Transcript:
right here so I'm about ready awesome all right just making sure it wasn't
gonna dissolve uh
okay
[Music] I think I hear your
clock there David yeah it's uh six of our time
we have people logging in already that's nice
Dave nice to see you one thanks for joining last minute I'm
thrilled you could be here too no problem happy to be here
we ran into each other on an earlier webinar today oh yeah
that's kind of the sign of the times that you're running from webinar to webinar without ever leaving your chair
right
that's right
now we're going around the world without leaving our seats
this is the first one we've had since that all 24-hour Marathon last December
it's tougher than it seemed at the time yeah that was uh that was amazing uh
David was on I mean he he did it from what four o'clock in the morning or five
o'clock in the morning yeah until late at night you know
it was uh it was amazing it was a lot of fun but it was
it was exhausting it was
it was really tiring but it was good I think I think you said that uh we got
something like 35 000 it actually climbed up to over 40 000 views and the reach was over 120 000
people oh I was feeling good about hitting a hundred wow
all right I just put in the chat what I had for the lineup just making sure it's something like that we're not live yet are we
oh hi everyone [Laughter]
are the behind the curtain banter you know fabulous
we have a lot of Dave's and David's with us tonight so we'll have to keep them everybody organized
oh yeah pretty much organizing David's is what I do with a lot of my life it's
not like the night sky network is all about I forgot to tell you we changed our mission
a lot of celestial material in each David you know so this is our name star
stuff so indeed yeah
so in your scientific opinion how old is some of that how new is some of that star stuff
I you know I I couldn't really tell you it's it's being made all the time you
know uh and being destroyed all the time and maybe you know the answer
nope I just know that I have a couple of meteorites in my hand so if I chew on
them then it's pretty new star stuff it's mixed up yeah that's right
fresh iron to the body yeah I love this group here it's called dogs and cats of space and astronomy so
I just like Envision all these dogs and cats is that what you're calling us and uh
yes here's what he is goes along with the hurting days first
one is from Elise dear David and Wendy I'm running to extend my best wishes for the upcoming
Adirondack astronomy Retreat I understand that this is your 13th event and proceeds benefit the 20 valleys
campsite I commend you for establishing this opportunity that allows participants to ReDiscover their
interests on level astronomy you're interested but that last sentence probably was hers your annual retreat
has undoubtedly been an inspiration to countless others and I look forward to this continuing tradition I wish you the
best of luck for a successful retreating clear skies and ask that you please keep in touch it was okay but it was kind of
wooden or she just said okay here's basically what I want to say and and then she they typed it out for her and
she said that looks good okay now let me read this one
I have to find it oh yeah dear Dr Levy this one is from Sandra Dale Connor I
have to stand back for somebody's heart I'm not okay here it goes I have now had
the privilege of reading your book starry night it is a treasure I can't
believe how you combined astronomy with literature poetry and some world-class photos I will keep the book always and
refer to it from time to time it is truly fabulous thank you so much for sharing it with me Sincerely Sandra Day
O'Connor now that's a letter yeah
I mean letter from my stefanik is okay but it's not did you get Joey again not yet I'm going
to look at it later
all right let's check and see if my library had your book in it down here
maybe I get you virtually to sign it
hey everybody Dave Prosper has joined us the night sky Network crew
he pretty much runs things truly um sort of
a lot but he's Named Dave so he probably does that's what I'm saying I just keep
sticking pieces together this generation like uh everyone else it's really just everyone
else makes the program that's the real kicker it's more than the sum of its
parts I told him we just heard Dave's
really true I would say as as far as a community of people that amateur astronomers all over the
world are pretty uh you know I mean it's it's a it's an
amazing Community a very very helpful people
um uh people that love the sky and get each other you know they
understand you know and so that's it's nice that to have that um
that commonality you know
really true
I can't believe I I have to say I was real busy over the holidays and so I on
Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday called up everyone I could think of and said hey could you join me on Thursday and
and I can't tell you how happy I am that everyone showed up that that shows how the dedication that's around it um
everyone just said yeah of course I I think only one person had something else planned that night and couldn't make it
tonight but couldn't make it together and leave
[Music] to be with all of you thank you for that short notice
she's right here Wendy says hello hi guys hi Terry
I should say hi to everybody but I'm excited that Terry's there too
and there is Terry Harry Lapin I'm assuming you mean right
that cherry lapping hi Wendy oh so this is good I'll be I'll be
listening listening from afar I just got off of another call so I'm
still getting reoriented so hopefully I'm not too much of a Space Case
they're supposed to be space cases that's a good point
[Music]
the high energy Outburst seen in April 2020 confirmed the surprising range of
super magnetized objects called magmortars this blast of X-rays and gamma rays
triggered instruments on several spacecraft the eruption was over in the blink of an eye and originated from a Galaxy about
11 million light years away magnetars are part of the family of compact objects known as neutron stars
the crushed leftover cores of exploded Stars what makes magnetar special are their
incredibly strong magnetic fields up to 1 000 times stronger than a typical neutron stars
changes to ultra strong field are thought to drive brief enormously powerful outbursts called giant flares
one giant flare in our own Galaxy affected Earth's upper atmosphere 28 000 light years away
on April 15th detectors on NASA's Fermi Swift Mars Odyssey and wind missions as
well as on the European space agency's integral satellite picked up a rapid surge of X-rays and gamma rays using the
arrival times of the signal at different spacecraft astronomers pinned the burst to NGC 253 a bright nearby Galaxy
from start to finish the event lasted just 140 milliseconds as fast as a
finger snap astronomers see gamma-ray bursts or grbs almost every day we know that at least
some of the shortest grbs come from merging neutron stars more than 100 million light years away
the April blast initially looked similar to these events but a grb located in our
own Galactic neighborhood should have appeared much brighter as astronomers explored this new burst
in detail they found it looked less like a short grb and more like a magnetar
giant flare astronomers have recorded two such flares inside our own Galaxy and a third
in a satellite Galaxy all of these bursts displayed a spiky tail as they faded out the spikes form
as the Flare's Hot Spot spins in and out of view like a lighthouse beam current instruments can't detect this
feature in flares located at Great distances but other characteristics such as their
extremely fast rise in brightness are unmatched by short gr Beats
this fueled astronomers growing suspicions that short grbs associated with galaxies in our neighborhood might
really be magnetar giant flares now the precise localization of the 2020
event to the disk of the sculptor galaxy has unmasked them at last astronomers
suspect that a few percent of observed short gear beams May in fact be giant
flares high-powered eruptions in our Galactic backyard produced by the
strongest magnets in the cosmos
okay everyone uh uh thank you for joining us this is
Scott Roberts from explore scientific and I am here with uh uh many people
here from the night sky Network or associated with the night sky at work uh we have David Levy here to my right
Vivian white who's one of the or if not the administrator one of the
major administrators of the night sky network uh she is the you're the
director of free choice learning is that right
Frozen videos freeze framed here so anyways
she'll come back um uh and uh skip bird is he bird is
here with us Carol Holmberg Terry Mann from the astronomical League Terry Lapin uh David Warner and Dave Prosper is here
we've also got Peter okay I'm not sure who Peter K is exactly but um
um and then Jay messerov so uh welcome everybody it's great to have you all
here this is the 28th Global star party and I'm so excited to do it with the
night sky Network really honored um it's cool to see some new faces here
uh people I haven't met before and to see some people that I've known for a long time so very very interesting
um when uh Vivian logs back in I'm not sure if she lost her internet connection
or not but uh she just texted me uh she'll be on in a second her computer just reset she's special yeah
yeah okay it's cool that's all right uh uh what I'd like to do is I would
like to introduce David Levy David is a very very good friend of mine uh like a
brother to me he is um uh an amazing um astronomer lecturer uh author
um uh he is someone that has had a vision uh that he has followed through his entire life and uh often with
difficulty uh but I would say that the rewards of of what he was able to to
yield by following his dreams his passion his Drive uh far exceeded any
challenge that he might have had and um so it's uh it's great to have you here I
haven't seen you David since the great conjunction um and uh so it's uh of which he just he
went all out and was there for five events that we did that day so
um David thank you very much we'll I'm going to turn it over to you well thank you Scotty and it's great to
be back the 28th Global star party and it's good to see some new faces Terry
Mann Terry Lapin in particular it's good to see you guys and uh hope that you'll
be coming back again and again I have two poetic quotes tonight and the first one is just four lines long
and it's kind of commemorating the horrible horrible weeks that we have had
here in the United States uh in the last few days and um
uh this is written by um um Walt Whitman
and those of you who how many of you have seen the movie Lincoln I think a lot of you have
yeah a lot of you have I've seen it twice and there's a terrible heartbreaking scene at the end where
President Lincoln tours a battlefield and sees the remains of all the people
lying on the battlefield and Whitman managed to do this in four
lines and it goes like this look down Fair Moon and bathe this scene
pour softly down nice Nimbus floods on faces ghastly swollen purple
on the dead on their backs with arms tossed wide pour down your unstinted Nimbus sacred Moon
it's actually a beautiful beautiful thought a beautiful expression the other poem is very different we're
getting this back into astronomy and it's called when I heard the Learned astronomer and this is a poem that I've
known since high school days and I think most of you know it you're welcome to read it along with me
as I do but um when I give a lecture I often think
of me as the astronomer and you as the audience that goes running off into the
night screaming and you just might but anyway this is when I heard the Learned
astronomer why Walt Whitman written around 1868
when I heard the Learned astronomer when the proofs the Figures were arranged in
columns before me when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add divide and measure them when I
sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much Applause in the lecture room
how soon unaccountable I became tired and sick till rising and gliding out I wandered
off by myself in the mystical moist night air and from
time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars now back to you
Scotty that's beautiful you know the way that you uh
you read those poems David uh it just really it kind of permeates everything
you know and I love that um because uh as in as an amateur
astronomer you know all of us that love the night sky and really been touched by
the night sky uh you know we I mean we get those words you know and so it's uh
it's important to hear them like that it is important thanks Scotty I also
admit that I've never taken a course in astronomy in my life I got my three degrees my bachelor's
degree from Acadia my master's from Queens my PhD from the Hebrew University all of those in English literature and
um the bed the most thing that I'm using that degree for right now the final degree is on these star parties and I'm
able to choose an astronomical quote each time and try to make it different and hoping
that they will inspire our many Watchers to go out under the night sky and look
up in perfect silence at the stars they are and they do David thank you thank you very much
okay so um let's see if oh and we do got Vivian's
back so let's um uh Vivian uh I I'm looking at your schedule and um uh
I'm going to let you uh take it from here but I I did want to mention
um uh some about Vivian she is someone that is just along with day Prosper I
mean both of these people are an amazing uh duo in educational Outreach and
astronomy and they both have been involved in it for many years uh you
know tirelessly I mean you know a fusing their passion and making it fun and
magical you know and so everywhere that they go everybody gets that that's that's kind of what they carry with them
I don't think they know that okay but but this is true um uh you know uh Vivian has been I
think with the ASP working with the ASP and night sky Network for maybe 15 years
or plus maybe indeed okay um you know and so you work with music museums you know you create and share
all kinds of ways to explain educational Outreach Dave does the same Dave can do
it on his arm I mean he pulls back his sleeve and he's got tattoos that that have astronomical uh uh things here he's
pulling it back right now so I mean you know anybody that's really in love with
the educational Outreach from astronomy uh if it's got to be anyone's Dave because
his body's bodies uh permanently done up this way so it's very very cool it's very cool it's my job application
literally fired on the spot
that is so cool um so I'm gonna let Vivian talk a little
bit about the night sky Network Dave and Vivian and uh why don't you give us what
what night sky Network's all about and then maybe after that it would be a good time to switch to maybe the astronomical
League give some door prizes and then we'll we'll get uh the the whole program underway so excellent thank you so much
Scott for having us join you tonight I am really thrilled to be here I love it
it's awesome it's like old friends week I get to see all of you I you know we've been in the house for many months now
and uh it feels like a social hour I'm so glad I get to hang out with the people I really enjoy hanging out with
so thanks for showing up uh Dave and I work at the Astronomical
Society of Pacific in San Francisco well we don't neither of us are in San Francisco now but we're working remotely
that's where our headquarters are and uh been there for many years and we
together uh work on the NASA night sky Network which is a coalition of more
than 400 now astronomy clubs across the country who are dedicated to doing uh public Outreach and engagement in
their communities so many of you might be members many of the people here tonight are definitely members but maybe
even some of you watching from out in YouTube land uh welcome and uh really we
just are as I was saying hurting Daves or hurting cats it's it's the clubs that do this amazing Outreach so we're just
here to support them in lots of different ways and Dave um uh you want to introduce yourself and
say hello oh yeah hi yeah I've been working um about at the ASP for exactly half the
time Vivian as I was there I'm almost going on eight years actually So currently seven and a half
um yeah got my start um basically because I would wake up late having to do uh Tech work for
executives um who were very demanding and that led to me um loving the night sky because I
could uh chill out and look at oh that that bright star moved over there but the other stars are the same
very calming when someone's mad about their email at 2am
but yeah um and I end up working at a volunteering at the Chabot Space and
Science Center in the East Bay Astronomical Society and set up some talks for them and stuff and then um gradually from there ended up at the uh
night sky Network when and the ASP around 2013 and I can always
remember it because it was the year after uh the Venus transit in 2012. so
you can always place it there and yeah so we've been working the night sky Network for quite a bit of time and it's been a very fun job
um been great getting to know tons of people and it's yeah like it's funny because it's like oh yeah Scott Vivian
now like yeah I'm gonna chat with David Levy who is one of the people who had a comment named after him that was one of
the things that got me into astronomy when I was a kid so which is always a thrill I know it's
also very funny because yeah I'm a little more remote I suppose from the office in Vivian tonight I'm from uh also from Northern New York actually
about an hour north of where Mr Levy is from the Adirondack public Conservatory he's having to explain I'm not in New
York City the state so it's very nice and nice Dark Skies up here too not
quite as dark as at the Adirondacks but it's great so that's enough for me that is fantastic we both come from the
amateur astronomy world I was part of the San Francisco amateur astronomers um many many years ago before children
um but uh we have a lot of different topics to cover tonight so I want to let
everybody know what we're gonna kind of go over the first hour we're just going to talk about the night sky Network and
get a lot of our amazing members to come and give some cool demos on activities
that we have created through the network with the network and then the second
hour that's six o'clock Pacific time nine o'clock Eastern we're going to talk
about the big astronomy project and that is one of our latest projects at the night sky Network where we partnered with planetarians and it's a really cool
project that came up with some fun activities so we'll do some of those after that at seven uh we've got the
Girl Scouts coming on I can't believe they made it up so late but I'm really thrilled to have a lot of
our Girl Scout Reach for the Stars team coming on to talk about what we are doing with Girl Scouts and amateur
astronomy clubs a lot of fun stuff and uh then the last hour we have more just
fun Outreach tips and activities so it'll be a lot of Outreach and engagement tonight and you may learn
some new astronomy if you're new with this or you may learn some new Outreach techniques if you've been doing this for
decades so I'm really looking forward to getting to talk with you all tonight
wonderful wonderful okay uh that's great
I think that probably we should go ahead and switch over to Terry Mann and uh
Terry you all set yep I'm all set let me all set all set
Larry Mann is the Secretary of uh the astronomical league but she is also a
two-time former president of the astronomical League uh she is uh she bleeds uh the
astronomical leagues uh blue colors I think and uh she's got a blue shirt on right now which is astronomical League
blue I think as well and uh she is fantastic
um in in all that she does and we're happy to have you on Terry well thank
you very much Scott uh and I'm glad to be here it's great to see all the people in the night sky Network too uh before
we start the door prizes I'm gonna go ahead and we always put up this warning just in case you're ever looking at the
sun to be very careful always make sure everything is filtered never look
directly at the Sun so what I want to do is give the answers clear back from the
great conjunction night on December 21st three questions were asked
and uh I'll give the answers for those and the winners so the first question
was what spacecraft first discovered the rings of the planet Jupiter and in one
in what year the answer was Jupiter's Rings were discovered in 1979 by the pastor passing
Voyager spacecraft and the winner is Andrew Peters
the next question was how did Saturn get its name the answer was Saturn was named for the
Roman god of Agriculture and wealth who was also the father of Jupiter and our
