Global Star Party 104

Transcript:

7:00 p.m..Adrian Bradley
foreign
7:30 p.m..Jason Guenzel - Personal Exploration Through Astrophotography
foreign
8:25 p.m..Ilyas Jaffer - Spectroscopy at Mt. Wilson Observatory
[Music]
8:45 p.m..Marcelo Souza
foreign foreign foreign
10:00 p.m..Maxi Falieres - Astrophotography to the Max!
foreign hi Terry how are you I'm good how are
you Dave I'm well we seem to have lost David and uh we seem to be stuck with on
the same screen here with the warm-up so I hope everything is okay Scott vanished too Scott vanished and
David fell off with his video here he is
we can't hear you Scott yes laughs how about that here we go you
hear me now that's like Scott Roberts now yeah yeah
all right I'm gonna hide behind my screen again here
well at least we know he's there yeah
y'all set for Thanksgiving yeah everything is uh quite good here in
Wisconsin because we have the arrival of uh twin girls in the family my son and
his wife oh creamy so they're still going to be in the NICU for another three weeks or so
probably but they're doing fine and and looking good and they're tiny but they're growing and so everything's good
there well that's great that sounds exciting for the holidays yeah another generation of hiker girls
definitely um have you had any snow yet no no snow
thankfully yeah sort of you know little bits of it in the sky but nothing gets
stuck at all really yeah we had some snow flurries but nothing that stuck on the ground kind of gets me in a
Christmas spirit yeah yeah well it won't be long we'll be getting a deluge probably
yeah how's everything going back in the Homeland though these days Terry pretty
good it's dry just like every place else I think yeah Wind Blows all the time all
of our pretty leaves have blown off the trees almost wow yeah but uh it's
actually I was just in Oxford a couple weeks ago looking around down at Houston
Woods yeah it's a nice uh visually stunning area there it is it really is I
was at Houston Woods before all the leaves blew off the tree or you know there was still quite a bit of color it
was beautiful perfect time to be there yeah yeah yeah definitely actually that's where I'm
spending Thanksgiving uh wow yeah families getting together so we're gonna be down there oh nice well that should
be fun I hope the weather is nice for you there yeah me too you know I don't mind a little snow though I'm kind of I
can I don't know it just it's the holiday yeah yeah
oh excellent glad to hear it yeah uh what is the two uh Tucson
rock and mineral The Big Show that they do in Tucson Tucson gem show Gem and
Mineral show it's the biggest uh show of collectors of that kind of stuff in the
world there's also another very big show in Munich each year but it's not quite
as big as the Tucson show so it's the Tucson show generally speaking is you know three or four hundred dealers and
it's kind of spread out at various hotels and other places it kind of migrates around a little bit as the
hotels evolve and and either gain or lose quality you know but it happens every February we're actually throwing a
star party the magazine does at the same time as the show oh really in
mid-February yeah so that we can be there at the same time and look at some star you know hope there's a lot of
crossover with the people who are interested in rocks and minerals and meteorites too of you know doing things
at at night uh and getting the astronomers to be interested in the rocks and minerals during the day a
little bit yeah my dad was a rock hound he used to go to Montana and bring he would go with
another uh couple they would bring home baskets of Montana Agate and they would
make beautiful jewelry so I think some of that is kind of rubbed off on me sure and that's good stuff that's fun stuff
to have yeah that Agate from that area yeah yeah yeah I found myself up on Lake
Superior looking for agates on the beach I spent time walking on the beach yeah that's a good collecting spot too yes
indeed for that yeah but you'd go you know it's you're dizzy I mean if you go through Tucson you know three or four or
five days in a row and you look you know from the mid-morning to late afternoon you know after a couple days of that
you're just dizzy you know you've looked at a hundred thousand specimens you know and it's can be overwhelming sort of you
know but it's fun yeah I bet so hi David hello I'm back hi yeah good to
see you yeah yeah I've been in Tucson when the
show was going on um but not at a time when I could stop I was driving through on my way up to flag
and I couldn't stop so well it's you know remember what they
say about the Tucson gem show if you want to have that collector mentality
that I'm infected with certainly and many of us are bring all the money you can and more
I bet I am going to make a point to be able to go out there at the same time when I really can't stop at the show and
look around there's a show um here in Ohio Saturday that I'm gonna go to so
not near as big as what that is but yeah just a nice little show um they have some interesting things
that's all that counts yeah yeah definitely yeah cool yeah
actually I went to one in Indiana probably two months ago and it was really nice it was a bigger Association
and it was it was at a Fairground and covered like three huge buildings wow I
had fun with that one I found all kinds of stuff yeah I mean that's pretty good size and after all this stuff you know
it's planetary geology this stuff so yeah yeah and I love looking at the old
dinosaur you know dinosaur bones that are fossilized I mean that was amazing yeah yeah the fossil areas and other
huge adjuncts to all of this at Tucson as well and they have you know everything from you know for both rocks
and minerals and fossils you know there's everything you know from a two dollar specimen for kids all the way up
to you know million dollar pieces for museums you know right there on the spot yeah and you guys got into fossils I
thought you guys were talking about me I hear a voice
well we have um we have some old friends here already
watching Norm Hughes is watching out of Tulsa Harold lock uh howdy Norman Scott and the great star
people on the panel osmosis 007 howdy internet people's
and David ing Dave was on global Star Party a long time ago you should come
back sometime he says hello everybody so
we're getting started and you know or restarted with a great tradition of
the global Star Party Scott when was the date of the last one was it August 25th yeah it sure was
that's what I thought that's where exactly what it was yeah yeah it's weird
that this is August 20 or October 25th yeah I did not plan that I thought maybe you
did yeah Kareem Jaffer is watching
um he unfortunately couldn't be on tonight but uh I'm glad he's uh listening and
and his son is going to be on a global star party tonight giving a presentation
about his uh spectroscopic work at Mount Wilson Observatory
I guess it's time to get started here
astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a jet propelled through space at nearly the speed of
light but the Titanic collision between two neutron stars which are the collapsed cores of massive supergiant
stars the explosive event observed on August 17 2017 was the first combined detection
of gravitational waves and gamma radiation from the merger of binary neutron stars
this discovery prompted scientists to quickly aim Hubble at the site of the explosion
a total of 70 observatories around the globe and in space collectively gathered
data across the electromagnetic spectrum of the mergers aftermath astronomers used Hubble's capabilities
to precisely measure the position and movements of the explosion Shockwave they were trying to see how the
shockwave's physical properties changed over time combining Hubble observations
with that of several other telescopes allowed researchers to pinpoint the explosion site 130 million light years
away the data suggests the blast shock waves traveled along a narrow beam
confined by powerful magnetic fields the results in Jets smashed into and swept
up material in the surrounding Interstellar media this material included a mass radiation through which
the jet emerged as the jet moved away from the sight of the explosion the mass
moved outward this work paves the way for more precise studies of neutron star
mergers more observations like this one help us understand more about the
universe [Music]
well hello everybody it has been a long time a couple months I think since we've
had a a regular Global star party I have been running uh halfway around
the world doing events such as the starmus event in Armenia I came back
just to change suitcases and then I went to I went to Arizona to Oracle Arizona for
the David H Lee the Arizona dark sky star party
and combined with that was the entire community of Oracle who decided to
celebrate their dark sky Heritage and have celebrations at restaurants and bars in the area it was a lot of fun we
did have some thunderstorms in the evening and even into the late evening but almost every night it did clear off
Saturday was the coup de gras though we had clear skies all the way through and
um uh we had a live live bands music that was you know inspired by my uh
interaction at starmus understanding that music and astronomy
really can go hand in hand and um it was uh it was a fabulous night they so many
people came to Oracle State Park that they had to sadly turn some people away
but uh it just gives us encouragement to do it bigger and better next year
um so uh and then from from that point uh came back changed suitcases again and
went straight out to Mount Wilson Observatory where we had the 60-inch star party
and we just had a fabulous Tour by Tom menegheny and Chris Burns of Carnegie
and uh you know a new group of people got to learn all about the history of uh
that was made at Mount Wilson so you'll have to join us on one of these trips here in the future
but let's go ahead and get started we have David Levy here with us
and he will kick this 104th Global Star Party crossing the Great Divide
um and um you know it's uh that whole theme is
kind of metaphorical in the way that uh you know scientists and even amateur
scientists are crossing the Great Divide of the unknown you know to try to figure out where we are in the universe and you
know our relationship to it but also uh it is uh uh for amateur astronomers
especially uh in the way that we cross the Great Divide in the differences between people uh astronomy is one of
those uh things especially amateur astronomers one of those things that
bring people together it makes us make us all realize that we're all connected
somehow and uh so but uh I'm going to turn this over to David Levy David
thanks for coming on to Global Star Party thank you and this is the 104th I think
I've attended 103 of 104. well we added an extra one so this is uh this is still
technically for you 104th so it's still 104. it's still like okay so I have an
unbroken record somehow that's right I have to tell you that a lot has
happened in the two months that we haven't had the star parties and the most important thing is that
Wendy Wendy died on the 23rd of September
which would have which was the night the one night I was at the um Oracle Star
Party the star party in Arizona and we were observing together I had given her
a big hug earlier that later that afternoon and then went up to the star party and she passed away leaving a very
bright meteor that we could all see that night as her way of saying goodbye I
have two quotations today one of them is in memory of Wendy and it is um the other one is a happier
one from Lord Byron so the one for Wendy is from Macbeth and
it's also from the end of Hamlet and I think some of you might have heard that King Charles
III said that on the loss of his mom
back then and uh and that was only about three weeks or
so before I lost my windy and here goes the first quote tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in its Petty Pace from day to day over 30
wonderful Unforgettable years to the last syllable of recorded time
life is so much more than a walking shadow of friends who struts and Frets their
hours across the stage and then is heard no more out brief candle
it is a tale told by an idiot and it is a tale told by a genius full of sound
and light signifying so so much now cracks a noble heart good night
sweet Wendy and May flights of Angels Sing thee to thy rest and now comes the happier of the two
quotations this is from George Gordon Lord Byron's from Manfred
and one line has been added to it when the moon is on the wave and the glow
worm in the glass and the meteor on the grave and the Whisk in the morass
when the falling stars are shooting and the answered owls are hooting and the silent leaves are still in the shadow of
the Hill shall thy Soul shall my soul be upon thine with the power and with a
sign and tonight we go out to observe online thank you Scott and back to you I like
that ending um David I um uh What uh what people did
not see um uh in the behind the curtain of the global star
party was uh some happy news that David was able to share with us I I do want to
say that before we go to this that uh you know our 104th Global star party is
uh you know is dedicated to the memory of Wendy Levy who was a great
um I'm a great person to encourage David to uh
work through trials and tribulations that he had and to inspire uh all of us so
um it's really wonderful when I was at the Carolyn Shoemaker tribute at Lowell Observatory a topic of
discussion was where was the missing original plates
for the com for Comet Shoemaker Levy that David and Jean and Carolyn
Shoemaker discovered together and apparently they have been found
foreign can you give us a little backstory on that David yeah they have been found
um they were found by Patrick Shoemaker who was doing the final cleaning out of
Carolyn's house and he was in the basement looking in a filing cabinet and there he found
this this envelope wow
that there are two comets one of them is Comet Faye
um and then the other one is Discovery films original Discovery films love coma
teammaker 89 and I have one of them here the other one is on a transparency oh
wow just kind of showing it to you there yeah this is like holding the Rosetta Stone or something it's kind of like
holding a Rosetta Stone I don't know yet where they're finally going to end up
but I'm suspecting they will either go to the Smithsonian
or to the Linda Hall Library depending on which organization is prepared to
give them a better display but um I don't know if I don't mind bragging a
little bit yeah these are two of the most important photographic films I
believe ever taken and I'm so glad that they were recovered
just before the house was broken up and sold just
before everything would have been tossed in the trash yeah I'm so glad that this was this these films were recovered I I
would certainly rank these films in order of importance along with uh the discovery of the variable star and
n31 with uh from Edwin Hubble and um perhaps maybe one of the first images of
a star or nebula or the moon ever made so this is uh just to kind of have it in
your home and to be holding it is really amazing in itself so
um but I'm sure you'll find a good place where you know people throughout
throughout the future will be able to check this out so a very important one
of the things one of the things that I remember regarding these films is that when when will the announcement came
from the Central Bureau for astronomical telegrams that the comet was going to
probably collide with Jupiter um and the three of us were sitting in
the observatory in the bottom floor of the 18 inch and we're just looking at the films
again and we weren't talking very much it was really pretty quiet that afternoon as the three of us were trying
to understand the importance of what we were reading and we were being told oh
yeah yeah to absorb all of that well thank you for sharing that with us David thank you it's really cool
okay all right so we are going to transition uh now to uh Terry Mann from
the astronomical League uh she's going to share of course the astronomical league is is an organization that we uh
greatly support um in in all the ways that we can um from the underwriting of the national
young astronomers award and the Leslie Peltier award and now um and now the uh went well I mean a
Fleming award for women in astrophotography um but uh you know it's a wonderful
organization to join if your Club is a league club then you're kind of
automatically joining um but if you're somewhere in the world and you support what the league does and
all of its observing programs and all the awards and things that it does to support and uh encourage people to look
up and explore you can join the astronomical league as
a member at large and I know lots of people that watch this program have done
just that so um but I'm going to turn it over to you Terry thank you for coming on to the
104th Global star party I know that you've been also running all over the place and uh so it's nice to have you
here with us and um I'll let you take it away okay thank you Scott I hope I remember how to
do this since I've been on here I have to stop and think that's the reason why I do
them every week so I actually remember how to do this like what was last week you know
um yeah so thank you it is a pleasure to be here to see everybody again and uh
just to kind of catch up so I am going to ask the
um the questions once I remember how to do this I started that wrong
let's there we go and uh
we'll see if there we go we always talk about observing the Sun and being very
careful and make sure you have the right filters um and if you've never observed the sun
always try to find a club or somebody that is very familiar with observing the Sun so they can help you learn how to
find the sun in the telescope if you don't have a go-to mount or however you're going to use it or binoculars
especially we've got the two the 2023 annular eclipse coming up in October and
then we'll have the total eclipse coming up in April of 24. so we've really got some cool Sun stuff coming up and
hopefully a lot of Aurora with all the sunspots we have seen on the Sun so
before you look at the Sun have a good idea um of what you're doing or ask for help
because the sun can do some damage if you don't prepare correctly
all right the answers from August 25th it took me a little while to get back to
all my answers and the people that answered the questions correctly so the
first question was for observers in mid-northern latitudes what well-known
asterism is found centered at the Zenith when Darkness Falls late August and
early September and the answer is the summer triangle
next question what planet is closest to Earth on August 25th and that was
Mercury and the last question is which moon is
most massive and that would be Jupiter's Ganymede
so these are the people that answered the questions correct correctly that I
put on the list so it would be Cameron Gillis Bill Manley Adrian Bradley Don
knabb Barbara Brown and Andrew corkhill so for October 25th questions
what two planets did the moon occult in October
so what plant two planets did the moon occult in October and please send your
answers to secretary at astroleague.org
on a moonless night under Dark Skies can Jupiter cast a shadow is that true or
false I guess it shouldn't have been a question this is true or false so can it
cast a shadow yes or no and again please send your answers to
secretary at astrowleague.org and the final question what was the name
of the first comet ever discovered what was the name of the first comet
ever discovered we can't let David answer that because
yeah don't you dare not online
we will give the answers on the first um star party of every month the winners
will be announced and also we need all answers some people don't answer these
questions until they've watched it maybe in a day or two but we need all of the answers in by the Friday after the GSP
anything received after that we're already in process and cannot be done so
again please send your answers to secretary at australeg.org
and Scott I think we've talked about a little bit I was going to go in and talk just a little bit
oh wait a minute let me do the more important one oh yeah this is going to be fun this is going to be a blast I'm
telling you we have got amazing speakers uh astronomical League live is this
Friday and we're having another Halloween party we did it last year and we loved it and so this year we're doing
it again so again we will have Carol org which is the president of the league and he'll be doing an update we've got David
Levy and his celestial incantations and Barbara Harris at this point might
not be there um she contacted me today and said she didn't think she was going to make it
but we'll keep our fingers crossed we've got Scott Roberts that's actually going to give a talk and it's going to be a
good one I've heard the story um on November's blood red moon I'm really
looking forward to that I mean I'm sure a lot of people are there's a lot going on with the eclipse
we have Ken Kevin Schindler from Lowell Observatory Tales from the Crypt the
stories about Percival Lowell's Mausoleum that ought to be good too Mary
Stuart Adams dragons and devils in the night sky and we have ba Astro Bob Bob King from
Minnesota it came from outer space people and possessions hit by Space Rock
s so each one of these people will be speaking anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes
about their topic and it believe me this is going to be good I am so looking
forward to this one everybody has got such interesting topics Dave I can't
wait to hear about the eclipse and David you are always always welcome and it's
such a pleasure to have on Ali and Scott it's about time you got up and gave a
story I'm scared which I should be on Halloween this time you're gonna make an
appearance so please join us this Friday 7 P.M
eastern daylight time and you can watch us here on this channel or on the
astronomical League Facebook page whichever place and it will be recorded as always so you can watch watch it
anytime after so all right your topic was interesting
to me because you know I do a lot of astrophotography and there are you know
there us women are around to do this but most of the time you know there's not as
many as what there is now but I tell you the connection and the the actual
camaraderie camaraderie in astronomy is amazing our community is so easy going
so willing to share information um and just it's a pleasure really to be in
such a community where you can know so many people but for me I think being a woman out in astrophotography or night
photography and I asked actually I've known men that will probably say this too when you first start it you go
through an adjustment period especially when you're alone you can go and you Scout during the day
I Scout all the time during the day wherever I'm at where I want to shoot that night but when you go back at night
it is a total different the feel is all different everything's quiet you hear
the noises at least I usually am way out in the middle of nowhere and secluded
because I'm after the darkest skies and that's what everybody goes after you're going to be Imaging or visual you want
the darkest clearest Skies you can find and I find myself in a lot of really
cool places that if I was not doing this maybe I wouldn't be there look at starmus look at what these guys have
done they are seeing the world and they are bringing so much back to all of us and with Scott doing broadcasting it
actually opens up the world even more so so many of us connect that way we get
over that division but this is uh this is actually Casper Wyoming setting up for the 2017 Eclipse
oh wow yeah and you know when you're in this Hobby and you see a
view like this we sit here and we say it is amazing but I'm telling you it'll
knock your socks off because being in the crowd The Sounds the people the
excitement it is amazing when you're at a total solar eclipse it'll be amazing
to see the total lunar eclipse or the annular coming up in 2023 you don't
forget it I mean I've only seen three total eclipses Dave can outdo me by a
long shot but it's something I can tell you the picture from each one I can tell you the
feel and what happened from each one and again I bet every one of us here that
has seen a total solar eclipse remember so much about it you don't forget this
and you share that and it gets others excited and now with 2024 coming up
people are coming out of the woodwork here where I live and you know I'm
working with the parks people in my counties with the libraries doing talk
giving talks already lined up for next year and the following year to get ready
for this because so many people will see the 2024 and Michael
blockage package I don't say isn't package there we go
yeah he gave an amazing talk at Alcon uh I was I had a great time at Alcon I
listened to his talk and it inspired me even more but you know it's just like
um spending the night at arches you know during the day right now I think well maybe you don't have to have
reservations in October I think it might have stopped at this point but I'm not sure just going and shooting at night
trying to set up and do the type of shoots that you do you know like I said
when you first start this there is a little bit of element of ah you know you're out here in the middle of nowhere
and you're alone and you hear the noises I just actually I just did a shot uh was
in Colorado at Canyon of the ancient shooting a couple months ago and the
people were talking about I was at a BNB in a ranch and they said they had a bear
break into their honey okay yeah I'm out here five o'clock in the
morning and I hear something grunting in the woods and breathing heavy and I'm thinking oh my gosh the bear you know
and I'm not about to take off because he's not threatening me he's you know way far away but there is that element
of very much being aware of everything that's around you your Spidey senses
kick in you know you begin to be aware of the wind you begin to be aware of
Lights anything traveling and eventually as you do this long enough you get better at that but you also relax more
I find that when I go into a shoot and I'm by myself and I'm really literally
in the middle of nowhere I I sense a lot of things around me and I also know when I pull into an area if
I don't feel right and I even though I have no reason I will not stay in that area these are things I think as you do
this you get used to and once you relax you begin to see all these details such
as I think this is the three gossips at arches uh the Alaska Aurora I spend many
many nights traveling the night skies in Alaska or night roads looking at the sky
in Alaska alone and and it is spectacular um you know seeing the Earth Shadow just
in different areas around the U.S uh Borrego Springs um it was just incredible I would not
see these sites if I didn't do these things uh watching the Milky Way at the national parks
just is an amazing opportunity but one the whole thing I think I'm trying to
say is you begin to relax once you do this a lot you see more
and actually it's kind of like it's a very humbling kind of experience when you're standing under that dark milky
way where you're standing in a place like I saw Scott and um you know the whole group out at the
temple when you were doing the star party that had to be amazing to be in such an old old place yeah and all of
the people that were there I mean it had to be incredible so to be able to just oh I bet and share
it um you know I went to Death Valley I had wanted to go to the racetrack all at
Death Valley the moving rocks race track all my life and to actually spend the
