pound telescope and uh
with a 2 000 pound moving mass and of course that builds up quite a bit of inertia and starting and stopping so
you have to be a little bit concerned about you know the ramp up and the wrap down as well as the uh the overall inertia
that that telescope makes if it's moving pretty fast so i'm very comfortable with that
with that slower slew rate and it kind of scaled down it kind of reminds me of palomar you know
i that's probably about the slew rate that they have there but uh but anyway it's uh uh the
the selection of motors uh that you guys use are just fantastic
the torque matches up perfectly with the with all of those requirements and it's
extremely quiet it's just a it's a beautiful system to experience
yeah that's one of the trademarks of our system i think is the quietness of the stepper motor system
and uh actually on the smaller amounts and wes can attest to this he's used
this system under the sky actually more than i have next to it
but it sounds it sounds nice slowing up and you know ramping up and down and all and and doing its thing
okay so this is uh you're seeing i believe if you can see that that's a uh
just a webcam up in the dome with a picture of the telescope um
and it's uh connected down that's obviously upstairs we're downstairs it it's connected through ethernet
uh and conduits to our computer downstairs and then we access it through ascom remote server console
so uh it's it's just worked out really really wonderfully we just love it so theresa you're using alpaca for that
we are yes and you use cars to seal to uh to as a
planetarium and controlled end right correct yes yes can you put this thing in motion for us
do you want to where do you want to go ron i i don't want to i don't want you to trigger the demonstration effect
which is when the telescope falls off the mountain that's right
uh well let's see yeah we can demonstrate that we'll just pick a point here uh
demonstrate which the falling off for the movement
there we go
okay we're not connected at the moment but we'll do that shortly i think i've mentioned the story before
but that demonstration effect happened on the keck telescope uh during
the 90 1991 eclipse that went over mauna kea wow and uh the scope was not yet the
keck one was not yet finished at that point but it did have some mirror segments in it and they had the dome
open i guess like like the you know to show the telescope like you have the dome open here right and uh i guess in
all their excitement you know the group that was uh kind of showing off the telescope ran off and and to to talk to
uh the other people there and and uh the sunlight hit the mirrors and then
that started to burn the inside of the dome [Laughter]
anybody smell something yeah yeah zoom out
no that's that's the as an electrical engineer that's the dreaded thing to
look forward to right the smell of the magic smoke comes out that's right the magic of the
electronics yeah all right
i think with telescopes it would be the vaporization of your coatings yeah um are you up there yeah
yeah we want to show some motion okay okay okay we're going to just do a little bit
of a northwest slew for you and you should be able to see some motion there in the image
here we go oh yeah look at that that's nice
that's a pretty smooth that slew is just the way a big telescope is supposed to slip that's
right yeah now in life i think smooth and silk here it's a little jerky because at
least on my ear on the video yeah the video yeah that's not the telescope itself
[Laughter] well that's yeah that under controlled
um we have a goat we have a push to giant equatorial mounted scope that's
very heavy i wish we had our motors working where it would slew on its own
because when it gets going it's hard to stop that thing and you don't want to
bust an almost 100 year old telescope on the side of the observatory so
absolutely yeah oh that's beautiful
it's good to see it move like all of our products that's only half a degree a second right
i think it ended up being about 0.6 isn't it well maybe well i i think it's 0.5 on the button uh
right okay that's right it didn't end up saying well it looks like it's moving pretty quick you know so i guess well
any faster yeah just do a uh you don't do one on this
thing just do a meridian flip at half a degree per second and you won't think it's quick anymore
yeah well that's cool that's cool so i i know that uh ron and teresa have uh
guests tonight at the observatory and um i'm really glad i was able to get them
on uh the program today and uh it was also nice to have you jerry and
wes come on as well and um so very much want to thank all of you and
uh we'll come back some other time and maybe see some live views through that
telescope that would be really cool that would be excellent yeah we look forward to that
good to see you all and thank you so much it was really our pleasure good to see you theresa ron i'm glad to see you
guys excellent presentation and it's good to know the bad lands are from morton just
typical landscape photography yeah that's very good to see
oh yeah there's definitely some good milky way photography in the badlands
that's so now i have add that to the number of places that i need absolutely if you haven't if you haven't
done it it's a must must i'll be coming out i'll be coming out soon ron theresa i'll be coming out soon
to see the scope we look forward to that jerry be great to see you
not letting near it trust me don't touch that yeah i want to make
this a little better let me tweak this um
all right that's great guys thank you so much thanks thank you well next up is is uh thank you
um next up is uh uh maxi ferrari's maxi is down in
as you all know if you watch global star party you know he's down in argentina he does amazing astrophotography
we're glad to have him on tonight he's been a little bit under the weather but i'm glad he was able to come on today so
thanks maxie thanks for coming on to 102nd global star party
hi guys well thank you again for inviting me uh well it's it's good to
to hear that you jerry you are you're here with us again so i'm glad to
yeah actually was asking about you just as uh just as we were
kind of putting this all together and i said well you know he said how's jerry doing i said well ask him yourself you know he's
going to be on tonight yeah thank you maxie i appreciate that yes i'm doing pretty well uh much better now so i
appreciate that oh i'm glad to hear so well uh tonight what i'm going to
show you is some kind of pictures that i've been doing in planetary way
but i have my equipment it doesn't prepare to do a planetary
astrophotography but it's what i got right now so
i was watching the weather and some nights says it was a bad scene
in the we had bad layers really tough and but anyway i put
out my equipment i'm starting to do some testing in my
telescope because i have an f4 let me share my screen
okay do you see it yes
okay yes well this is my telescope this is an 8 inch
f4 telescope and now i have more automitis
automatizer uh because i have my cwo
hdr plus and also a swo a
electronic focuser so when i go remotely i can connect this
and well get focus but also i have my filter wheel and that is motorized too and
connected to the sl plus so when i connect my camera i can do
pictures in different filters but here i have a
3x a telestandard a barlow so i can
go more a focal because even this telescope is a it's
really huge in the diameter it's really short
in the focal length but well uh i was practicing with a
saturn preparing to do the the the opposition
but i have really bad weather the the wind was really tough
and this is the the image that i could get in that night
it was this was the the last gsp on thursday 11 last week
and and also uh i was i remember that i was
doing some live view from of the moon uh i don't know if you remember
but i was capturing almost 120 pictures that i stacked and
processed in pa pipp and gets a 6 gigabytes
a file of that image to get process
so when i do the
the stacked i have this picture of the moon and you can see it's more like yellow
because this was the the shared i said a
method that gives me this i think this one was yeah
you can see here and the edge is blurry here in this picture
also here because this is the the original stack picture