winner is Andrew corkill oh wow great the last question is where
is the tallest mountain volcano Olympus Mons found in our solar system answer
was is Mars and the winner is book Davies Davies all right all right so
three questions for This Global star party now the rules are is that um you
will send in your answers uh for these astronomically questions you'll send
them to explore Alliance at explorescientific.com and uh uh being
that we are simulcasting and that uh some people are seeing the simulcast
before others the way that we do this is all the answers that are pulled into uh
for each email or for each question We Gather them together in that random we
pull the winner uh from from the correct answers and so
um and that kind of that levels the playing field a little bit but um I guess with uh
um you know a drum roll and I don't have a drum roll but uh let's go ahead and get
started here okay if we could travel back in time to see
another Jupiter and Saturn Grand conjunction on what date would we be
able to see a closer alignment between the planets
next question is what well-known Galaxy
can be found near the star alkid okay and in December the Hubble Space
Telescope discovered this nebula was fading what is the name of the nebula
December of this year right uh December of last year not this year yet yeah no
no let's don't rush it by and that's it
oh that's great so thank you Scott
thank you very much Terry thank you thanks to the astronomical league for joining us tonight sure glad to ride
back over to Vivian all right uh Terry thank you I you know
you were the president of the astronomical League when I joined and I um have always looked up to you I'm so
glad that you're here and well thank you very much I I remember all of you very
well too it's been a long time since I've seen everybody it's been a long time since I've seen anyone
hopefully that'll keep change this year yes I'm looking forward to it YouTube thank you thank you for having me thank
you um the astronomical league in the night sky Network are work hand in hand and
we've been working on different projects over the years trying to
get public Outreach to be part of astronomy club culture I think it's been
um really uh quite successful in a lot of ways I'm excited you guys give great Outreach Awards um thank you I love that
yeah thanks yeah well thank you I appreciate it so we have a lot of really cool people
on tonight already um and I know Dave was going to give a little introduction to the night sky
Network he has some good slides to share just to tell you a little bit about Who We Are
um you want to do that now David sounds good awesome great all right let
me uh crank this up here [Music] all right
oh and then we gotta do our classic
oh it's been a minute slideshow
from beginning Okay so um welcome yep the night sky network is
a program that we've had for quite some time now over 15 years
um since the 2004 um this pic we have a few member
pictures throughout this um uh presentation and you might see um what's in here is actually I think it
was taken by Linda Prince from the immature Observers of New York
um one of their events and so yeah I think Vivian mentioned earlier we have over 400 clubs uh in the us and we're us
only at the moment um all about astronomy Outreach and as of
today we've had over 57 000 events recorded and 6.3 million people reached
by members eager to show folks the stars and the sky and along with NASA science
which is the other important factor here and uh member clubs receive space
science Outreach materials which we call tool kits and their thing is we just love helping
clubs with their Outreach it's so much fun I mean many of you here you're probably here you'll that's why you're
here you'll love it or maybe someone was showed you their view through their telescope and now you do the same all
right or perhaps you would like to do that soon or within hopefully the next year so
um but yeah as you all know there are many issues um that can potentially affect Outreach when we're in San
Francisco of course fog is a major factor you can't really look at anything other than fog or a nearby street sign
and when it rolls in um uh storms always a random Factor you
might see them coming you might not the the severity and length May differ
um of course now I moved from SF to the Northeast and I've got snow again which
is a fun thing to deal with um and yeah these can all affect your scheduled events and who knows what else
can happen many things can happen as we've learned in the past year well so
what do you do you've been scheduled to do something you you want to do an event for school like they still want you to
come even though it's raining or whatever it's the middle of the day and there's nothing on the sun etc etc well that's why we made the
Outreach toolkits and we have many topics that we cover with them um with all kinds of different sorts of
activities and materials to kind of try to fit different folks uh styles of Outreach and engagement
um we're fairly loosey-goosey there's no one way to do Outreach we try to give you a bunch of tools that you can use
and adapt for your own purposes I think she was from Jay who's here with us tonight so hi Jake oh yeah
a lot of folks are going to see their pictures tonight which is great yeah great picture thank you hey look at that
um the first thing we're going to hear about the more about this later is we have a new kit called the big astronomy toolkit all about the science and the
people behind the science and how they get that to you from those giant observatories especially the ones
located in Chile but really around the world any High Clear Mountain Top area
um and uh Yep this is a little shot of a few of the materials there
um we've got a lot of difference of this about the Spectrum there's stuff about actual light trespass and light
pollution which we're very eager to finally have some stuff in there for folks of course stuff about careers
um different sorts of things you can do like the go have constellation activities make your own constellations
as well kind of like a grab bag of fun a goodies talking about the sky and big science and stuff
uh one big one that people might like especially if you've got some inclement weather that pops in and out we have the
Milky Way umbrella which is an adaptation of an earlier uh tool that we
had but which was formerly about the size of a CD um which people some people might not
know what those are anymore so um yeah part of our toolkit we have to
keep adapting and changing our kits and yeah this was a very welcome one and very fun
um to you I think we're going to hear about that one in the next hour or so oh yeah we've had a few others the year
last year um we did or two years ago now um we did the Apollo at 11 Moon toolkit
which had a bunch of materials relating to the moon lunar exploration man space flight or
up crude spacecraft space light crude
and we have um yeah I had a bunch of moon phases Legends of the Moon around the world and one thing that really
popped out for folks people love the tactile sheets that you can see a little bit of here
um where they were Braille and um Braille based and you could actually touch the
moon and touch other fun stuff there's a crater as well other toolkits include the life in the
universe toolkit always a fun one especially because you always get questions about the aliens well here's a
way you can discuss the aliens whether or not you believe they're out there here's some issues with astrobiology and
watery worlds around the solar system and development of life on Earth and of course my favorite is the little cards
they're a lot of fun you can see those along the bottom with this uh watery Worlds the big banner we have here I'll
talk about the banners more in a second you can flip that around and because we don't like wasting any space or on the
opportunities so you can flip it around and there's an earth timeline with the geolot with the old if you remember on
the cosmos you stretch your arms out and you measure the timeline of the earth and then you find that uh you can file
your nail off and there goes human civilization it's always a fun demo another one is our galaxy our universe
we discuss the just basically it's like the cosmology toolkit a lot of stuff
about galaxies where our solar system is it's also the number one search thing on the night sky Network even more so than
um reporting on UFOs which we get a lot of especially when starlink launches
um but the um um the difference between um solar system uh Galaxy and universe
apparently researched quite a bit on the internet again apparently our site's one of the number one resources which is
great it's from this kit and we also talk about the populations of stars in the galaxy and a few other uh fun
details shadows and Silhouettes is probably the quiet champ of all of the tool kits it contains probably the most
used um most urgently used one which is the yardstick Eclipse demo where you can
demonstrate how lunar and solar eclipses work this is originally made the kit was
actually originally made to showcase the Kepler Mission and detecting planets as
they Transit across different stars and detecting the light difference thereof but of course we added in uh eclipses
because those are also a Transit of A Sort and um it has been used quite a bit
ever since for many other events which is great and the old standard of the exploring
the solar system toolkit where you have your fun um models of the solar system you can
help craft and make yourself which also as I found makes a very fun daytime activity for kids at a table of at the
Rocky Mountain star stair that was a very fun event and we had a lot of time customizing all the planets they also
can do a solar system walk with the planet so yes the planets are to scale and you can even make them to scale
distance wise with a poster of the sun which is on the other side of that
exploring the solar system map you see on the side of that uh truck there which pointing to that Banner is Marnie
Berenson if you're watching hi Marnie she helped really kick start a ton of the night sky Network
and we're all very grateful for every all the hard work she's done she's the Godmother of the night sky Network this
was her idea originally so we're greatly indebted to her oh yeah
and um just I always throw this in because I like to point out that when we make the toolkit everyone with the ASP pitch is in Even in our like executive
that's Linda there um she took some time out to help package some stuff for this is from the Apollo toolkit
um the moon tool kit and you can also see other folks that you may or may not know um if you've done some of the Girl Scouts workshops Teresa is right there
uh Pablo if ever called the ASP or set up a meeting there's Pablo and in the
corner is uh Vivian there as well making sure everyone's putting everything in the right spot
um yes and Banners uh people love the banners they're great and I like to also
mention that they're vinyl waterproof they're amazing the only problem is is
that they can kind of catch a little bit on some wind um but if you have a sturney uh Banner
holder that can help or you've got a good technique you put on the side of your car or something else uh Geralyn
Ramirez from the Kansas astronomical observers actually sent in these pictures and diagrams of them of how to
make them yourself which is a fun extra DIY activity also I just want to add before we had
the umbrella um you could use these in a pinch to cover yourself from rain
um they're vinyl so it's okay and we also do a night sky notes um and a monthly uh star gazing
a newsletter we kind of kind of merge some stargazing info with the latest in NASA science and it's always kind of
interesting trying to get both things working together without kind of overstepping what some other folks have already written about everyone wants
like you know next month is the Mars landing and I'm writing that right now and I'm trying to make a unique take on it so we'll see what we can do and those
can be edited and you can put them in your newsletter if you'd like so that's to share and use as you will with mostly
new images although some of them are from NASA also yep we actually picked this up for formerly the NASA Space
Place uh newsletter and yeah so uh you're free to use these
in your own newsletters or distribute on the web as is and yeah if you need to change them up you totally can that's fine just don't make don't just don't
change something to be a wrong thing and then uh blame me if you think some creative edits but if I did make a
mistake please feel free to change it and don't yell at me and yeah but of course especially did
not realize how big this would be this year but we have a ton of pre-made presentations which work great for Zoom
or other things these are originally for if you're going to go into a classroom and do a presentation or you know outside of a
um some sort of thing at night or whatever as you're getting ready to set up yeah great for online we have a ton
of topics um you can and I forgot to mention that I have uh short links to all of these in
the corners of these slides and you can of course find all of these on the night sky Network website at night
sky.jpl.nasa.gov and there'll be more in a second we also have some handouts which you can
also just distribute virtually they're all printable you can also read them on a tablet which I've started to take to recently
um also about a lot of different things though funny enough I found myself printing out a couple of these now and
again just for my own use because I find that the corner there is a what can you
find in the Triangle I find that a very nice refresher every every late spring when things kick up nicely
um we also have webinars every month um in a couple weeks we actually will be joined by
um Kelly Beatty from sky and Telescope who will be discussing uh light pollution and what you can do about it
and last month we actually had a great webinar about Astronomy Picture of the
day it's our annual uh December chillout time which is wonderful and we've had some other great guests
and topics before it's we often have a NASA scientist on to discuss the latest missions we discussed last year was like
osiris-rex a ton of others we're hoping to get a lot more fun folks lined up this year our schedule is not finalized
but we are hoping to have a finalized soon of course tries to get getting folks
after vacation and during a triple A S so schedule pending probably sometime next week or the week after
and we have Outreach award pins uh we award every year as well so we try to
change them up every year um and the latest was um the latest changeup also involved of changing the
date slightly or keeping the date so we now have a 2020b pin so for folks that
have done because we formally rewarding these we award these for hours done the year before and due to some stuff that
have a long story short change the date slightly it's all good but to avoid confusion this year has
2020 B like when people have all 15 years of pins which is really amazing to
see yeah there's a new design every year um I don't think I included them in this one but pardon that's okay we should
probably wrap up soon so that we have chance yeah if I keep going oh you did I didn't put them in great okay yep and
um yep and just we have a few we have a few new items where we added stuff to help you uh with doing Outreach events
in the age of covid um including some for if you're doing want to do something like in real life
um some safety precautions and things you can do that might not involve hanging out with people like uh sidewalk
chalk um um some virtual events tips on how you can do your own virtual event like this
and I think we're gonna see skip in that setting very shortly which will be lovely Deja Vu looking at it wow it's
actually a live feed now embedded in PowerPoint reframed yeah
and um yep and that's just you go to the website all the stuff I just discussed it's all there free to download and
check out and I believe uh yep short links if you want we can pause the video
here check them out or just go to the site and that's it thank you all so much you have all of our um all of our social
medias at night sky Network except if you're on YouTube where it is NASA night sky Network and uh
yeah thank you based in the US and the clubs are in the US all of the resources are
freely downloadable by anybody online so um feel free to use those at any point and you can change them up and share
them as you see fit translate them if you've done a great translation please send them our way and we'd love to add them to our list we have some folks in
Brazil that translate a lot of stuff in Portuguese and some folks we have a few Spanish language materials too but we're
always looking to increase them very cool thanks Dave
yay so that's it if you get if you have any questions along the way feel free to stick them in the um comments or chat or
wherever you happen to be and we're happy to answer those for you
um we have some really amazing presenters tonight and I don't um Scott did you have anything you wanted to talk
about before we we do some uh activities no no I I I I'm I'm feeling that uh you
know that the this is rolling along quite nicely and uh so let's uh let's
just keep going all right Terry are you here you're here excellent all right I will um give you the floor thank you so
much Dave for giving a really perfect overview and um Terry not get out of the park we're
glad to have you and Skip bird with us tonight and you're gonna um uh share some astronomy Outreach that
you do with your Club yeah hi everybody I'm with the Tucson amateur astronomy Association and we've
been um a member of the night sky Network since it first started and in fact I was
a little annoyed when they first did the research project for to develop it because it was limited to California
clubs and of course we're in Arizona but I was so glad once it was you know
off to a good start and so I told our club we've got to do this so here we are
doing it still um what what of course this year has
forced us to do is um virtual Outreach and so we've I want to just show you
what the Tucson amateur astronomy association website has for virtual
activities and um some of them are night sky Network projects and some of them are not but I
will just show you what I have so let's see if that can everybody see
the website yeah yeah okay all right so we added
this page just because of this year we didn't have it before
like in March we didn't have it um but we've got Facebook and YouTube
links and we do a virtual star party every quarter and our star parties are
recorded so you can watch them later and we've decided that even after we get
back to normal observing that we want to continue a quarterly newsletter uh
quarterly uh virtual Star Party um and we've got several different projects
as you can see on here um this moon phases is Phase moon phases
is the one that I'm going to show you in just a little bit um some of these are word searches these
came from Larry lebowsky who's done the work with the Girl Scouts and so you'll if you click on one of these you'd see
the Girl Scout emblem but he gave us permission to put them on our website and of course we also have the answer
keys and down at the bottom is our links to the different um virtual star parties that we did so
let me go back up here um to the moon faces what we did was
back in um I think it was June on a Saturday afternoon we decided to do a virtual
presentation on both Facebook and
um uh through YouTube It's a recording on YouTube obviously uh
and it's it was intended for kids and so this is from the Moon tool kit
from the night sky Network and so the kids can download this through our website and they can create
their own faces in the moon and tell a story about the what they see in the
Moon and so that was the main physical activity that the kids were doing and
then this is I'll click on this and just show part of this video of um one of our members Jim Noll
doing the activity uh with the kids online
and hopefully this comes through okay all right welcome everyone to the Tucson
amateur astronomy Association virtual Moon exploration
so let's go ahead and get started so here's the familiar face of the Moon that we see
you can see probably three prominent features here I'm just going to move my cursor around so you'll see kind of a
little arrow but here's here's some dark areas we call these Marias which is Latin for
Seas so we have lots of dark areas around here they're they're kind of lower
elevation and I'll talk to you in just a minute about why how they form we also
have some of the higher elevations these are called the lunar Highlands and so this is uh slightly elevated and then as