night at the racetrack Imaging and and you know I found myself when the moon
was up when I first got there so I had a moon I could do a lot of shots and then it set but
standing in the middle of the racetrack was something hi
I'm gonna blast off right Scott yeah yeah Blast Off time
and again just the Aurora just amazing stuff but I tell you what this is my last shot
I have never in my life seen this site before um in May I was in island of the sky
National Park and I was doing the arch of the Milky Way and the air glow I have
never seen this before and I I was totally amazed because it was like one Arc over the other Arc
and I you know how you just see something you've never seen and you stand there and all with your jaw on the
ground saying oh my gosh what what is that I spent so much time there and you
can see the air or the light pollution mountains kind of here in the background but it was spectacular that you know and
again I'll never forget this evening and I'm sure Adrian can can go along with
this too he knows exactly what I'm saying I'll bet yes I do yeah uh did you
go through a stage when you first started doing this there is a little bit of uh getting used to it stage that you
you do yes there is I can vouch completely for that because
even as I do it now every little sound that I hear if I can't recognize what
the sound is I immediately put up my dukes so it's uh you're out there by
yourself and you know all of your fears run through your head now the truth is
you know that the animals like you said you talked about the bear
um the animals generally want no part of human beings they're not going to engage
unless something is wrong or you know something big so you you generally left
alone um you still do have to be aware of your surroundings but as you get used to it
as soon as you look up like you've you look at a scene like this before you even shoot it and it immediately calms
your mind um so that's um that is a part of doing
what we do with the nightscapes and um you know the landscape photography
you're enjoying the beauty of the night sky and you're capturing it as you're seeing it that becomes your focus unless
you know if you if animals and Little Things That Go Bump in the night scare you you're gonna need some time or
you're gonna have to go with a go with a friend in order to get yourself acclimated yes doing this because it is
not it is not easy to Trump through a dark wooded area
alone right with nothing but a headlamp and a tripod that you're holding as a
weapon um as soon as you get to the other side where the sky opens up and you're
presented with an image like you're showing us it makes it all worthwhile and um yeah you you know that's what we
go for yeah and you know I have found one strange thing a lot of people like to
sleep at night now I can't figure this out um what's going on here I don't I
don't get it they're missing so much sleep I think sleep could be overrated at
times this this will I won't use the term addiction because I think it's the wrong direction I think
passion is the uh way that we see it when you see beauty like this and in
some of those dark places you go to you know that you see it before you actually image it and
it really drives you to want to continue to not only capture it but show others
and say you know all the light that we throw up there or you know you're
blocking your view of this yeah exactly yeah it brings light pollution home it
shows people that don't understand what light pollution might be or how it affects really dark skies or even city
everywhere it kind of brings it home so I will quit talking and let you move on
so thank you very much thank you Terry
um okay uh that was that was excellent our uh our next speaker is
um uh David icker David was with me uh or I was with him at uh the starmus
event in Yerevan Armenia uh was uh it was really an amazing
um event something like I've never been to before and I felt uh I felt it was a real honor
to be there you know I mean there was so many Nobel laureates there uh scientists
that uh you know that you've heard about that never had a chance to meet much
less just hang out with and talk to um and uh you know the entire
presentation the astounding music the fusion of music that was there this was not you're not going to be able to buy
the album uh of music that was performed there which is sad because they should
have they should have the soundtrack to starmus on uh you know for streaming or
something the star parties were incredible especially the public star party at what
was called Camp starmus uh you know they said something like a third of the population of the area Yerevan went
through this and at the time I was the only guy there with the telescope so they were very very curious about the
telescope to say the least um and we did get a nice peek at uh at
Jupiter and Saturn while we were there um but uh you know the the hunger of of
that Society those people living there to learn more about science was
something that uh uh I don't think I've ever experienced before so uh you know the you know we
often talk about the transformative effect of uh of astronomy and astronomy being a gateway to science and uh how
things can make you more scientifically literate but uh you know when you have a
Young Generation that is really starving for this and they're finally presented with it in such an amazing way
um you know it's uh it creates something that uh you know you have to live through to uh to really understand so
David I'm going to turn it over to you thank you for coming on to our 104th Global Star Party of course thanks pal
and it was really a pleasure to have you there and we really had fun you know there's nothing like it and you're right
I mean when you go to a place where people haven't experienced this kind of thing and the enthusiasm the you know
the energy from people was just incredible and and it was a a large number of people we had you know I think
between four and five thousand people there and it was kind of the first event after which we came out of the pandemic
and kind of had a normal event with all the old people together again so I'm gonna share my screen if I can yep and
uh walk through some of this I'll see if I can start a slideshow here as well and can you see
Freddie Mercury yes yes we can then we're in the right place and I thought I
would just talk a little bit about starmus and Scott you can certainly jump in if you'd like having been in the core
of of our Inner Circle there um you know it was essentially a week-long event but we had some other
special events Scott brought telescopes at Great complexity of course you can
imagine shipping I I believe it was something like a dozen telescopes and getting them there on time on the ground
in Armenia and we had a remarkable star party I'll show you an image of where it was at a 1900 year old Greco-Roman
Temple as a backdrop with a band there and all kinds of things too but it was quite remarkable and we also had an
astro Imaging school that Scott and that my colleague Michael bokich were
involved in running his well with a number of people there talking about Imaging for several days so it was
starmus with some additional stuff put onto it this time
and I just kind of wanted to open with this image because there's a huge Festival sort of opening night of all
kinds of things that goes on uh and we had an arena now with you know 5 000
people in it that was quite a different venue than yeah starmuses of of past
days I can tell you you know it's it's become something uh a lot more Grand and
large uh in in its presentation than it had been but we had this incredible uh
you know just moment of of this Children's Choir of Armenia from year of
on coming out and and we also had uh involvement from the national Symphony Orchestra of Armenia there as well but
we had Freddie you know up there synced doing some Queen tunes and he was
singing and the kids were synced with kind of doing motions and singing along
with Freddie and I'll tell you Scott you were there with us I think row as well and when the kids were got to singing
with Freddy We Are the Champions yeah yeah we're weeping they're watching yeah
yeah I definitely I don't I don't care how uh hardened uh you are to uh things
like this but uh we all had big knots in our throats um that the singing was was amazing and
the harmonics and the building were were incredible I mean it is uh you know this
this building was uh built for rock and roll and um but uh you know this is part
of the fusion of the music that that I was describing a little bit
um at one point even this Symphony Orchestra and the children's uh choir and uh you know top performers
all performing together you know it was just you know I I just wish that I did
have uh you know the album because it was just it was uh it really got to you
and uh and this is part of what really reinforces all these scientific
information that you're hearing about all the uh you know basically rubbing
shoulders with some of the most Brilliant Minds in the world uh you know it was all right there and there were in
the audience children uh parents you know grandparents people of all ages
were there and uh and they were all getting it and it was uh it was really incredible
it was quite remarkable and as you know Garrick israelian is the founder and director of starmus along with Brian May
who's an astrophysicist and he also has a day job um he's a guitarist
um but but they sort of founded it and as Brian likes to say you know using both halves of your brain you know the
analytical scientific part and also the musical creative part you know and we
certainly saw that here uh at starmus this time so I thought I would just walk through a few highlights now much to my
surprise a few weeks before I left to go to Armenia I was given the startling
news that they had made me impossibly what was a backwards move in the in the progress of civilization they've made me
the president of the board of starmus um and in part this was because I also
found out when we arrived there we were going in to give a report to the
Armenian Parliament about this status of starmus and that was because the government of Armenia funded a good part
of it this time it's a long story but the past president was a physicist who
who is no longer president but was until last year so he really was excited to
have starmus come there can you imagine a physicist running a country you know um and we like you know running Germany
as well there Angela Merkel as well where we haven't quite gotten to scientists running the United States of
America yet but we'll see if we can work on that in the future so anyway to our surprise we had to go in and testify to
the Army this is like going into the Canon an office building you know adjacent to the capital and testifying
about what we were going to do I I thought for all I knew they'd made me the president of the board I was going
to spend the rest of my life in an Armenian jail no doubt okay so they were
happy with what we said and you know it was fine but that was quite an experience and we got to see you know
Armenia just the the city of Yerevan and and the country of Armenia going outside the you know it's a really wonderful
modern city I would say there's about a 30 by 30 square block core of the city
that's really nice and modern and it seems like you know you could be drops and you could be in a part of Manhattan
in little areas of it and then you get outside of the city and their archaeological ruins and places to
explore and it's very much you know uh not quite as you know it's it's a it's a
sort of an old world place outside of the you know Wonderful you know highly
shining you know spots of the inner city there um so it was really an interesting place
to be I'd never been there before Scott I don't think you had been there either no no and I was really I was really
taken back at um here we are in a city of a million plus people
um crime in year of the end is almost non-existent yes uh that was really a
surprise um the people that were uh you know the
the the hosts and the people that were taking care of us from the organizational part of starmus were uh
telling us you know the back story of you know why this event was so amazing in Armenia you know and I had you know
being an ignorant uh USA citizen so to speak uh you know certainly you hear
things about some repressive um uh things that were going on uh but
uh Armenia was of course part of the Soviet Union at one point and um uh you
know they they were definitely the average person would not have been able to go and study science would not
have been able to really use their imagination to create much okay
um you know and and that was uh to hear it from them and not to hear it from you
know some something that I might have considered to be some sort of propagandist type of thing but to really
hear it from them I would say was it
definitely had a profound effect on me um you know and the other thing that going
back to how non-violent uh European is uh
um they were talking about a murder that had occurred there seven years ago that they still talk about okay
um I was thinking about living in the LA area and going gosh you know Murder seven years ago that that you know
murders happen every day in in Los Angeles so it was just uh I mean it's just if you're considering going
someplace you want to you want to see some beautiful architecture meet some wonderful people
um you know I would highly recommend Yerevan and you will be absolutely safe
is very safe and and the culture is very interesting and it's an old culture in
terms of interest in science they're old astronomical observatories uh it's a
very old uh um Nation when it comes to having adopted Christianity too so
they're very interesting sites to to explore long before the Soviet Union came walking along and but we should
really give a shout out we had an army of volunteers who kind of looked after and took care of us and I have to give a
shout out to Sammy because I never would have been in the right place anywhere at any time this whole week without her
guidance and help so we we had a sort of red carpet treatment of people who were
assisting us we gave many times at schools going Here There and Everywhere
and it was organized just beautiful and perfectly so it really worked out well
the head guy um although I'm the president of the board I answer to this guy Garrick
israelian is an astronomer in the Canary Islands he's of Armenian Heritage and so
there's a big connection going back to Armenia for Garrick to have starmus there but he's a Spanish citizen now
working in the canaries and and he's an astronomers involved in all sorts of research and is the co-founder of
starmus when Brian May went back to finish his PhD which he did 35 years
after he began it because this band kind of got in the way of things there for a while
um Garrick was one of the advisors that he had and that's kind of how they hit him and how starmus got going so Garrick
sort of opened the festival here you can see the theme of starmus this time was 50 years on Mars because the Mars 3
probe Soviet probe and Mariner 9 both go back to well it wasn't exactly 50 years
thanks to the pandemic but it was planned to be 50 years later we talked about a martian theme here in large part
this is our neighborhood friendly billionaire who's on the board of starmus with us Tony Fidel if any of you
have an iPhone or an iPod you can thank Tony because he's the inventor of the
iPod and the co-inventor of the iPhone and he also eventually then left apple
and he began this company of home security stuff that you may have heard of as well called Nest so he's a really
fun guy and a just a riot to be around and kind of open the festival as well
with some some very highly energized remarks he's a great funny guy and his
son played in one of the Bands oh that's right around in the city I think at the
central start party event there I think you're right Tony Fidel uh you know of
course a lot of us were getting pictures of each other I was uh getting photos
with Christopher go and Sebastian who's you know one of the top AI AI scientists
in the world and who else I'm forgetting right now but Tony was in
the back kind of photobombing us you know and so I said okay Tony Bring It On in you know and so we all took pictures
together but uh you know it just you know the the the moment of of all this
uh you know rubbing shoulders with these people but there was no there was no
pretense there was no uh you know there was nothing uh where you
felt like someone was above you or whatever um so uh you know it was just it was
really it was wonderful that's all I can tell you that's I know that's cutting cutting to the quick there and saying
something that that sounds you know but uh it's it goes beyond words I mean they
really are the nicest most genuine people I think it's the people who are really trying to still get there who are
not the nicest people you know the people who are really on this level are really wonderful yeah kind people I
would agree really nice and and then this is still the opening concert in them came along the greatest
keyboard player in the history of rock and roll Rick Wakeman who is part of our group is as well and he he put on an
incredible show to sort of open the whole thing with the symphony orchestra of the country and you might have heard
he he had a band that he was in for a long time called yes um and he's just a remarkably talented
uh keyboardist and a super nice guy and he's very very interested of course in
science as well and this is a popular moment this was early in the proceedings here as well
you may have heard of this Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and he did a famous version of David Bowie's song
Space Oddity when he was on the International Space Station that got in it became incredibly viral and so on and
to hear Chris play that song live really gets to people as as well and so that
was kind of a a real highlight of the opening ceremony as well
there's a great bunch of people on our board with us this is the woman who you may not realize it yet but who may
extend your life span perhaps this is Emmanuel charpentier who is a French
Nobel prize winning uh biochemist and she has developed this crispr technology
of gene splicing that you may have heard about that may uh essentially uh extend
with therapy the lives of us in decades to come here so that is a big big step
forward in biology this is the fellow you were mentioning
uh Bernard skulkoff who is is one of the who is he was hanging around the Astro Imaging that's right um not Sebastian
Bernard that's who he is talking about a ordinary what kind of a lens do you use you know to shoot the North American
nebula you know a day later this is one of the
world's leading experts on artificial intelligence intelligence yes you know who you know he's talking about you know
lenses for a cannon to do shoot deep Sky objects with her it just shows how easy
it is to do it even yeah yeah you know 85 1.4 1.8 I bet you that's probably
what he said or something like that but uh yeah it's I I had heard early on
I had heard early on that that he was into artificial intelligence and so you
know I gave him uh I had a short conversation with him and was talking about
um you know how far away we are from you know
super intelligent Ai and uh he was he was saying Scott you have really nothing
to worry about in your lifetime so I said it's it's it there's some huge
problems to overcome uh yeah try to get there we're not quite uh where the the
movies present we are without but I mean it was astonishing because this you know he was hanging around talking about Chit
Chat and then you find out you know the next day he's a genius basically so this
is kind of you know part and parcel of what the starmus experience is like and these people not having seen each other
you know either and kind of carting you off to dinner and things like that it's also an exercise in sleep deprivation
you know I can tell you that storm is doubt about that but this guy he's a very nice and very funny guy then we had
our local comedian this was a a this fellow is a london-based uh sleight of
hand magician and Illusionist David sambuca he's a really funny very nice guy as well and he did a routine that
used all kinds of Tricks this is just kind of one moment here unmasking Einstein but he had audience
participation and it was very very funny and it was remarkable to narrow down to
one person with the card that he was talking about entire Arena of 5 000 people and he
narrowed it down to three and you know two and one and the card that he had on
stage the the partner card this person whale out in the audit you know obviously it's a trick where scientists
here folks but a remarkable trick wasn't it it was
it was yeah we're all wondering how in the heck do you do that so also a very
friendly guy had a long conversation with him on the bus uh heading back over to the hotel and on to other things that
were going on all night long uh for starmus so I highly encourage you uh when the next
starmus happens that you go there's really nothing that's exactly
quite like it it's this kind of blend it's quite remarkable this is a uh a
picture that I just called you know this this is you know
warm-up time I'll call it you know this this is Brian just sitting there you know we were in there for you know an
hour just kind of fooling around while they were kind of getting the concert sound ready for the night that was to
come there and fortunately we we ran around and gave a lot of talks in other
places and Scott Hubbard here who's at Stanford University now he's an expert
on Mars but years he was the director of NASA's Ames Research Center in
California um so he is a guy who had many of the leading Mars scientists and others
working for him let alone being an expert on planetary science himself and
he was an incredibly nice guy and again just you know these people are just very warm and genuine but basically Geniuses
the knowledge bank that these guys have right
another fellow who gave one of the early talks is another Nobel Prize winner
Michelle mayor you may remember in 1995 the discovery of the first
exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star uh and this is the fellow who discovered
that planet and was awarded the Nobel Prize for this
and so I don't take too long I'll get through some of these speakers fairly quickly this is uh someone who had me
rattled with an incredible scent really dry and kind of assertive sense of humor
and we had a table at the opening dinner Scott I think you were nearby yeah I was
and we had a couple people with her and we had seats reserved and so on and we
had various people we were and with and she was very you know upset that well
what do you mean we can't sit here and then played for a day I thought this
woman was really incensed with me because she couldn't sit at our table it
turns out she's the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University Lisa kaltendager who's in authority on a
variety of things um but but among them life in the universe and the search for extraterrestrial life and she put on you
know she she basically played a skit on me for a day and a half and then said you know I was just kidding you this
whole time and came up and gave me a great big hug and I thought wow scientists you got to watch your back
you gotta watch them that's right that was quite something there's another
great planetary scientist who's a good pal for many years of us Dave grinspoon
he's the fellow who co-wrote the book on New Horizons with Alan Stern another good pal of ours and Dave grinspoon not
only grew up as a child with his father who was a famous researcher being one of
Carl Sagan's best Pals in New York uh but David among other things is one of
the world's leading Authorities on Venus among other planets so he gave a talk on
climate change on Venus Mars and believe it or not yes it's happening on Earth
too so he's a really great guy and a funny guy and full of all sorts of good
stories well this was actually not the warm-up not the sound check but the actual
performance here with Brian you can see you know he almost has a sort of a sergeant peppery uh outfit on here which
he used in in Queen's tour this year and he has a long-standing friend Graham
Goldman here who he wrote a song called floating in heaven which they released this year actually you may know this and
Graham had a band back in the day that went on for a long long while called 10cc and they had some hits as well and
so they collaborated on this and and kind of opened this big main concert
night if you will Graham and Brian together
well of course what happened after the concert other than you know I got a message along with another friend who
was sitting next to me come back to Brian's dressing room right away after the show so we went back there and we
were escort we actually had a police escort and two cars that took us screaming out of this car after the
concert so we went to a restaurant that was closed that you can see here just for us which was really nice and we had
a dinner that lasted until about 3 30 a.m um you know again it's a marathon you
know crazy catching up and it was great because Charlie Duke our pal our Moonwalker pal here uh and Dottie Duke
uh here you can see his wife were with us and and so it's always electrifying
to hear Charlie or another Moonwalker talk uh about I don't care if you've heard the stories before talking about
walking on the moon and what the experience was like there in Apollo 16 and what they did and just absolutely
you know makes your hair stay and on end and so we had a very very wonderful time
uh catching up after the show even though we got it was about two hours of
sleep that night and we were up and at it again so start you know you need to sleep a lot before and after starmus
potentially then the next day we had the world's leading Authority uh on black holes our
our dearly beloved friend Stephen Hawking of course is no longer with us but Kip Thorne of Caltech is and so he's
the the man when it comes to Black Hole Theory and he wrote a very cool book
with a an artist friend called Leah Halloran who's here with him and they did a sort of a multimedia show about
black holes and about gravity and about time warps uh and you can see this book
online if you go to Amazon and they talked all about what black holes really are and of course there are a lot of
misconceptions some of which were fueled by black hole scientists about black
holes and so to hear Kip sort of set the record straight um you know I don't care if you heard
this talk before it's it's really magical to hear the guy who is the world's leading expert on one of the
coolest things in the universe this fellow Mark boslow is another old
friend and he's been a starmus regular for us and he's the world's leading expert if you will on impact and
explosions uh and is it Sandia National Labs in New Mexico uh near Albuquerque
and is among other things the the preeminent expert if you will on
energies and what happens with impacts and that goes uh from things like Chelyabinsk you know which was pretty
minor but in our time all the way back to the kpg impact and others that you
know did the dinosaurs no favors so it's always he's a great speaker as well and
and really uh interesting and talented to listen to because of all of the uh
wide range of expertise and then Scott I don't know if you'd like to jump in this is Garney Temple where we had the star
party and this was really your babies Scott yeah this will I was amazing in