and then i cropped and the convolutional so i could get more
details on the surface of the moon and you can see here there's some a lot
of craters plateau crater and
well uh i processed this image i
i use a pics inside and i remember some
a mini tutorial that a gary palmer did so i was practicing on that
to get more info so when i processed the image
i got this and you can see here
i did a mineral moon to to re realize the
the colors of the surface by the minerals that has
and this is a really good one picture i
really love this uh [Music] you know i
process this too but i like this one so
i wanted to show you a little conversation because a days ago the 4th of august
i also did pictures of the moon and there was a crescent moon
here and i want to show you the difference because when you
see the moon like this you see okay but when it's full is almost it's
practically the same phase but it's not like like that simple for
example you can see this part of the sea
and i have here the the in photoshop the the picture of the
another picture of the moon and watch this place this edge from here
to the left you can see is more outside it's more
far and also it's almost rotating that's because our
perspective and the the position of the moon and also
the moon has approximations that well i don't know how to say in
english but it's um that we call here a
[Music] the moment that the moon is
go far away from the orbits of the of the earth and the
the moment of the the most approximately a near of the earth in orbits
so you can see it's like a 3d image when i do this
but you can also see the the movement of the perspective and around the surface
and for example in this part you almost have the edge of this sea
but in the full moon you have a lot of more and it's
it's amazing of course this part you can able to see when it's crescent
but well this is a little uh experiment that i was
doing uh well the day is passing by and the 13th
of august we had really good scene that we say that we call
the astrophotographers and the amateurs because to do some planetary image we
have the method of the lucky imaging and that's
basically when you do a video you have a lot of frames and
you you try to choose the best of those frames to get a stacked and then process
to get the sharpening of the of the details of the object that you're taking for example um
i started a game with saturn and i was practicing with the barlow and
then i added another barlow but i want to show you this one uh
for example this was a this is a image that i took about
8 000 frames and i only stuck five percent
uh of this and let me open it
and yes i have a really i have too much frames here
so you can see that this almost really blur but when i do
when i work with the wavelets you can see the the rings and the
details of the surface yeah and remember this is an f4
telescope uh really short it's not prepared for this
if you go more soon the details you cannot offer because
also the diameter plays with this so [Music]
you can go more more details if you want but i tried not to do too
much so when i do i well i i have a monochrome camera so i have to do
a four videos with a light a filter with a red filter the green
filter and the blue filter so so i can get the the inform the
colors and so when i get saved
this particularly frames this is the red channel
and when i get the focus i have this this is the green
and this is the blue channel and there's a lot of programs or
software that you can uh do the the rotation
but uh it doesn't work a lot with my pictures because there are rings
of the of the planet it looks like a they are
of a i don't know how to say it uh
um it's it's really like a move it has movements i don't know and it's
awful so i i say okay i have
a short a focal so i don't know if
i did pictures of videos of one minute and i don't think that
has rotates too much to get a lot of information so what i did i went to pixel site
i opened let me
this is saturn here i opened the
l channel a red green and blue channel the the four
and let me see if i can okay i go to
a lrgb combination that
resets and i put the every
every channel but before that i did the this little
tip that had gary palmer did a couple gsp ago
let me find linear fit here i go to the a
green channel and i put it on the rest of the
of the channels without the green okay so oh i come back to lrgb combination
and i gave aptly go google and we have the colored
planets okay let me
turn this and you can see here we have a colored planet of a
saturn but we have still to to get working
because we have to eliminate
the this blur a light
with the instagram and we can stretch a little bit
from that you get more and then i will apply
and here we go but i i don't know this is a
it's not yeah this is this is nice but the colors i in this case i don't like it too much
because you can see there's more like red here there's more like
a green so what i do here is this i invert
the image go to s c and r to get out the the green
then i then invert again and then i play it again this
so you can see here all that
red and green goes off right so when i go to a saturation
for example you have more orange and the
the the the rings are more blue okay
so i i like this more like this one that before i can if i go more
it's like we say we we broke the file but
not to give too much to to burn it so or an f4
a eight inches telescope this is i think this is nice one of course
depends of the night because you remember this one with the same
the same the same
equipment and there's a lot of difference from here
to this and this so of course you can do then the rotation
to get more sharpen on the surface but i don't think that i could get
a lot of more details that i have right now of course maybe some kind
of sharpening and that's it yeah but
the the planetary astrophotography is
completely different than when you do deep sky astrophotography there's a lot
of things yeah you have to to make sure and
well of course i have the the king of the solar system i
pointed to jupiter also and i was practicing with the
put in the 3x barlow and also a 2x barlow
with the camera so i get more further but when i process
the details there wasn't like a when i processed the the natural a file
of the video i couldn't get a lot of details so
i remember that when i do after photography they planetary after
photography with the cell phone uh i have the same problem so i
resize the file here in pipp for example this is
[Music] i think for example this one
you can see is hundred for 800 size uh yeah it's almost you can see the
sharpen but here in the
sorry when you put planetary in the processing options you can have the this option to resize
frames so you can do it from 400 so it's going to
be the the middle and the digits get more compressed to
get when you do the the convolution and work with wavelets
you have more a scale to work with that
details for example um
i don't remember i think it was here yeah
uh open let's go here well in saturn i also did that but
it doesn't look like good to me i don't i don't think that i'm going to do it again
but i was practicing because for the opposition for jupiter we have a lot of
months but i think here for example
this is the the the o channel and when i go with the wavelets
i tried not to go farther because i don't want to broke
the file processes yeah and i try to do the same
with the set with the with a other channel
so when i when in here in jupiter you have to they
rotate the images because the the the rotation of the planet it's really fast
so you remember the day jupiter is on only nine hours
from us so it's rotate really really fast
so i have to do you can see there's a lot of five this lrgb lrgb lrgb
videos i was processing and working with the wavelengths and you
know two days i was with this and
i think there's practically in here i don't remember now
the file was but i i did a lot of files
to to work but here there's more details but it's like
a broken file you can see that the the greater spot
and the the the clouds that's surrounded but
and i yeah it was this i think this was the the finally
process of of course remember i don't have a
a planetary gear right now i hope someday like nico
but what i i was i'm still practicing a
you know to to to to working with what i have maybe in