you can see as you look around the Moon you see lots and lots of craters some bright ones some big ones small ones um
because both the Moon and the Earth and all the planets especially the inner planets go into a lot of asteroid
impacts in the early formation so those are kind of the main features that you see we're going to do a little drawing
now all right so let's start with the lunar poodle so if you want to draw along that's fine if not just follow me
along so pretty big that's right so I'm going to follow along here we're going to draw
around this Mario [Music] down here this is one of the legs of the
poodle I'll come back up here and come back down here
and a little close there back up here
and then this is a little fluff ball tail so it's kind of like a groomed poodle so here's the face or the head
the body and the legs and the tail back here so we call that the lunar poodle
that's one of them
all right the other one we're going to do is the um man in the Hoon so we're
going to start over here and we're going to just kind of do a circle around
this large Mare and we're going to come over here
and do one through the middle of the poodle that you can guess those are probably
the eyes down here around this dark area and down around
here and back up here and that would be the nose
now here kind of go around these guys and that would be the mouth so it's not
quite as prominent as the poodle is but uh that's considered the face of the man
no it's good two Bright Eyes the nose and the mouth
all right and then the last one we're going to do is the lady in the moment so we're going to start up here
kind of go around here and down around here
back up and around here and this one I'm gonna draw entirely and
then we'll see if you can maybe take a guess at kind of what the
here [Music]
back around here
and on here on this Edge
and down here so this is kind of a profile shot so yeah this is the hair
going here you've got the brow and the nose sticking out here and the mouth and
put maybe like that chin come on down here
and so that's called the lady again not quite as prominent as the man on the
moon so that that's part of what we did and
um it actually went about an hour we had we talked about skylor Native American
skylor about the Moon and the Sun and then we also talked about the evolution you know how the moon was created
um you know impact theories and such and so um it was it was geared towards older
kids um but uh we we are hoping to do some more with younger kids
so we'll see how it goes um I think that's all I was going to
show and so I will stop the sharing here Harry that's so great I was going to
share these um some I love how he interpreted that there the thing with the activities is
everyone gets to do whatever they want with them right we all get to take them and make them our own like teachers do I
think some of these came from I'm just gonna share this screen there's um one of the activities that we have it's not
going to want me to do that um anyway it's called Moon myths from around the world um and it was part of the Moon toolkit
but you can find it if you search for Moon myths from around the world and it has lots of different traditional
stories that people tell um from different places what they see in the moon and uh there's also really
cool audio versions of different stories about the moon um from I think it's uh lpsc the lunar
planetary oh am I gonna get that one wrong but anyway they're great
is it from LPI I think it is oh okay great good I'm glad I didn't go there
thank you Larry welcome um LK I put out some great audio stories
of people telling their own stories from their own culture so uh it's it's lovely
Terry I love that he put those all together and and Drew them out and then you can print these out or or do them
even online have everyone draw their own interpretation and tell stories yeah maybe we can add links to the to these
stories on our website yeah good idea thanks that's great all
right thank you thanks so much for joining us for this is great um and I know it's getting towards the
end of the hour but I do not want to miss Skip's um amazing uh comment making
um oh yeah I want to introduce get bird who is also one of our Outreach
um gurus and he's been doing this for as long as I've known him probably longer than I've known him
um and this is from um this is from a space rocks toolkit I
mean it's been around for a long time but it's also included his hat I think and there used to be an apron that comes
with it it says Comet Chef on it and and the apron has the whole oh yeah it's got
the um oh nice when you're working with yeah excellent so the this is from a toolkit from a
while ago but the activity is really available online so um skip I'm gonna let you take it away
we have probably just about 10 minutes left before we need to take a break so it's all you
all right can you hear me yeah sounds great all right hi I'm skip Berg you saw me in one of the earlier pictures right
here all right so you saw the picture I'm done thank you is that fast enough oh okay all right yes now what I do uh
well Westminster astronomy club from the shirt and from the thing here you can see we're a member of the nice guy
Network we've been here since 2004 or something like that uh actually when Vivian started out she
was only 12. okay so 15 years later she's still doing good
there okay uh we take the Outreach tool kits we do them all as you know
um we do a bunch of them and I have a bunch of people or we have a bunch of people that are doing them but the
favorite one of everybody is what we call I call it Chicken Little was right
little chicken there okay the sky is falling and David knows this because he's the one that told everybody and
they all believed him okay if the sky is falling and so we do a program about comets meteor showers meteorites
meteor wrongs all right I got two of each so we do a bunch of different ones there
and uh we actually one of the things we do as you saw from my bio or whatever is
that we actually give away a meteorite at most of our programs
I want to thank Dave from Star Stones who gave me a
I don't know probably oh I'd say about uh not a kilogram but
close in crumbled meteorites most of them from Canon Diablo in Arizona
but he's got a whole bunch of them he came to me he said give them away so every time we do a program somebody wins the meteorite some of them are really
really really small some of them are as big as an Eminem I'm sorry I ate it right so real quick
it's a fun thing to do now we've modified it a couple of times if you notice the blowing water in front of me
here the green okay we found you know a while back I noticed
that you know comets look green when they're in the sky or they when you take pictures and stuff and I'm going
how can we do that here on the planet Earth and I'm also a science teacher so I said
hey guess what if I take yellow highlighters
soak them in water find an ultraviolet light on them
they glow green wow okay they glow green so now whenever I do my
program now I don't have anybody to turn out the lights for you so you're just gonna have to bear with me but whenever I turn out that whenever
I'm doing a program by the way you can't see this this says
dihydrogen monoxide one of the deadliest chemicals known to man be careful with
it don't get it on you it'll destroy it it destroys entire continents nothing
can withstand it right and I'll let you all figure out why dihydramon oxide is
later but when we're doing it I mix it all up and of course I make it entertaining it's 45 minutes long
or longer or shorter uh we do a bunch for programs and stuff and you can get it down to 15 20 minutes if you talk
fast but when we're all done I'm just going to put a little bit in here to try and change it but when we're all done we end
up with a thing called a dirty snowball all right I'm gonna
have to show it here I'm gonna have to bring it in closer to you all right so I'm gonna bring it in there that's my dirty snowball
that's a comment notice what happens when I shine it with a UV flashlight
it turns green okay right just like the water does
and so comets for less and then there's a little rocks in there you can see the little rocks in there too that's all over the meteors that's where our meteor
showers come from uh this isn't going to take very long but I do all of that I
have five comets or five things we put in the comment now I try and engage the kids because of
being a science teacher you know you got to engage kids to do things so I do things by telling them that everybody
that does anything with science astronomy biology physics uh accounting nursing
carpentry they all do it by observing so one of the things I tell them is look we
got uh there's hundreds of thousands of chemicals in a comet but we're only going to put in five five
five y'all got that five how many fingers do you see
seven wait seven one two three four five six seven hey whose turn is it your turn
I know you're excited the kids are here but it's not your turn wait all right there you go so we do that and they get
prizes if they catch me making a mistake because my dad always said that you know you can talk to yourself just never lose
the argument so I never had that problem because I always always listen to the voices in my
head oh sorry that's it out loud sorry about that so we end up with a comment we got
rocks which there's only five ingredients in here we got rocks okay rocks
no no not dirt but rocks I use recycled asphalt because it's black we have
ammonia now you can't see this as well but this ammonia jug
the labels on it upside down okay so if I turned up now you can read
it now it says ammonia I walked in the store one day ran out of ammonia walk up there's a whole wall of
ammonia and there's this one there and it's upside down I said oh I gotta have it thank you thank you he wanted me to have it
I have my poly aromatic hydrocarbons all right I dyed in blue they used to be
this really sick green made me sick every time I tasted them hydrocarbons found in everything alive
dead giants in space and I run through a little thing about getting lucky and finding some mild straps running through
a mouse blender or a blender right through a coffee filter and get rid of the mouse brains and end up with poly
aromatic hydrocarbons and then I have a hammer wait the hammer what's the hammer fan oh the hammer is
the the goal with the glove because the aliens are not so good with their like they're
they're light pollution over there they're actually throwing stuff away too but the Hammers remind me to crush up
the Frozen carbon dioxide which turns into this okay
okay one more thing here but again anything that bubbles smoke suggests that the kids are going to love
and then I bring out my friend thing and he waves to the crowd
whoa there he goes okay so you can do all of that stuff so there's thing we do all of this
so we try and make it as interacting as possible I can do this at work so and I and I work for Home Depot so
that's kind of weird and then the last thing is the dihydramon oxide which you can see is very deadly
we talk about that what you can do with it and we make our own little volcano here for your science project so we do
all the C I want to think the night sky Network Vivian especially and Marnie I've known Marnie since day
one she's like she said she's a godmother of everything I want to thank everybody for that because she's done
such a great job for that that uh I don't know where I'd be
without it all right sorry I just if you might be uh they might have put
you away by now without if you didn't have the science aspect I love it yeah yeah yeah
because there are kids on this program you're fabulous thank you so much yeah I
just want to say real quick I use every single one of their their Outreach cool kids I was in with some beta testing and
I like the beta test versions better than some of the ones that came out sorry about that but I also do one with
glow-in-the-dark uh we call in the glow in the dark constellations with hangers and plastic wrap
thank you for that and let me be a part of this thanks so much for joining us skip you
made my night thank you yeah
I should say it so we test all of the activities that we do really thoroughly we have rounds and rounds of testing
before we get about to the amateur astronomers and um and and it's true some of the best
activities never make it to the end and it breaks my heart but I love uh you know it's the ones that work for most of
the people Skip and I have a little bit more enthusiasm than most so some of them don't make it all the way to the end
right thank you so much skip thank you Terry
thanks for your Dave for giving the overview um Scott do you want to take a quick break and then come back
um give people a chance to get a sandwich or something to drink and uh so
we will be right back thank you all so much for joining us
okay foreign
foreign
foreign
thank you so much that was the most fun I've had on zoom in a long time
thank you you're really good I wish I could carry you around in my pocket
hey Lily pudding huh yeah
Renee thank you for joining us on here too oh hi Viv no problem just so you know
that we can be heard on the stream okay hi everybody but it's extra fun yeah
good to know shouldn't tell you that about that then
[Laughter] so anyway the secret the secret place where the UFO's stuff is
about the research institute down there in Nashville North Carolina that's where they're hidden
y'all it's an xdod site so
oh as long as they're listening to us uh remember that thing we talked about last night that you said you had a few extra
ones that that are uh cylindrical as and they go from January till next February
uh that you got from a certain amount there you go yeah if you want to send me
some more of those I can use them I will do what I can you know it as soon as I
can get back into the office I haven't been in the office in months
you're a young one out here man they just want to eat like dinner every night
or stop for dinner
good thing so yeah I know you can't stop you think about it all the time
so true closest I got to understanding well my mom went through and me and my friends would hang out for the weekend at our
house and empty out all of the food
um was when a friend of mine who came back from like the Marines hung out at my house for like one night and I told
him oh you can just have whatever um I wake up late and he's like oh thanks and then I woke up late and all
of my food was gone and he was like thank you so much where
are we going for lunch yeah
hi Libby I see you're joining us too it's so nice to have you on here what a treat
very nice to be on what have you been up to lately I've got the telescope out I started a
website and I've been doing some vlogs awesome oh that's really cool you'll
have to tell everybody about it when we get back on
Carol I think you're still on oh there you are yeah great we've got everybody yep we have a
question a comment or a question uh Richard lighthill is asking have we had
a global star party with electronically assisted theme showing live images with
video cams um I think that we have had
um uh or I think that we've had cameras that were maybe not necessarily video
camps but really quick exposure cameras you know
um a lot of dedicated astrocams um you know can also uh take very short
exposures and stuff so um I think that the Imaging that was done on the 60 inch
Mount Wilson telescope uh had uh you know we did some of that but we did you
know extend the exposure so we could get deeper shots um and uh you know there have been
amateur astronomers astrophotographers who have done some things like that but
strictly straight up a video camera um maybe not so if you want to do that
and bring your game on to the global Star Party um the next one we do will be Tuesday
night so think about that
it's fun to see all you guys here hi Libby how are you
hello I'm doing good how are you good good [Music]
so Vivian told me that all the presenters were going to get a telescope
order everywhere and I'm trying to buy one
you didn't say when you would get that telescope
[Laughter] telescopes are like bicycles right now
they're very difficult to get
I just got an XYZ
um I'm really excited about this I haven't tried it out yet but it's uh supposed to be a great uh
cell phone adapter for a telescope so I'm pretty excited about that I got to the ASP desperately needed this so we
could do some public Outreach with um cell phones so I'm pretty excited about that oh yeah that's a nice product
that's what I've heard from everybody who has it [Music]
pretty cool I'd be interested in what you're doing with cell phones because that's one of
the things I want to do with uh I've been doing it with the Girl Scouts but more so oh yeah oh good okay yeah
um because it's actually it's actually amazing how I think you can go just handheld
incredible isn't it for I think I've gotten fourth magnitude with handheld with my cell phone
we were doing Imaging of the grand conjunction on the 21st uh oh yeah
people were taking pictures of Saturn and Jupiter together in one eyepiece uh well folks who are back after our
10-minute break here um and uh we are you know he's excited to
see lots of people here on our chat literally we have a worldwide audience
and it's great to have you here on the 28th Global star party which is co-hosted by the night sky network uh
Vivian white is um our uh official co-host here uh
tonight and uh what's up next Vivian oh up next we have one of our newest
projects I'm really excited to tell you about um the big astronomy uh it's a National
Science Foundation grant that produced well it didn't produce Ryan Wyatt who is
here with us produced an amazing planetarium show called Big astronomy
um people's place people places and discoveries and um and so we have Ryan here from the
California Academy of Sciences and um and it's part of a much larger
project and I'm involved because the amateur astronomy Community is involved in order to create kind of a stem ecosystem around
the topics that we're talking about I'll tell you a little bit more about those in a minute so we created a an amateur
astronomy toolkit that was using um it's got main topics that are dealing
with light pollution and myths from around the world that we tell
about the night sky it talks about multi-wavelength astronomy um and what is the other one
oh now I got multi-wavelength I just got distracted I can't remember
now I'll get back to that and I'll show you some of those activities in a minute um and part of that is also we are
having live interviews with some of the people who are in the astronomy in the planetarium show and Renee Kerrigan is
here from Peoria Riverfront Museum and she's going to tell us some about that we've also got Carol Holmberg here
Carol's from the Museum of York County in South Carolina and she's going to share one of the activities that we
developed I thought maybe I would try to show the YouTube trailer or the trailer that's on
YouTube from whoops hold on I'm sharing it I didn't mean to stop
um to see if that it'll tell you just a little bit about the planetarium show uh
maybe we'll start there and then talk about how we did this just a second let's see if it works
maybe can you see it not yet oh okay that's because I haven't
bottom of your screen you'll see a share screen yeah I was almost there and then you got to just select the one that you
want to share it got a little more complicated pretty quickly hold on one second God it needs my thumb print and
date of birth now it's a um one second I just have to there's a check box to share audio so
you might want to make sure that's checked when you can't even get that far unfortunately um if anybody else wants to share that I
can give you the link looks like my computer is not yet configured that for
some reason let me just go ahead and share that link with these cotton you can start there Ryan did you I know you
have a lot of things you're doing today do you want to talk anything for just a minute about the show and how you made
it and what we're trying to get across with it sure that would be great uh the
show was a tremendous pleasure to work on uh we have a production team here at
the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco that's worked on numerous shows over the past 10 years or so but
this was our first chance to go out onto these incredible sites and the amazing observatories in Chile meet these
fantastic people who make these observatories run and kind of knit together a story that involves the
people the places and as the sun coma indicates discoveries that we find at these incredible places so we actually
had a chance to go down to Chile be able to capture these
observatories using fisheye lenses on on really cinematic cameras these are the
same digital cameras that are being used by James Cameron uh to create Avatar 2.