the respect fact that I you know of course it's a UNESCO world heritage site this is a First Century A.D Pagan Temple
you know so it's pre-christian uh you know it has I didn't learn all about the
architecture but it definitely is Roman architecture there are uh you know it has been
destroyed I think a couple of times and rebuilt uh you know so you can see kind
of newer parts of it and older Parts kind of in this jigsaw construction that
you see here at the light and dark Stones uh inside of it was actually
quite small and there was just like this small table for making um
you know reading something or doing you know some sort of ceremony on the inside
uh walking around it uh you know it did feel there was a sacred kind of feeling
about it and stuff so we did we went uh early you know a couple of days early to
check it out and to see uh where we would put our telescopes and uh you know
the best part of the sky to look at and everything when we got there for the event uh it had an incredible lighting
job I I know that the international dark sky Association might not have approved this particular uh Star Party event but
uh the stage uh with uh the one of the bands called no sound it's it's band
leader is an incredible astrophotographer by the way I was looking at uh you know long exposure you
know 60 hour long exposures that he had done uh and he was into it
um their music was incredible incredible we had astronauts there we had Laura
Nobel laureates there people that had bought tickets to come to this
particular event were treated to really
um you know a five-star maybe six star type of event
um and uh you know so uh the company I think it's pronounced Arora is that
right they yeah they they make the um Brandy that I think that uh Winston
Churchill preferred uh you know so they that that Distillery has been around for
a long time they were this they're serving free Brandy uh at the event there was also a micro beer brewery uh
that was there uh also serving we were treated to a very traditional Armenian
dinner and you're sitting down with the likes of uh you know astronauts you know
Charlie Duke of course was there and just just everyone and it was just amazing uh to be there with this and
then the amateur astronomy uh group in Yerevan was their Manning telescopes uh
uh you know maybe Manning's the one wrong word because there are plenty of women there running telescopes too
um and uh uh even though with all the lights on and everything we were still
able to see plenty of deep Sky objects uh the air is very transparent in that
location in uravan and um but uh I did learn David uh maybe you can set the
record straight here but uh I heard that uh the that UNESCO has never allowed a
world heritage site to be used as a center for an event any that even
remotely resembled this you know with live music
and and refreshments and stuff like that so it was uh um it was quite a privilege to be able
to do this here and just you know so I went back I I of course have pictures of this as well I went back to the as far
back as I could get with my iPhone and my cameras and stuff like that and just took photos I was just trying to take it
all in you know because it really was and an amazing social star party you
know with people just having a great time uh part of the volunteers of our
group of course they were all there helping people get the scope set up and collimated and everything
one of those people was Norman Fulham who makes those giant Newtonian
telescopes he was there he's also a musician and he's also performed on global star party before uh you know he
uh he performed Rocket Man live on that stage for the audience and they really
got into it so it was really cool it was something we've really never had
a Nevada Star Party event quite like that and a lot of people who were there had their first view through a telescope
that night and were really emotional about it yes yep so it was just a great event oh this
this I'm glad you got this picture this is uh this is a special moment so this
is a there's a fella there's a fellow who's a fan really famous guitar player I'm not talking about Brian who's
writing the picture here but but uh Slash you may have heard of who's the guitarist for Guns and Roses you know
very famous band this is bumblefoot tall on the right here
the other guitarist who was in Guns and Roses with Slash not slash but he also
has his own super group if you will called sons of Apollo and they were there and boy they really that was some
pretty edgy Rock we had from them for a while on that night and of course bumblefoot what does he do but to come
over and play right in Brian's face you know yeah yeah it's kind of a face melting uh Qatar lead it was just uh
yeah and the closer he got to Brian May the more amazing this guy became you
know it was just like wow it was incredible right right Garrick is
on the left Edge there as well and and so yeah that was quite a moment uh of fun and and Brian was very gracious of
course about it as well we also uh gave a number of Stephen
Hawking awards for science communication which the board Awards and the probably
the preeminent one if you will this year was to Jane Goodall who is really the
great uh leader and expert and the wisest founder if you will
um of the science of of studying chimpanzees you know and and there's such a Heritage that she has of
understanding chimpanzee Behavior she was not able to come physically to
Yerevan but she was with us joined us via link and boy the I don't know Scott
if you remember the the talk that she gave about humanity and where we're going and the meaning of life yeah
together yes you know she really I mean she shared with us uh you know some
profound wisdom about what you know being a part of humanity is all about you know and and there were people who
teared up from that talking yeah well it was quite something yeah
um and then we go we go from profound philosophy to our pal Michael bokich who
um uh hosted some of the days on stage and was very enthusiastic and you know if you know Michael Michael has kind of
a little bit of a Rodney Dangerfield kind of a feel if you will of you know of throwing some jokes out there and
making sure is very relaxed and so that went over very well and I can tell you that
Garrick has already asked me to get Michael to host some of the days in the
future so crazy jokes and stuff worked very well uh uh so that that was a good thing for
for him he really enjoyed that one of the days we also had the chance to go
and visit arabuni uh Fortress which is up on the highest point of Yerevan here
which is a fortress that was established in 782 BC uh and has been rebuilt and
was assaulted multiple times and captured and recaptured and just incredible to see the the history that
goes back uh so far um in this site and and this is kind of
a shot of all of the starmus speakers Gathering uh for a for a shot it was
comical because we all marched to the back of the stage and stood there and Brian and everyone else looked down at
the stage wondering what the hell we were doing and then they told us we were in the wrong place and we had to March
out to the front again so it was a little bit comical but we eventually got to the right place and took a group
photo there um and forgive me uh for oh oh no I'm
sorry I took that one out okay wasn't that or maybe I didn't I don't remember now anyway we opened this is actually
going back to the start of the festival and we festival and we opened with a press conference uh with some of our
board members and Nobel Prize winners here and with the astronaut on on the left there Garrett reesman who's a a
space shuttle in an ISS astronaut and that's Emmanuel uh with me
um there in the middle and Michelle mayor and then a very talented
um scientist who's a multi-disciplinary scientist Chris rapley who among many
other things has been the director of the science museum in London he was a really nice guy and a super special guy
and forgive me um I thought I would end with a little bit of a self-serving one because Scott
was in on this conspiracy but several of Scott and Sammy who was shepherding me
around and several others my Michael and Holly conspired to surprise me because
while I was there on this day in in uh um Yerevan during starmus I recorded my
40-year anniversary at astronomy magazine all right so they gave me it
was fun of gin with astronomer this this fellow who makes this gin it makes it
it's astronomers gin you know so Scott and I had to you know do a toast and I
think we had three or four shots of this each something like that Scott and we had a little cake and celebrated and
thank you for that and and that was really meaningful to me a lot of fun yeah it was meaningful to
me too I mean to think you've spent four decades at astronomy
um you know does it feel like 40 years you know yes and no I mean it's in one
sense it seems like a long long time ago and we've had a lit since the old days with Richard Berry and Robert Burnham
there it's that's a long time it's many many changes have happened since then
and in another sense it's all you know like it's happened in a Flash and it's been a great great deal of fun and and I
look forward at some point here to uh pulling up stakes and just having a lot
of a lot of fun you know with astronomy again someday here yes
wonderful so it's been quite an experience and I will end uh screen sharing Scott we were so
um proud to have you there and I know we have plans to uh move forward which I
think at some point reasonably soon we'll have some things to talk about about a future starmist can't say
anything right now but but I think it'll be a great fun and I would encourage everyone who can come to do so because
you can see how what a special experience it is yeah it's it's more than just hanging out with Geniuses and
it's more than the music it's more than all of this stuff it's a it's an
important profound experience that when you're there you're part of it and so
it's not like you're sidelined in any way and um you know the uh
this event had a lot of volunteers we talked you talked you know I touched on
it briefly you talked more about it but the volunteers uh really I mean pulled
the whole event together for us they made sure that people were taking care of that they were uh protected that they
were on time uh all this stuff and and um you know I just trying to watch all
the moving pieces of starmus it was complex yet it had its its um it had its
glue and I think that a big part of that glue was the volunteers that that were there uh I imagine that in future
starmuses if you are so compelled um that you could volunteer for something like that if you could give up
about three to four weeks of your life and uh in many sleepless nights because they
were working 24 hours a day seven days a week you could have called any one of
them and they would have been there with whatever you needed so that was uh really amazing we had a personal
assistant for a week basically it was really scary and I showed one more thing
to underscore you know uh I showed a selection of some speakers
with the main stage with the events in town in the city with going to schools
here and there there were well more than 40 speakers yeah you know this is a tiny
slice of what actually happened there right yeah uh Nadine Cox was there from
JPL you know she's managing The Rovers on Mars uh
um you know and to sit down afterwards after the event and have have a a drink
and have something to eat and all those people are just around you you know uh
that was it made it seem a little surreal in that respect
um but um every one of them said you know I don't
know how it all came together it did and um you know they can't wait to do it
again so well I can tell you that we will do it again and at some point and
perhaps reasonably soon we'll be able to talk about that great great thank you
David that was awesome that was awesome all right okay so
um we're moving on at this point and uh by the way I've
shared some um uh YouTube videos of uh you know Graham Gould and um Brian May
uh performing performing floating in in heaven you can watch it on YouTube when you get a chance here and a section with
bubblefoot who is really one of the most gifted uh Rock guitarists uh that that's
out there and that dude was cool I mean he we're hanging out in the lobby of the hotel and he's letting us hold his
double-necked guitar which I don't know how much that thing costs but uh that was just uh absolutely awesome
um but um uh we're gonna move on now uh uh we've got uh Adrian Bradley who's
been waiting patiently uh backstage here and so we're gonna bring you on thanks
Adrian for coming back on to Global star party again absolutely and
um the topic that you picked um couldn't have been more
to [Music] what makes me go outside even when it's lightning out back I don't know Terry if
you're still listening I don't know if you've ever been out when there's been a distant Thunderhead
that you didn't expect to be there but you even try and take pictures of that as well when you're
um when you're out Imaging the night sky um so
so I think what I'll do um Scott is I'm just gonna go right into sharing my screen
and use some of the images I've collected over the last um
month or so while um you and uh David eicher were in
starmus and I I'm kind of thinking you know I was an Okie text and maybe I went
to the wrong Forum maybe I should have saved the pennies and went to flew to starmus instead because that just looked
this guy images you could have done from um from the Temple of Garney would have
been that would have been a great foreground oh yeah yeah I wish I had your talent and Equipment uh you know
just to uh get some of the to just to try to take it in it was really amazing
um well and we're going to start right away with an image that I think typifies
what your topic was there I am in a self-portrait basically
um looking at the night sky just sitting there and uh contemplating what I'm
seeing and if if you know your constellations you know you're looking at Orion Taurus and this part of the
winter Milky Way over Lake Huron it's a uh a portal 3 to portal 4 Sky
you've got the fall this is a this is a slice in time anytime I'm out Imaging the night sky
this is what it looks like before I actually hit the button so sometimes I'll go ahead and I'll hit the button
while sitting there and see if I can sit still for two minutes so that's something I've started so the question
is how did I get here well that same night I fired at the
cygnus region and I noticed I got some fall colors here as well it's fall in
Michigan I'm back from Okie text and so we're going through this story backwards
where I'm noticing the Milky Way dust Lanes don't come out even with two
minute exposures one for the ground and one for the sky this is all I can get
it's a beautiful location and you can see the fall leaves and I was able to
capture this the way the eye sees it you know if if there
were a little more light of course but um it's a very natural setting and if
you walk down here and you look over this Lake this this might be what you see with some trees in
the distance some have lost their leaves there's some fall colors here
and there's leaves this way so you know also
this is the this is a simple shot but it's our winter hexagon or winter
circle with Sirius here rigel here aldebra in here
um looking for which I do believe this is Capella of auriga and caster
Pollux um and
help me name the star it's it's escaped me it's uh the look it's canis minor
um that fills out the circle this has a joints Circle say it again
yeah Mars is now a part of the Winter Circle for this season fits right in line well
maybe it you kind of have a dip to Mars and then back to Capella
and um procyon right here and serious so our Winner's Circle has a
visitor this year and um I thought that was interesting so
I frame it against this tree and and I took this image so
having come back to Michigan where if you shoot in the daytime you get fall
colors like this um it that's what led to trying to do those
fall colors at night but I came when I came back
I thought I'd try my hand at Milky Way Photography at another favorite spot
I wasn't getting much of the Milky Way is uh Perseus is here the double cluster
but I noticed there's a Thunderhead in the distance so you know the picture that's in my
background this is a full image so I turned my attention to trying to capture light if I could capture a bolt from the
Thunderhead this is probably the best shot um like you can see some of the rain in
the it's a distanced sea storm and whenever there's one of these you know
the stars are above it but it often captures my attention when I try to shoot at the core of the Milky Way I
didn't have my tracking unit so I got a lot of stars streaks and barely this
part of the Milky Way and when I wanted the Thunderhead to produce
more lightning it wouldn't work so so I just accepted
what I got here in order to get here this is where Terry Mann was talking about you see these
woods behind me it's about a quarter mile walk through a trail in these Woods
to get to this spot um in order to take photos so you do
have to be committed if you're there with a friend it's great if you're
um there by yourself you just have to trust that the animals really don't want
to come after you they unless they're hungry and then you might have to make a
noise and um you know and they go away quietly
now as we're traveling back we um we got a chance let's see we'll go with
we'll go with this picture taken one of the last nights at Okie
text over one of the mesa's the uh Earth shine here
and the bright moon yeah look at the way it's lighting up the the top of the tree
yeah you can tell this is not a um you know this isn't something done in
Photoshop this is right that was the that was the single real image
and I just cropped it in and tried to um expand it a bit Yeah the Photoshop if
I wanted to be a Photoshop hero we'd take another image layer it on top and
maybe even try and do some stars but I like Simplicity in my photos
um you know putting a lot of effort into photos you do that sometimes when
you want the picture to be a reflection of your own how great you are at doing
pictures but if you want the honorable to feed to like your photo you best keep
it simple and you best keep it about the night sky itself or you may you may get a harsh rejection
when David sent an email you're getting uh you're getting accolades here from the audience so that's great yeah
um you know we've got these mineral moons to feed that you've probably been sent and
um you know the moon well and um you can tell when it's something
that has lost its natural appeal you two Scott everyone out there yeah those
those can be very interesting and I'll give you a case in point
um with some of the images I tried to collect of the zodiacal light and Orion
we we tried it again for this year we captured it and sometimes
the sharpness you know the the resulting image may not have quite been
you know the way that I would have liked it I actually want to leave that there um
here's an example so this I think is a little overdone
it's it's you've got a lot of dust lanes and the thing about dark sites the dust
Lanes in the Milky Way are much more visible and you know it's much easier to
pick them up in images and all these stars come along for the ride because there's so many so much more starlight
can come in and while you've got detail you know if you like it for the detail
like I can go zoom in and there's the shape of M23 right there um but you sometimes blow out some of
the features here and it's possible to take shots you know there's
around here I think bathes our body's window appears it's possible to get that
sort of imagery but you just have to be careful with um the settings that you use
whereas a shot like this well the foreground looks a little more
natural here even if it's a composite and yes lots of red like this was a night that got cloudy so a lot of people
took more Liberty at brightening their lights but look at the dust Lane here
um very much visible the Stars here doesn't appear to be a split in the Milky Way it appears to be
a full unit essentially and there's Altair Tarzan and if you've seen some of
my other presentations you know that I like to look for Barnard Z and see how
it looks and I like to look for the coat hanger and see how it looks and whether
I've got some colorful stars whenever I do this section of the Milky
Way many might say well Milky Way season is over when this part of it sets to
which I say Milky Way season is all year round cygnus sets over here
and it's in a dark area where you've got all the sky glow it still can be as
bright as the core um let's see here's uh another attempt
and there's a meteor that's streaked through this image M45 sits into
zodiacal light here wow there's in 45. there's a zodiacal light
and Leo is Raising its head I think it's hard to see where regulus and where the other stars
of Leo's head but it's amazing to see the landscape before us too it lit up by
Starlight this is not absolutely you know this is Milky Way lighting up the
hills out there uh you know yes when you process black Mesa Oklahoma when you
process you can really see how the lighting the shading changes
based on this light from zodiacolite gig and shine maybe an hour or two
prior to the zodiacal light forming I know there are times when both will be
visible depending on when it comes up and I have yet to capture that but uh
Milky Way light yeah Milky Way light is amazing you can't you can see a faint
Shadow around each one of the cactus and stuff like that but it's not
it's not elongated or sharp um you know like you would from the Sun
so it's uh you know it's very it's like an amazing studio lighting yes it
absolutely is and it does help you when you shoot a photo like this now
chromatic aberration I don't recall if I used the tractor I was able to
get this you know to show exactly how Camp looks this is sort of uh with your
eyes what you see and you see most of this some of the detail you know is
not as it may be a little clearer with the picture but this is in eye view you can
see you know the butterfly rising over the Mesa over here
so it's it's an amazing time and I always recommend
um that you know if anyone comes out come on out and you know take a look
at the night sky here you've got we back off a little bit and we've got
you know we've got the Mesa this is this is essentially what you're looking at when you go to Okie text either bunch of
campers telescopes out here somebody who's sitting there working on his Imaging
you got the big dabs you got this scope here
um from next door and you've got the Milky Way just sitting here with the cat's paw and
these four stars which are part of the uh Lobster Claw and you've got all of
these all of this detail the ptolemy's cluster here the butterfly
somewhere here over Sagittarius M22 there's M22
shining the Lagoon all of these M23 M25 small Sagittarius star cloud and I spent
a lot of time observing even more so than Imaging just
because I wanted to I wanted to capture with my own eyes
what I'm seeing in another view of the cygnus region
that's good look at that yes the whole summer triangle over this Mesa yes very
Serene and and there there's a lot even and this the
shot here typifies what a cloudy night looks like
that you generally don't see when you're looking at the night sky
it's all clouded up except for a bright region poking through the galactic
center in only 30 seconds we have all of this star detail here
and um there's there's M23 sneaking through everything else is covered by
this these dark clouds which because there's no light pollution they're dark
Underside so it's just like someone's closing the uh Observatory door
on top and um and you can still get a beautiful shot if
you know if any part of the Milky Way presents itself that's cool and one
thing that I always try to mention you know when you give me the opportunity is Milky Way season never ends
um there are going to be some images that I'm showing again but um and here I was able to finally get a clear view and
some more ha detail here you've got this section of the Milky Way near Orion that's a challenge for those
who are only used to shooting the core sure shooting the core can be beautiful
you've got all this I decided to shoot it here and
this image kind of typifies what the Knights of Oaky text look like
um if we go all the way back to um
I'm not even sure I can do that but I'll try um
see if this is the one so from my location at home
you know you've got this but
from Okie text you've got this same region look how much more detail
you can get um the sickness region
looks like this that's amazing and and in a portal
through sky it's not that far off but you see how
it's a little more faint in a portal 3 portal 4 sky at two minutes
versus the two minute shot that I took here
fills in a little bit more and there's a little more detail going towards the uh where the
Bulge starts which is below Horizon what happens with our type of
Photography is the cooler looking the landscape the
more people are drawn into the photo but if you don't live in an area where
you've got great rock formations try and make your Sky something that you
can look at yeah there's the Pelican there's the North American can we see that in Michigan
yeah if you can see it you can still see it so and that's what you know when
Jason um comes on Jason guinzel um with you know with direct shots like
maybe here's my one wide field shot classic astrophotography here the
California this Rift is from the Milky Way and the Pleiades on this side
um I was able to get somewhere I think two minute shots look at the density of stars those that
process there's a reason that they take some of the worlds out any one of these worlds could have a planet around it
that might be similar to Earth so you know you don't want to just you want to take it lightly when you're removing
Stars you could be removing yeah with like planets whole civilizations right
you're moving whole Civilizations for the sake of a beautiful image but I do understand when when it's so chock Full
of Stars like this and you want to highlight you know I've seen a lot more a lot more time given to the Pleiades
this void really exists that's near there you can kind of see it
and you've got the dust Lanes here the detail you can get this was with
I believe um I'm trying to think of the camera I
think I use an 85 millimeter lens on this um
either 85 or a 35 millimeter lens one of the two and then did a crop and gathered
about an hour's worth of data to get this tracking with one of your Scott one
of your Explorer scientific xos unguided wow that's nice that's enough
so Shameless plug for Scott's Equipment I actually used it to take the shot of
myself that's cool thank you you know all the way back so we'll have to uh myself yeah I love that shot too it just
looks um uh that should be like uh you know the last picture uh or the first
picture of of your next book so I I've had that suggestion and I'm I'm thinking
I'm going to follow up with that yeah so so what I'll do is I'll um
I tried to capture what it really looks like when it's dark time and you're at a
board of one sky and you're at this and this was the best I could come up with the Milky Way appears roughly like this
you know your eyes have more dynamic range than I captured in this composite
but and this actually may be a single picture now that I think of it but
this is roughly how the Milky Way looks how bright it looks and
um now do I know whether or not you can actually see M22 naked eye I'm not so
sure you know some with a camera you pull out a little more detail than you can see you can absolutely see m6 and M7 naked