the in the future when i get more diameter and more focal length uh
of course they're going to be much better but well
well this is all for tonight i hope that you liked it and well thanks thank you
nice great feels great it's nice to learn excellent i had to do techniques like that just step by step so really
wonderful it's sometimes it's frustrating you know when you
you don't get you don't finally get that
details but anyway you are doing astrophotography you have to remember that you have to get about a
five minute pose and then continuing maybe you have remember something and
something changed and but you are doing after photography and you are capturing in another planet so
even even more when you do lunar and deep sky
uh after photography too right so don't give up
don't give up that's right and i think that what you showed i mean the images of the plants did look
excellent to me so i know that guys get really picky about this stuff yeah
that was really really very nice so thanks for coming on maxie and have a good night okay you too
all right so uh we are going to take a uh 10 minute break and come back with uh
marcelo souza down in brazil and then we've got dr daniel barth so stay tuned
did how's that okay i'm unmuted now anyhow we've had a great first session
here we started off with uh david levy and peter jedicky uh singing uh uh music
to us which was uh about how stars go kaboom um
uh the astronomical leagues don nav was with us uh sharing the uh the questions
and answers that the astronomical league does in honor on every global star party um
we had david eicher sharing part of his meteorite collection with us and kind of schooling us on
uh you know just how rare uh meteorites really are um adrian bradley was up uh with uh his
nightscapes and showing us uh bade's window uh and explaining uh uh
how we can see through that uh through that window to part of the
center of our galaxy and then the the good folks at the badlands observatory ron and teresa came
on uh uh along with uh jerry hubbell and wes mcdonald who
worked on refurbishing that uh you know two thousand pound telescope uh
with the you know a pro version of the uh explore scientific pmc8 system so
it was uh nice to see that whole system come online and it's the first time i've actually seen
it uh completed so that that's uh as far as moving and actually working and
everything so i was very pleased to see that uh then we had maxi fellaries on from argentina
showing his processing techniques for saturn and the moon so thanks for for for
watching that up next is marcelo souza down in brazil
marcelo is the senior editor of skies up magazine and
he is also someone that is a powerhouse in astronomy outreach in brazil something
that he's done for many years and so we're really pleased to have him on to global star party again
marcelo how are you hi nice i'm nice i'm fine thank you very
much for levitation it's a great pleasure to be here sports again thank you very much thank you
i will share some information about this guy on a moment i will share my screen
about how the i would show it part of what i will show now
let me show you now we are
begin to work with the 3d animations
this is one of our now begin to to make it 3d animations
and the the next animated cartoon will be in 3d
oh wow excellent
so these are sample clips i guess is that right yeah make it dice this way for these
do your students uh do your students put these together marcelo yes
wow okay excellent and it will be the next one relax the
animated cartoon that you have written this is a video that
uh i saw in instagram that is a a
this is they you'll see a lot of photographers here with his sister two
times per year this
is like stonehenge he is in san diego if i'm not too wrong
you see this sun here it was beautiful you have a lot of photographers look at
that that's here's cool to this moment one two times
and here [Music]
and here is closest i guess sometimes you can see the green
flash i don't know where where where is in what beach but it's something fantastic
i know that's easy sanji yogurt but i don't know and here i will show you something that
i found and it is i talked with the guy that's responsible for this
this homepage that his name is alfonso and he is a doctor
a physician and he has this home page i don't have
all the models that he remembers the paper motors of the rockets
and satellites uh space stations that's a is a fantastic
place i'll share naughty his compassion to show you because he is
something that i was looking for during
uh as during last year and i found this and talked with him but
he do a fantastic work with this i share now this screen with the home page
all right it's open here this is your home page
oh i need to go there jumbo is your homepage
uh here and here you have all the models
of the international space station everything here that you imagine he has
here you have here all the space stations in the history he has international space station and
the what's fantastic because he has all the information for people to
build the and there is a paper ah there are paper models
yeah i open one of them here the european section
and the it's fantastic you can download it everything is free
and here you can download here the modders
if anyone wants to to make a presentation uh exhibition to show is
a place where you find many things that it can help you to organize an exhibition about the
space exploration or if you want to show the rocket satellites is a fantastic one
this is the link again [Music]
hello may i add something here
yes yes for sure okay so this is really interesting really good you are sharing this
because i used to make many space trap from this website
so for example i made a soyuz spacecraft maze a big falcon 9
really really nice oh great dude like i can share
some sometimes using new exhibitions paper
models and they have a big success right and what is important because kids can
participate actively yes building the murders
now i'll talk about the brazilian constellations there is a work done by this guy he already died but he is
professor german force he is a brazilian in jesus he is not an
injustice but he her grandfather was i
lived in a tribe here and he tried
to [Music] show to everybody the constellations
imagined by the a special type of brazilian indigenous here that
is the varanees beer
and it's different from the way that we we look for the constellations we immerse the
constellation pharisee constellations we connect the
most luminous stars and the brazilian jesus
didn't do the same they did something very very different from this
what they do is this this is a region here you have the southern cross
alpha and beta from centaurus wolfie scorpios here
and what they saw here he's not trying to connect the most brilliant stars they connect also
they look here you have dark and the bright regions in the milky way
and they use this difference in the mid way house to help to build the constellation the model of
the constellation here in this place here they saw this constellation
that i don't know the name in english of this animal but in portuguese izama
i don't know how to say in english it's like the one that you have in australia
but the big one that you have in australia that and here you see the head of the the bird
here
maybe uh his translation is maybe something like
a coat bag something like this this division of the milky way here in the
south and cross is the red the right of the birds
alfred better from saint taurus they are jews here
inside the deep world and here is scorpius here is the
large part of the body this is the way that the
this special tribe imagine this constellation and i'll show now we have another one
but i have something that is fantastic also about this that is how
because you can see this in a software
i will show software here you have a taurus here
and he had plates and did they imagine another bird here
that her name is chinwasu also in the same condition
they naturally connect the most luminous stars
they imagine this region this bird
this is southern cross that's it ever see and
i talked something about the shuttle because before i show the constellation in sterling
uh in 10 000 years we will not see again the southern cross you see a different image