um and so from a production standpoint was very exciting to really explore new territory for planetarium films and then
combine that with um computer simulations and visualizations of some of the objects
that are being observed uh as well as the interviews with the people who make these observatories run and really
that's the heart of this of the show um the the the show is really narrated
by it first of all overall a Chilean astronomer um
but we also hear interviews with all of the different people who make the
observatories operate so you're hearing firsthand from a lot of people who work at these places and uh and it really
weaves together a story that is um very much like a first person kind of story about how these places run
very cool all right well I have it uh queued up if you
started yep Ryan I hope this is the right one
I know there was one from before and I hope I haven't grabbed the wrong one I think this is right
here we go let's share that and here we are
[Music]
thank you
[Music]
foreign
so one of the really cool things about this planetarium show is that it's in Spanish and English both
so um it's being played worldwide it's also being translated into many many languages I think we know we have German
Japanese what no what else were you guys know better than I do there there's that uh
German and French I think
yeah and um it's a free planetarium show that you can download from the web which is great it's National Science
Foundation was the sponsor of this for us and um we were researching to see
what these additional um pieces of uh amateur astronomy
engagement Museum engagement these live shows that Renee is about to tell you
about and um and see how they all come together to make the experience more Rich for individuals so we have a whole
research component that goes with this but Renee if you wanted to talk a little bit about what's coming up with the live
shows and and how they go that would be great sure
um so as Vivian and Ryan were saying the whole goal of the show and the larger project as a whole the big astronomy
project is to help people understand that of course if you just have a telescope the world's best telescope
that's built is nothing without the people who
um make the telescope work who work in the many different roles that are needed
in a major Observatory and um Vivi and I actually were on a program
together called ASAP astronomy and Chile educator ambassador program back in 2015
and that's kind of where the start of this idea for this whole project happened because when we were down at
these National Science Foundation funded telescopes and Chile we realized that there were so many
different people with so many different jobs uh that were needed to make the
observatories work and um you know jobs you might not expect like machinists who have to custom make
parts to make the um actuators work on the back of the Scopes or or you know
even just um the folks who make the facilities run the folks who make the cafeteria happen
for all the astronomers who come and stay overnight or or who run the data
collection you know maybe they're not directly doing the observing themselves but they um they have to analyze the data that
the the telescopes bring in so many different jobs um are needed and it takes people from
all over the world uh to make these telescopes work and that was sort of the major goal we wanted to try to help
people understand the show uh and so as part of the project not only is this
fantastic show that was created by California Academy of Sciences that as Vivian said is is free for planetariums
around the world um but also we're doing these ongoing events on social media so I hope
everyone who's watching will like big astronomy on Facebook or Instagram or
Twitter um but um we do about every two weeks or so
um a Facebook live event we also have a zoom webinar component and that allows
us to have simultaneous translations so the events are in both English and Spanish where we directly connect
viewers with people who work at these observatories and that people just tell us a little
bit about their job about what their daily life is like um at their job you know their
background what interested them and working in this in this job um you know their favorite thing about
their job maybe their least favorite thing about their job but then they we also asked them a little bit about themselves to tell us you know what do
you like to do when you're not at work and you know uh what is something that
you enjoy to do in your free time because again the idea is to help people understand that these are real people
um whole people not just you know a career but a person with that like them
and that will hopefully help folks imagine themselves in a science job
um and so we've had a number of these and you can see the archive of them on uh big astronomy YouTube channel you can
also see it on the big astronomy Facebook page and you can tune in tomorrow
our next um event is tomorrow Friday uh January 15th it's at 3 P.M chili time
which is noon Central Time which is where I happen to be I'm in Peoria Illinois uh so that's one o'clock
Eastern and uh 10 o'clock 10 a.m Pacific
so uh and if you're not in one of those time zones I'm sorry you're gonna have to do the translation yourself
um uh but this event is featuring Kathy Vivas who is an astronomer she's from
Venezuela and she works at the sarasololo inter-american observatory on the blanco telescope and
um her job is to analyze the data for other astronomers who maybe have time on
that on the dark energy camera um but she also does her own research so
she's an astronomer with sort of two roles she she really enjoys helping other astronomers meet their goals of
observing but then she also gets to do her own research on the telescopes in Chile
um and so that is tomorrow and I'm looking forward to learning more about Kathy and her more about her life
outside of astronomy um and uh again you can see a whole
backlog of these events as well and we'll have more and more in the next person uh after Kathy that we're
featuring is Alex uh Geraldo and he's the head of the cocinas or cafeterias at
both um Sarah to Lolo and Gemini South and so that's like you know a totally different type of job that we haven't
had a chance to feature yet and I'm looking forward to learning about um what his daily life is like taking
care of all those hungry astronomers who've probably eaten around the clock
that's so great where can I find out uh what websites should they go to to see some of these
programs oh thank you yeah so a whole lot of information
.org is where you can actually if you're a planetary professional you can download
the planetarium show uh from that website it's available in um 2.5 k and
4K if you want the 4K version we send you a hard drive um and you can also uh get the kits or
request the kit from of educational activities from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific that Vivian led the
creation of you can get an educator guide there for if you're a teacher who
you know is bringing a class um to the Planetarium who might be open
uh and that's also where you can learn about these events and then I recommend
liking us on Facebook so big astronomy on Facebook and that way those Live Events they go right to Facebook and
you'll also get notified about the weekly live streams because most
planetariums in the United States are closed right now and in the world and so
we've been live streaming the show Ryan's team at California Academy of Sciences has been live streaming this
show every week and 360 degrees and I've started doing it as well so that now
there's two streams a week you can watch on YouTube if you're not able to go to a
real Planetarium and so again you can find out um the times for that on our Facebook page as well big astronomy on Facebook
okay so I've put up the big astronomy.org Link in chat and also your
Facebook link as well so if you have never seen a planetarium
show in 360 which I had never seen before I was part of this project it is so cool so if you have a phone you can
actually hold it up and look around and see like you were actually like you're in a planetarium I mean it's not being
in a planetarium but it is the next best thing to being in a plantar if you're on your computer you can Mouse around and
look up and around and it really does kind of feel like you're there if you have
um what is the Google cardboard or something you can even do VR in that way too so it's as close as we're going to
get to the yeah okay if you have these yes oh oh they're matching yes you can
watch it in that and you feel and and I have not watched it in that but I imagine you feel like you're in a planetarium yeah I'm looking forward to
that that's going to be fun they're really fun they're so cool to see it live so I hope you get a chance to see
that because it it really does a great job talking about all of the different jobs that it takes to do astronomy one
of the things that's in the toolkit that we created is this Banner that's my background here about astronomy being
for everyone and all the different types of jobs that it takes to run these observatories so it goes into some of
the backgrounds of that so yeah
both so much I think we have Tim Spock on too who's our principal investigator for the whole
he's the big astronomy herder um yes sorry sorry I'm running running a
little late here is that's normal part of my life I only hope that I'm late for
my own funeral that's my one one thing that I'm I'm hopeful that this pattern in
life will bring but uh so yeah no I was listening to Renee and
and it's uh it's great I'm sure Ryan did and did an amazing job one thing I I
will add is that uh also in the in the not too distant future we'll be uh
placing on the the website the ability to download an HD flat screen version of
the the show itself both in English and in Spanish and uh so that gives one more Avenue to
one more way of of enjoying the the program but
um this has been just a a really cool project I know I've been uh going to Chile now since uh probably uh 2015 I
believe was the the first asep expedition and
being at the observatories is something that you never you never Tire of
I can remember the first time in uh I guess it was 20 yeah it was 2015.
um to be able to see your Shadow by the Light of the Milky Way is just uh an
amazing and very um very special experience and so I know
for me one of the things that I wanted to know was whether or not California Academy of Sciences and Ryan could
actually make me go back there you know sitting in a planetarium and watching the show uh and if they could could
really give me an authentic that sort of authentic experience of being there and
while you didn't really see your Shadow by the Light of the Milky Way they did a phenomenal job of of making it feel like
you were there and uh just a great deal of a really authentic show that makes
gives you the the bit of the real experience of what astronomy and Chile is like and what these facilities are
like and what sort of the environment is like the around them so
I think it's I strongly encourage everyone to you know watch the 360
streaming but definitely you have to get into the big dome uh once we get Beyond
covid and uh and watch it in the dome that's where it's uh
that's where you get the real feel thank you for joining us Tim I'm raising
my glass of fine Chilean wine to you you're on the East Coast so
um well wine is an essential part of Chile
so yeah yeah absolutely
um so if there are any questions we're happy to take those I know Carol is here and has some she's got an activity from
the toolkit she was going to do I've got one too if we have enough time um
just got let us know you can just interrupt us you know us no I think that I think that if you want
to show some more activities that would be awesome we have all the time in the
world so all right so if you want to get any of this information it's all on bigastronomy.org you can find all of
these things there um Carol would you like to show us um so like we said before with Skip and
um that everybody takes these activities and makes them their own and I think Carol has done an amazing job I saw her
video of that and I wanted to ask her to come and share that with you all too so
Carol take it I didn't to go first
oh uh is that on the schedule yeah I think he just did you have
anything where you wanted to say Ryan so uh so I'm good but uh certainly I'm
happy to stick around and answer any questions that come up around the production and we actually also have some great making of videos that we've
linked to on the um on the big astronomy YouTube page so if you want to learn how
the show was made I mean I I happen to be the uh the the writer director of the
show but the team is absolutely phenomenal that I get to work with every day and uh you can see some really
enthusiastic and entertaining presentations by uh Ken Mike Matt and
Molly who were all instrumental in making the show happen so um so that'll answer a lot of questions
right there yeah I think there are there's more questions about the VR aspect of um of watching
this show and um uh you know if people want to specifically do the VR
experience with it what would they need to do so the great thing about the YouTube
streams is that basically if you have a YouTube app on your Oculus or if you're
running it on your phone with a cardboard it'll all kind of happen automatically so if you've got some kind
of headset YouTube is almost certainly installed on it and you can just watch the streaming uh link
um right now we're doing that twice a week eventually that will just be available on YouTube to watch us a video but
because as Vivian mentioned this is a an nsf-funded project that has a research
component where right now we're trying to imitate that that aspect of going to
a planetarium and seeing a show so we're offering it as these live streams twice a week to kind of replicate that and
we're we're planning to do that for the first several months of the grant but I think very soon what you'll see is uh
and again if you look at big astronomy.org we'll certainly announce that is the opportunity to watch it as a
streaming 360 uh video is uh sorry just a 360 video that would be available on
YouTube as well so that option will be open but we also don't want to steal the Thunder chasing of the planetariums
that'll be running this and when a planetariums eventually will be reopening so we'll figure that out but
that'll be a great chance to see it um I'm going to put the link up for the YouTube channel
and as soon as this program's over I'm going to download the YouTube app for my
Oculus Quest and get ready to watch it so uh when you
guys when you guys run that so that's very that's excellent do you have a chance on every Wednesday or Thursday so
what what times does that run so in UTC on Wednesdays it's at 7 30 p.m
UTC um and uh and on Thursdays it's uh 8 30
p.m UTC so um noonish yes so I'm gonna guess that
everyone operates on that and that's for the Wednesday streams it's 11 30 uh uh
a.m Pacific Time on on Wednesdays so
Pacific time it's then 12 30 p.m on Thursdays okay but 7 30 UTC Wednesday 8 30 UTC on
Thursday yep yep and UTC works pretty good for this audience because they're all they're everywhere so I was guessing
that yeah Tim put a note in the chat that if you
are not already in Chile right now and you'd like to go to Chile or maybe even if you are in Chile and you'd like to visit some of these observatories the
astronomy ambassadors program is amazing that's where Renee and I met and we were
she was talking just a little bit about that earlier but it's an incredible program for educators and you can find
that at Astro ambassadors.com astroambassadors.com yeah so I wanted to
share that um Tim is a wonderful tour guide and being able to see these observatories
firsthand is is really phenomenal we get to see um sit in the control room with people
while they were making all these observations and it was it's pretty phenomenal to get to be up that high and and we went up to Alma for example the
Atacama large sub millimeter millimeter array and um that is excuse anybody
remember how high that is really really high 3 404 feet
I believe it was above about half of the Earth's atmosphere um and it felt like it so uh but it's an
amazing program if anyone is interested I really we can recommend it highly so not only do you get to go to these
amazing observatories and see wonderful places but ton with other astronomy Educators who
maybe are from around different parts of the United States um some who work in a in uh universities
some who work for informal education institutions some who work in schools
but all who love astronomy and so uh it's a really great bonding experience
as well so I do highly recommend it excellent Carol I'm sorry we had you um
okay there I just keep wondering if the zero Reuben is online yet
it's it's not online yet it's got its first light will hopefully be this year it's still it um we had a presentation
about their Reuben from their deputy director for the big astronomy project and so I recommend going back and
watching that if you want sort of an introduction it's called meet uh Reuben Observatory you can find it on the big
astronomy YouTube channel um but uh she told us that
um it's just delayed just a few months because of having to be shut down um and due to covid and a lot of folks
not being able to work on the site but it should have first light this year so I'll I'll give you a little bit of a
you're actually probably talking three at this point they've they have
experienced some additional delays and um so while you might they might do some
early testing uh as far as it actually going online that you're probably
sometimes I think mid to late 2023 at this point and if you have not heard
about this Observatory it's kind of phenomenal it's really phenomenal it's going to take a full
Sky picture of the night sky deep to I don't even know what magnitude 16 17
magnitude it's pretty pretty deep uh full Sky View every three days so it's
going to basically make a movie of the night sky I am thrilled about this it
doesn't hasn't been anything like that it's going to change the astronomy game quite a bit the professional astronomy
and it's gonna be open to the public pretty quickly the data is going to be open pretty quickly
so it's going to be just like finding needles in a haystack I imagine
at that point because it's really Dome looks like something out of a sci-fi movie it's amazing
yeah it's really cool yeah I'm excited about that one this is incredible 27 foot mirror geez
is it super fast it's like the focal length is really short yeah so 100
megapixel camera yeah yeah full Sky picture that's just amazing to see yeah
very unique because the the mirrors got two different Curves in it right right
oh let's see if I can find a picture of that um I just gonna get one for my 25 inch
which is uh lsst.org
at the Bay Area Science Festival they had um virtual tours of the slack
facility where the mirror was uh struck and you can see it I think it's it's
still uh on tape that you can just check the Bay era Science Festival that was
cool cool I had no idea that they did the mirror there oh that's so cool that's right around
the corner um yeah there's a lot of exciting astronomy coming up
um Carol all right let's let's see you've got your Galaxy umbrella up so take it away Vivian asked me to choose
my favorite Outreach activity and I had no problem it's this
umbrella from um the big astronomy toolkit because I just love to twirl it
and I think it's a fantastic representation of the Galaxy that a
model that you can use in Clear Skies or even rainy skies and
um it's got a an image of the Galaxy right here on the front
and you can explain how our um Galaxy
is a spiral a double arm spiral two major arms two minor arms but it's a
little bit more flat than this if the Galaxy were this why it would be only
half an inch thick it's not curved like the umbrella and I like to explain to
kids that all models have limitations not only is it really small and there's
not really Stars there's no supermassive black hole in the center but it would be
a lot Slimmer than this and there is a little place where we can show our place
in this in the galaxy and try and put it towards the camera this little circle
right here that Circle which is four inches represents the stars that we can see
with our eye so when we look at it all the stars in the dark starry night about
2 000 of them what you're looking at they all fit in this little circle here
um the rest of the Galaxy we can't see with our eyes and our solar system
is inside that little circle less than a width of a human hair in fact I think
it's one ten thousandth the width of a human hair that puts things in
perspective yeah it really does put things in perspective so my husband who is not an
astronomy person was saying how do we know that we're in a spiral galaxy if
this is all we can see how can we see the arms well the Milky Way when you
look out at the Milky Way you're looking you can't see individual stars with your
eyes you're looking Beyond and away from the center is the Orion Perseus arm
which you see in the winter sky like now
and towards the center we see um sagitt towards Sagittarius and
Scorpius the Sagittarius arm which I guess is just the little offshoot there
from the Northern Hemisphere but we can see some of our galaxy from just with
our eyes um just buy that Milky Way which doesn't resolve without a telescope into
individual stars and we know another way
that we know what our galaxy is look looks like is when we go out and we see
these other galaxies with telescopes um we can't see the other side of our
galaxy because on the other side of the supermassive black hole but we can guess
and we're getting better at it um with with gravitational lensing and things
we're able to see but um some of it is just conjecture we've never gotten outside of our galaxy to
see now now that we understand what our galaxy looks like let's think about how
far they are apart so this umbrella if we think about the closest galaxy to us
one of the magellanic clouds is a small satellite Galaxy that's about One
Umbrella width apart and that close Andromeda galaxy the
closest large spiral that we can see is a good 12
umbrella with 12 galaxies distant apart so if we had 14 umbrellas with 12 apart
we could see how far how far away the galaxies are spaced and
I just think it's an excellent model a fun model that you can bring out in any
kind of weather you can paint Galaxy on an umbrella or I
was saying that they are for sale from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and I think they're just wonderful
it's really all I have to say about it unless that's awesome Carol that is great thank you so much