eye you can see M8 naked eye you see the Sagittarius star Cloud I don't think
you'd quite make out these become they glow but you don't quite make it out you
can absolutely see these dust lanes and you see there's a slain here I don't
think you quite see these four stars these little dim stars but they of course come out in a photo
um when you image of course all of that detail including the tails
Everyone likes the image Row for Yuki um I'll go ahead and drop Molly
wakeling's name she was here and she got some very beautiful images
so it was uh it was nice to see what's going on so I'm going to I'm
going to do a comparison one quick comparison photo this was last year
where I edited data and this year
that was my updated image not much different really
let's go back one more one more time so we can yeah let's see if I did this
right um let's see if this is the nope so we'll
go back uh so
so this was a processed image I did in 2021
and then I think if all I got to do is just close this and that and this is the
processed image from 2020 to a little bit of vignetting here
you know that it's okay doesn't look much different but it does that's basically how it
looked at Twilight yeah and this Milky Way comes out at Twilight these dust lanes are visible
naked eye and you use them to jump across here this dust Lane this
LDN I want to say it's LDN 90. that little dust Lane is visible and then this dot right here is actually
the wild duck M11 those are you you learn where the messier objects and the NGC objects I've
got a few more to learn but when you can see those objects in a
Milky Way photo you know that you've got a
decent and I do mean decent uh detailed image and again it's for me
it's about marrying the Earth with the Milky Way so we showed this image well
when you turned around you saw the other side
this part of the Milky Way with m33 here yeah I wonder if it's the design you
actually see the dust laying there there it is yeah and I wonder if m110
somewhere if there's a blow it may have disappeared in the uh
noise reduction the noise reduction sometimes is or is not your friend you
know if you blow things out the double cluster gets bright with the heart and soul show up
and then there's all of these other nebula that you know I need that I definitely need to take the time to look
at and you may ask well why is are these mountain tops red well
that's light that was captured by my modded camera that's shining from Camp
all the rest that's mainly on those mesas reflecting on those bases that's
amazing and I left it there I just said well that that red light's actually there so yeah well thank you Adrian for
sharing oh you're absolutely welcome yeah we have to be moving on to our next speaker but uh uh those were amazing and
and uh we'll we'll have to see more next week so yeah
I'll have to go get some more um you can well fall colors and I think
yeah I blew away I think uh Jason it's your turn
Where is the I wanted to do the final
here we go real quick I'm ending on that final image go out
and look at the night sky contemplate and just enjoy it even if you don't do
imaging see it for yourself and see what happens to your mind see if you aren't
somehow rejuvenated and this empty chair for those who should be joining you and
sitting in that chair with you invite someone along yeah so there you go let me thank you Adrian thank you so much
welcome all right so coming up next here is
um uh uh Jason gonzale the vast reaches um uh Jason thank you for coming on uh
with us we've uh you know it seems God was only gone for
um a couple of months um you know running around doing all kinds of uh in-person types of the of
events but um I have to admit I really missed uh the
Tuesday night Global star party and uh to be able to sit down and comfort with
everybody and um you know
one of the things that we've all learned even though uh the pandemic is I guess
officially over you know we are all traveling around and you go to places and no one's wearing masks anymore and
it's it kind of seems like a weird dream that that happened but of course covid
is still with us and uh there are still people in the world who can't leave for
various reasons and a global Star Party does serve that audience
um you know gives you an opportunity to send chats you know live chats to us and
to see presentations from some of the top astronomers in the world so
yep and so Jason are you uh are you ready to come on at this point or
your audio is yeah let's get your audio
no audio uh
so I have an idea Jason um uh you could do a silent uh no no no
no no no he doesn't have to do that he can actually he can actually call me uh
and I can I can have his voice over telephone onto my microphone I've done
it kind of thing before I think he's actually going for I think it's Plan B as a laptop though okay he
could do that too that's the cool thing about uh the platform that we're on
um uh when I was at the Arizona dark sky star party we had one guy running PowerPoints another guy uh you know
running a uh you know various Zoom you could have multiple Zoom connections and
Nix uh your presentation which is kind of cool so yeah I've had I had to do that a couple times I think because uh
if I came in like say I'm on the road as I usually am from Imaging or something
and then I get to the computer or something doesn't work out I've done
that where I'll present with the computer and talk with the phone so yeah I've been there before yeah make
doing all of the stuff that we're doing here to give a presentation um can be a little
um can be a little tough so I think that uh I think Jason has now
logged in with another computer to get us audio here
you want to say something can you hear me I can hear you fine I hear you all right hold on for a second I gotta heck
I gotta turn the speaker off on this thing okay yeah
okay so now I don't care
can you still hear me I can still hear you yeah all right I got an echo on my end
um let me try to turn turn the volume down on one of them yeah and turn it all the way down on one
all right can you hear me now yes yes yeah there's a little disconnect between the video and the audio but that's okay
yeah I got one crazy setup going on here
um because you guys are really uh quiet to
me like I can just uh talk I have um so just one final check this is working
yes okay I don't know what happened here I apologize
um so I've got um thanks for having me on Scott and again sorry for all the the
discombobulation but yeah it's all right I got a little bit of a presentation I
put together I did a talk at a local astronomy club here last week and I'll just uh walk through
that because you know the topic of this is
um you know how we connect with the night sky and um really that's what astrophotography is all about for me
is that connection we have with the night sky and my ability to um
to kind of explore from my backyard let me see if I can get my screen
shared here and let me know when you're able to see
this yeah that's good good yep all right well okay one way or another
we did this I don't know how I tried to hook my laptop up and that didn't work either yes we have the technology
so um you know like we you know like the others before me
um you know astronomy um to me is about you know
exploration it's also about you know introspection and connecting to the cosmos and um
you know I I started pretty young with the interest
and I just kind of developed that over time um you know my parents kind of sponsored me um this goes a little bit back into
my uh my journey into into photography and um as a kid I took a few trips to Kennedy
Space Center uh saw space shuttle launches this was you know in the 80s
um and about the age of 10 my parents gifted me this telescope that you see here in the center and I actually still
own this thing it's a cheap department store refractor um Jason brand and I thought it was cool
because it had my name on the side but this past summer I I um put my iPhone
behind it and I still am able to get decent images through this and it just kind of demonstrates
that maybe you don't need so much to kind of get that connection um you know all told the equipment here
is uh Dirt Cheap if you were to find one on a Facebook Marketplace or something you
could probably pick it up for free but I thought you know still relatively decent crisp shots of the Moon
through that little telescope yeah and so uh you know out of childhood I
you know had my young adult life where you know I wasn't really involved in
astronomy at all and in 2009 I picked up a Canon Rebel camera because I've always
had this interesting landscape photography and really that kind of spawned a reconnection with the night
sky I immediately took that camera and started shooting I bought it because I was going on a vacation up to the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan and um during that trip I took what I consider my first few
astrophotography shots and that's the ones you see on the screen here the um
the planet Venus below the Crescent Moon Rising in the dawn and even at this point he had to wear
with all the to realize that I was um you know under exposing the moon because I could see the Earth shine with
my eyes so I was playing around with exposure and I I hardly had an astrophotography set up at all I had the
the camera balancing on a lawn chair and I was taking pictures of the night sky but
that was kind of really the beginning for me and then I kind of progressed through
the hobby I um I took that same camera and on a fixed tripod and I pointed it up and I was
trying to shoot a picture of Andromeda and the picture you see at the top is that is
the result of that it looks pretty bad at this point in
retrospect but I was super excited by that shot because I could line it up to a photograph I consider good and I could
see okay I'm you know picking up m110 I'm actually seeing a little bit of dust
Lane in the in the galaxy and it wasn't just but a few years later I took that shot at the bottom using the same camera
so again it shows you that it's not necessarily about equipment it's about the dedication of The Craft and then
kind of figuring out where you need to improve and then going a little bit further down
that road uh getting a a better telescope for for shooting um longer focal lengths and this is uh
the same shot of similar you know framing of an Andromeda
just zoomed in a little bit and uh with this telescope I'm picking up individual blue supergiant stars in NGC and two and
you see 206 here in the center
and stepping forward you know I'm still kind of playing with astrophotography and and um you know
seeing what I can do with different representations of the data so I've I've kind of dug into
given some of these photos of video treatment a 3d effect
um by animating depth into these these shots kind of brings them alive so it's
something I enjoy doing um moves a little bit deeper into the artistic side of astrophotography you
know uh maybe some of this isn't scientifically correct but again the visual interest
inspires me and also you know people with a passing interest in astronomy or
space you know look at this and um it's kind of eye candy so it definitely drums up some interesting
questions and kind of goes from there so about me that that childhood interest
in astronomy led to an engineering career I got an aerospace engineering
degree and worked in various um Industries always in product design
and development but um you know I really enjoy sharing astrophotography and I've taken to social media as a form of
public Outreach basically so I've been fortunate to grow a large community online and and I share these things and
I try to to use them as sort of an impetus to some form of Education about what we're
seeing in the night sky and I try to inspire people to get started in this and that sort of approach led to many
opportunities and recognitions we've got uh you know Astronomy Picture of the Day
a few times other photographic Awards and and some Publications
um you know all all through just progressing through the hobby you know letting my interest kind of shine
through so stepping back and just looking at
astrophotography at a glance
um I really kind of separated into two main pillars and that's the science side which can still be
amateur science or what I call citizen science and there's a lot of different
categories you can you can enter into and actually contribute to the science
side of things and then there's the other main pillar which is uh pretty pictures and videos and that's kind of
what I do I just like the like I said before I just like the Eye Candy of it and
I would consider the main categories here deep Sky which are Galaxy's nebula
and clusters just uh looking at objects far away from Earth outside our solar
system and then planetary which is everything inside our solar system and then the Milky Way nightscape kind of
the stuff that Adrian shared just looking at wide angle shots maybe incorporating some
uh Earth elements into those were some landscape elements and then other
subsets are you know solar Imaging Imaging the moon uh other things in the
solar systems like comets and asteroids and satellites and then there's all these special events you can get into
eclipses meteor showers certain alignments or other celestial events and
uh beautiful Aurora also
wow describe a little bit about the discipline astrophotography underlying
discipline because it really is a lesson in patience and perseverance you got to have certain personality treats traits
to really excel in the Hobby and um you know namely just be a problem
solver you come up with all sorts of issues and problems when you're when
you're Imaging the night sky and so understanding what your shortfall Falls
are what you can do to address those that's just a key the kid trait you can have to to Really
push your Imaging to the next level I won't get into too deep into this um
like I said this was a longer presentation but I've just acquired a massive amount of equipment along the
way this is the stuff I used today mainly to
shoot the the night sky but I've got all sorts of ancillary gear and support equipment to
go along with this but I've I've got a about six main telescopes I use four
mounts and then a whole stable of dedicated astronomy cameras and dsrs I
even use a GoPro from time to time software as much equipment as I've
gathered software as the whole other part of this and uh you really just have to be
a little bit tech savvy to get through all the software part of it but there's
tons of different um specialized programs to to deal with
certain issues and different types of Imaging you know certain things for deep Sky stacking and capture certain things
for planetary again capturing and stacking sharpening and also planning you know
planetarium software photo uh like planets
Pro is kind of a nightscape type of planning software and also weather is a
is a huge thing so I use uh astrospheric and other weather forecasting apps to get a handle on that
and the big factor we deal with um weather-wise is one issue but light
pollution is another and that's just purely location dependence
and this is really just a thing look out for if you're Imaging deep sky
or nightscape so you want to be in the as dark as sky as possible for me living in Michigan I just have to
go north for me minimum two and a half hour drive to get to portal three or darker so
it's quite a production
so as I described above the the main pillars of astrophotography the pretty
picture side is deep Sky Planetarium nightscape so I'll walk through a little bit of
each of those I don't have any permanent telescope set
up and I set up every night so I really tailored my gear to uh allow
for that quick setup and so I try to keep things in one piece as much as possible so all I have to do is plop
them down hook up data and power pull our line and then I'm kind of Off to the
Races I shoot with my computer inside and I run everything inside
and really the main focus there is just to keep things repeatable repeatable right
yeah look at that set up yeah so this is my um
eight inch SCT and I've got a motorized focuser on the back guide cam with off
axis guider and then a monochrome filter wheel here yeah sandwiched in between
that's quite a rig yeah thanks I this this is my weapon of
choice really for deep Sky I I've used this setup for a number of years and I can't see really changing it
I just really like the results I get it's manageable for me since I do tend to carry things in one piece if I want
any larger it would get heavy and unwieldy so
I mentioned before the domain problem with shooting deep sky
from a Suburban location is guy condition and this is
one of the worst nights I've one of the worst scenarios imaginable but really my
telescope would continue to shoot through this because it's just light high clouds but you can see how much the light
pollution bounces off those clouds and it just makes the subframes garbage so I really have to be careful to
weed this stuff out when I go to stack the frames and sometimes it's not so
trivial so I really rely a lot on software quality weighting and keeping tabs on the weather outside
to know when to shoot certain objects that try to make sure I
shoot them when they're high enough in the sky but Adrian you're showing all those nice
beautiful Milky Way shots and you can see the band of the Milky Way Behind these clouds you can see just how much
worse it is in Portal six Skies to get a look at the uh the Milky Way
so really how I take care of that is I just shoot tremendously long exposures and my
typical deep Sky shot will be in the 20 30 to 40 hour range of exposure just
just packing on a ton of exposure to average down that that no noise
signal so this little video playing on the right hand side shows really how I
collect pre-process process the data and kind of get to a
final product so single sub really doesn't look like much of anything but you stretch that you can
begin to see nebulacity in the background and by stacking hundreds of photos the
contrast comes out by virtue of reducing the noise
and then if you you add the colorization by shooting through color filters
and remove the Stars you can see all that background nebulosity so that's the Flaming star tadpole nebula
in a wide field shot very cool
I love I love that you're showing that process and um you know kind of guiding
us through this whole thing so many people dream of getting an image anywhere near what
you're doing Jason well yeah and see I'm running through it in about 30 seconds right you know the amount of work it
takes to get to this point yeah 30 seconds for 30 years of uh you know attorney here so
but you know I get the question you know how do you make that photo well I mean these are the steps that go into it but
each one each segment you see in this video is just a tremendous amount of I'll say sub steps
so generally speaking I'll take all the subs that collect all the subframes I collected the quality weight those
they're aligned and then stacked and there gets rid of the noise and the defects and then you process them for
detail using process called deconvolution and then all those Master frames are combined into a full color image and
then I'll find typically do final adjustments in Photoshop after all the pre-processing work
all right so here we are in the planetary and again I set up each night I can't
leave my planetary rig set up because it's just tremendously heavy but this is a 12 inch Newtonian which
I've been using to shoot planets in recent years
and again I control it all from the house but this is the the final Imaging train consisting of a teleview Powermate
to get some image amplification a filter wheel then this is the ASI 183
camera and again weather is a big factor and really for
planetary it's all about seeing conditions and up far in the north it's
pretty rare to get decent conditions so that's something I really struggle with and I end up only shooting planetary on
the best of nights and I shoot at monochrome to get rid of
issues with Astro atmospheric dispersion which again is a
is an issue if you're at a high latitude but I'll take multiple video files
those are quality weighted stacked and then combined into a full color image
this kind of shows that process the raw stack ends up coming out looking a little bit blurry
but it takes well to to sharpening processes and that so this is a sharpening process called wavelets which
takes it from the raw stack to a sharpened image and then combining the red green blue channels you come up with
the full color image wow and look at that stunning stunning image of Saturn
that's beautiful this is some of the um are these some of
the uh kind of video clips that you might share on social media as well
these this yeah so I'm uh I'm including here off to the side I'm I'm gonna walk
over here I'm sorry to get it's all right I um you just walked back into the universe so
yeah I'm trying to get a phone charger so I don't lose the audio again
um but all right um yeah I I share these you know I've
started to share a lot more video format online yeah is kind of moving to that yeah
but it lends its wealth itself well to these videos presentation type things because you can kind of see the
you know people like seeing things move it helps pictures worth a thousand words but a video is worth a million yes
all right so um you know an offshoot of planetary is is lunar and solar I do a
lot of that work um I've presented it on the global Star Party plenty of times we'll see a little
bit more of that later but I just want to move on to to nightscape it's something I really enjoy doing I don't
get the chance to go out and do it much but I just love the blend of you know
these natural landscape elements with the night sky um Adrian presented a lot of beautiful
work um just a few minutes ago but a little bit about you know how I
shoot night sky is you know I take really really portable setups
when I go out to do this because I like to get places that are um you know maybe
less accessible um you know find those good landscape elements and and um that adds a lot to
the image I use a Canon 6D I've got the star tracker and uh you know just lightweight tripod
what's that big yellow telephoto lens I see it I mounted on the uh the fence
there yeah that's a that's a 16 ounce um energy drink
yeah all right so um you know like I said it's my goal is to find those
interesting um foregrounds was fortunate enough to get
to Hawaii last year and this is from the top of Haleakala so it doesn't get more
interesting than that I think but this is the big island of Hawaii in the background
and I'll take typically it depends on the darkness of the sky but a few minute exposure a series of those from the sky
tracked in a series of those for the static foreground and blend those together in post-processing so this just
shows that I'll take you know this is three by uh two minute Sky exposures
tracked so the sky is crisp and then three by two minute static for the
ground so the ground is crisp and then those are Blended together by masking the horizon
line basically and then you see at the bottom that's the combined and processed final image of
that set of data definitely can do a lot by brightening
brightening things up I mean I think you'll notice by looking at the top two that they're
a lot darker that's representative of what the scene actually looked like to the eye and then the bottom is you know
brightened up for that visual interest stunning all right so
now I'll do a little bit of Show and Tell I just have a series of
looking at space this is the core of the Pac-Man nebula
so we'll go through a set of deep Sky Images um that are some of my
greatest hits or favorites this is the Crescent nebula which is uh the atmosphere of a wolf Riot star shout
out and the red tones or the hydrogen uh really interesting formation here where
it's got kind of this tight web of hydrogen enveloped by this
envelope of the hydrogen or sorry the oxygen in the teal blue color
just a real beautiful nebula in the heart of sickness yeah
this is a hot off the presses one this is a tiny little nebula not not an
uncommon one but see through a telescope visually although it typically just looks like a little blue
disc but the long exposure photograph through a long focal length telescope and was
able to dig into a lot of the details in the core and down below I set my image alongside
of the Hubble Space Telescope image to show just really how far we can go with the
amateur telescope as compared to uh it's amazing Space
Telescope quite a difference in budget yes a little bit blurrier yeah
but nonetheless uh I mean to me it's breathtaking it's it
is spectacular yeah this you know something you don't
really see in the Hubble Space Telescope images are the extended nebula that surround a planetary or a typical
planetarium have a bright core but this extended shell around it so it's something I really try to do by bringing
out the um that paint hydrogen and oxygen
yeah layers out in the distance and that really takes a lot of exposure so this is almost a 30 hour exposure image all
right you got a struggle in on this one and as somebody who's observed the Blue Snowball a few times and it just looks
like a Blue Snowball this uh blows my mind here I I step back on right quick and I saw this and you know this is
something that I can't see visually and um it's great it's I think the first
time I've seen what the interior of the Blue Snowball looks like so uh so uh
kudos to all those hours just to get that it's uh it's inspiring to see exactly what it is
I know the course HST you got pretty darn close you got all the same data Maybe not the same
Precision but then again you're not running an observatory above Earth yeah you don't have a 90 inch telescope in in
space right maybe something yeah yeah that's you that'll be your save it'll be
my my GoFundMe yeah but uh just with what like you said
with what you've got you've got an amazing image it took a lot of time I mean it this isn't this isn't something
you can just take a snapshot of two hours later ooh look what I got it takes
a lot of time and some dedication to do it so yeah it's off
so you'll notice a trend here with what I shoot with this telescope is I try to put a lot of hours on Target and that's
you know mainly just to get the light pollution uh squared away but also because I do try to hammer into these
details and by quality weighting the subframes I can pick the best ones to
stack and and so that's what I I tend to do also and this is uh NGC 4490 which is the
Cocoon Galaxy and its companion this is an interacting Galaxy pair and
really just a beautiful um web of hydrogen surrounding these
galaxies and that's just because of the creation of Stars due to
these galaxies passing through each other
this is the wizard nebula shot with the explore scientific ar-152 in narrow
bands wow wow that's a acromat telescope I I use narrowband filters to
shoot deep Sky through it that is who would have thought that you could do
that with an acre map I mean really that was something an image like this
would have been impossible to do not too many years ago so with an acromat system
fun stuff this is a wide angle shot with a telescope called the TPO Ultra wide
which is a little um telescope not bigger than I can a red bullets
180 millimeter focal length so the field of view you see here is about five
degrees wide by seven and a half degrees tall it's quite a substantial field and um
again shot from my backyard so I had to use a lot of exposure time to pull out this dark
nebula in the center you see the dark shark and down below is
what I call the Space Penguin although it's upside down here but it's a Bernard 175.