from earth and flores is very important because we can find itself
from the southern cross and these uh how sorry it is in portuguese this is a different tribe
here that they call this kurusa that means cross in
their language these are the names that you use here in portuguese
for the start of the southern cross i i don't know this is me mother and i
think that it is everybody knows my mother his recovery here he's in
magdalene stars he has his palette in portuguese
obedient and this one that god belongs to the cross we introduced
something that he don't could not be here and it is here
and how that you know the seasons of the year
from the position of the southern cross in the beginning of the night
and for us here is the south celestial pool
and south and here uh when southern cross is in this position the beginning of the night
then is the beginning of the fall forest when the southern crossing deep
disposition the beginning of the night it is the winter for us in the other position this side here it
is the beginning of the spring and when we don't see the southern cross in the beginning
of the night is the beginning of the uh sorry the summer forest
man we ever used the southern cross as a reference for us and how that we
find the south from the south and cross we have something that we do when we go with
telescope because you need to know itself to put the when we have equatorial modes and we use
our fingers to find the the self we we put it inside the two fingers
these two fingers the main direction here of the south and cross
and then we measure four times in the half this distance and we find it south
the south celestial pool and this is the direction of itself and this is what we
do you hit south and cross and you measure this distance four times
in the house you arrive in this
region here and here is the poland uh solar celestial pool
and this is direction of the south then we use it during the night to find the the stuff is what to use then we when
you have the telescopes you need to use your fingers to make this match we do this all the time man because
it is better than you use the
buso to do this this is movement during the night and the i will show now
at the brazilian constellations in the stellar
if you want to see in stellar it is possible because you have the brazilian constellations there on a mountain i'll
try to change if i distill i don't know it is open i don't know if you if you will have
tried you can see here this table right you see i'm moving here
it's possible to see the movement here yes i i changed your time here by the
beginning of the night here i have the southern cross here centaurus alpha and beta from south
and here if you go here in your options you have established culture here and we
have an option here that's to pick underneath that is the brazilian
indigenous the name of the tribe and here we do this
and here is the bird here
[Music] here's the bread the big one recall emma i don't know
average through is in in australia in portuguese i'm trying to
find you correct two words to say to you what is the animal it's like an obvious choice
and this is the ammo here in part directly in the southern cross
this whole bag here i don't know if correct them means in here is scorpios here
and here are the two stars here that
the bright stars that you have here the alpha and better for some times and here is another this is a brazilian
animal here i let me come early here
oh sorry letting me put you here do you no it's okay near is another one that
you call anta these are that you don't have united states everyone in brazil that
this is as animal from here that is also part of the animal is in the south
and cross house you have to see that you have constellation same different constellation same region
like this and you can find these constellations installations
it's a great program yeah and here i'll show
another thing let me share again my screen here
holy moments [Music] here are the contests that you organized
the two contests this is a quantize about us photography this one about the
articles for the nda for students from our region that participate
and you are giving price well thank you scott this is possible with your head
thank you and this is the another again i'm showing the cover of the
last edition of the sky's app magazine and everybody that you want you to
contribute to be very welcome thank you very much thank you so much thank you march hello
that was wonderful okay and have a good night
very soon take care okay so um uh our next speaker uh will be
uh dr daniel barth now daniel and i occasionally and
daniel pointed this out to me uh we occasionally kind of are on the same wavelength uh in in thinking
about our presentations and stuff without even really calling or checking with
each other or emailing each other or anything and so uh you know when um
i was thinking of the uh the mind cosmos connection uh you know he he went give a
presentation on the anthropic uh cosmological model which is basically
the proper uh technical interpretation of what i was trying to get across here at global
star party so we are going to end global star party with dr barth's presentation thank you
uh daniel for for doing this this is awesome hey thanks scott this is like our third hole in one
where i've done a program on how do you know and then scott's like oh we're doing that on global star
uh and we we really we don't we don't plan these it's just oh
great bowling balls roll in the same gutters i guess i don't know anyway what we're doing tonight is the
anthropic cosmological principle and i put a couple books in the chat but for those
of you who want to dive deep this is the book by john barrow and frank tipler
and this is quite scholarly um really we'll take you deep into the
history of these ideas but to give you an idea the anthropic principle came up in about
1974. it's a fairly recent idea but for a long
time i'm talking ancient greek persian asian astronomers
people were looking at and saying well is what's the purpose of all this where
did we come from why is the sky dark at night uh how do we explain the planets and all
these sorts of things and for the ancient peoples almost around
the world the idea of mind and purpose and best fitness for human use and
consumption was a pretty prominent idea well of course it rains to make the crops grow so we can have
grain so we don't starve the land is there and it's sperm underfoot for us to walk on uh the sun is there to warm us
during the day and the stars and the moon are there to light our way at night and it's all about me you tell me about
me uh and it seems like kind of a very egocentric sort of an idea but this idea is what we refer to as
teleological the idea that oh the universe has a purpose and when we came into the
medieval era the christian church adopted this idea
that of course the universe is created
and god said man shall have dominion over all of this and name all the beasts and the
creatures and the fishes and the whole genesis idea was that this was made for
us it was a purpose-made thing well we get further along to newton and
company newton hook descartes and these guys say you know all this
crazy stuff about uh the purpose of the universe is us
no we don't like that and particularly with the success of newton's gravitational models and kepler's
uh planetary laws of motion copernicus reordering the universe and saying the
earth isn't the center anymore how can it be the purpose made place if it's not the middle
well then they shifted over from teleological arguments to you taxological arguments nature must
have a cause and these concepts are a little bit slippery and i i just i had a lovely
brain wave and i thought you know i have to figure out a way to show people the difference the difference
between teleological and you tax illogical
arguments and so this is a gadget you've probably all seen one they use these on
game shows you see them in you seem in in arcade parlors you see them
uh everyone who's done a science class in statistics has probably seen this you roll marbles down through the little pin
board and they fall into the little slots and they form this beautiful bell-shaped
pattern well in this if you'd never seen one before the idea
that it makes this consistent bell curve would be quite a surprise and science teachers use this for that