everybody wants one yeah oh um I have a link to them um I'll have to get that for you this is
a it's a representational uh image it's uh it's not a picture
because we can't take a picture of ourselves on the Milky Way right so this was by Robert hunt at Nasa and he is
part of the solar system.nasa.gov resources so um it's our latest most up-to-date
of what we understand that our galaxy looks like which is pretty cool
um it is really cool and you can fold it up and take it with you
cool well that's the thing so we we had been looking for something that was already made out there that was a Galaxy model and didn't really find anything
so uh we made one and it was it was a lot of fun doing you can go you can find one oh sorry Robert Hurt excuse me sorry
Ryan thank you so much for that not Robert hunt Robert Hurt um uh is who designed that visualization
yeah it folds right up so um the only ones they had were kind of big and clunky and you had you a little bit
delicate so we wanted to make something that would be easier to um lug around
um which is you know when we make activities for amateur astronomers that's one of the things we think about we don't want them too fussy and we
don't want them too big because often they just go in a telescope case um you just go into the Astro shop it
looks like yes I even have a bitly for you if you just do bit.ly forward slash Galaxy umbrella all lower
cast a lot lowercase even get dot l-y forward slash Galaxy umbrella
you can also print this yourself we have the poster on the website so you can print it on just a large poster size if
you want to make one of your not an umbrella but a um a flat a version I forgot to say
we're about half the way out from the center and if you twirl the umbrella you know
the the the outside edge goes faster than we are but that that
idea that everything kind of goes the same the the really inside doesn't but
the outside you know kind of also illustrates dark matter
because the fact that the outside goes with the same
Revolution as where the middle is is proof of dark matter
huh yeah it's it definitely is pointing that direction it's amazing I never
imagined it to spin it doesn't even look like it's just been like a record right it looks like it should twist up and on itself
yeah um thank you so much Carol it's great to see that in action
so it's really you know we we create these activities and then we hope that they get used
to show my favorite activity thanks Carol
yeah Carol we're gonna have to have you on again I really enjoyed the Your Enthusiasm that's great yeah
well I had one lined up but it sounds like it might be time for a break before the seven o'clock hour and I can always do
that one later if we have time what do you think um
um I think we're probably okay uh where
it's 8 52 here um you had a uh what a nine to ten
segment that you wanted to do yep we've got the Girl Scouts coming up next I want to thank all of our big astronomy
presenters thank you Carol and Renee and Tim and Ryan so much I appreciate that thanks for coming on last minute and
being here for the party thanks for having us on thank you take
care yeah thank you all right I guess we will go to intermission right now
um and take about 10 minutes and we'll be back with the 28th Global star party uh Co hosted by the night sky Network so
here we go we'll be back with Girl Scouts even better [Laughter]
all right see y'all soon just a minute
foreign
foreign
foreign
foreign
foreign
foreign
notice what I went and got what did you get I got the umbrella hey awesome
we forgot we were going to give one away in the last hour I totally should have been looking at my notes
you're going to run away that'll be exciting [Laughter] yeah I go wait a minute I have one of
those where did I put it I'm getting ready to modify mine with
some glow-in-the-dark paint yeah yeah that's included in the tool kit so
um so I just downloaded the VR app on YouTube uh for my Oculus Quest so it was
easy to do it made you get a code okay and then you have to go into with your Google account put in the code and it
all ties together so I'm so excited so excellent really fun you'll have to
watch it this Wednesday or Thursday yeah it will fun show yeah tell anybody I'm watching it so
in an important meeting yeah that's right do not disturb awesome
well great so we're now on the uh and to this next segment here
um Vivian what's what's in store for everybody well we have a really fun group coming
up next I'm super excited to work with these guys too I I think I have the best job in the whole
wide world I get to work with some amazing teams all around the world across the country and
um this next project that I wanted to tell you about the night sky network works with lots of different partners
and this project is called Girl Scouts REITs for the stars and it is a
nasa-funded project where we partnered with Lou Mayo who's here and Larry
Lebowski who's here Jessica henricks from Girl Scouts of Northern California and the Girl Scouts of the USA and we
have helped to create nine no six new space science badges for
girls and they're they're kind of fantastic so if you ever get to do Outreach with Girl Scouts
um these are a fantastic way to collaborate and I wanted to bring all of
these folks on so that we could talk a little bit about some of the work that we're doing and
um let's see what else did we want to say I think I think I'm gonna let Jessica
introduce this she's got an amazing set of activities that go with the
um younger badges I think for the Girl Scouts is that right hi Jessica just a couple of samples Eileen thanks
for having the bad sitting there that's great [Music] um so yes hi I'm Jessica Hendricks I
work with the Girl Scouts of Northern California so Girl Scouts USA is the National Organization and that's who
issued the badges our principal investigator um for this project is seti Institute
and they partnered with gsusa but also we are one of the co-as Girl Scouts of
Northern California where one of 111 castles across the U.S um the great thing for me is that I got
hired on when we got this funding so the last five years I've been thinking all about these badges all the time and some
of the other projects of course oh with the astronomy club patch there with Eileen oh I love that with the planets
it's our Western Oklahoma patch a lot over there I mean and there's a
lot of lots and and maybe I'll let each person who's here talk about it but yeah I just
wanted to share a little bit about the um the badges today um uh let's see Vivian should I do any
other intro to the badges just that there's six levels of Girl Scouts um so daisies are kindergarten and first
graders and maybe I'll just share a screen and show you a picture then I don't see my
um the permission to to share you know how sometimes you get to share your screen and sometimes it just says share
your whole screen it's at the bottom just just put your how do you think you're near the bottom and it should show no I know it's not showing up as
one of my window options so I'm going to share the whole screen so sorry I won't be able to see your chat comments as I do it I'll let you know are you seeing
your selves in the little windows at the corner then nope you are just you oh we
see us yes yeah yeah well but we see your full screen okay good I'm just gonna hide it but I can put this in
gallery mode if you want so there you go sounds good um so these are the badges on the left
you've got the daisy for kindergarten first graders and there's just three steps two choices each the next one the
triangle each one of the badges the shape actually maps to the level so the triangles are for brownies second and
third graders the juniors are that round one that looks like an observatory third and four oh sorry fourth and fifth
graders that diamond shape is for the cadets uh that's Middle School girls sixth through eighth grade the um that
rectangle is seniors which is a little confusing because it's ninth and tenth graders and if you were a senior in high
school you would be an ambassador on the far right and that's um for 11th and 12th graders so six badges uh the
brownies through ambassadors you girls need to complete five steps to earn their badge and the badge requirements
are available in the store the Girl Scout shops so one of the things that we do a lot is
have some fun I mean there's the batch steps but how do you throw a space party
you plan it so there's a lot of this and we're doing things with younger girls in Virtual spaces as we try to make it playful and
fun um it really makes a difference uh to just sort of add a little bit of that
yeah goofiness uh so this is a solar system game so a lot of you know this as
the solar system walk which of course there's amazing places all over the United States we can take a solar system walk it is um a batch step in the junior
space science investigator badge um but we've modified it for virtual setting and I wanted to share it with
you I will post the link to these slides in the chat after I'm done so you're
welcome to use these slides with your own Outreach so if we shrunk everything in our solar system until the sun was a
size of an eight inch ball today my ball happens to be a bowl could you guess how big would Mercury be
so everything Shrunk the same amount and the Sun is the size of an eight inch ball about a soccer ball go ahead and
hold up your hands show me with your hands how big you think Mercury would be would be a little bit smaller a little
bit bigger than the earth go ahead and show me Mercury would be the size of a pinpoint
and we're going to go through all the planets so each time I'm going to call out the name of the planet and you'll go ahead and show me with your hands your
guess of how big it would be how big would Venus be in this scale model where everything struck the same amount
Venus would be about the size of a peppercorn like you'd find on your table what about Earth how big would Earth be
nice got the same size you're right it's the peppercorn again you got it and Mars how big do you think
Mars would be go ahead and show me with your hands back to that Pinhead that was Mercury
then Jupiter okay some guesses coming in go ahead and even if you're at home here
we go it's nice of a dime Maybe yeah so Jupiter is a large marble about
um yeah 0.9 inches so a little shy of one inch and I happen to have a measuring spoon here so whatever you've got at
home that fits that size you go ahead and use Saturn
okay Saturn is the size of a marble so a little smaller 0.7 inch and then Uranus
there we go it's about the size of a bead we've got the beads right here I've got you know like I said you use whatever you've got around at home and
the last one Neptune once again about the size of this bead
of 0.3 inches so that is our solar system walk turned virtual now when
we're talking about Scale Models it's really important that when we're talking about size they understand that this is not the scale distance and JPL has an
amazing gift I love gifts they don't use as much processing power as videos so I've got the URL in the notes of the
slides of where to find this so you can see here this is the size to scale of
our solar system moving out to the distance to scale and I just love this to explain a really difficult
concept I think the use of gifts is amazing and NASA has a whole site on giphy as does the European Space Agency
again goofiness these are giant balls of gas many light years away most are only
seen at night although one is seen in the day and I would usually pause and let everyone share their answers in chat
but they think it might be one of you go ahead and Shout It Out yeah let's see if anybody here in the
chat group knows it
I think they're sleeping out there I don't know we're awake
son I think a few of you might know the answer to this it's the most if you're
an astronomer you should okay martinis that we're here at the global star party it is okay here we go during the day
exactly is our star the sun and I really like to emphasize that when I went up girls
we also have some playful sort of openers where you don't have to have any prior knowledge these are some
constellation diagrams from the Girl Scout badges um that's cool and that they're just
sort of they're cute illustrations it may not be the the easiest way to see where the stars actually are but the illustrations are really what we're
focusing on here um so we ask people to go ahead and add in the chat what's your favorite constellation you can type in the
numbers numbers are really good when you're working with younger girls because it's much easier to find a number on the keypad than a letter so a
lot of times we'll use numbers but if they'd like to type in the name or if they know any others they're welcome to
do so as well you go ahead and throw into chat if
you'd like your favorite constellation I see one person typed in and you can of course Sharon elsewhere
I think there's a lot happening on YouTube and some of the other platforms that we don't get to see on this oh I'm
so glad that you are yeah new ones but um everybody's getting some
sort of feed um if they're looking on Twitch or uh
Twitter no uh but twitch yes and YouTube and Facebook yes they're getting the feed Gib what is 13.
me
number six Martin eastburn said number ten zofiuchus isn't it there you go
oh my gosh the 13th Zodiac constellation that definitely does show up in the badges just the science of what is what
you know what are those signs there's a lot of interest from girls around that um so then of course if we're talking
about Stars this won't be a big surprise to any of you who do astronomy Outreach but we really like when we're working with troop leaders to make some very
simple slides of sort of what we want to make sure we cover so have you ever noticed how stars in the sky can look
like shapes and this is a beautiful picture of the San Francisco Bay area where I'm based out of so the
constellations are patterns of stars in the sky and sort of like connect the dots and astronomers there's a lot of
confusion around the word constellation so astronomers agree to use the same 88 constellations to map the sky for
science but of course people from cultures around the world have stories about the stars and I would highly recommend going
to um send the link afterwards figures in the sky and it you can see a little
screen grab here so here's this familiar Orion constellation but all of these
different people from different times different places have seen different things in these stars and I love to explore it as a screen share with girls
um and then of course just to sort of close it out we do talk about constellations and daisies they make a star pattern so we're going to do one
more activity where you share and chat now you may already know what constellation this is so you're gonna
have to try to scrub that from your brain right now it's kind of hard let me know try a new connect the dots what do
you see in these dots if you connect the dots and make a pattern what do you see an object an animal
yeah I have a tough time scrubbing it out of mine we have a seahorse and an elephant trunk
and rabbit tracks this is great a hammerhead shark yeah awesome
yeah I can see all of them the moment you say it without his head either oh a
high heel shoe there you go oh yes there you go nice
it does definitely looks like a high heel shoe yeah and I love this it's like
looking at the clouds with people too during the day it's a hammerhead Archer oh yeah Fish Hook yeah so it's also
known as Scorpio here but um we've got one more that's in the
slide deck again I'll share it in chat afterwards so quickly this one is probably even harder for some of you to
scrub out of your head
I always thought it was like a kite in the sky you know
my son used to meet with a rocket ship with Beetlejuice being the tip and then
those three at the bottom being the bottom of the rocket ship oh yeah spraying out the like the jet the rocket
yeah yeah yeah an hourglass yeah butterfly
and my students have seen this as a basketball player and he's a dancer with
one hand and going up for you know a lab and then with and then Taurus is the
basket that's so cool I love it this is such
such fun and you can definitely do this for a while so this is the constellation Orion
um and then of course as you look up at the stars you can look at the set of stars and create and share a Star Story
with your family this is one of the brownie the second and third grade steps you can of course make your own dots on
a page you can look at a picture of a constellation or you can just go outside and stargaze lie down on your back and
tell your story um I definitely want to recommend we always ask girls to reflect you know one
thing I learned one thing I want to know more about NASA space place is such a great place I've gotten a lot of
Graphics from them this is one of their Graphics that I like to use for Reflections I just think they are adorable for the younger girls and then
um if you want to get the badge booklets they're available in the Girl Scout store or join Girl Scouts actually and
help be one of the leaders um and thank you for exploring today with
me hi Jessica you are so much fun thank you
I love this um we do lots of Outreach with uh Jessica with Girl Scouts and amateur
astronomers we have one coming up a space science Symposium for um the California area is going to be in
the next few weeks and it's exciting to make these Partnerships with different um astronomy clubs and solar system
ambassadors and the Girl Scout councils in different areas so this will be the
second one we did we did North Carolina two years ago and they were of course supposed to be in person but this one's
going to be virtual and and we'll learn a whole new set of things which is pretty exciting
thank you Jessica yeah um and we have
um maybe actually I was wondering uh we have Astro Kathy here who is the leader
of one of our Girl Scout astronomy clubs but I thought maybe Lou if you wanted to
um do a little introduction to what the Girl Scout astronomy clubs are Louis from Aries scientific and Marymount
University in Maryland right uh it sounds like it's in Maryland but it's in Virginia
Virginia close call it Virginia Mound Virginia Mount
uh and Lou has been a major part of this and he runs a pretty cool program Astro
Kathy has been a part of it and Lou did you want to just share a little about it and then maybe Kathy can
um share some of what she does in the um Club yeah sure
um so I'll share my screen here um
and Jessica had put some links in here I don't know if you can share those out Scott the presentation link and the solar
system GIF and the figures in the sky all right are all on there thanks Jessica
thanks so one of the things that the study Institute Reach for the Stars program
does is set up um help Girl Scouts set up girl scout
astronomy clubs and NASA has actually been doing this for over 20 years we started uh doing
girl scout trainings up at the Macy hunts Conference Center in New York we did that for a number of years
inviting um people from NASA from all over the country to come and provide astrophysics
monetary science heliophysics um uh training knowledge content activities
a lot of fun and uh then we have done this kind of thing in
various parts of the country uh with with more Regional Girl Scout
groups but more recently uh we've been able to run some training programs for
Girl Scout astronomy clubs at Goddard space flight center we started this about uh five years ago
and each year we bring uh 10 Council teams that are competitively selected by
Girl Scouts USA to Goddard each team has two Girl Scouts
a volunteer and an amateur astronomer from there uh uh from their Council
and we oh my goodness we have interesting talks
um from here I have a I actually have a little Montage I put together these are
pictures from some of the trainings that we've done as you can see my cursor so I mentioned
interesting talks this is John Mather uh he's a Nobel prize winning uh astronomer for his work in
understanding the um Cosmic microwave background and he is generous enough to
come and talk to us uh most years and we have many other speakers so we have all
that which is kind of as only NASA can right where are you going to get where are you going to find these kinds of people and
then we have fun activities um that uh we Engage The Girl Scouts and
doing over here you can see all of them all the 10 Council teams here they um uh drew a picture of what they thought
the sun looked like and we get them up and have them walk around and do exercises to understand
how spacecraft work and how they need their observations and lots of uh
construction and modeling activities over here we have solar system
um sorry um solar cookies you can make a cookie that's a model of the Sun using
various icings and sprinkles we we give each Council a an eight inch
dobsonian reflector and they take that they learn how to take it apart and put it together and they take it back to
their councils and they use that to run their Girl Scout astronomy clubs
we have star parties for them we have tours of Goddard all kinds of fun things
and uh the goal is that we are able to send them back to their councils and not only some fun
content knowledge and understanding of how they can get resources and
how to do activities in their clubs but how to run a Girl Scout astronomy club
so they um then set their Girl Scout astronomy clubs up oh and we feed them too here we go
you feed them a lot um he sat there girls got astronomy clubs up and they
um run them and invite even more girls in to enjoy the wonders of the night sky
the wonders of astronomy and then they're helped by their amateur astronomer who's there as a resource for
them and every month we have a zoom teleconference and we all get together
talk about telescopes talk about what what's up in the night sky how are the NASA missions doing we have a science
talk and so that happens uh that happens every month
um so uh this has been going on we've trained uh
four well actually 41 we had 11 one year we trained 41 Council teams
and um let me Backtrack on that we have invited
in 41 Council teams we were not able to do our training in 2020 because of covid
because the pandemic so we invited them in to they had already been selected to our program and
we meet with them each month and we are now just starting to plan um is uh remote uh probably Zoom focused
um training for them coming up this summer in either June or July so they will get in fact get their training
um so Vivian I don't know uh I I have a
fun piece of software to show if I have time but maybe I should just uh let that sit for a while and
um uh let Kathy talk a little bit I definitely want to see the software but