and the red strand running through it is actually an ancient Supernova remnant
and above that with the in the more magenta and blue
teal color is a small planetary nebula so just a lot of different type of
nebula nebulae going on in this image so I really enjoy shooting these wide
angles to to get to see all these scale of this yeah yeah no nebulae and how
they relate to each other in the sky yeah quick question for you how long are your exposures
um for this telescope I use two minute Broadband in four minute narrow man
okay so yeah I I was able to get two minutes unguided on my little bitty
California and Pleiades uh shot but I only did an hour's worth
um so what this is showing me is it just takes a lot of time yeah you just gotta
put a lot of time into it yeah this is m76 the little dumbbell nebula
this one was interesting I thought because it's got also a red giant star
in the frame so this is these are two future stages of of
sun-like stars I realize uh an example of the progression of our sun yeah the
the little dumbbells unrecognizable at this exposure uh you know it's it's uh
it looks like a butterfly now you know it doesn't look I don't see the dumbbell
shape anymore that's that's really amazing uh this is ngc891 which is a beautiful
Edge on spiral galaxy one of the largest in this orientation in our sky
but what I really loved about this image is all the dust Lane detail that came out of the final exposure
and this is really the same you know this is kind of like how we see the Milky Way if we were to step back
you know a few thousand like a few million light years you see the whole
galaxy coming to view but you know the band is is pretty similar to how we see the Milky Way in
the sky yeah and it's like 30 million light
years away and this is a Messier won the Crab Nebula I shot this one
through um a near-infrared filter to pull out the Pulsar wind nebula in the core and
that's what you see in blue and purple and then the hydrogen cage is is around it
filter I was able to isolate and actually get some of the disc of the the
Pulsar wind nebula and the Pulsar is actually down here in the center and then there's polar Jets
coming out of both sides but to really just exotic object then the deeper you push in the
more crazy it looks all right so planetary uh we got a Mars
opposition coming up so I threw this image of Mars from our last opposition in one of my favorite images I've taken
I'm really looking forward to kind of getting back into this one in the coming months I think mid-December is Mars opposition
so it's coming up this is Jupiter from a few weeks ago
well one of my better shots through the 12-inch Newtonian
Venus through the uh ar-152 shot in
near infrared green and UV so this is an extended spectrum and that's what allows
us to see variations in the cloud deck of looking uh looking forward to being
us being well positioned again to get back into shooting it it's it's tough to get it you have to kind of shoot it when
it's at a maximum elongation and right now it's buried in the sunlight
being a shot though yeah this is a cool little video I put
together because I shot Saturn for so many years now this is an eight-year cycle of the Rings of Saturn
the played in sequence you can see the Rings tilt to their maximum and then come back
and uh just in a few years it's time it's going to be back to uh Edge on with
the Rings so I'll keep adding to this video as I can so it's very cool what a jewel
all right Scott I'm pushing over my time here I have a few more categories but I can hop through them really quick but
um just just examples of where you can go with astrophotography and this is the
Sun and calcium light which is a deep ultraviolet
this is in hydrogen Alpha light where you can see the fluffy
chromosphere come into view
and a fun thing to do with solar Imaging is the time lapsing so you can see the uh
certain features dance fun thing to look at here the prominences
and lunar just for you Adrian I got a mineral Moon here this is where you saturate the colors
deeply to show the different uh mineralogy of the Moon the colors of the that come out here are
the differences in the regular list and this one's especially for you this
is a a composite of um multiple images to produce uh clear
Earth shine with the well-exposed uh bright side and then a
star field in the background that's more of an impression of what the Moon looks like to the naked
eye although it goes a little bit further than that and uh reveal some details you can't see with the naked eye
Comet uh time lapsing is fun to see things move real time that's something we don't really get to see very often
so we got uh that was Atlas this is neowise from a couple years ago
I really just wanted to get to this next slide before I I um wrap it up here Ryan
but um a few weeks ago NASA crashed the dart
spacecraft and dimorphos and I was able to get a video of that
sailing through the sky and by stacking the frames I was able to actually see the
what amounts to a commentary Tale coming off of dimorphos
thought it was a really cool time lapse to be able to produce yeah that's very cool so the single
frames don't show the tail um it's very faint um you can see it
slightly but as we stack the 150 some odd frames
that I shot then the noise is reduced and the tail becomes visible
very cool all right well uh I can uh
drop it off here Scott unless you want to keep going but um yeah
doing this stuff and all the possibilities that exist within astrophotography yeah more for next time
more for next time thank you very much great and I know that you made a huge
effort to come on tonight so thank you very much for that and um and hopefully we'll see you next week or the week
after so um but that's that's great that's great so uh and thanks for making tonight work
as well because uh of the technical uh difficulty but uh there's always a way
to make it there's always plan B so yeah well thank you
all righty okay so um we are going to take a short break
um and um head off to um
um our next speaker will be young Navin uh uh sentel Kumar uh who's going to be
talking about smart telescopes up after that is Ileus Jaffer which is um uh
Kareem jaffer's son uh he's going to talk about spectroscopy at Mount Wilson Observatory Marcelo Souza is due to come
on Cesar brolo from Argentina John Johnson from the Nebraska Star Party
he'll be sharing some special news with us um Nico uh uh will not be able to join
us because well Hammer Time with Nico kind of indicates he's a drummer and they are having an extended long band
rehearsal so we'll have to forgive him for that um and uh and then we also have Maxi
filari's on as well I will include uh a special video that was uh uh
recorded actually for starmus with Doug struble who you heard people talk about
earlier in this program and check Ayub of the famous Chuck's
astrophotography they made this beautiful video together about uh how
they overcome light pollution to make the incredible images that they do uh
you know Jason gonzale is one of those guys as well so uh let's just take a few minutes and then Nevin you are up next
so here we go
foreign
okay
foreign yes
foreign
[Music]
foreign
foreign
[Music]
[Music] looks good
yeah no cracks on the screen seems okay
foreign
wow I don't think that they'll be putting any people in a hard crash like
that but uh I think it's more or less designed for you know just another way
to get some equipment maybe food um uh maybe not so sensitive
instrumentation although that iPhone did survive uh that impact so
um you know it's amazing what they're doing over at NASA uh you know because we are uh no doubt
getting ready to um try to put boots on Mars one day so lots of lots of little problems need to
be worked out not not so many little ones some really big ones too but uh uh
you know I want to say the presentations that we've
had so far in global star party has just been nothing short of amazing um and uh something I was uh uh remiss
in showing David are you still uh are you still awake back there
not sure I think he's listening in but uh David was showing something to us
that was uh uh really special and um uh
so if I can get him to come on a little bit later we'll uh we'll do that but uh for right now uh I would like to
um reintroduce uh young Navin uh santel Kumar who is going to talk about smart
telescopes which is you know something that uh smart telescopes have been
around for a while but they're starting to come of age where you're able to buy
like complete packages explore scientific is now selling something
called the uniceller which is a kind of an all-in-one what they call an EV scope
or electronically assisted telescope and it does Imaging it does
everything all in one so but uh Nava will tell you more about these things all year is Abby
so hi everyone I'm Naveen Sandra gumar I'm going to be talking about um
smart telescopes so yeah
so what are our smart okay first let me just go to slideshow
so what is a smart telescope smart telescope's also known as a robotic
telescope they're a totally brand new category of digital smart
robotic telescopes that can you can control from your smartphone or tablet
or any other mobile device using they use integrated image sensors
software and um Optics to deliver unique and compelling experiences in all simple
and all-in-one efficient packages so now let's get into the per how wide
they're here so there you basically using Cutting Edge technology
then to look at fake objects um and basically take long exposure
images of them stacking them one on top of each other to remove noise and also
battle the problem of light pollution and also to improve the image quality some of them also have onboard light
pollution filters built in so these are the parts of the filter the
first sorry the telescope they have an onboard computer which is a
Mini PC built in their within system um your mirror like this is a unisler EV
scope it's a reflector telescope so it's just going through and then they have a sensor right here
to pick up all that light and then they have an integrated battery
that's rechargeable and stuff and yeah it has up to 12 hours of range I think
for astronomy yeah how do these things work
so first thing it does it identifies where
it's pointed in the sky uses plate solving or like uses like two star alignment or
what or like something like that it it like analyze analyzes star
patterns using an algorithm to find its own Target and then it
proceeds take a series of long high exposure photographs
while rotating to compensate the movement of the earth so they're kind of like an equatorial Mount where you're
like tracking the rotation of the Earth a similar concept to that okay
so now let's talk about some telescopes that are available on the market so the first thing that Scott was
talking about earlier on that they also sold in explore scientific because the unicellular EB scope
um they also have an equinox of this um and then there's the vionus there's um
vionus they're another company they have this telescope called the stelina
um and this one is also from vionus it's called the vaspara
you might also want to search these up they're pretty nice ones so now let's talk about my smart
telescope I currently have this is also my newest telescope and this is my newest edition
we just recently bought this one this is the unistailer equinox
um we recently got this so we're still testing it out trial and
error doing stuff so let's see yeah um I'm gonna show you some of my images
I took with it so this is my first image this is m33
triangulum Galaxy this is a 14 minute exposure and then here just shows the latitude
and longitude and latitude and it shows the date that it was taken
and I think this isn't this isn't this is not processed yet okay so now we're gonna see a raw image
in a processed image this is currently the Helix nebula this is a much more better 38 minute exposure
it was taking on this it was taken a bit earlier
um now my dad processes through Photoshop
um and it has it has a little bit more improved image quality as you see here
now I'm going to talk about some of my Outreach I've done uh this was back in September
it was a no backup event at CM Crockett I just went around up and around the tents and blah blah blah so yeah it was
a good night and we had a lot of stuff so these are some milky shots and Milky
Way shots that were taken there through smartphone not yeah so you can see the Milky Way a
little bit here yeah and then I don't and this is also Milky
Way I think here it's supposed to be so yeah
I took the swan nebula and the Eagle Nebula
through a smartphone through a reflector which this one was pretty cool because
it had a rifle an illuminated rifle scope that was custom built I think or custom
bought I don't know yeah so like it was taken through an iPhone 13 per Max so we ended up with a
small nebula I think this is and the eagle Knight below which is um so yeah we came out with that wow
these aren't and also these are not processed these are raw images
it's pretty impressive yeah also part of its image quality
what's much better because it's you it uses the illuminated rifle scope which is night vision so it's really it has
much more lighting added on to it so that that contributes to that
so now this is all the ring nibbly taken from the same telescope in the same smartphone
so yeah oh smart telescopes
they're fast they got firmware updates they need
firmware updates frequently and they have a pretty good resolution they just lock D2L and contrast
and it's not that good so yeah that's all this is my presentation
thank you yeah thank you so much are you uh are you enjoying using the telescope or how
do you find it you could you can find it in um all the usual astronomy like retailers such as
High Point yeah places like that and I think you guys were also selling it on explore scientific EV scope yeah so how
we've become their distributor here in the USA are you are you enjoying using the
telescope yeah it's a pretty good telescope so far it's a really worth it model
excellent okay well I'm glad you're having fun with it and I look forward to seeing more work with it that's great
it's also really portable though it's like right very I mean and you know uh not
only portable but um uh it's uh especially the model that
has the eyepiece uh the way I was seeing it used by people who do out astronomy
Outreach is they'll be there with other telescopes if they'll be running the uniceller in in combination with other
telescopes and this just adds like a another it's like having another astronomer
there with you you know so uh as you're looking through they look through the eyepiece and start to see uh what looks
kind of like a blue gray image and then it's tracking and stacking in as you described and then pretty soon you're
seeing color uh in a nebula and so that's that's really amazing stuff
just for my advice like for like beginners these telescopes are great for you they're like really nice all you
need is a smartphone a mobile device you know like gets you started for it and also for unicellular they have a
citizen Science Program which is like contributing to like finding like galaxies and stuff and they've partnered
up with seti so that's the thing to look forward to and you can participate in that
so yeah great thank you so much thank you so up next is
um uh Ilias uh Jaffer uh ilyas's uh uh the son of Kareem Jaffer who's been on
her show many times but uh uh when I was at Mount Wilson I was
happy to learn that he was up there I think just before I got up there uh with
the um uh the undergraduate study program that they have going on at Mount Wilson to do spectroscopy and I think
that you were pretty involved in that so thank you uh for coming on to the show
and um uh love your time and it's good so
anyways I'm going to let you have the stage Elias thank you for coming on uh uh I don't think I had a chance to meet
you before um but um uh maybe tell us a little bit about
yourself and how you got involved in the um the undergraduate program at Mount
Wilson yeah for sure so the uh summer asked uh sorry it's called the soar the summer
observational astrophysics Retreat and it's not just for undergraduates uh oh
they've they've had people as young as 18 and I think as old as uh like uh I
think 40 year olds attend so it's it's um it's really about getting to uh
to be more Hands-On with astronomy uh it it was quite the fun experience and uh
so um uh about end of August uh I gave a presentation about uh my experience at
Mount Wilson um for the Montreal uh Rask uh which is still up on their YouTube channel if
you'd like to go see that uh the the presentation I'm going to give today is a bit more focused uh because I intend
to present this at the uh cupc which is the Canadian undergraduate physics conference which is happening in Guelph
uh this weekend oh great great well thank you for again thank you for coming on and I know your dad's watching right
now probably your whole family's watching so hello to them okay and and thanks again we're really proud to have
you on the program thank you so yeah I'll begin by uh uh is this my
screen visible it is all right perfect so uh yeah I'll begin by just giving a
brief overview of what the experience was like so uh we were up in the mountains of California Mount Wilson
which is about a five hour drive from Los Angeles um and uh here you can in the middle you
can kind of see a map of the area um uh here on the top right these are the this is the monastery where we were
staying um and uh yeah we got to see some uh see
some pretty interesting instruments this was the uh 60 inch uh reflector this is
the 150 foot solar tower this is the uh snow solar telescope uh that one is
really cool because uh a lot of the stuff is done manually uh which is quite
fun and uh this one over here is the 100 foot reflector uh so uh yeah lots of
amazing things to to see and do you um but for this presentation I'm going to focus more on the research that I got
to do in the second half of the retreat so how it works is the first week we get
to learn a ton about astronomy uh and then uh that weekend uh we uh draft up
and submit a proposal for a research project to do the next week with some of the instruments uh over there so um uh
yeah so the project that I decided to work on uh involves spectroscopy so uh
for those people who are not quite aware of uh what spectroscopy is
um basically when you've got uh an electron that's around an atom that gets excited
um and then gets uh goes back to its initial state it will emit uh uh certain
uh certain wavelength of photon that is characteristic to that atom and the same
thing can happen if light passes through it that same wavelength is what it will absorb so uh uh spectroscopy is
basically looking for either what light was emitted or what light was absorbed
now the problem with looking for molecules is that you don't just get a line uh you instead get a band so um
because the electronic structure of molecule is more complicated so instead
when we look um when we look at uh the Spectrum and
we're looking for molecules we'll see uh uh kind of uh drop down and then it kind
of tapers back up because there's a whole range of uh of wavelengths that are emitted but um the main wavelength
that's emitted is called the band head and that is the one where you'll see the strongest decrease so
um uh yeah basically my project here was to look at the Spectra of uh of cooler
stars and see if I could detect the presence of titanium oxide and uh if I could find that cooler stars have uh
higher uh uh have more absorption uh in their titanium oxide uh uh the
wavelengths that you would expect for titanium oxide so um this is kind of the setup uh so we use a 16 inch uh I used a
16 inch telescope um uh equipped with this spectrograph uh and a photometry camera uh whose specs
are written there um now in order to take the data accurately uh we had to take uh darks
and lamps as well so what what those are is uh so each camera uh is has uh like
its intricacies uh and uh in order to remove like the peculiarities of that
specific camera what we'll do is uh depending on what exposure we're taking uh we'll shut off all the light to the
to the camera so close the telescope and then just take that long of an exposure and see what pixels are hot and so once
we have our actual data we'll be able to subtract those um now lamps are slightly different for
lamps uh we use uh emission Spectra of known atoms uh to basically calibrate
our image so uh here you can see uh this is the uh um the lamp that uh I got uh for uh the
star 57 Pisces um so uh the lamp that we used is the
Mercury argon lamp so you get the lines that you expect from Mercury and argon uh and you take a lamp before and after
to see if there was any drift uh that you have to account for for like uncertainties and stuff um
uh yeah and uh finally when we're focusing the telescope uh for the uh
course Focus you always want to go in the same direction because there's some backlash with the gears um but when you're doing the fine focus
because it was a friction drive uh we were fine to go either way and uh uh we use what's called Full width half Max to
determine uh whether uh our instrument is in Focus or not which means uh
looking at an object um taking the brightest pixel uh going
at half that and seeing what the spread is and you want to diminish that spread as much as you can in order to get a
more focused image um so this is a full width half Max curve that you see here on my slide
um so yeah uh basically uh what I do with this lamp is uh I take the sums of
the columns vertically and just move that into Excel and then in Excel I can
see where the Peaks are and because I'm you using mercury and argon I know what the wavelengths I'm expecting
these emission wavelengths to be so I can use those to kind of get a graph
to correlate a pixel number with the wavelength um and that then allows me to take my
actual data and know which wavelengths I'm looking at given which pixels are
hotter and here you can see that the Precision is kind of high that is
because instead of just using the brightest pixel uh the the peak pixel
there I instead took a certain range and then did the centroid uh to get like a
weighted average uh just to to be more precise um now uh once I take the actual data this
is what it looks like so it's an exposure over a certain amount of time and there is some like drift that you
can see but it doesn't matter because we're taking the sums over the columns so um uh uh ah yes uh there is some
correcting to do however uh due to something called instrument response so each instrument uh because the light is
passing through that being recorded um well the instrument will respond to different wavelengths slightly
differently so we have to do first is take the spectrum of a uh star whose spectrum is known so that we can then uh
so here is the Spectrum I took for a star called alfeka
um and uh I knew the uh like in the in our database there was the Spectrum for
alfaka so we could correct that to see uh what the instrument's response was
and here there's a few irregularities because our Spectrum in the database um didn't take into account the lines of
absorption from our Earth's atmosphere but once we take that and kind of smooth it out then we get this approximate
instrument response curve that we can use to uh calibrate our data um uh so here is one of my original data
and here is what it looks like after it's been calibrated using this instrument response curve which I generated using the software called Isis
um now uh you can see at the end here it tapers off that's just because that's where my instrument response curve ends
but that doesn't matter because this region over here is where the data I'm actually looking for is so all is good
there um so once I did that and I normalized
the Spectra and plotted them on the graphs you can kind of see how uh so the K2 star Arcturus is the hottest one that
I looked at and uh v1351 Sydney is an M Star so it's it's on the cooler side and
you can see how when you're going uh from the hotter at the bottom to the cooler on the top you can see that drop
from titanium oxide more uh more obviously and that is kind of what we
were expecting but I wanted to quantify this so uh I went on Excel
um and used the uh ratio between the highest pixel and the lowest pixel of
that drop uh to uh quantifiably uh determine uh uh the strength of this
absorption line and doing so yielded this graph which follows the theory that
I was expecting it to which was published in this article of the uh uh
American Association of variable star observers Journal um uh which is that when the temperature
of a given star is cooler the opacity of titanium oxide increases and thus the titanium oxide absorption lines are more
prominent and um to discuss a little bit the theory about
why we'd expect the opacity to increase is because in like really hot Stars
there's so much energy that the bonds for any molecules to uh to exist would