very purpose the bell curve is the teleological component of this
it's the hidden purpose that reveals itself over time as the marbles fall through
the maze of pins now you can't predict which way a marble will go
and yet you can predict that this bell-shaped pattern will emerge every
single time another example of this got a picture here of
a salt mine where your pie you're digging up salt and you're piling it and it always forms
a pyramid if you've ever driven past any place that mines gravel uh and earth works and stuff like that
where you have the big conveyor belt that's putting the stuff and it forms this nice little pyramid
the pyramid or if you will the uh here we go i think this is it yeah the
pyramid or the little bell-shaped curve this is the teleological end this is the
end purpose this is what reveals itself over time but it's the pins
on this little little board the pins that bounce the marbles along they're the cause they're the you
toxicological argument say you've got the cause and you've got the purpose and the purpose isn't always revealed is
this a divine purpose no it's just statistics and you'll see a lot of times you'll see
people who are religious who are trying to sound more authoritative by being scientific
and say oh look this is revealed there must be a divine purpose or a divine
cause the cosmic and the anthropo uh the anthropic principle doesn't
doesn't say that the weak anthropic principle doesn't say that there's a strong anthropic principle that puts god in there but
that's that's another story for another day well what's the connection how do we connect mind well brandon
carter in 1974 realized that this idea links us
our mind as observers to the size and shape of the entire cosmos
and the argument as barrow and tippler develop it they say look
when you go out at night you get your lawn chair and your thermos a coffee i'm
gonna watch me some perseid meteors you go get your binoculars i'm gonna see if i can see the nebula in scorpio tonight
you go out and get your telescope and say i'm gonna look and take some pictures of saturn and you look up and
you ponder and you say oh the universe is so grand it's so amazing and carl sagan's
poem i suppose the pale blue dot and he says oh the earth is a tiny speck and
there it is lost in the vastness of space and everything and everyone that's ever been has been born and died here
this is you're a speck on a speck floating in insignificance tipler barrow and brandon carter say
because you exist as a carbon-based observer the universe has to be
the size and the shape and the age it is it could be no other way
in order for us to be here looking up and wondering at the sky right and you say well how does that work
well it's pretty simple you think of the first generation of stars when the big bang happens what do we get we get some
hydrogen we get mostly hydrogen we get helium when you get a very little bit of lithium why don't we get bigger
atoms the furnace is too hot the temperature will destroy
larger atoms than lithium and well how do we make the larger like
oxygen nitrogen phosphorus carbon how do we make those well we need cooler furnaces with longer cooking times we
need stars we need stars that will over five
or six billion years will cook and form and then explode in a
supernova and seed the cosmos with enough of these heavier atoms so
that the next generation of stars can form planetary disks
and terrestrial planets like this one which means you've had to been cooking elements long enough to get things like
silicon magnesium iron aluminum the stuff of which across the terrestrial planet is made
and so if you think about how long does it take for life to evolve on a planet well the journey of
single cell life to us is four and a half to five billion years
so you figure okay it takes five or so billion years to just make the elements
to make the planets for life to evolve upon and then another four to five billion
years for life to emerge and develop into intelligent forms
that can look out so when we look at the universe the fact that we are here
means that the universe must be at least 10 billion years old the universe must be at least 10 billion
years in extent in every direction the universe must be as old as it is as
big as it is and complex as it is in order just for the possibility of some
intelligent carbon-based creature to be standing on a planet with optics made of glass and looking
out and seeing the universe as itself in fact
daryl and tipler put it out that you know what okay with telescopes it's our
mirrors and our lenses that image that collect the light and image the universe
and it's our eyes at the eyepiece for our fancier sensors
that the focal point that collect these images in this data but in effect
all of these are extensions of us web is an extension of our human
creativity ingenuity and expertise as is hubble as is palomar as is the the
very nice 10-inch dog there on scott's desk this is an extension of us
we are how the universe observes itself and the universe was blind and
could not observe itself for at least the first 10 billion years of its history
and without carbon-based life forms like us and even if it's not carbon-based life
even if you want to go completely star trek honest and say oh silicon based life and all that sort of
stuff it still requires the 10 billion year history just to produce life
so we are the way the universe observes itself and
the shape of the universe the extent of the universe the constants of the universe are uniquely
precisely tuned in order to make this life possible if you make the gravitational constant a little bigger i
mean tiny hundred thousandths of a percent more stars collapse into black holes
gravitation is stronger stars burn hotter they explode sooner
planets don't have time to develop before the supernova boom and they're gone
if you make the gravitational constant weaker you don't have stars hot enough to make elements
the ratio of the mass of a proton to the mass of the electron the ratio 10 to the 40th between
gravitation and the electric force the electromagnetic force if these things are altered in the
slightest way life is not possible and so this leads us to the
philosophical idea was it a purpose created this way by a divine
being or perhaps do universes are they born and die and every time
it's like a slot machine and we reset the constant because if that's true
we've had however many trillions of universes born and die
completely sterile because the constants weren't right so whether it's by accident or by
purpose the universe is finely tuned to produce
us carbon-based observers not just us us i'm
a full believer that there's life on other planets there's too many it would be too great a waste of space to be
conscious so all these all this carbon-based life that's probably there throughout the universe i know
intelligent life on my planet but we look at this and we say oh
in order for the universe to contemplate itself it has to be at least this old and this big to produce mind to be aware of things
like this the universe must be very precisely tuned
and again accident purpose don't know uh and in the fact if we look at this crazy
uh you guys have all seen this little pegboard demonstration haven't you where the marbles run down and they form the
bell curve is there a purpose in there is there a divinity in there is it an accident of
statistics uh beyond my purview i'm afraid but in
fact carl sagan's idea that we are the most infinitesimal
of short-lived beings on an insignificant spec lost in the vastness and therefore insignificant is
completely wrong we are significant because we are the way the universe
sees and understands itself and it took
10 billion years of cooking with a very precise recipe in order to produce us
as a representative of carbon-based life and so there is a very intimate
connection between mind and the cosmos i really encourage you to do a little
more exploring on this i put three books in the chat uh just six numbers by martin reeves which
is definitely the most friendly accessible to the public
the constants of nature by barrow which is quite accessible and quite nice and
if you're in for something meaty and read a few paragraphs and think about it for a day and then go