maybe we'll have Kathy share first and then you can share um after Larry does that seem like a plan okay cool that
sounds great uh let me see um we have Kathy on who's the leader of
one of these Girl Scout astronomy clubs and I'm gonna try and share my screen again and see if it works any better this time oh
um I actually gave access oh okay you've got hopefully try that let's see
hopefully I've done it correctly if not I'm happy to try that again
see if it's gonna work I think it actually might work this time let's see are you seeing my screen
yes I am okay it looks like it works then we'll just go with that
um Kathy do you want me to start you tell me when to play it and we'll do that
okay um so the reason I am having Vivian uh
do the screen sharing is because my internet is very slow I've actually had some issues just very recently so
um I will actually be playing the video on my own end here so that I have the
timing right just in case things uh bomb out um and I also hope that you have the
correct one yes you do okay synchronize you ready ready one go
all right well thank you Vivian I'm excited to be here I'm uh Astro Kathy
talking about mapping your skies and uh astronomy is for everybody an astronomy
and Girl Scouts we're definitely reaching for the stars um I'm thrilled to uh that there are so
many new girl scout astronomy badges thank you for sharing those earlier uh
bringing the cosmos to the Hands Hearts and minds of our young Leaders of Tomorrow now science generally starts
with a question so uh my question is how can I learn to
find celestial objects in the sky while I'm demonstrating uh the my
favorite activity in the uh video I'll be talking about other things but just
as we um show just as we know how to map the
uh what's going on on the ground we can also map what's going on up in the sky
and that's a space place has something called a Star Finder I actually call it
the cootie catcher Star Finder it's good for latitudes at about 34 degrees north
um the materials you need are the directions that you can get from the space place and the month for which you
are working and then some kind of cutting devices for your appropriate
cutting devices
when I was a child we called these cootie catchers but I think I've heard some people call them fortune tellers as
well so I'm showing the uh the video of me actually making this and while that's
running I'll talk about my connections with astronomy and Girl Scouts so my
astronomy interests include Outreach events like this this is the biggest one
uh I've been involved with the small ones and medium-sized ones but this is by far the biggest Outreach event I've
been involved with um I love to do observing daytime and
nighttime observing um I have gotten a little bit into astrophotography
I love going to Star purdies and I love learning I also like to connect with other
like-minded individuals which is always fun
and I love working with the Girl Scouts My Girl Scout connection started when I
was a brownie I went through brownie through Cadets where we moved to halfway through my
Cadet life um we didn't have a Cadet troop so I
couldn't do Girl Scouts for a while but then I got back into it going to Girl Scout summer camps and working at a
couple of camps when I was in college I'm a lifetime Girl Scout member
and in 2008 I was working with
um a college um astronomy club that uh we you know we
ended up doing a I created a badge event during which a hundred girls in my um
region uh were able to earn their astronomy badges in 2009 I was in the
astronomy uh astronomer member of my council's astronomy club going to
Goddard space flight center so I've actually been there but it was a long time ago and it was a different program I'm a facilitator of adult learning in
my Council I give Star parties at the adult and girl training weekends and
like uh Lou was saying that um 2020
um uh astronomy clubs did not get to go to Goddard well my team I am a member of
one of the newest teams we didn't get to go to Goddard so um we're going in person Lou we're not
doing virtual my group is wanting to go personal so
um administrator number you give them just let them know you're coming okay got it
whatever we are conducting monthly virtual meetings uh with the girls we actually
just had a meeting earlier uh this evening um otherwise I would have been here at
the start of this whole thing o'clock my time um and like I said we're hoping to go to
Goddard uh this summer I enjoy working with the Girl Scouts to provide
resources that I wish I had had when I was a girl
um I had uh when I was going to camps I could sometimes find Orion or the Big
Dipper but I wished I knew more about how to find the celestial Optics in the sky
so my hope is that this activity will help others
uh to learn about the night sky there are many other activities available with this
um this one star chart there are so many other things around the outer edges they're they're obviously the um the
constellation pictures and then you can also learn about what it means to have
the sun in a house or a constellation and so if you were to
fold up the the star chart for for this month you would see that there's an
arrow that points from Earth to the Sun to the edge of capricornus
and so that's what is meant by the the sun in that constellation that means we
can't actually see that constellation uh because it's daytime and the sun is in
the way um that photograph of um Orion I purposefully took that just as an
airplane was flowing into view I used that photograph to discuss the
um relative distances or actual distances of objects from Earth
obviously the uh the airplane is one of the closer objects actually the closest
object is the corner of the of the building I was standing right next to you
too and then uh talking about um that things look like they are on a
celestial sphere similar to say the uh
the umbrella that we saw in the last segment that everything looks like it's on a
sphere yes exactly skip it looks like it's on the sphere that surrounds the
Earth but in actuality um the stars that make up our constellations do not actually set
equidistant uh from the earth in relation to each of them
so that was a really quick introduction into what I do one of my
favorite activities um I had everything timed so that I
would be finished talking when the video finished but so I would like to thank Vivian thank
you very much for inviting me to join in on this and thank you Lou for uh doing
our monthly meetings we look forward to actually doing our
training our girls are very excited we actually during our meeting today we
actually talked about the February 18th Landing of the Mars rover
and the helicopter and so we talked a lot about that and our council is hoping
to be able to do a watch party it turns out that there's a possibility we won't
be able to do anything in person because of covid restrictions but we will be
discussing a virtual watch party so we're all excited about that
yeah go ahead I'm sorry I know this wasn't as interactive as Jessica's
activities but I think it gives a good idea of what you can do with uh with the star charts
absolutely it's the activity itself is super interactive and I bet the girls really love it
um I think there's a link to it in the chat Scott did you were you able to share the Space Place link to the Star
Finder yeah it's a great one yes yeah great I also love space place I
think Jessica and Lou for giving me lots and lots of Segways right into my presentation that was awesome and Vivian
thank you for having Lugo before me so that uh I get those Segways
thank you so much it's really cool to see all these astronomy clubs happening I know Eileen is here and she's
um leading one as well I believe right I mean you're yeah that's what I thought and in Oklahoma and
um they are doing amazing work uh it's very different so the astronomy clubs in
the US are not usually um filled with young girls um so it's nice to have these astronomy
clubs who are doing different um who are you know a whole new generation of amateur astronomers for us
here in the US I know in some parts of the world this is very common I think in Iran and some other places a lot of the
astronomy clubs are led by young women and so it's exciting to see that happening here too thank you all so much
um I we we also have Larry Lebowski here too and I want to uh before we get there
I wanted to hear from a young woman who's joined us tonight Libby and the stars
um Larry you're coming up right next um but Olivia would you tell us about
what you've been up to yes I actually put presentation together about immature astronomy great go ahead
and share my screen it is right
yeah sure uh I have it over here
why do you want to do a little introduction of yourself first oh yeah uh
um and we'll be in the stars and from Bentonville Arkansas Northwest uh I do a lot of astronomy
um into amateur astronomy because I know a lot of Outreach events
um you know stuff like that so uh amateur astronomy I know since quarantine a lot of us are stuck at home
and we can't do a lot and I know a lot of people who started doing
a lot of astronomy and so like when you're stuck at home
because you don't really have a lot uh you don't really have a lot to do at
home so I started doing astronomy back at home uh I started with uh this
telescope behind me this is my first telescope I ever got it's a need 60 millimeter and I kind of wanted to talk
a little bit about amateur astronomy because I know some people might be getting started on astronomy
and it's just very great to uh start astronomy and I know if you join an
astronomy group some people will help you uh with astronomy and help you you know decide what to do on
uh like research and there's like a lot of it to amateur
astronomy uh this is a quick thing it's not too much because I know people could write pages and pages about immature
astronomy I just decided to do a little bit because I didn't want to do too much
because honestly people could do segments on immature economy so I just have a little
slideshow um I just gorgeous picture right here this is the uh
uh Andromeda galaxy I thought it was a pretty star added it in uh how to start with astronomy uh
research about astronomy uh I researched a lot about astronomy I started back probably wasn't when I
was in second grade and I read a lot of the astronomy books uh I read every book
about astronomy in my school's life my school library and there's this one book
that I really liked about nebula's and it was kind of more one and they were
like are you sure this is a this is like a high school level book do you want this book and I'm like yes I do I want
this book I'm going to research and I'm going to start doing a shot at me so I
started researching and doing astronomy and uh I've gone to eventually NASA centers and
I've learned a lot from there and eventually about NASA space flight history and
a whole bunch on you know a supernova Stars a star's life and uh
last year I uh my mom got me this telescope I actually seen the picture this is the telescope
at the same telescope I have behind me mine is slightly used uh my mom got off
the Facebook Marketplace and we picked it up and we didn't know a
lot about what was going to that telescope what we would do with it and so we took it out one night and we
started observing uh the most of the easy objects um easy objects that you can really find
in the sky is Mars you can find Mars very easily it's very pretty to look at
uh Saturn you could see the rings around Saturns and the little holes in between the Rings you know around it and uh you
can see them in the Moon is gorgeous to look out look at because there's like this Rainbow Rim around it showing the
atmosphere and it's very pretty it's almost unrealistic um so I started reserving easy objects
and then I I was going to talk a little bit about Azure photography because I
know a lot of people who run telescopes do astrophotography with their telescopes and
um I do a little bit of astrophotography myself it's not very skilled astrophotography
but I definitely have a lot of fun doing it and you can see details and the pictures that I take
so uh you want to research about astronomy uh this is a horse head nebula
over here and um you'll want to know where you can find
things in the sky because um you want to know uh like even if you
just stargaze and if you don't have a telescope you want to know where you're able to uh where you're able to see
stars uh before I got my telescope I knew I had I wanted to know where I
could find Saturn Jupiter the Orion belt and Mars and the moon well I mean
everyone can find the moon so you definitely want to research some a lot a lot about stars and where to find them a
lot about astronomy that in constellations where you can find them because you'll be able to find them in
the sky you'll be able to look at supernovas and you'll be able to look at a starting map and know where
uh Galaxy is in the sky and stuff like that so I researched for a while and
there's researching is easy uh there you can also research or like books you can
research your books um you can research from NASA uh
there's videos online of like NASA talking about um talking about uh
that oh sorry uh um the uh the wrong so you can also see
uh you can see videos online and NASA talking about New Missions going up
um soon I know the James of telescope I've been very fascinated by that for a while
um and so there's some easy things you can research with uh it's very helpful if you have a
telescope to research because it's just an essential skill to be able to know
where constellations are galaxies and know about them be able to identify what
you're looking at for your lens um research on what telescope to get
and so um my first telescope was Newtonian and I know when people link a telescopes
they usually think of the Newtonian amount newtonians and the obsidians are the
same exact thing they're just on the different mount and so um the Newtonian telescope is kind of a
little bit easier to know what you're doing because uh I know with a dobsonian when
I first got my when I got my job Sony and I didn't really know a lot what to do I'm like okay this is weird because
it's on a different mounted base sorry what uh pick a telescope that
meets your needs because I know some people out there may be like Pro
astronomers and some maybe uh amateur but I would just pick some that meets
your needs uh you can get a panhandle mount on your Newtonian uh Panhandle
mounts are very nice to have to you bend your telescope around
um those are very nice to have so I would suggest a Newtonian if you're amateur
and then uh we have the rosette nebula over here it's very pretty there's a little picture
and then I would start desserting so I mean um
a lot of people think that you can just get a telescope and get amazing images like the Hubble telescope gets but you
don't have to worry about that at all you don't have to worry about that because NASA has a telescope that's up
in space and that you have a Newtonian telescope down on Earth you're not going
to get the same images or results without extremely hard work so I
wouldn't be like pressuring yourself to get an image of like a perfect nebula on the first night
you have your telescope because I remember the first night that I got my telescope and I took it out
into the yard Saturn was beautiful but compared to the pictures I saw on Google and NASA's
website it looked a little bit off and I realized wait they have a full Space
Telescope and all I have is new Tony it's in the new tummies for uh 16
millimeter Newtonian so I wouldn't pressure yourself to get amazing images
of high quality because this does take a lot of work to you know do a image so I like a nebula
no I know NASA takes a lot of time to send a telescope in this space that I
just wouldn't pressure yourself too much um you can see Jupiter's Galilean moons uh
I love seeing them it's very cool they were all in a straight line you could
see Jupiter and you see one two three four and I went up and I would start
naming them all and it's just I wouldn't pressure yourself to get a photo like
the ones you see on Google so definitely that um and Mars too mars is great to serve
um I went to my backyard One Night in my Newtonian telescope and I saw on Mars
and it was so beautiful uh the beauty of like observing the night sky is like
really seeing those details because I mean that's your hard work that you put
to you know find it in the sky and don't point it put the lens in and look in and
you ask your photography that's your word so uh Mars is great to look at too it's
very cool thinking that our generation will soon be going to Mars too so start observing the night sky
and then astrophotography um I know some people out there they use
cell phones I've always used the cell phone I don't have a professional camera
so I use a phone I use a cell phone to take my pictures uh I have a adapter that I use and now
some people out there can use cameras too you know cameras that you can get from the store which are good too
you can get the most high quality images of a camera like that you don't have to edit much but when you take pictures
with a phone um you you have to edit them a lot more
because your phone is used to the settings on earth and the lighting's weird and you have to control the
brightness and eventually that stuff so um
I use a phone but uh I would start with simple objects before
you go hardcore to uh uh to you know uh nebulas and stuff like
that so uh I use a cell phone
um uh I know some people out there use a camera so yeah
um that was it here let me stop screen sharing
but uh that was a little bit on uh amateur Shawnee I know it wasn't a lot because I know people could write dual
chapter books about uh amateur astronomy I just want to do a
little because I want to do a lot more amateur Sean neon how it works and a
little bit more on what to buy there's just a quick slideshow movie that was fantastic Your Enthusiasm
shines right through yeah thank you yay
astrophotography apps for their iPhone or smartphone and um
excellent and before we go I want to make sure Larry Lebowski is here for the
University of Arizona and he is part of the Girl Scouts Reach for the Stars program and he's doing some really cool
things there with Girl Scouts and I wanted to invite him to share some of that I don't know Larry are you able to
share your screen or did you well I'll try all right give it a shot I love it
I'm gonna try okay
Libby have you ever thought about joining the Girl Scouts am I sharing
well actually uh I still do Girl Scouts you haven't met well
I used to go to camp Creek excellent maybe she can start an
astronomy club in her area yeah okay am I on you're on Lee okay so just
want to give in context we've been doing astronomy camps with Don McCarthy uh it
started out for about 10 or 11 years as part of James Webb Telescope working
with the local Girl Scouts and then Girl Scouts nationally and then uh the last
five years we've been doing it with part of Girl Scout Stars we started out working at the
one of the camps that the local Girl Scouts have and then we were fortunate enough to be able to move to this random
site north of Tucson and you might recognize the facility in the back
which is Biosphere 2 yeah so I actually that that my the room that I stay in
actually has a view like this so it's actually very nice so we get to do astronomy fairly dark site daytime uh
activities daytime observing safely looking at the sun but also then tour
the biosphere down
so lots and lots and lots and lots of activities that we do we basically end
up working about 18 hours a day you can ask Jessica about that it's it's really
intensive because we just have a limited amount of time so I'm going to talk about just one quickly one activity we
do it's called classifying solar system objects so you have a an idea in your
mind when you think about something and based on your prior experience so most
of you when you think about hi there's a cat in my yard you might see this little guy over here
cats like this do not exist where I live north of downtown Tucson only a few
miles this is more like the cat we have we have Bobcats wandering through
so when you you know your your perception of what a cat is what a dog versus a
coyote might be is dependent on your prior experience and as you go through
life your experiences change your ideas may change you might have to vary how
you perceive things let me get rid of the
chat window sorry about that um
I get rid of the chat or the view over here we can't see it on ours oh you
can't okay so on the right here one of the activities is an activity a classification activity which is
basically taking a group of 12 spheres and
I hand them the uh spheres in a bag have them take the
objects out and say you know here is a set of objects
extremely important details and what I want you to do and
then I say sort them and they usually look at me and go well what do you want us to do I told you
sort them so they basically group them into whatever they want to do here looks like
in part size or color uh do they have holes of them what's their texture are they what's their
density some of them are dog toys you can squeeze them and they make noise and so there's really when
you're sorting objects there's not necessarily one correct answer and
that's true when you do astronomy when you do astronomy you're looking at
the what's a planet what's a star it may seriously depend on
what you're interested in are you interested in atmospheres are you interested in planetary surfaces do you
worry about the Dynamics of the thing as it's clear as it's cleared its space so
if you look at the Dynamics of clearing its space Pluto isn't a planet
but if you look at all the properties of an object like Pluto it has an
atmosphere it has Seasons it's a dynamical body it's a dynamic body it
has um glaciers and other things like that it
has six Moons for those of us who study planetary surfaces pollute as a planet
end of story call it a dwarf planet whatever it is but it's more than just
an asteroid so here's a quiz everybody
here are six objects which one is a planet
I'm going to say a say all of them all of them
okay in our solar system there are eight planets as we Define them there are no
planets outside our solar system because of how International astronomical Union
has defined it all right there are these objects which sort of look like planets but they're exoplanets they actually do
not they are not by definition they are not planets a planet must evolve around
the Sun end of story so anybody else want to say a all of
them anything else oh come on guys you should you've probably looked at some of these through
your toes is being uh quoted on chat okay
you see that Far Side of the Moon I I
yours guess is as good as mine yeah she looks like a Mercury right