be broken immediately but titanium oxide can exist in slightly cooler stars because they won't break those bonds
immediately which is uh basically what I was looking for and was thankfully able
to find so I consider my experiment to be a success um so I'd like to give a big thanks to
Dr Paula Turner Robert bukheim John hoot Patricia Hill uh and Thomas menegini
from the uh from the uh Mount Wilson Observatory um they ran an amazing program it was a
ton of fun uh I'd also like to thank my uh cgf physics teacher Caroline Vijay
for writing me the reference letter to apply to this program and uh Rask
Montreal for uh for helping get me into astronomy and giving me a lot of the
background that helped me uh that helped me so um in case any of you are
interested uh now that the main part of my presentation is over this is kind of what the schedule looked like uh during
the retreat so um yeah I'm open to uh discussing or comments uh or questions
uh however you want to do this uh how did how did you feel about the
program in general I mean it seems like you learned a lot um uh you obviously came prepared
um you know to work with your data um uh how much did you learn at the at
the conference versus how much how pre-prepared were you I mean oh I I
learned a lot that I didn't know before like like I after that first week I came
out feeling like because it felt as if I took like a a
whole course because there's there's so much that you get to learn by just doing
the stuff Hands-On because every morning we would go up to the snow solar telescope and we'd get to do some solar
observing every night we go to the 16 inch some and then one night we got to
use the 60 inch one night the 100 inch uh and uh do the observing learn about the different parts of the serving and
then these classes that you see during the day we got to learn about a whole bunch of different uh uh uh interesting
Concepts in uh solar and stellar and spectral uh uh astrophotography
um so it is and like uh like the data manipulation and what what these
different uh things mean uh it was absolutely phenomenal experience yeah
well you basically had you had 100 plus years of uh of experience for Mel Wilson
being imparted to you uh I have to ask you I mean I've been to Mount Wilson
many times I used to be one of the guys one of the volunteers up there that took care of one of the telescopes one of the
small telescopes up there how did you feel being at Mount Wilson
where so much history was made oh it was it was it was such a great
feeling like um I basically you it was imposing but
it was also really inviting like it was inviting uh
the the fact that that there was uh I mean Matt Wilson is where uh uh Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the
universe and so it's it's inviting you to keep looking to to to you know just
to to stay curious to keep asking questions to keep uh uh to keep looking
into into this that and and just discover um and I I I really enjoyed that that's
great that's great dad uh you know there's a lot of people that look at
Mount Wilson like it's an antique it is old uh but they look at it as an antique
they look at it as a museum piece something like that uh but this is an
instrument you can still do Reese these are instruments you can still do research with oh very much you know and
they have also the uh Korea uh interferometry program going on there as
well from I think it's um um I think it's University of Georgia is
running that um but uh uh you know I um I always felt
that that the history or that that feeling of being there were all those astronomers were you know from hobble to
shapley to you know bada to it just goes on and on when you walk up to the 60
inch telescope I'm sure you saw the lockers uh for for and all those other
people still there that's not a prop those are the real lockers that they use yes uh so that was that was fascinating
and uh I don't have it in this slide deck but I also uh I didn't get to take
a picture on the actual uh Bridge even though I passed on it um but uh from the uh 100 inch Dome I
took a picture of that bridge uh and uh there is a picture uh floating around on
the internet of uh Einstein and uh uh and a bunch of the Mount Wilson uh
standing on that bridge yeah I failed to mention Einstein so that's right that's right yeah and that car interferometer
you spoke about here on the map you can see the different uh parts of it I
didn't actually get to go see that because uh uh guessing there was uh stuff going on but
I got to see it from the outside and it it's quite impressive yes right well I'm
glad you went uh do you plan to go back at any time kind of a one and done type of Deal or
if I get the opportunity again I'd love to yeah all right well great
well thank you so much uh Elias and um again uh uh you know regards to your
father who's normally uh who's appeared on global Star Party many times but you are also welcome to come back at any
time to share your uh you know new adventures in astronomy so thank you so
much thank you bro so Alias just to let you know I told your father what a wonderful
presentation that you did Global star party and uh he sent back a little love
icon so so he's uh he's sent his approval yeah
great job I can see you're following in his footsteps of uh you know of astronomy and hope it goes hope it goes
even further for you that it you know as it does for your father who's uh
he's responsible for me joining the Rask so you know his Outreach continues I I
wish you nothing but success as you continue learning um all these things so excellent thank
you so much I got to learn a ton and so hopefully uh
with this new knowledge and the software from John hoot I'll be able to do some
more stuff uh oh yes so John hoot wrote the software oh yes he is an old friend
so that's great all right um okay so we are going to uh make a
transition um and go to um Brazil to visit with Professor
Marcelo Souza uh Marcelo is uh is always up to some new program in astronomy
Outreach with his students and um uh so it's been a couple of months it'll be
great to catch up Marcelo how are you hi are you fine nice to see you again
yes it's great to see my old friend I love you again it's a great pleasure to be here yes
to organize many new activities here and tomorrow we will have a special event
that he will have the participation of the I presentative of the Consulate of
United States here in Indonesia that will be the the events that the project closed
we will go to close the the project that you developed one year in schools here
in Arizona I will share now results that we got
well with the development of this project and the forest was a fantastic
experience I hope you can see the screen let me see
if I shall I shall be starting the share okay okay and my computer sorry my
computer sometimes here I say that it's not sensory but I I will talk until ah I
think that's hard now yes yes yes it is here
earlier we in the spiritual had the opportunity to participate in an event in Santa
Maria Medallion that was an event is a seat where is located the headquarter of
the the stage Park of Disneyland that is the first dark sky Park
in Latin America and here is our group and here is a
my friends that is possible for the presentations in the
mobile planetary well yeah you are there and there are a lot of people
participate it's a small City with 10 000 people that live is there is a and the we organize a solar observations
and the observation of the sky at night Andy with it and they will help the
college that is from the astronomy Museum we feed the sessions of a department of
bioplanetary that choice a big success here
and you had a lot of people we first observing the sky
you know not during the day this guy who have clouds but see during the afternoon it
was possible to observe the Egyptian and it was a big success in this seat
is a small City now that he is only talking about astronomy because of the
recognition of the pack here at the team our group and also the
responsibilities in the seats this person here that I don't know if
you see my my mouse here but this guy that is on my
side he's your owner of your hotel in this seat
and he that she is a person that's responsible for everything that's happened there I I was there with my
wife to stay for a weekend and then I talked
with him and a few months later I and our group organized the first
external events in this seat in the after this
we organize other events and now the city has the first dark sky Park in
Latin America and the something that is amazing and the is different from what
we expect he had he has problems with his eyes
and he can't see now in the telescope the images
but even with the defectors he has he supported astronomy events in the
city and here is our project young stars of
tomorrow that's a rather fantastic experience he these are the group this is our group
we have nine students that his Civ is a scholarship wow that is passed by the
a United States consulates in induction here oh that's great during one year we
have four University students and five fundamental students from fundamental
schools and high schools that have scholarships here is auditing in one of the mid to
heavy meetings out the week and the this was the first activity in
schools in the end at the end of September 2021 now that's when we began
September 30th going to 2021 was the first activity in school
for the project we distribute many gifts for the students to receive the support for
Charlie Bates on astronomy to give you the solar glasses now so the students received the support
from the United States consulate to give gifts from us for the students and they
also have your spot here that's great thank you very much to announce the events
you participating in one of the
as part of the project thank you very much thank you and here are part of the events let's
organize you can see here these schools are located most of them far from the center
of the city in regions while the students don't have any kind of equipments any kinds of
support and then we had the opportunity to visit the schools and talk with these
students this was the most important for us out of them from public schools in
Brazil and the it has a Unforgettable
experience you can see here this is in front of one of the schools you have farms in front of the school and the
near the in the middle of the families we have one school there
and they needed they need to go in a scholar bus because they live far from
the school here a part of our experience these are
a magazine sorry a newspaper about the 50 years of
the Apollo Live mission that we gave more than almost 600 newspapers for the
students oh that's excellent it's great sometimes with a lot of students in the
schools here we have more than 100 students in these activities
and how work it is we give to the students Jesus
notebook the challenge notebook you know about how to to develop a mission to the
moon and at the end the first day at the end of the first day of activity we
asked the student to make a project to send the a national out three
astronauts to the moon and to build a base on the moon
these are the results that we see from the students we choose the best projects
and you give a price for the students that developed the best project
Andy we've developed activities in six seats we had the opportunity to visit 56
Public Schools the developed in 56 Public Schools something but we didn't
expect that you have and we have we began during the pandemic
periods and we didn't imagine that it was possible to visit so many schools and develop a project in so many schools
in only one year of project and you had participation of more than 1 800
students in this project that's why something fantastic these are the vets that you
organized during the the project these are the moments that we give
certificate for the students that participate a scholar with scholarships
yeah an event in the biggest theater of the seats here you have the
participation here of the representative of the consulate the United States postulated Edition here
here uh how the team involved in the project and these are the amazings of
the observation of the total lunar eclipse that we have in the first semester of
2022 we organize events in nine place at the same time
it was a fantastic experience for us
and here at the Village of Gabe Gabriel here that's great
I remember how how um excited and anxious the kids are in
Brazil to learn more about astronomy and science uh you know it is uh you know
and you really feel their interest and you fuel their passion you know and
being that you've done this for so many years um you know I know that you've seen
young people grow up to be adults and to go on do you think it's beneficial in
their lives do you think that uh that they go on to better careers and
yes I have in our group we have two students now that they are doing they
are a master who's here in University that's great for having two students that finish the
PHD we have one of the students that now are finishing the PID in Canada we have
and in many place that I go somewhere meets me and say that they choose his
career or her career after the participation or events like something
different you organize events for 26 years all right we began in 1996
there's a lot of work and it makes it all worthwhile it does yes we have three generations all right you know
one of the the students that participated in the beginning as a
child now she give classes in University here in our seats
there is a fantastic opportunity for these students because I would like to
have this opportunity when I was a kid I only had the opportunity to observe in a
telescope when I was in my universe only then now we have students from here
that they can see we go to telescopes in every place here and give this
opportunity to them and you see that they like this because Gabe Gabrielle
stayed here during one week we had the participation for more than 1
500 students wow in his presentations here you can see here in the theater
here huh in other places a lot of people participating in the presentations then
it was a fantastic experience for us yeah we're fantastic and what you have
the results of this not only the participation of the students now we
have these nine students that they expect in astronomy in the development
of apps and there are also in the production of the animations and we
developed 10 apps and the six apps about the student it is
address the homepage that you see here you can see all the apps that device developed and the one of them I showed
you all right in the beginning of 2002 in London from here that show has an app
about variable Stars this is why the first one that to develop for this project
the other one is about 80 hockets developed by different countries I have
a list of your heart so if you own information of the hearts this is astronomical keys
well that's the first one there to developed here and this one is a challenge that we use
in this course now we have the same challenge in you can access in all this
much fun and the last one is about a light pollution
how often are in Portuguese but we are planning how to to have a version in
English of this oh great wonderful it's the most important is
that now I have a group that knows that they know how to produce the apps
right and this is the address or the apps
and also we have it six animations with this group that starts off tomorrow
I show it here in the programs now here we have the links where you can see how
the animations now we have only Portuguese but here uh we are planning
to make a version in English now of the animations no
and I hope that in a future not so so far for now we produce a new a new city
of animations then tomorrow you you close this project
with this event and but Syria already
planning to announce in November or December a new project that we are going
to develop in your history in Brazil and now I have something that is is
something unexpected for for me that's International back Sky
Association they consider me as the monthly stars in
August about what happened here in our region and the I'm very happy with the
uh that's great they gave it they gave me an award
wow the first time in Brazilian received an hour yeah from oh that's great
Association is the dark sky Defender hours
that is fantastic congratulations Marcelo very well thank you very much I'm very happy I
would like to thank you International back Sky Association and thank you everybody and I also thank you because
the participation also in the Sky's app magazine
and we had the opportunity I also to show what happened here the announcement to have an article
about the dark sky Park here on the region then it's important to to have
the opportunity to share our experience here thank you very much for all your
support thank you I am so happy for you so
that's great and I know many more good things are to come so
um you know there's uh uh they should build a uh you know a shrine to uh to
you and to all your work that you've done there in Brazil and the entire
region of South America I know you're well known and um
so thank you for all the great work you've done in bringing space
exploration astronomy now Dark Skies being protected in generations of young
people who are going on to make a difference in in the world and in their own lives so that's just fantastic
thank you very much it's a great pleasure to be here thank you thank you okay all right so uh we are still going
to stay in South America we're going all the way down to uh Buenos Aires Argentina where Cesar brolo just gave
some talks to an amazing astronomy event down there
um so let's uh let's bring Caesar on and uh
Caesar you got the stage man some place you're very comfortable with because you've
you know yeah yes there's guys here there's guys here in chat that are talking about your amazing uh
presentation okay now you are the best one I have no doubt about that but uh no
no no all your fans yeah yeah the comments in YouTube are my god
oh yes it's the girl is the essence of the girl yeah of this totally funny group of people
that was totally uh the happiness the the motion of the the katamarca
um before sorry [Music] party we went to he and I Buenos Aires
uh we was we was a sponsor of uh the
um of the association stormy Argentinian astronomy Association that is that
the data this Association enjoy um is for the professional uh
astronomers for and for um of course uh investigators students
astronomy professional students uh um we start
um working in Buenos Aires um we we
um uh we put in a screen the in in a live in
inside the the astronomy meeting in the in the our stand uh we put uh to you and
your uh equipment from the Arizona star party uh we show to the people uh we
talk about your Surprise Arizona Buenos Aires wow it was very very interesting
and we enjoyed to I'll show you first a little part but before catabaga's a
party of uh please do yeah yeah tell us about this uh star party and uh the
katamaka group yes yes absolutely you can you can see
the the screen yes okay well here uh we started in in this is
the stand when we had the sun ready to uh in in the Hall of the the Buenos
Aires University this area is a new new one is for maths and physics students
very very here something that I I need to explain from Argentina this is a
public free education this is very important to to show this is not a
Payette University it's free it is incredible in our country something that we have it's very important for us
all that I show you the the of the building is as a free University
here here uh well this is this was the the the Oliver about the the conference
students and astronomers watching you can see here in the screen your third
party oh in Arizona yes yes it's amazing
oh that's great let me share yes without without sound
because we don't uh we um yes I know the the things music and
YouTube or or yeah but here is is the stand the people
you know this this kind of telescope maybe yes maybe you know yeah
we we work a lot well it's a very nice display thank you yeah yes uh was a
pleasure for us and uh really you uh when a sponsor uh
thrall us and uh and this was a a beautiful uh coffee breaks in in Buenos
Aires in the the zero the zero uh building
foreign
another another video look the the welding this is free very
nice this is huge yeah yes this is amazing it's incredible yes I I took
this this video only to show for the people that that this universities is
amazing it's all for uh map and physics department wow we're gonna see this very
very huge and yeah architectural or you know uh social science super modern it's
nice absolutely and this is all the posters of of uh the expositors you know
for investigations you know and really we enjoyed a lot and we talk with the
students of astronomy professional astronomy a lot about
um Optics sensors photography astrophotography and it was very
interesting the the the the the things between the professional astronomy students and they were our war
of amateur telescopes and something that every time is more near between
professional and amateurs is the techniques especially for astrophotography and this one was
um I I saw that the people was very very happy and they take a gray oh yeah a
great time especially students they love it to to talk about about the things
that we use as I'm not a restaurant it's it's funny that they say okay I can
explain something from our world um and this was the the solar the solar
image for for the students was very very this this building that you you can see
in in red bricks is the eafe is is a place uh where they this is like for
cosmology they use their it's a place where investigate
um they basicate all about space and astronomy yafe
foreign a place for for of course for for investigation
well here you can you you know maybe the telescopes yeah
okay and I say I know most of the telescopes but yes I definitely breaking
guys around absolutely absolutely I I can say I say okay
yes and and after we we went to America
is amazing amazing of Argentina full of mountains full they they don't know
really the the all the the completely the names of the their mountains because
they have a lot a lot of mountains in America I was totally amazing for for
the the the landscape of Captain America Captain America have an especially a
song about their own landscape in the folklore Argentina for
Glory that that the name is landscape or by second America landscape of America
and uh that of course that when we when we was going in the road we use handis
to communicate between us and we were talking we was sorry we was singing by
the song between us by handy in communication was really we was a really
a fun song between us in the cars we went uh for example this is the typical
the typical amateur Stormer going to to apply to a safari full of telescopes and
keep them in look that here was the first day the first day and
um where uh This was um organized by administerio De ciencia an
innovation technological the University of katamarca The Institute of superior
Enrique and the local my my friends of treasure
Verde green star of my that where my the the creator of the green star is my
friend Miguel marakiel this is this was a an originally uh private a private you
know um a private idea of of
um to make their own Observatory but giving the observatory to the community
for education of of my friend Miguel magazine again now this is amazing and
he received or the girl was Trisha trishaver the green star receive it uh
the the support of the local governments the and this was excellent maybe you can
see the the let me tell us
sorry in English I I don't know how to translate the very large okay yes but is
it you understand that yeah yeah and and you have Caesar you have many people
watching it looks like from Argentina right now yes yes okay so we call it the
channel you can talk in Spanish if you'd like yeah yeah I can see the comments oh
yeah yeah for example here
um my my friend Garcia is my go and keeper my my partner
in another Safari in umari Mendoza this is another Province
and he was invited uh he was very important uh Matt and a specialist in
astronomy he was the president of the abso in the past
um this wasn't the first day where uh spoke uh Jaime Garcia Nicola valvi
um that is the director of the server the
new Observatory The magakian Observatory because my the name of my friend Miguel
Miguel magachian and this is you know mag again where is the the last name
from Armenia from Armenia oh wow okay yes Argentina is full of Romanian people and
and it's a huge Community really especially in the province in the
Northwest is full and it's a huge community and he had the the great idea
to to call to his Observatory magaki observatorio magachian or something like
uh you know playing with the last name magachan Observatory I was a great idea
right really really a nice idea well this was a in the in the second day
where uh another friend that maybe you know because you call with me and