back again uh tipler and barrows cosmic anthropic or the anthropic cosmological
principle is well worth your time it's just a great history of science and astronomy
and cosmology and if you have uh any inkling of making the great leap
from astrophotographer to cosmologist from astronomer to cosmologist i encourage you to take that
leap and become another part of the cosmos
contemplating itself
i'll take those words in the heart daniel that sounds like something i may well consider
as much as i look up into space and wonder what's going on there um
as a as a catholic i often balance the um
you know what the catholics say of god and you know my own relationship with
god and then then we step aside and say now what's this stuff made of and
you know that when you're when you're catholic but you love space industry in astronomy and cosmo and
principles of cosmology interest you you do separate sometimes you don't go with
just blind belief so much as you go you go with a curiosity of how these structures
are are made how they come i was looking at the bell curve and saying it's the nature of things to it
seems to be the nature of things to shape themselves into a pyramid a triangle
um it just seems to be a fundamental shape that comes out of um that just naturally comes out we get
order out of chaos yeah we do and it's not it's not easy to take that step across to cosmological
wonder because the way we're taught science is very much in the newtonian tradition of there
are causes to things but not purposes and that's one of the things that people
struggle with with darwin's ideas of evolution and certainly um having been
raised catholic myself i know galileo struggled with his faith copernicus did uh kepler was a
lutheran but he certainly did and uh newton
he had very interesting religious ideas but all of these great thinkers uh struggled
with their relationship with with god and divinity and uh
what a religion asks of us versus what our intellect demands of us
and it's it's never easy it's always a struggle but the struggle is worthwhile
uh wherever you are on the scale from devout religious person to
uh committed atheist this struggle with the relationship between mind and cosmos
is worth thinking about it makes your whole experience as an astronomer so
much richer and more meaningful uh i go out and
some of my students think i'm absolutely nuts when i bring stuff up aren't we supposed to be talking about astronomy
and gravity and orbits and stuff like well let's let's uh instead of narrowing the focus let's
let's broaden the canvas a little bit yeah i'll give you an example i have um
my wife's two friends are complete astrologers and they post
online oh goodness you know what i tell them they'll say things like the moon is
in capricorn or the moon is in something and i'll tell them you know i
use your posts to know where to aim my camera in order to take images
because whether whether or not i think that it affects how people behave
you did say where the moon was and i can use that so
you know it's an example of taking even taking astrology you can use it for
you know there there is some concrete thing you can do with that and so instead of just
unfriending and saying you guys are crazy it's like well no there's something i can pull out of that and
that's what i think the astrology has the extremes at both ends they go
completely you taxological and they say oh this is the cause of your life whether it's good bad and
different how your love life's going and they also uh they they go very much this is you
taxological but uh they also because they are mostly modern western
people who were taught science in the newtonian way uh you can quickly say
well is it the purpose of the stars to control me and it's an interesting it's
an interesting garden path to lead them down and kind of say oh well let's think about this
um it's hard to do it without convincing them that without making them convinced that you're mocking them or trying to uh
you know tear their their ideas apart as we know astrology can be big enough
business because there's plenty of following who are looking for i i i've
had i've had people say dan you should do this you you know the math you could do the calculations i'm like oh no i
don't want it because your powers for good and not for evil um no i couldn't i couldn't do that
i am very much a scientist and an observer and an astronomer uh i i couldn't even
for whatever amount of money go and put up stuff on astrology i couldn't in good conscience do it yeah that's
yeah it's um the images that i started taking i realized there
you know we talked purpose in some cases i think purpose is okay when it comes to
i take an image and am i doing it to see how many people like the image oh that's
cool it gave me a greater sense of purpose and joy
in taking the image and then zooming into the image like tonight zooming in and going i didn't realize
that in every milky way photo you see you'll see some sort of representation
of this window and it's just it's information like that that makes
that part of each of these images come alive there's something there's something more to it
then is this a pretty image and can i get 5 000 likes on it because it's such a
pretty image and you know can i you know is it glorifying me as a photographer because
it's such a beautiful image or am i just simply repeating the beauty of the cosmos itself well and you want
to talk cause and purpose the photons you collect have been on their way
literally if you're photographing the milky way anywhere up to a hundred thousand years
if you're photographing galaxies millions of years uh and those photons are the cause
of the image that appears on your camera sensor but was it their purpose
when you look at andromeda in a big reflector and go ooh
galaxy was that the purpose of those photons the purpose was this purpose ordained
two and a half million years ago when those photons left those myriad
stars across that entire galaxy were they purposed
we can certainly say they are the cause of me seeing this galaxy or photographing this galaxy
and i often comment to my students oh you're looking at saturn you realize the light left there six and a half hours
ago and it's been on its way all that time saturn is not where we're seeing it now it's moved on
and those photons have come all that way to go extinguish themselves in creating
an image on your retina and one of my students just burst into tears and she said that's horrible to
think that that light has traveled all that way and it just went sploot on my eye i said no it's glorious it's wonderful
how else do we get information about the world around us how are we aware
and if you're aware that your awareness has a cost then cherish it
make sure that the cost is worthy
because you've used it to make a game and it's something to contemplate when
we're out in the dark and looking up and clicking the camera shutter or just
in a lawn chair with a pair of binoculars it's this idea of cause and purpose and the idea that the universe
really is finely tuned to produce life and that life
seems to be intelligent life is certainly contemplative we know that people have
looked up and have recorded the phases of the moon in carvings on bone and
stone and clay tablets for something going on a hundred thousand years and
way before we get into eastern culture western culture you know middle east middle eastern
culture and the the whole newtonian religious debates
all of this we know as human beings we are contemplative
beings we are a contemplative life form i think that's pretty good evidence that
we are the way the universe sees itself because
we see and we observe and we're aware and we wonder and it seems like we've been
doing that almost as long as there's been speech certainly far longer than there has been
written language far longer than we've had written language we've made these drawings to pass on our
knowledge we look we contemplate we think and we pass on what we discover
we are the instrument through which the universe observes
discovers and becomes aware of itself so a very intimate connection between mind
and cosmos very well spoken
i think we should probably let scott take back over or we'll go we could we'll find something else and go all
night having this discussion it's it's the sort of discussion i think that