okay so C is a planet if Mercury is a planet
F isn't totally round right so if isn't totally round
be Titan which is larger than Mercury is
not a planet it has an atmosphere that's thicker than our atmosphere it goes around
another body so it is therefore by definition not a planet if you go if you're big and solar
in science fiction if I think almost to a t most of the bodies that people
are on from start Star Wars to uh Avatar
those are actually moons of gas giants but they're not planets they're moons
so Mercury is a planet doesn't have an atmosphere doesn't have satellites yet
it is a planet in Pluto because it's smaller and farther from the Sun is not
series is obviously about half the size of Pluto and Pluto and series or dwarf
planets and then there's Vesta which if it didn't have this chunk time taken out
of it would probably be a dwarf planet too so this context that you have to take into
so how you define what a planet is what a star is made to may be dependent on how
you perceive things or your prior knowledge is what your interests are in of how how
planets form how stars form or you can look at the bodies and see you know what
is this object doing oh it's you know burning helium or hydrogen then it's a star it does and it's not dependent on
how it's formed and so that's a nice little activity to give people context about how we Define things so it's one
of about a dozen activities we do over the three day period
and I am done I love that that's a great way to introduce things
it's really nice to and and to me it's really important to put it in the
context of the science so you have the activity but how is it important
to me who used to be a scientist when I was much younger but when it's education
yeah yeah absolutely so great
I think I'm out awesome any questions
uh nope yeah one guy says he has many pieces of
Vesta yeah you had a question
I have one Larry um how much of what we used to do in the a ripsy program where T.L ribsey has been built into this
program um a little bit of it of what I think a
lot of what we do is either some of it is based on that some of it has roots
similar to what ASP does um so I mean in a lot of cases what I've
done is or what we've done is take activities and build upon them so there are a few things that are have similar
roots in the mean TL ribsy had stuff that originated you know in you know in
distant past history and so you see that in a lot of the activities
um from and that all of us have been doing I mean it's it's the old story
that there are very few original activities we all
build our activities upon other things I mean obviously we've got
an activity called uh explore a planet which was done by somebody at Nasa I
wish the heck I knew who it was which was called Planet X we got away from
Planet X because there were four different versions of what a Planet X is so I asked uh Arizona State University
does one with Clay um I think lunar planetary Institute
does the same thing there's one similar to that in the Girl Scout hand and the
Girl Scout badges and we do it slightly differently so it depends you know
but yeah Roots you know who knows what activities where they actually came from
we try to make sure that we do give credit for what we do so but yeah some of them
are either ideas we got from TL ribsy or
parallel to your ribsy was sort of oh look they're doing something similar to what we're doing I wonder where we both
got those ideas from do they do much spectroscopy at all
um we do a little bit basic spectroscopy of um looking at
um uh various lights and stuff like that so it's a
as much as we can do in a in a in three days and three nights literally about
literally probably 60 50 to 60 hours so sleep is the one thing you don't get and
when we do it right Jerry remind me what TL ribsy stands for
I've forgotten teacher leader research based Science Education it was a program that came out
of um Noah and uh it was they had a National Science Foundation Grant and it
morphed into astronomy research based Science Education in the last year I was in the
last group of it it was 2008. and we spend two weeks at kid Peak and
um but you're taking this was before we had zoom and all that good stuff we were taking things by Blackboard
um over the course of the entire spring semester to qualify to come it was fantastic and we were put in
research groups so I wound up in the AGN group and you know I've always loved
that so yeah what we did our stuff started out as
project uh project artist astronomy teacher research astronomy teacher and
service training and it was more uh for elementary and middle school teachers
because that's where we felt the need was so we came in from a much the the lower
level of trying to get second third fourth fifth grade sixth seventh eighth grade teachers
engaged in astronomy and so a lot of art and literature and other good things
like that the Girl Scout badges have taken many pieces of for many of these programs and
and turned them into things that you know that are specifically useful for the Girl Scouts and the Girl Scouts have
some really interesting ways of some Frameworks that they use about um you know what they want the girls to
get out of it so it's pretty they're amazing badges I think they've done a really incredible job and it was fun to
have you all as partners on this it's great it was a great group yeah for sure
um you can uh let's see oh I wanted to say too that uh the reason this is
related at all tonight Sky network besides the Girl Scout astronomy clubs um which have an astronomy club
component is that each of the badges have oh there's a hand to me
someone's making himself dinner
um each of the Girl Scout badges have a component that encourages them to visit
their local astronomy club for an Outreach event or go to a local planetarium or Science Center so that
they can experience the night sky um with experts who do this all the time
and that's you all the amateur astronomers out there so um part of what we're also doing with
that is we're training amateur astronomy club members and informal Educators
across the world actually to do um to do great girl Centric Outreach and making
sure that we are thinking about girls and the ways that they learn best and
making our Outreach as welcoming as possible to girls in particular so if
you are interested in taking one of these courses they will be offered I think four times over the next year if
you're an amateur astronomer or an informal educator I encourage you to there's a bitly it's bit dot l-y forward
slash Astro all and you're welcome to join they are really fun and engaging
courses and I think um a lot of amateurs have gotten a lot out of those over the years thank you
for putting that in the chat if you want to share that Scott there's a bitly there and you can sign up there it's got
a lot of information about how to make your astronomy Outreach welcoming to girls and specifically how to work with
some of these badge steps and and what will help um you know I think it's something that we
recognize in amateur astronomy clubs in the U.S that they're um a lot of our members are older and a
lot of our members are males so we want to make our astronomy clubs as welcoming
as possible to girls and women and um there are some really simple ways to do
that so we're we're helping to share that information so
um I know Lou had a really cool thing he wanted to share I wonder Scott do we
need to take a break or should we just head on through this next hour what's up to you anybody else I want to see what Lou has
to offer he always has the most amazing things okay yeah okay so let's just keep going and I want to just thank all the
Girl Scout presenters I understand it's eight o'clock here an hour 11 o'clock if you're on the East Coast so
um thank you so much for joining us um it's a great program and I am excited to see where it goes over the next who
knows how long take care all right Lou it's all you okay um it's late so I won't spend much time
on this this is a really fun piece of software and I'm putting the um the URL for it in the chat right there and some
of you who've worked with NASA education before know this very well it's called eyes on
and uh NASA through their uh JPL Field Center has produced three pieces of very
cool 3D modeling software eyes on the solar system which I'm going to show you
in a second eyes on Earth and eyes on exoplanets
so um if you go to izon you can download the software real quickly it's easy it
runs on PCS or Macs probably Linux systems too
um and let me show you what it looks like
I think this is
nope that's not it let's try this again how about
this
are you seeing my screen yes yeah okay yeah okay could you share
that link one more time just so everybody can follow along I didn't get that one yeah oh there we go thank you
great never mind Jessica found it it's um eyes.nasa.gov to get most of you there
so um if you go to eyes on the solar system you download it and you go to the
website and click Start here's what you'll see and you can move this around in space
like this uh you can um speed up time and watch things orbit
one of the cool thing one of the coolest things that you can do it has a lot of solar system objects in here it also has
solar system probes in here oh if you go down over to this menu here and click on
spacecraft and uh well let's see we'll say a spacecraft to one of the planets and
moons and I'm just going to say Saturn
let's see so that takes me to the planet Saturn
with some pretty good high resolution images of its rings and you can see the shadows in the back of the Rings
that's what I was going to do here was get to spacecraft there we go
um outer planet whoops I'll do Mars really
excellent graphics it's beautiful yeah they took a long time to put this together
um outer planets and I'm going to go to my favorite
Mission Voyager One um
no and it will take you to the spacecraft there's Voyager one out Way Beyond the
edges of the sun's influence and you can um
rotate it take a look around look back towards Earth and the orientation of all of these
spacecraft is precisely the orientation that they have they've downloaded what
they call the uh the C Matrix from the spacecraft so wherever the
spacecraft is pointed at the time that you're looking at it that's the right orientation
who may make a comment you are a sun-centered person I am a
small body person the son has an influence Beyond Voyager it's called the
Earth cloud and also the Kuiper belt that's true that's true so when I say
beyond the sun's influence I guess I'm at magnetic electric field influence as opposed to gravitational
what Larry's talking about is the furthest reaches of the sun's gravitational effect which is darn close
to a light year away from the Sun so so there's a good example of how you
define something sorry yeah yeah
definitions good point Larry that's a really good point so eyes on the solar system
um download it play with it they have uh tutorials that'll walk you through various missions
um just a lot of fun so cool thank you for sharing that late
I loved it thanks Lou when you all do amazing Outreach and I'm
really excited to be working with you on these yeah
Scott's already downloaded yeah I'm already he's an early adopter
we have a whole lot more to go before the night is over and we only have about
48 minutes left um we have some people who are joining us
from all over the country got Dave Warner and Eileen Grabowski and I think we have let's see Jay is in the in there
and Dave oh yeah I said Dave um Luana might be joining us too is she
on yet let's see yeah she's here too wonderful um there is amazing
astronomy Outreach happening all over the world uh even in the face of a pandemic and there is so much happening
online I wanted to say you can always find um uh astronomy events happening online
that amateur astronomy clubs are sharing and if you um want to just look at a whole list of
those any old day of the week you can do the there's a bitly there that's um again bit.ly and then you slash NSN
virtual I'm going to copy that and paste it into here hopefully we can share that one
um there are a number of astronomy events happening at any given time so feel free if you get in the mood for
astronomy and Scott is not live streaming um to go there and enjoy some of the
Outreach events that are happening um let's see
uh we've got so I I just made up an order here but if anyone wants to share
some of what they've been doing with their astronomy Outreach this year or even what they hope to be doing next
year at the end of this year we'd love to hear from you I've got Jay is on I don't know if you had anything in
particular can you hear me oh yeah there you are okay why I apologize I've been
on for the the whole the whole tour tonight and uh you haven't seen me though because actually I'm set up
outside here in Charleston South Carolina my backyard and I'm Imaging and uh the weather is such that you have
to grab every opportunity the weather's been terrible and yet tonight is clear till uh Sun up and it and tomorrow we
have rain again so you you grab it when you got it um well I I appreciate being invited
Vivian um I thank Scott for hosting this I like his and I listen to his Friday programs
and of course um I use David's articles in the newsletter I I do the newsletter for our
local Club here I've done the newsletter for two other clubs even from afar currently a member of four astronomy
clubs so I've always joined the club wherever I've lived it's always been a great Community I've been interested in
astronomy since I was a kid in the space race um I asked my parents for a telescope
instead I got a chemistry set and ended up as a pharmacist don't know what I would have ended up had I gotten that
telescope but when I was adult I did finally get my first one
um two ends of the hobby uh started out visual got into
astrophotography when I realized there was a lot more out there than you can actually see through the telescope even
though I do enjoy seeing and I love to do public Outreach and I've done Outreach in four different
clubs that have been really tops in the list for the night sky Network the San
Antonio astronomy Association South Florida and the astronomy Society of the Palm
Beaches and now I'm located in Charleston South Carolina in the local
Club here let me share the screen uh
hopefully you can see that slide yeah okay so um
the local uh Low Country stargazers uh primarily Charleston South Carolina but
we do have a lot of members from surrounding counties and we've done a lot of programs in surrounding counties
um okay why won't the screen change let me
get this up here let's go to the next slide okay so the
club uh club's a little over 25 years uh however as uh I've experienced with some
clubs it has its Peaks and then it has its Ebbs and when I moved to Charleston uh helped
reinvigorate the club back in 2014. from basically what was a dormant group
to now uh quite thriving uh local Club of 95 Plus members that consist of a lot
of visual observers a number of Astro photographers and we have many astronomy
hobbyists that just like uh interacting with the public uh doing helping us with
Outreach many of them don't even own a telescope but are very knowledgeable and
always helpful when we do public events [Applause] um
and we've done many of them um mimic mimicking some of the things that I've experienced in other clubs
that I belong to when I was in other cities we do a weekly event at a local
park in downtown Charleston and even though we're in the Heart of the City where you have lots of Lights there's
still plenty that we show people we were doing those programs every Wednesday night astronomy in the park
we publicize in a lot of uh local media that has drawn a lot of attention
we continue to get emails about whether or not we're going to be doing anything
live out in the public but of course unfortunately a lot of everything we're
doing uh face to face is on hold you can see here we were fortunate to be
recognized by the night sky Network for our programs in 2019
we log many events we've done the Girl Scouts you saw that early slide at the
very beginning of tonight's program that was the Girl Scouts out at the James
Island County Park uh where we set up uh Library loan Scopes as well as some of our own
and worked with them we've done Boy Scouts we've done library programs school programs uh we've done an annual
stem program so our our programs are both day and night time A lot of times
we're doing uh solo work during the day and of course showing things that are up
in the sky at night um always enjoyed Hands-On Outreach and
very appreciative of the tool kits that the night sky network has given us for
doing Outreach you can see some of that here uh the Solar System model has always
been a big hit uh not all the programs however we're able to use in the dark
but when we do school programs and library programs we do make make use of
all the programs Everyone likes to look through a telescope young and old
and it's unfortunate that since the pandemic all of that has been put on hold
so we've had to think about how do we do public Outreach going forward
and it actually started a little bit with local meeting that I participate in
for the south Florida Club one thing about zoom and WebEx and a few
of the other uh online programs is that even though I belong to other clubs I
never really saw those people I just enjoyed getting the newsletters
because their monthly meetings were live they weren't basically broadcast as
things are today now I actually get to see folks and see good old friends and fellow astronomers
in San Antonio and South Florida from my home here in Charleston but the south
Florida Club does a program every Saturday night from their Observatory
and broadcast that through through WebEx and they were putting a camera on their
telescopes but a few nights in the beginning they had poor weather
and it just so happened that the skies here in Charleston were clear
so I set up my telescope and attached cameras to them
and shared my screen like I'm sharing it now so we were doing live Sky tours
um by sharing uh what I was actually seeing in real time uh using using uh
those web programs so we went from Hands-On Outreach and
now we're into kind of social distancing we've been fortunate to have a
relationship with the county parks here in Charleston and they've given us space that we use wide open field with 360
degree views that is near the beach away from the city and they're allowing us back out but of
course they want a social distance so in terms of the numbers of people are limited uh keeping people apart and so
forth but nonetheless we're starting at least to get out right now members only
but we're working to consider starting back a program where we'll invite the
public but we've done virtual uh Sky tours but
I call them live Sky tours because we're actually showing live images you can see
some of the pictures here I have a number of different telescope setups in this particular case I've got two
refractors with cameras on them and uh both sharing uh proprietary
software and sharp cap you can actually stack images uh
um I wouldn't necessarily consider them in terms of uh deep space
astrophotography but it's you can see some of the pictures that you can bring on the screen and share your screen
and normally I'll take requests from people who've joined us and they'll ask
me to salute a different objects and I and as long as they're visible in our nighttime sky I I will show them
we were actually fortunate I had posted the very first live Sky tour for our own
club's monthly meeting on the night sky Network calendar
and I got an email from a teacher in Los Angeles who asked if he could have his daughter
and her classmates join and I was glad to welcome them and
they've been with us twice and we've had at our last live Sky tour 60 students
and family members from uh Kessler Elementary School in Los Angeles
incredible I love that so in some respects you know when I think about the
limitations from the pandemic it's opened up a lot more opportunity to share the things that we do very easy to
share pictures of the planets you don't need expensive equipment or expensive
telescopes basically you're showing video uh the moon of course we did Show
the recent uh conjunction and then of course I can take you know
30 second exposures stack them in real time and and give some decent images
you'll see here you've got the Orion Nebula um we had uh I think this was Comet uh
neowise in the lower picture and of course everybody likes to see uh the moons of
Jupiter so I I basically Overexposed to pull in the moons
um so we've done we've done that what we're working on in terms of getting
back out in the public and we'll be testing this at the end of January
um taking the uh the banner idea from the night sky Network I uh expanded the
PVC piping to hold a very large uh movie screen
and I will be projecting from my laptop so that we can keep people a bit away
from us directly and at the same time be able to project the image on a large
enough screen that can be seen far away we've also been using monitors connected
to the telescopes and the camera you see that in the upper pictures
and one of our club members got this new scope I'm not trying to do any
advertising per se uh it's called the Evo scope it's kind of one of these
automatic Scopes you basically turn it on it's got a built-in camera it automatically goes to the object and
tracks it and it shares the image through basically an iPhone
or an Android phone and you can see the actual images that he took testing this in downtown Charleston
these four images from the scope and and so it's another concept that we may try
out um but I do think there's a limit in terms of the number of
um uh iPhones that can connect to it so to speak at the same time
but again number of opportunities to do
I know everyone likes to look through an eyepiece but unfortunately
um for the safety of club members as well as the public I don't think we're going to be doing that in the near term
so we will at least be able to show images by projecting them and in some cases
we'll show more detail than a faint fuzzy that you see through the eyepiece
so we'll actually be able to show detail in some of the globular clusters and Detail in some of the galaxies and even
pull out color in some of the nebula that we're able to project so this is where I think our future is
going to be in the near term and I just hope at some point we get back to normal but I am just not sure
exactly when that's going to be okay that's great I I am really looking
forward to getting back to normal as well uh maybe better than normal because now we have all these new skills that we
can share with lots of people um together yeah somebody was asking if