um Gabriel bengocia that he's a cosmologist physics do you remember the name that
you talked with me and Gabrielle in the role when we uh we was returning from
from the the uh from the Patagonia we
talked between in the road in the gas station [Laughter]
really enjoy us with a lot of of things about about physics about uh quantum
physics or and all about gravitation especially he he actually is is
in the investigation and Sir um of all about gravitational force you
know dark energies all that this is a is a a gray specialist in this
were more of of uh Jaime Garcia
maybe you know this guy I I talked only a little of about Optics and uh and and
well you know but you know me no problem okay yeah something that I've received
they were so great with me I was really uh uh I I was really
amazed with the work that all these people work about about the the you know
the the things uh that the work that they made for this for this
um third party and you know the the meat the first the name of the visit was
first Coronado astronomia in katamarca um
well and of course that I went fast as
was uh fast as possible I went to the to prepare the observatory with with Diego
Diego it's it's an excellent Professor for
kids and teenagers and he is the director for for the of the observatory
and we work fastly for the night to put
hope Peter in a camera you know for the first life of the of the observatory
and and this is the the tower here you here is the is the dome but it's
impossible to see now from here but this isn't here the Dome
here's uh they go the the government the government give to to the observatory
the two big screens to show you know presentations and the the that's great
yeah yeah touch with touch and they was like each
one was a was a computer for me was wow a RICO brand I don't know it was amazing
okay the the and the party started and was amazing with talking about the
history and Miguel Miguel when I I went uh to the airport Miguel came to to the
airport to receive me in the in and going to the city Catamarca City San
Fernandez City and we went uh he told me Cesar I have a surprise for you and you
know when I think okay I don't know I am scary sometimes okay but yes yes Miguel
have a huge a huge energy that you know when if you can if you
sometimes you came here and we can go to okay
yeah it's amazing and uh we started they are talking about the history of of the
the how was all about the the uh
the the grow greens are started and was a very very nice very emotional the the
the word that we that they made to have a an association grow an observatory you
know it's a private observatorians it's amazing it's open to the old community
of of uh of uh San Fernando America
well here the presentation the a lot of people and the inauguration
and a something that that for me was amazing here is the integration
here I am and something was amazing for me was that
that they uncover a Miguel uncovered wow
something to wear yes
congratulations for me yes I can I can't believe this for me yeah it's a
wonderful huge a huge you know it's a big honor yes big honor absolutely for
me was totally amazing but by like they by this well here you have where is the
the the yes yes I am more responsible now about this
but yes absolutely well here you're not gonna forget us now Caesar now that
you're really famous and uh yeah yeah you remember who is sister brother why
yes but if you for example congratulations yeah for me but for
example Victor Garcia was however from for him because
I made it's uh and Victor Russo is a discover of the Supernova Argentina
supernova
is my name in the same place of course that was I'm really really grateful with
this well here do you have the whole picture in in the screen that people say
oh wow and this is not the kids you know the people say it's something that we
wore for this to say the first lie in the in the new technology with a beautiful hospital to show to the to the
people mm-hmm here is Victor wuso that is a genius a
very very affordable man you know it's it's
Unfortunately they don't speak English but come on it's so so
um it's okay yes I need some idea to president in some Global third party
sure to him and maybe I can translate something I I don't know of course my
idea is is to make something with him because he's the the only uh amateur
Stormer that he know a lot about about uh supernovas and it's something where
um it's special that he discovered the Supernova when the Supernova started
started to to level up the bride to
explode um this is something that you can search big so in Google to or Argentina
supernova three four years ago maybe four years ago and
when he explained to the people how you know know the technical things in if not
the the the the the the the humanist the the human part of the
motion or you know it was amazing so the next day we travel
600 kilometers and went up to trip
3400 meters above sea level yeah this is real yeah yes because we went to the
real to the real place of the sir party yes yeah yes yes maybe maybe I can read
it in the comments uh how the people feel about you know you need oxygen you
need oxygen yes yes something that I can can explain that that I receive like uh
support in this part is illegal that you can you can put a Coca how they say the
name of of the parts of the plant well I don't know but no cocaine coca the the parts of the plant yeah and uh and you
need really that I probably say okay okay yeah to help again yes it is of
course yes I need to taste that or to try yes of course totally helping for me
and it's real the things and because you've noticed historical situation with
a high altitude like the sky must have been amazing
there no no no really we we don't have more that maybe two pictures that I can
show you about control the telescope because we were totally amazing amazing about
the the sky and for example for me I never put the camera in my telescope
because was for example I never seen I
never saw sorry the the in in so bright to The Naked
Eyes remember that we are in the Argentina yeah for example the M31 Andromeda galaxy oh yeah
come on easy easy to see naked eye yeah absolutely and we enjoyed more
a lot of people that carry their cameras they don't use because we was watching
about the telescope the Helix nebula totally completely for all the flame nebula flame nebulas is something that
is you know is near to the bride uh the bride almitag maybe a star
um and I think that without filter in that in I saw the horse head nebula too
wow yes yes it is dark yes I don't have in
this moment you know the the obsidian tree uh filter um really really we we uh enjoyed a lot
uh to see the sky we had a a 16 inches
uh telescope we have 11 inches telescopes with Casa right we have a lot of telescope uh with great apertures
where we use it and we um
we really enjoyed the the to observing situations of the sky where they say
come on it's for me I never I don't remember to see uh so beautiful dark sky
in many many years was amazing yeah yeah it would be hard to beat yeah yes
absolutely yeah [Music] is the Miguel magachian wife and if you
have if you have a uh we we call it that uh beside a gray man do you have a great
great woman she's a genius she work a lot with Kevin a lot in the organization
of the Star Party um um and really I'm helpful with
um uh I'm really um how do you say happy that Liliana
working organized a lot of things about the the
this third party here do you have one of of the of the
meat inside in the the hotel not in Kata Market if not in cortaderas
hotel here we had we had about three
well the place with three thousand four hundred meters
over the sea and really we enjoyed a lot of meets and you know things where the
people like biker Russo's Planet things about about his new book about how he
discovered the the Supernova Argentina
um Sebastian Otero from there so Sebastian is from Argentina but he work in the episode maybe people from there
so now of course and we enjoy it we prepare this living room for for you
know to to and joy and share myths and presentations we had a great
presentation from from Sebastian um [Music]
Fernando ricardini and me we explain things about the San Miguel you know
restoration Observatory um this guy is the governor the governor of
Captain America he visited Us in the night and we will say oh my god really
they they feel that it was really important
for for them of course for for us and it
was a smart person that that enjoyed and
um talk with us very affordable person which was really a great experience
well here's something of the of the landscape of the place for to starting because it's over is
very near to the real Andes and it's it's a near to the frontier with Chile
the place is amazing totally amazing well here starting to deny
here I am one of my customers and Friends Alejandro barely
and is it a typical things that we make at afternoon you know uh put the
telescope in place and prepare everything and here you have something of the night
with lasers pointing to the Stars enjoying yeah here's a picture with my
my cell phone because I was totally totally amazing and losing my my idea to
take good pictures but you know here we have for example here while the the X's
100 with the the Newtonian 130 uh here
the the sodium 16 inches uh but really we enjoyed a lot a lot really just to
put our eyes in the in the in the in the eyepiece really really
for uh here Alejandro barely he have a collection of 80 80 eyepieces and many
of them are explore Scientifics
people with a star something that we love really really here is a Jaime sorry
um and people from that from the katamarca
government that are free now our friends and they support a lot over the all
things about that we need for the organization that they need for organization well here is the people
with the telescope in the in the wow the hotel yes yes it's amazing yes
nor is something that if you have a a hotel with a lot of Commodities with a
lot of of yeah of amenities sorry yeah where do you have
only to work uh four meters and put your telescopes uh we enjoy it a lot really
really um we are happy to lose a lot of photographies because we talk about to
say okay but we we enjoy the sky to the next eye or to the telescope yeah we
don't need look how dark it is so that you can see stars yeah it's not like there's a light Dome or anything it's
it's just it's dark I think I think that it's impossible to to show how was this
uh the pictures are not so good like uh you know to show that real thing are but
for me was totally amazing and all people send me the pictures of
this same group and the pictures are amazing and with cell phones
okay guys send me pictures other pictures are amazing amazing beautiful
the big one and the small one magellanic clouds you know yes
let the same idea when you watch this uh
we watch it to the sky like pictures in another side Andromeda like a picture
you can see in the sky and come on we are at in this moment we were sat uh 27
27 degrees latitude degrees south um we have Andromeda galaxy to watch by
the telescope or uh you know was totally amazing but the this one this clouds was
totally insane insane all night I say okay my God it's incredible
another picture of the the Milky Way the Milky Way was uh of course that we was
we watch uh we watched mostly the the Orion arm not the Milky Way of in of the
of this side
I hear well official or another customer and friend
something that is a sometimes my customers are friends too
one of the I have another picture that I don't have now that the four galaxies in
in Grass Grows um but a picture that that I can show
you is from Fernando ricardini um of uh tarantula nebula a southern
nebula that this nebula I can tell you that this nebula we can solve this nebula a little
a little a lost brighter brighter and black and white image
um the the real I guess I can tell you the the you know the how we feel to the
eyes in the in especially from the Dobson 16 inches Dobson
um was amazing the picture is amazing but the things that the real life Nails
the real life details of this same nebula was totally totally insane yeah
and here we enjoyed a lot the landscape we went to the took pictures of of birds
um you know the place is amazing was out for me was totally I I never I never
went to the this part of the country and it's incredible incredible for me look
that is totally insane it's the high altitude we we went a place where we uh
we are here here we went 5 000 matters
over the the sea level wow it's the kind of blue yeah look at Blue yes it's
totally inside this here do you have a a volcano well it's all thing about this
is another this is a avocado with a glacier no no it's totally it's
incredible the place uh here while watching Birds
um beconias you know it's amazing
um is a specialist is to in about birds
we're watching and he took amazing pictures of birds
um maybe he need to talk and make a presentation with Kent with Ken smart
about we're watching right absolutely yeah look at this picture yes we have
this was this one was a a amazing experience astronomical and you know
about the nature about the landscape the universe you know
and really I I'm really happy to know this this guy videos has a
very human person uh he and uh and his wife are amazing at
his family is is a beautiful beautiful people well here our guest
uh in the in the translations
the translation is not a yes going you know going in sorry sir not translation go go into the part to visit you know
the dinner the price you know and we enjoy it a lot you know well of
course the food in our third party is a very important part sure
remember it's good yes for anyone that came to Argentina food are are totally
the uh well in the United States I enjoy it a lot in safari in in Atlanta about
food yeah yeah sure you have something absolutely astronomers Gotta Eat Right absolutely yes absolutely but really we
have a happy a happy experience and really we are preparing the next year in
October the uh the the same the same
third party with new things about about the organization we we will have having
the the in April party and maybe around October the
second edition of this third party thank you very much thank you very much see you soon thank you so much people that
maybe is and really I am showing you so much this is our very and of course that
you are all invited um any uh thing that you know to for to
take the try the trip the you know our information I can give you all about
this uh maybe I can put this in in I'm happy to help you advertise the
event yes yes of course yeah maybe in the comments if if Liliana or Diego put
something about how to contact them for the next year is perfect you can watch
in the in the comments wonderful of beauty of YouTube of course thank you
thank you very much thank you Cesar thank you and thanks to all of you the Argentina audience there that uh I think
many of these people were at your event so uh yeah yes I can see I can see that
that yeah I can see the comments now yes yes that's good
if the girl is so it's it's a it's a so
it's a kindness is so happy we we had a great great moment this was really
really uh was a great experience thank you very much Scott
my opportunity to show this um of course that you know I can we can
see you uh next time in this sobriety yes okay
all right take care Cesar thank you thank you thank you very much all right okay so uh up next we have John Johnson
who uh uh leads the Nebraska star party and uh so he's going to give us um uh
some um report on uh on what's going on uh
for the next year uh you know uh Nebraska star party has been celebrating
its Dark Skies uh for three decades and uh so
um and along with that comes some exciting news so I'm going to turn this over to John thank you for for coming on
so late John hello can you I know it's not late for you
because okay I've been sitting up I haven't been
talking so I need to warm up my voice here warm it up that's right okay so you can you hear me we can hear you fine
okay I got my little mic there okay um well I'll jump right into it I I uh
Caesar's a hard act to follow as they say my goodness I I was going to brag
about my star party but uh man I I won't be able to well you have you have uh
justifiably yeah I I have a few pictures I'm gonna
try to pull up a a PowerPoint here okay and so we'll see what happens uh okay
help me along here let's see a hit share screen okay hit that one
yeah it looks like it's how we doing okay if I go ahead oh and you just need
to bring it into presentation there we go there you are great here we are
okay I like that Civ that's that's a see
fourth it took me a few seconds when you first sent those to figure it out but okay I'm gonna go through a brief I
don't know how many people you have watching uh but I'll try to go through this real quick just put the Nebraska
star party is and a little bit why are we so I'll I'll run it fast if anybody
has a question that can stop me so uh we're a a fully uh registered non-profit
organization in the state of Nebraska and in the US uh Charter encourage both
uh public and private uh astronomical observing activities encourage dark sky
friendly outdoor lighting practices in the state of Nebraska more on that later uh we sponsor an annual star party at
what's called Merit Reservoir which is about 35 miles Southwest of a small town
in in the north central part of Nebraska as Scott mentioned next year 2023 will
be our 30th year of holding the star party there uh you may think US Sod Busters or uh
out there inside houses and and old-time clothes but uh that's just just to give
you that impression that we're we're out here in the Prairie uh it's a gathering from all walks of
life uh that share a common interest in seeing the nice guy as the Native Americans the early Pioneers settlers
sought out here in Nebraska the sandals are around Merritt Reservoir provides a location yet today that is a
premier dark sky site as I've mentioned many times before on here located here's
the state of Nebraska you see this uh Little Town of Valentine up there of about 3 500 people but you can already
see with this map there are not many towns in that area and that's why it is such a great place
to go we hold this event right by this little Lake here called
Merit Reservoir right by a a national forest which has more uh grass than
trees but it's still called the national forest so why there uh have you seen the one of these
weather satellite images the Earth taken at night everyone goes oh isn't that pretty just
look at all those tiny points of light shining out in space beautiful right well it is but let's look at what all
that light is really doing to our ability to see out into space from the ground level
there's an image uh it's showing the the various light pollution areas around the
whole continental United States and you can easily pick out some of the major metropolitan areas of Chicago
there's Minneapolis of course Washington DC Baltimore Philadelphia out here
California the LA Basin there's Denver of course Dallas but look up here
there's a little dark spot in Nebraska as we zoom in you can see where that
dark spot is this is Denver this is Omaha Nebraska this one over here is
Kansas City zooming in a little further x marks a spot where we hold the Nebraska star
party it's right on the edge but we indeed are in a mortal one sky there
activities other than stargazing that you can take part in uh there's the lake offers boating fishing hiking swimming
it's a beautiful Lake to have summertime Recreation on uh there's cooing and
canoeing and tubing down the Niagara River which is always a fun activity
uh there's the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge which has a lot of
native animals to the area including quite a herd of bison which are always fun to to look at and stay not too close
to and it's close enough to the for day trips to the Black Hills and the Badlands National Park
we emphasize education uh we have an astronomers beginners Field School which we hold three days a week two hour
sessions of and as as I said we we really emphasize and cater to uh the the
people just getting started in astronomy or or just new to the the Hobbies so we
really uh set it up that way and on Wednesdays we have a lecture
series at the Valentine high school they have a beautiful facility there and we
dry in some really exciting speakers as I'll mention a little bit later
we also hold a Children's Program because as I said we emphasize the family and so during the Wednesday uh
lecture series we have an afternoon Children's Program which always gives a
or we always get a lot of kudos for that and of course the beauty of the night
sky from there is really what we go to and it's really unbelievable uh and the
pictures do not do it justice uh but here's a few uh these are from
previous years and then I'll get into some specifics from last year typical milk away shot uh from up there
there's a view looking North in the northern Milky Way you know the uh all the vehicles with
the red lights and it was it was really really apparent
this year yeah and uh people think well what of course to the human eye it just
kind of looks like little gray streaks uh your eyes aren't sensitive to pick up that greenish color which is what it is
is of course the uh the oxygen app atoms in the atmosphere uh releasing The
energy they absorb during the the sun you know during the day in the Sun and so they were giving off this little
faint green light speaking of Andromeda there's Andromeda there's a double cluster and you know
between Perseus and Cassiopeia here there's another shot of Andromeda
Andromeda is easy naked eye up there all the time above the Horizon uh yeah very
obvious and and a 50 millimeter binoculars either seven or
ten power you can see you know the whole uh it'll stretch across like a four
degree field in there binoculars I can't remember the orientation on this
spot but there's just a dense area of the Milky Way is probably around
I think maybe Vega and whatever now we do get some natural light pollution up there occasionally
uh there was a few years ago we had uh yeah that's beautiful
but we you know we well some of the real die-hard uh people said you know they
weren't happy with the natural light pollution but the rest of us were ooh and I especially we if you had a camera
and you could take time exposures of it we have this area it's kind of unique up
there we call it dab row and you can obviously see why uh it's a nice asphalt
area about the half the size of a football field that stretches down a road uh and uh so that's where the guys
with the big guns set up and uh getting prepared for a night of
observing here's some specifics from this year's event uh 2022
uh it was held from July 4th through the July 29th it was our 29th year of
holding the Star Party uh we had a total attendance of 308 people this year which uh is a little
more than what we've been averaging but a little bit down from um actually last year we had about 360
total registrants but uh but I I think that the excitement I'll tell you about
here in a little bit uh 300 is going to be probably the norm or the minimum we
get up from here from now on because uh it's getting we're getting a lot of a lot of interest
uh it's always a mixed bag of clear and cloudy nights I think I was up there from Sunday through Saturday night
um we got a couple nights where you have to deal with the clouds but boy that night
that comes along when it's clear it is just unbelievable and as we've talked
before and we were talking with Caesar the Milky Way will actually cast a
shadow up there I mean yes it does you say it's dark yeah but it's not you know
it's not really that dark [Music] um and that's why we always say you got to come out if you're one plan for next
year's event I'm at least for three nights preferably all week uh to get in on the what it's really like up there as
I said when it's clear it is amazing location to both observe an image from
uh we had some great speakers this year uh just it was really exciting the we
had a kind of a homegrown fella uh he grew up in Omaha and was a member of our
local astronomy club which we call the Omaha Astronomical Society uh attended our meetings regularly uh he went to his
got his undergraduate right here in Omaha at the University of Nebraska at Omaha but then
he is currently teaching at the University of Nebraska at Kearney physics and astronomy but he went on to
get his Masters and PhD from the University of Colorado and his specific
research is in exoplanets so he gave us a very interesting talk on his research on how did they've discovered exoplanets
and some of the details about him and this next person I'm sure if anybody has
watched many of the global star parties you'll recognize that name uh Libby in
the Stars Libby white was there with her mom and uh I think this was her first
official you know really big star party and I think you're right he was talking
to it for a long time she was just you know totally overwhelmed uh with with
what we could see up there and everything and gave an absolutely delightful talk on Wednesday