we need more of well it's it's a great it's a great discussion to have if you have
like minds out in the dark with telescopes yeah i i have a picture
to that end i have a picture that i didn't show this time i think i showed it for astronomical league where
i had the giant 24-inch telescope i'll say giant um
next to the milky way you know both instruments there at the same time
um as if to suggest there's a connection between the two so that's um
i do i feel the connection even more so than being able to explain
it eloquently like you can dr barth but uh it's it's that feeling of the connection
that draws me out to take more images or if things aren't working to just shut the camera off
get the binoculars and let's see how many things i can find you know yes
and appreciate the sky especially in michigan where clouds can come at any time
and change the uh we need to remind people that every photograph implies a photographer
a purposeful mind that was behind this and we tend to see
images from web and hubble and from you and we go wow cool the milky way look
and we get lost in the image and we tend to forget that behind the image
unseen is an imager someone and i don't care whether your
van gogh doing this with paint uh and i'm sorry starry night looks like he was kind of on something when he did that
brilliant genius crazy your images are glorious and
the stuff from webb i just i literally weep i'm like oh my god it's so beautiful yes but
webb is not webb's photographs are not instrumental made by an instrument
they're an extension of the minds of the people who built it yes the connection between the mind and
the cosmos we need to remind people that it's there and i'm sorry this is one of the things
where i completely disagree with carl sagan uh and uh i'm not going all
divine and churchy i'm just saying that no in fact we have a real connection between mind and cosmos
yeah there's there's definite levels and um
another point and they are processed by people the images are processed by people that's right yeah yeah and we
shift our visible to the different wavelengths of infrared so that we can understand and by doing
that it produces the image like that and
we understand what we're seeing when we look at those types of images and um
in it you know whether that was a calculated thing we've we've done that for infrared for some time we shifted
the color schemes for him but it turns out the images are beautiful enough for those who
may not know anything about astronomy may not care about
astronomy and astrophotography but they're willing to look at those images and discuss them and talk about
how beautiful they are and i suppose that too i mean then it comes
it goes to outreach and that too is something you know even humans that aren't
necessarily in cosmology will still contemplate the universe because images like that exist
they get created so you know it expands the number of
millions of people on earth contemplating the universe you know the universe
contemplates itself no matter almost what grade age or grade level a young child
definitely seeing them look at the sun safely is uh it's a wonderful thing to see them
oh i see it there you go that you've got a five-year-old just contemplated
the universe starting with our nearest star it's a wonderful thing
it is well gentlemen thank you so much for a great evening uh i think we've left uh
some of our audience here deep in thought they all want to uh get around a campfire and talk about this some more
so that's our job as we sit around the virtual campfire tonight i want to thank
you all for tuning in to the 102nd global star party we will run the 103rd global star party
next tuesday night so tune in for that until that time
we want to thank you all for also being a very important part of global star party itself for sharing our
programs for supporting those programs and so we're going to wish you a great night
and uh which wish that you can keep looking up so
take care and i think that's that's it thanks everybody
and i'm going to run uh don't run away okay because i will run a
a little uh ten minute feature uh that i think you might enjoy
when considering the possibility of life beyond earth we look for three main ingredients the first one is key
elements such as carbon hydrogen oxygen and sulfur the second is a source of
energy and the third and perhaps most important is the existence of liquid water water is a necessary solvent in
all chemical reactions that have to do with life energy is required to drive these chemical reactions and organic
matter is the material from which all life that we know of is made life as we know it requires liquid water scientists
believe that life on earth started in our oceans now through our exploration of the solar system we've realized that
the moons around the giant planets have the right conditions that there could be liquid water underneath their surfaces
so that really sort of expands our whole concept of where you could have a habitat where we might find life
[Music] water is fairly common in the universe
we've seen traces of water in large molecular clouds between stars we've seen traces of water in protoplanetary
disks we've also seen traces of water as water vapor in the atmospheres of giant planets around other stars and we know
that water is in the atmospheres and interiors of our solar system's giant planets so we know that water is
ubiquitous throughout the universe as far as liquid water that's a little less common earth is the only planet in the
solar system where we see liquid water at our surface moons such as enceladus and europa may have liquid water beneath
layers of ice we're really expanding our understanding of what makes a place habitable instead
of just looking for an earth-like terrestrial planet that's a very specific distance from its star we're
learning that there can be hidden habitats that are underneath icy layers and they can be a lot further out from
the sun so we believe icy moons in the solar system actually harbor kilometers
thick oceans underneath their icy surfaces these icy moons and their
subsurface oceans may be some of the best places to search for life elsewhere in our solar system
enceladus is one of saturn's many moons and it's a very small moon that people
tend to kind of ignore so small about 500 kilometers in diameter but decades ago in the 1980s from ground-based
observing we found out that the location of enceladus relative to saturn happened to coincide nicely with saturn's e-ring
and so we were thinking that enceladus had something to do with the e-ring particulates the icy material but we
weren't sure what we later find from cassini was that we directly determined
that there are indeed plumes jetting out of the south polar region from cracks in the south pole of enceladus in the crust
and it's dominantly water-rich material just jetting out into space and so the way we saw it cassini happen to be
located where enceladus was backlit from the sun and so you saw this curtain of
beautiful diffuse material jetting out of the south polar region quite breathtaking actually even more we were
able to use the different complements of instruments on board cassini to go after the chemical composition of the plumes
and that's where things got really interesting so number one that's because of liquid water there's definitely a
liquid water reservoir subsurface below the icy crust but that is there number two
the chemical composition of the plumes told us that there's a lot of organics things that make up amino acid and
things on life that are very interesting and number three what we are really looking for is a source of energy on
enceladus photons from the sun aren't going to work because you can't penetrate the tens of kilometers of icy
crust to get down to where the liquid water reservoir is but what enceladus does have is hydrothermal vents it's
very hot into liquid water that has a lot of analogies with the ocean floor where we have a form of releasing
chemical energy via something called serpentinization and so we think that
enceladus might have that potential to have an energy source being chemical
not sunlight and so you put all that together and enceladus has all the
ingredients or most of what we need for life that makes it a very astrobiologically interesting object to