then we finished up with Dr Diana Hannah Kanan who is currently the observing editor for sky and Telescope magazine if
you get her get the publication you'll you'll notice her byline in there quite often uh she's she puts together the
whole observing section but she will occasionally write an article uh herself
but she also her Reese or her education through a doctor
uh I think from the University of Helsinki I went on did research in micro
quasars which was very interesting micro quasars it was interesting uh and
a lot of it in radio wavelength uh astronomy and she had worked down in
Australia for um down there with radio telescopes and everything but and absolutely delightful person uh
had never been out to this part of the United States Nebraska or the sand tails and was just absolutely totally Blown
Away with not only the uh the echo ecosystems out here but the people and
and of course the star party itself here's a quick picture there's a picture of Adam not the best uh when he was
talking at the high school on Wednesday and of course there's Libby
um I I pulled this this particular slide up my mom took me to an explore scientific
viewing one of her key points of of getting excited and interested in
astronomy yeah and and of course as she's talked about on the global star party she's been to space camp several
times and yes and for I I don't think she's maybe she has had her birthday but
she was not even 13. she was still 12 at this point in July for that young person to get up and talk
almost extemporaneously to you know a full audience of a couple hundred people
uh right was just amazing yeah that's wonderful she is she is something else
so you you folks down there keep encouraging her yeah
and of course Diana uh this particular slide was she was talking about their quasars and then how
she transitioned this kind telescope magazine uh she just kind of got burnt out on on uh doing research and so back
in I think it was 2017 or so uh she answered an ad and added somewhere that
you know Scott telescope was looking for a new observing editor and she jumped on it
is really having a great time enjoys it very much wonderful so if you get the chance to meet her
sometime uh everyone you know please please do yep you gave a great presentation you gave a great
presentation on both the micro quasars and of course on what she's doing at scan telescope and what they and what
the activities uh you know I'm I've become of course I've been a subscriber for more years than I care to admit
right at the moment but uh uh I yeah I'm I guess I'm also an ambassador for sky
and Telescope magazine I I think they they've really kind of turned it around in the last three or four years you know
they were kind of in trouble financially and everything and I uh I believe they they got it yeah
the American Astronomical Society right the magazine yes they're part of AAS now
and that provides some great resources so that's right anyway there's the the three plus Jack Dunn uh some of you may
know Jack Jack uh was the planetarium director at the University of Nebraska for oh I don't know 30 33 34 years
retired moved to South Carolina his wife now uh runs the the planetarium uh there
in Columbia South Carolina but he still comes out to the star party and he's
kind of the guy that helps you know put the speaker program together anyway and here's the pictures I was
promising you okay that's beautiful and they're all of course in in uh
vertical format um but and I can't claim credit for any of
these uh these were taken by Matt bielsky uh from Chicago uh he's become a
great friend of mine has been out to several star parties uh and as far as I
know these were all just you know single shot
you know 20 second images with an a Nikon I don't know probably a 14 millimeter
wide angle lens so um yeah that's not light pollution back there that's lightning no that that
is that we had a storm roll through before that night now
okay here here's another shot wide angle shot right so the it just gives you I
mean the awesome power and and storms that move through this was probably a
hundred miles away by the time this shot was taken wow but it shows you the you
know we of course we have tents set up for our dinner meals and what have you but yeah what an amazing what an amazing
view it is just utterly amazing and of course there again you see this green glow yeah
um there from the the O2 atoms there's I think it's a cool shot of there again
what we call dobro and you see people with trailers you can see people with RVs I mean this whole area just becomes
one big party area sure hey come look and see what I got in mind and you know it's yeah
and and we we keep it that way we keep it a very friendly uh you know open
atmosphere yeah a family oriented and um you know totally open totally open to
the beginners now if for those of you I mean if you want to come up there and do some serious Imaging we've set up an
area over to uh the kind of the northwest of this particular area where
you can go and and do imaging and whatever or do serious observing and not be bothered but uh but this is the area
where all the fun is happening yeah and a couple other shots there uh you
know people for their red lights and they're telescopes and there's another shot of the
the clouds this is what I kind of look like yeah a bunch of smoke coming out of
this yeah this is another uh fella that comes over from Chicago as some of you
may have heard of me dragon nicking uh he belongs to the Chicago club and that
whole thing that telescope is that is a 25 inch Obsession yeah true Obsession
too yeah he's way up there on that ladder those those type of Scopes you can we had somebody like that at Okie
text and we were looking at Thor's helmet in the horse head in his yeah oh
yeah I mean it's not you know nothing about averted Vision you can see it well straight on yeah we were looking at this
stuff straight on one of one of the really one is always blows me away when they and it's usually almost right
overhead is the cat sign nebula up there in or in Draco it is just you can see
colors you can see the blues and green yellows and the Cat's Eye Nebula it's amazing
and of course there was a I think a 24 inch over there in the background
but yeah there was a couple 22 2018's
big the big guns as I said we do get clouds
and they can be very impressive uh that was fortunately had already it
was it was already way to the east of us but uh they can get some impressive thunderheads but here's mats again this
was this was earlier in the evening kind of out of sequence but this as far as time but this was what it was looking
like uh there that evening and where you see that shot of it way down to the
southeast of us and this is one of the most dramatic ones I've ever seen I mean you're wondering okay so so where do we
go hide well yeah see the bowl of lightning over there I mean it can get a
little scary up there but uh but that stuff all you see the rain over there that was the Northwest of us and then
that all went to the South it is so uh that was one of the better nights
okay the great news announced just after the star party we didn't quite get the word before the star party we knew it
was going to happen but you know bureaucracies take time working with the international dark sky
Association and in collaboration with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and the Nebraska tourism Commission
we have received designation for the Merit Reservoir SRA as a dark sky Park
congratulations it took uh it took a while but we yep it's designated you can
check out the Ida website you can find it Merit Reservoir State Recreation Area dark sky Park and kind of a neat thing
we were the 200th dark sky Park designated in the world so wow so
congratulations we're uh we're planning uh for next year to be a big year
uh and we haven't quite decided if if the whole celebration ribbon cutting whatever will
be at the star party next year or some other event but we'll keep everybody posted but as far as planning for next
year uh it'll be the July 16th through the 21st 2023
costs we're hoping to keep the same uh but you know ours are very nominal of course we've parked we charge extra for
meals we'll have to get rid of the caterer and find out but it's all yeah very nice and we'll have our Field
School always great food knowledgeable friendly astronomers willing to share their knowledge
and we'll have another lecture series we're trying to line up like you know speakers already for next year
and we always come up with great t-shirt design we're in the process of having that all done
uh web link there's the Nebraska starparty.org web link
um we're also also on Facebook and we will probably have early
registrations opening with online registration by February 1st we will
send out what we do is we we print up a paper brochure and we send it to
everyone that has attended uh one of the star parties I think the last three years we go back so we call out who's
been there and they get a personal invite in the mail um
you can raise your online or you can send it in by the address
send in your form okay that's my spiel great
wonderful all right well thank you very much John
um at when will registration start foreign
out brochures um oh that same you know maybe by the end of January yeah
all right wonderful always a great time so yeah look forward to maybe we'll see
some of you up there this year all right well thanks again John for coming on all right well thank you I appreciate
everything and uh come back to uh Global star party
again so yeah I'll try to you know drop in at some more just listening and sure
look but um but uh always very enjoyable uh all
right maybe we can uh talk you into putting together an article about Nebraska's Star Party the 30th
anniversary and your dark sky um designation for merit reservoir uh
for Skies Up Magazine would be very cool okay yeah very good I'll still have something
work out for it great all right thanks all right I know I talked about going
every year but hey Adrian Adrian you gotta go man yeah that's not that far
away for you I mean if you went to okay you can go to I can drive and yeah I made the drive to
um well basically two Okie texts yeah we went to pick up somebody at Denver so I
figure I've been through Kearney
and it would just be another turn um so turn right at Carney or turn right
at North Platte and about three hours up the road and you're there yep so that's
uh I put it on that weekend at least if I can't make the whole week that's why I wanted to get the dates out there just
yeah yeah that's it yeah but people you know actually uh there's people showing
up the Friday before or even the Thursday and we'll stay through the following weekend just whatever their uh
their personal schedules require but um yeah all right so yeah that's uh no it's
interesting I you know I would definitely love to come if I can if I can pull off a uh weekend
and then just head back um or work from there for a day and head
back there you go we have people yeah especially well I the internet out there
or the is a little sketchy but uh if you stay in town yeah there's set in your hotel and uh
do your work in it yeah that's nice that's something I'll have to I'll have to look at what I have to think about uh yeah I'm definitely you know you see the
Thunderhead behind me you have way more impressive thunderheads
guys out there so definitely uh something I have to look
at seeing if I can pull off it's uh I don't think it would be too bad a trip at this point because I've kind of known
I kind of know what that trip is like now I had to take it yeah um
all right I had to do most of the driving myself on the way back
um a friend of mine I'll share some of the story I won't share the names but um we left Oki text
um and unfortunately my friend had come down with a mild case of covet and we
chose not to stay together he flew back that day and I said I'll just drive back
no problem and so you made the two-day trip uh which Kearney Nebraska is one of
my stops it's a nice Town great Mexican restaurant next to the hotel I usually
go to so I would simply instead of driving all the way through Nebraska I
would simply make that right turn yeah drive another three hours from Kearney and if if I don't just drive from Iowa
the first night drive right on into town and set up shop see what I can see so well you know how
to get a hold of me so uh yeah yeah that's very good that's definitely something to look forward to and all
right see if I can let's see if I can get make it out there make it out there it sounds it sounds excellent so and
congratulations again on getting that uh oh yes thank you that's that's big
that's huge we've been working for well a long time but the last three years I
mean it got really really serious we're going to get this done you know higher height you know and it happened and uh I
think we're going to reap a lot of benefits from that excellent great well yeah okay all righty very
good all righty John thank you very much and we will hopefully see you uh in a
week or two um and uh so uh at this point what we're going to do is uh we've had uh Maxie had
to drop out because of a storm coming through his area in Argentina so they were losing electricity
um Nico uh who's also supposed to be on uh had extended band rehearsals so
um so uh but I do have a treat for you uh this is um uh a video from uh
Doug struble and Chuck IU they are two astrophotographers that live actually
pretty close to each other in Michigan uh and I know who they all are yeah in
the Detroit area and they're in the Plymouth astrophotography Club yeah struble has a unit of time named after
him 30 hours of uh integration is a struggle it's a strew ball okay so it's
uh these are some pretty yeah these are serious astrophotographers because of the Michigan Skies they have to image
all of that time that Jason guinzel is writing along with them yeah he's right
along with those guys I saw his work that's that's the type of work they put out all the time they spend lots of
hours and um they put together these uh amazing shots from Portal 7 borderline
yeah I think Doug struble lives in like portal five but still it's it's it's pretty tough
and yeah so this is this is a video about how they do that astrophotography
from their own backyards and how they fight light pollution and get amazing results so here we go
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
thank you
foreign
Observatory every clear night I possibly get I opened up to take pictures of deep space
hey I'm Chuck Au and now they right up the road from Doug I don't have a home Observatory but like Doug I usually run
two Scopes every night back in Spring of 2016 Chuck and I got into this Hobby and back then we had a much simpler setup
trying to just get started out in this Hobby and and uh over time we've gotten
more sophisticated and automated some of our equipment to make our lives easier and to make our images that much better
that's right and this hobby is really not difficult to get into a lot of people make the joke with equipment they
already own like a DSLR camera and a tripod we actually fast tracked some of our equipment upgrades and automation a lot
earlier on than we had anticipated due to our skies but we weren't quite sure what we were going to get right we're
both around 20 minutes from downtown Detroit where the big city lights known in the Astro Community as light
pollution can wreak havoc on deep space photos I was even worn by the seller who sold me my camera that he wasn't sure by
to be able to accomplish anything in my area this is my main rig right here it's a Mach 1 GTO made by astrophysics
um I had this pure custom made by a friend of mine who does metalworking and on top of this it's an explore
scientific 165 millimeter triplet refractor it's probably the best
telescope I have in terms of getting what I get because I go after a lot of tiny objects so I need that focal length
to really get in there on top of that rest my Orion guide coat and then my
second rig is an atlas Pro made by Orion with a stellar view 102 millimeter on it
this is a little bit wider but on both systems I am running a ASI 183 mm camera
which has very small pixels so I can get in there really tight and get a good pixel scale of both of my objects
typically both rigs run on each two laptops and both of these laptops are
run from inside the house everything is automated once they get set up aside from Pickups here and there of course
and then one thing I really do to fight light pollution is I do a lot of what's
called narrow band narrow band is exactly what it sounds like it's a narrow sliver of the visual
Spectrum so it cuts out a lot of this light pollution that we have near the city of Detroit and allows me to wash
away a lot of that light pollution so I can really focus on the nebulosity that exists in the image right narrowband
filters are a must and when I'm not using them my pictures can become Overexposed very quickly so I've become
rather Famous online for my shirt exposure approach I take 15 second
exposures and stack them all together and you'd be surprised at what you can
capture and get around light pollution hey Doug I get this question all the time and I'm sure you do too how do you
stay on target with your deep space object if the Earth is rotating that's a good question so in astrophotography we
use what's called a German equatorial Mount and once we get a polar line to Polaris the North Star here in the
northern hemisphere what it does is it allows the What's called the right Ascension to track throughout the night
so it kind of just rotates around that North Star and to keep it on target you
use a guide scope which locks onto just any random star and it will correct send
corrections to the computer which in turn sends corrections to the Mount to keep it on target throughout the whole
night right along with the motorized Mount and guide Scopes and guide cameras we use software to help us automatically find
and Center on our targets even our focus is automated so we can be doing other things while we're Imaging
being fully automated is great but it doesn't necessarily mean that we don't get involved in fact being automated and
having more complex gear means there's a lot more things to go wrong right we do get the occasional head
scratching and hair pulling issues when we're trying to resolve an issue before the clear light disappears so Doug do
you have a preference with larger or smaller telescopes that's an interesting point I mean obviously smaller
telescopes are a lot less expensive and they do great and most of them have like a a very short focal length which means
they can get a wide field of view and most of my my objects back then I first started out with were a wide field of
view but what my one friend Jim Renard once said most things in the universe are small so over the years I've started
to realize that I need more focal length for like for example in my X4 scientific
165 millimeter as a great focal link I can really get in deep on planetary
nebula and and things of that sort what do you prefer to I actually like
using the large and wide field telescope at the same time a lot of people like large telescopes and they think they're
better but microscopes can give you a great view on a large Target but I still
like big bright targets to capture I'll leave the 100 hour targets to Doug
so Doug when you're finished capturing an object are you really finished with it that's an interesting point I mean
there's a lot of people out there that think that we just point our telescope up in the air take a picture and we're done you know but we spent hours and
hours of capturing data and then we had to do what's called pre-processing the data where we stack all the data bring
all the signal out from the noise floor and actually you start to see an image
grow and then we have the power set up I mean there's really no magic bullet involved for some processes that I do
and what a program called pixinsight and there's a lot of stuff I do in Photoshop and then sometimes I go back and forth
so to really get that final image it takes hours and hours of processing the data and really teasing out that signal
to get that image that we're looking for that's right I think people would be surprised how much work the Hubble Space
Telescope and the James Webb Telescope need before they're actually shown to the public but there's lots of free
tutorials on YouTube on how to process pictures like that and when I'm done with my patrons a lot of people are
amazed and they actually think my pictures are from the Hubble Space Telescope now here's a picture of the
pilgrims of creation made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope and here's my picture I don't have the uh the
magnification of the Hubble Space Telescope and I don't have the advantage of Imaging above the Earth's atmosphere
but I'm pretty pleased with these results remember this scope Doug yeah that's the old ar-102 from explore
scientific that I used to use for solar Imaging that's right I took this scope of dun's hands astrophotography is not
just a nighttime gig I have a lot of fun capturing the Sun but remember never look directly at the sun with the
telescope I have a lot of protection out here like my face artwork solar Scout and I have an energy rejection filter
but it's a lot of fun creating time lapses of what we see on the sun I even like live streaming it and letting my
YouTube subscribers watch the action that's right Chuck it's fun to watch people's reactions when you post some of
our work online so be sure to follow us on YouTube Facebook and astrovid
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well I want to thank all of you who tuned in today to watch the 104th Global star party across the Great Divide
it was uh it was great to see so many people come on to the program uh we're
sorry that a couple of them had to drop out due to extenuating circumstances it
does happen and from what I understand we had a drop out somehow on Facebook so
those of you who are watching on YouTube you got to see the whole program and we
thank you for that we will be back next Tuesday for the
105th Global star party and with a new theme to challenge our presenters and
um but tomorrow we're going to start a new program called Eclipse experience
and our first uh our first episode is going to be with uh with Michael zeiler
and Michael backach who wrote this atlas of solar eclipses but these guys are
real Eclipse experts and they're going to take you uh you know they're going to
guide you through what you need to do to get ready for the 2023 annular eclipse and the 2024
um total eclipse of the sun if you go to explore scientific.com and look at the
top menu you'll see there's a new uh featured drop down menu which is for the
solar eclipses this is uh you know getting ready for solar eclipses can be
you know all engrossing all encompassing and so we've got uh you know we're
already selling eclipse glasses we have a new uh edition of the Galileo scope
coming out which will be a solar edition of course Galileo was among the first
people to look at the sun with the telescope um you know and we we suggest you only
do that with safe solar filtration so safety is a big deal you'll see a safety
video on there on on what you should and shouldn't do with solar filters and
we invite you to come to Texas Hill Country to go to the crossroads of the
eclipses star parties so in one spot on a private Ranch in Hill Country Texas
which is just just west of San Antonio uh in Portal 2 Skies so it's very dark
skies you're going to be able to experience two amazing eclipses from one place so
uh you know if you come to the 2023 annular eclipse and set up it's going to
be great practice for the 2024 eclipse and so you'll know the spot you'll you
can I think you'll be able to request to keep your very spot that you observe
from in 2023 so um there's uh lots of time to prepare
for these eclipses now but you do need to get started you don't want to wait a
few weeks before an eclipse happens it's uh it's uh you know going to be very
very difficult to get the right equipment that you need uh it'll be difficult for you to get the practice in
that you need for photographing an eclipse so uh but we're going to be here
to help you get that going we're going to inspire you with uh uh Eclipse
experience programs with episode one starting tomorrow at 1 pm Central not
not later at night like this one is um and I want to thank all the
presenters that were on today it was wonderful to hear about the great
news that most of the presenters shared with us today so
um but we got more to share there's more to talk about there always is and uh thanks to the wonderful audience that
watched us from around the world and um uh for right now I'm going to say good night and as my friend Jack korkheimer
always used to say uh keep looking up
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