study [Music]
europa is one of the largest moons of jupiter and we believe that europa has a subsurface ocean
tens to hundreds of kilometers thick and so this ocean may be one of the best
places to search for life in the solar system there's been three space missions that have provided evidence for europa
harboring liquid water the first one is voyager in the late 70s the second one
is the galileo mission in the late 90s and most recently howell which detected
plume-like emission from hydrogen and oxygen which is closely related to the existence of
water beneath its surface these plumes may be directly ejected through cracks in the surface of the
moon and therefore what we're seeing in water vapor plumes is the actual ocean water from the subsurface of the moon as
these plume particles are ejected to space solar radiation is going to excite
these water particles creating vibrational modes now these vibrational modes are
signatures that can be detected at infrared wavelengths by the cake observatory so we observe europa on 17
days what we found is that the majority of observations have no presence of
water however on one of those states we detected water we detected h2o
in the past hubble provided indirect measurements of water by detecting hydrogen and oxygen but now we have
directly detected water for the first time both the webb telescope and the europa
clipper mission will give us a much more detailed picture of the surface of europa its cracks and crevices detailed
pictures of the water vapor as well as other molecules that may also be emanating from the subsurface of europa
so both of these missions will give us a great picture of whether europa is truly habitable
titan is a moon of saturn it's the second largest moon in the solar system
and it is about two times larger than earth's moon and actually bigger than the planet mercury and titan is also
interesting it's the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere it's surrounded by sort of an envelope of
gaseous nitrogen just like our own earth is titan was first discovered by telescope
observation back in the mid 1600s the first spacecraft observations were made of titan during flybys through the outer
solar system that was in the late 70s and in the 80s but we really were able to explore titan in depth with the
cassini huygens mission the huygens probe was dropped into the atmosphere of titan and it made measurements of
chemistry and it took images as it felt to the surface and that was back in 2005
and since then the cassini orbiter made over 100 close flybys of titan cassini in its design with the different
instruments we purposely were picking instruments that could go into longer wavelengths into the infrared so we
could really understand the moon we were able to basically peel back the layers
of titan to really see what was below and it was remarkable very earth-like
the landscape is similar to earth's in many many ways but with a little bit of a twist so on titan you can find dunes
you find lakes there are river channels the atmosphere is very dense and you can get clouds and smog and you even get
rain we saw winds we saw seasons and one really important thing we saw was
liquids pooling in the polar regions on the surface a lot of it but because titan is so cold those features are all
made of very exotic materials compared to what we would find on earth so the lakes and the rain are made of liquid
methane the crust that forms the surface of titan is actually water ice but it's so cold that it's as hard as rock and in
the atmosphere we get this organic chemistry that forms large organic molecules and particulates they fall
down to the surface and then behave like dust or like sand does so it makes us want to go back to really understand the
complex organic environment of that surface and what it means for either past life or maybe future life
[Music] dragonfly is a mission that was just selected by nasa to fly to titan and
arrive in the mid 2030s dragonfly is going to make a whole bunch of measurements to help us understand the
environment on titan and its potential for habitability we'll be taking measurements of the atmosphere that
includes things like pressure temperature winds we'll probe the surface to try to understand what
materials the surface made out of we'll also be drilling into the surface to look for the types of organic molecules
that are present and to try to see if we can find any examples of compounds that mimic the types of building blocks we
know we need for life on earth we don't really know how life started on earth we don't exactly know what the
chemical environment of earth was like before life started so with titan we have this really unique opportunity
there are times in titan's past where there could be liquid water on the surface impact craters can generate
impact melt and there's a potential for a possible cryovolcanism to erupt some liquid water onto the surface and so we
know that there's a rich organic chemistry going on in the atmosphere we know that's depositing to the surface if
there were times where those organics and the liquid water environments were mixing then there may be some really
interesting chemistry taking place when you have these processes operating for hundreds of millions of years how far
can they get you down that path of chemical complexity and can we see reactions and molecules that start to
look something like what we think of as essential elements for our biochemistry for life on earth
in the future looking forward as opposed to looking back and thinking about titan as a chemical laboratory for the
prebiotic earth i like to look forward thinking about what's going to happen when the sun evolves and warms up in the
habitable zone actually moves out to where titan is and it will you have all the organics you're going to have a
source of energy all we have to do is melt the frozen water and we're going to have a pool of organics just embedded in
liquid titan might actually have a chance at that point to harbor life
so when we think about ocean worlds it's good to compare them to what we know about earth in total proportion earth is
about 0.1 percent water the ocean world is a body that has in proportion about 10 times more water than earth does and
when we think of the trappist planets those planets have about 50 times more water in proportion to what earth does
ocean worlds do appear to be common in our galaxy as far back as the early 2000s we had astronomers some of them
still here at nasa goddard that suggested that we would have ocean worlds orbiting low-mass stars recently
we've looked at about 52 exoplanets and these are low-mass exoplanets and what we found is of these 52 planets one out
of every four may be an ocean planet and when it comes to these ocean planets
over half of them may be ice-covered ocean worlds and so enceladus and europa may serve as small-scale analogs of
these planets so there are a number of different ways to search for life on planets around
other stars but the key method is the study of the atmospheres we can search
for signs of life biosignatures we call them things like oxygen water vapor
carbon dioxide even more unusual bio signatures things like chlorofluorocarbons or other things that
are only produced by intelligent life by looking for these key constituents of planetary atmospheres that signal life
we can discover life forms on other planets that we could never actually visit in our lifetime so this is very
analogous to how we study the atmospheres of moons and planets in our own solar system and really makes the
connection between studying the plumes of europa and the atmospheres of planets around other stars what i would like to
see is the definition of a habitable zone expanded we don't want to keep thinking too narrowed about liquid on
the surface but broaden the scope and really try to embrace other worlds that might seem too far from the host star
and frozen out when they really aren't frozen at all at great depths they harbor a warm hydrothermal driven liquid
water environment [Music]
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well good night everyone uh sleep well and we'll be back next week
with more global star party take care
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