that was an EV scope it is yes um uh uh Scott put a link in their
unistellar Optics is where you find that um so Jay that leads so perfectly into
what they've been doing in Oklahoma City I can't help but bring you guys up next because you've been doing some amazing
things we've got um three people here from Oklahoma City astronomy club uh well actually Mark are
you from Oklahoma City as well are you working with them through the amateur radio Society I'm from Oklahoma City
area also okay great I thought so I wasn't sure so we've got Eileen Grabowski who's one of my favorite
astronomy Outreach Heroes Heroes that I know she's been done astronomy Outreach
and is making really cool new Outreach happen in the pandemic and so I wanted
to share some of what they were doing Peter core is also here and Mark Klein am I saying that right that is correct
excellent so y'all let me know what you'd like me to share and I've got some
pictures here that I'm happy to uh put up but let me know what you need and I
am here with you hey Vivian Peter here um if I could share screen I I kind of
arranged all of that and then if if Mark wants to pull something else out he'll let you know even better go
for it and while you're doing that let me just explain that as a high school I teach you one semester High School
astronomy course but I learned very quickly that the best way to get kids
involved is to get them out observing and so that meant contact the local
astronomy clubs of which I've always become a member um so we have Oklahoma City astronomy club we have Odyssey
astronomy club which is down just south of Norman Oklahoma it's it's really in a rural area but we have a really small
pot of active observers and then I'm also the amateur astronomer assigned to
work with the Girl Scout astronomy club of Western Oklahoma so um we totally believe in getting kids
out observing and we have an active observing program in a regular year the
problem comes covid and so uh and so we we over the years we've been develop
some other techniques that I said let's see if we can apply this to the great conjunction
and and normally we and Peter and Mark will tell you and Mark has brought the
the ham radio component in so that we can get it live streamed and all that
um during that whole pandemic so who wants to go first Peter or Mark
um I can go first and then Mark will kill end okay and okay
I try to get other people I'm sorry so they're not just hearing astronomy by Eileen Grabowski they're getting to work
with other people who are excited and this gets kids excited and and I can't you know say enough the other thing that
my students do I always use night sky Network activities I offer Service Learning component on my courses so the
kids use the activities and normally normally they would go out and do these with elementary students we have our own
Star Lab Dome that's sitting all wrapped up because we can't go in it because of covet
um so anyway so these guys have helped me be really creative over the years and I've had a succession of several people
um and and uh and we even have a meteorologist who helps us to plan and
give updated forecasts so we can do things and I have a a group of alums who
come out with us from time to time as their schedules permit so this has been an ongoing thing and uh but we needed to
show people and we didn't want to have masses of people we also wanted to do it
safely we did not advertise um I invited the faculty and staff of
Norman North High School who have been religious in wearing masks and
everything else and so we've we've been fortunate up to this point I got my
first dose of vaccine today and so Peter tell us tell us more
all right hey thanks um Vivian again for the invite and everyone can see the
screen I'm sharing yes yeah yes yeah okay you're just making pictures anyway yeah as um
uh just to tell in the Eileen and I've been fortunate here in Norman Oklahoma to be you know involved with all the
clubs that she mentioned and I've been um teaming up with Eileen and the high school students for the last decade or
so with our uh almost weekly um observing sessions in you know just
outskirt of town anyways myself you know while my interest has always been um in
visual astronomy you know I like to think around with technology and just you know bring in what Jada
talked about in um bringing technology uh into Outreach uh this is just a quick
overview of the real-time Astro video that we've been using in our systems so prior to uh the current covet situation
um I've got a it's a pretty simple setup uh you've got I use either four inch six inch or eight inch telescope it's a
off-the-shelf CCTV analog camera uh the only difference is there's a couple of those
that will actually integrate images the video individual uh video images on
board so you can get up to about four eight second exposure so this is on a four inch that's on a eight inch
um with the ring there and I'll go through for example so this is with the Norman
North High School group you know what you're seeing your slide shots yeah we just have all the slides not the
individual pictures ah are you in the right page yeah I am I'm showing hold on
if I double click this does this show up no nope you're just on a folder with a bunch of
slides yeah hold on let me see if I can I it looks like I'll have to share the whole desktop
yeah it's been happening tonight I've noticed that too thank you all right so
double click and you should see them we were listening yeah that's that
little oops that's the that's the end um so with Eileen then the Norman North High School group you know um it's a
great way that we can get multiple students you know first and foremost is always still
visual observation but you know with with a little pocket projector uh and a little screen out
um in the open we can project the whatever we've captured or in real time
almost real time onto the screen um the um the applications that we do as
well is to put in the diffraction grading so we can get uh basic spectroscopy of the Stars you know for
the students to take a look at and you know with the color um capture you know they can um they can
uh learn about the color emissions and corresponding elements
uh we also do the Outreach out to uh special needs Children's Group and this
is where we do the walk on the moon where we put where I project it project the moon down onto and this is
just onto a projection screen that's laid out onto the grass mat and the kids
love you know either walking on the moon or just laying down the uh with the
Oklahoma City Club we have international observed the moon night you'll see the
um project up on the tall tripod and uh this is usually the entrance and then
the club has you know a dozen or two dozen Scopes out on the left for the uh
uh for the public to take a look at and then in this picture you can see again the setup a tripod and this is analog
video and I've been been kind of tweaking this for the last 10 years so this is pretty uh basic stuff compared
to what's available uh this day and age uh we also do Outreach out by the Paseo
Art District in Oklahoma City and again um I like I like the projecting onto the
floor model especially when space is a constraint and that way uh if it's you
know the the whoever turns up you know I I joke with them they can always go back
and and tell everyone they walked in the Moon tonight um other areas such as this is from a
series of talks that Eileen and a few of the astronomy groups and the University
of Oklahoma uh the astronomy club and program they organize Postcards From the
universe and after each astronomy related talk at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History we again have a
observing event out there and you can see several you know video scopes and I
have that projected onto the ground very cool and just a couple of gallery you know this is just from a small four inch
you get M51 with a nice uh satellite Trail through it you get Jupiter and
this is a this is a single shot this is what you'll see out of a scope with a Barlow lens and uh this
again six inch out of a foreign nebula the neat thing is when
Orion Nebula is rising up on the Eastern sky for us at least there's a bunch of
um geostationary satellites that track across the nebula and it's pretty neat
to see them Trail across in real time and the students and the kids really like that as well
um two years ago 2019 the earlier early in the year the lunar eclipse
and we project that onto a wall and uh it makes a good selfie or you know a uh
Instagram worthy picture you stand in front of it and and they get other people will take a picture of it as well
and um and then dovetailing in this with my other hobby of amateur radio is uh
a couple of the events what we do is I do a video capture and some something like this and it gets transmitted out on
radio frequencies as a slow scan TV and that way it actually reaches out to a different audience altogether for the uh
the local amateur uh radio operators here where they you know I'm sending this picture out uh via a a
um a separate RF Channel and they are receiving it you know it's I'm basically encoding the picture onto a audio stream
and then they decoded in real time and uh this is the latest what Eileen
was saying with the current covet situation uh and the um we set it up so that uh we
have it was it was quarter moon that night and so we projected onto the wall and that way
um as people come in uh mosque and and socially distance they can see yeah and
get up close to the scope you know they I've got both the uh the first quarter moon there and the conjunction up and uh
it's pretty neat lots of people like you stand in front of it take a photo and then next one's along the way I think
this is my yeah this might have been my favorite picture of the conjunction of what people did for the conjunction
y'all did an amazing job for that yeah um Marco Eileen you'll go anything else
to share I think Mark Kendall all the you know dual streaming and everything else did you mark go ahead
this this time we put um oh we put some uh analog uh converters that took the
output of Peter's uh two telescopes he had one on the moon and then one on the conjunction and we put that into
oh a piece of software called OBS open broadcast studio and we we'd shoot out one of those images of image that you
see on the right there on the Peter's got on the screen it's the one from the Moon and then Peter if you've got don't you have one with both there you go
um and that the one on the left is the image that we were pushing out of uh YouTube uh went through zoom and YouTube
like tonight is happening and you can see Jupiter on the top left you could actually see the couple of the moons uh
up there in the Jupiter and then you can see the rings of uh of Saturn down in the bottom right in the same image
um so that was what we were shooting out and then we did some combinations where we would uh use that open broadcast
studio stuff to put the moon in there to let people look at some Moon shots as it
was going through since you know it was a pretty static display of the two the two just sitting there on the piece we
put it out on YouTube and and like Eileen said we took very good care not to advertise the the public event and uh
I think we were in the hundred folks some somewhere that range locally but we uh advertised the video links on the
Oklahoma City astronomy um section and um the amateur radio uh
websites and I think it ended up with about 250 visitors uh on the online sections and they just got to see the
videos as it was coming off the the uh video encoder the video encoder was
about 10 bucks so it takes the video off of Peter's camera and and goes into uh direct into the the computer and then
comes straight out zoom and straight out to YouTube we're working on a way to do a higher resolution camera and that's
the the next project to uh to make it a little bit tighter uh video but yeah that was kind of neat to get people
walking on the moon and standing up with the Selfies and you know they were all night standing there you can see those two sitting there uh Peter do you have
the don't you have one that's a just get the selfie camera in the picture yeah this one right there you can see the
selfie camera in the left-hand side of it I think it's kind of cool to watch the the people trying to take the pictures and I agree that's the greatest
shot there but uh so we did we got the combination of onside and and uh in person and
um like Peter said we did some nebulous shots uh a test piece the night before and got some geosync satellites going
through it and that was a lot of fun as well and we really felt fortunate
because um last spring we literally only got one observation and we just had such bad
weather in Oklahoma and this semester even with covert we were able to get 10.
we handed out night sky Network charts to everybody who came we also had about 10 other Scopes set up
that people could sort of trick or treat from scope to scope and stay social distance we let them be in their family
friend pod but we you know and we could we would just it you know we didn't have
to remind anybody there was one person my husband said he ran a he ran his um birding scope and and people were
fascinated because everybody thinks you get a very low view you know or very low magnification and they were looking at
60x at everything and loving it but there was one person who didn't have a
mask and he just kind of you know walked around we just social distance ourselves to say away from those people and but
that was only one person and she came over from the trailer park across the street at the very end so we were we
were in good shape and we felt um fortunate we would have had uh
hundreds when we did the lunar star party at the museum for the eclipse in
2019 we had over 350 people show up and we only advertised through our Thursday
folders so we know and when we do our astronomy lecture series and things like
that we have standing room only and we have to turn people away at the Museum so astronomy is Alive and Well in Norman
Oklahoma our problem is is um you know we like everybody else we want to see
this over and done so we can move on and do more live stuff and get more people excited
and Mark are you sharing the live streams that's the that's that's the
part of the live stream that we're putting out you see Jupiter in the top left and see the moons up above and down below and uh live right now no this was
conjunction this is conjunction okay this is conjunction and then we uh then
we uh put the moon on there back together again yeah well technically we can do that with uh video processing but
uh um that's really not the idea of the whole
thing um but uh Mark do you have a link because isn't it still up yeah it is
still up and it's it's the link that's on my video that shows uh w5nor.org Skye great we'll uh we'll get
you that video and um this is the little ten dollar device that we use to put the uh analog into
the um analog into the computer and make that happen um let's see I think Peter I've got that
video that uh oh that nebula videos Tech behind here if I can get
there it is that's the the nebula video that that we did in our first test run
and you can see vertically you can see the uh the geosynchronous satellites
through that image that's you know the details on that Peter uh no I I haven't I haven't go uh check
up the uh caps on it yet no but I mean no I mean the integration was that uh oh this was like four seconds and then this
is this is where you dial down the brightness so you don't have the outer edges of the uh of uh the Wisp the outer
wisp edges of m42 yep that's great
well you all are being so creative in this time I am really thrilled and I I I
was listening or Eileen was texting in the chat over here about how much wind Oklahoma has and projecting images
really has a lot of advantages but um we are all benefiting from your projection
so thank you so much that's great it's really cool
all right thanks for having us yeah I think it was nice it was nice because you're showing uh you know lots of other
people how this can be done inexpensively but with a very high quality effect you know so it's it's
great stuff yeah absolutely we use you as one of our examples on our um page
about how to hold virtual events because you do such great works
no no and it's all cell phone you know it's all cell phone connections uh it's uh
basically it's one laptop and uh one laptop and a cell phone is uh plus those
little converters is all it is on top of the normal camera gear off of Peter's
telescopes yeah and just FYI those um these are the old analog CCT TV cameras
they run less you know they run about 100 or less apart um you know as as Mark says we're trying
to get into the new HDMI stuff but you know that's a whole other you can do it I've done it I've done it with dslrs
with the HDMI feed out but you know trying to trying to stream that and project that and and stuff like that a
lot of stuff that I use is Surplus Gear so it's all it's all the older analog stuff great it works really well I'm
really impressed yep so the key thing is to find people who share your passion
and invite them and share with everybody because I know my students benefit they're the definite beneficiaries in
their families so yeah yeah very cool and the Girl Scouts had their CL they
had their scope set up and the um the person who is the president of the
Odyssey astronomy club kind of mentored them that night and they learned all sorts of stuff just from running theirs
and running into trouble and Nick gave them Nick Lazaro gave you know suggestions so he says why don't they
have a red dot and I said because it didn't come with the Girl Scout Scopes and that's one thing we need we need a
red dot finder you know so we're we're working on it we just have lost our Girl Scout astronomy stem person and and we
haven't had anybody replaced in a long time so you need to give me a phone call okay yeah talk to Scott there's some red
dots somewhere oh no I'll make sure you guys get connected
um Dave is with us too and he did a really cool thing for the conjunction I was pretty amazed about
um I don't know Dave I know we just talked I said earlier we ran into each other on a different webinar this
morning and um I said hey Dave come join us and I'm so thrilled that you've been here tonight um and you told me a little bit about
what you did with the great conjunction too and I just said tell us tell everybody about it I think it's awesome sure be happy to do that yeah we had
about an hour I think between uh the one meeting and jump into to this one
practically so so yeah thanks for having me I'm I'm Dave Warner with Colorado Springs Astronomical Society so uh we
had the we have The Misfortune or great Fortune if you think about purple Mountain's majesties and uh all the
fruited planes that America the Beautiful song is written about Pike's Peak is to our immediate West we don't
have uh Dave Levy uh here to talk about that poetry though so uh but but anyway
uh you know of course uh Jupiter and Saturn is setting uh immediately to the
West not very high up above the mountains and of course everybody in Colorado Springs lives right up against
the mountains so uh um it turned out uh in my particular
case with uh for our event that I had had the solstice astronomy hike planned
for our local park called Garden of the Gods um had that planned since beginning of
the year I do all of my typical not coveted years I do all my planning for
How We Do Outreach uh about a year in advance so that I can mark off whatever our events are going to be for the whole
year and uh so I already already had planned with the Garden of the Gods to
go on a uh on a solstice hike this typically uh 30 people in a group
sometimes we'll take two groups on a hike at night with just uh red light
flashlight Snow White Light flashlights allowed we I actually have a box of about uh 30 red light flashlights that I
can hand out to people if they want or we could show them how to put a red balloon over their flashlight or uh that
picnic the picnic table uh material you can buy at Target for parties to put on your
table um you can cover up your flashlight with that red and it's it's okay it's enough
to you know get us around the trails on the pl in a park so uh unfortunately
with kovid uh the park is like hey we can't really do this you know because
we're limited to you know uh fewer numbers than 30 or 60 people uh even
though we're outside social distancing wearing masks and all that we had a you know comply with covid
rules and so there's like hey can can you do a virtual event which you know and I bow down to all the people that
are doing the virtual stuff because that's incredible and uh there's a lot of stuff that I want to do and haven't
been able to do uh getting our different astronomy members involved and engaged
in being able to hook up their cameras to their telescopes and sharing it on uh
on a meeting software and getting it broadcast um that's been a big challenge for us
here but uh but I was like okay well we could do we could do a virtual activity and uh then
the park reached out back to me and said hey wait a minute I've got a Girl Scout Troop that wants to go uh and take these
spots to go out on a hike and they'll limit themselves to 10 people only which is within our limits for being able to
do anything in person and it was like hey that's great so uh so we worked that all out and uh
we did our uh in fact the park Personnel who normally are there to run their
Visitor Center and let us in to use the bathrooms and things because of covid they went and numbered limitations they
they didn't even show up it was just us so uh but what we did was right at
Sunset we had about 10 degree angle of uh Jupiter Saturn so uh we did looking
through the eyepiece uh took the risk of you know letting the kids uh take a look at Jupiter and Saturn and uh the moon
and Mars and all that through the telescopes and then what we do and normally we do the observing through the
telescope at the end of the hike but because of the conjunction we wanted to see that because we weren't going to see
it again if we went on our hike and came back it would be already set so but then what we do is we go on a uh a 2.8 mile
hike which is a a figure eight um Trail through the park and that gives
us so many different opportunities we stop along the way and we talk about the solstice because it was Solstice and
Grand a great conjunction and uh we talk about how the rocks of the park that you
know are sticking up out of the ground or formed in about the same length of time that it took us to take one orbit
around the Milky Way galaxy and we'll talk about the local Indian cultures and
how they perceived Solstice and Equinox and why we have the seasons and why the
seasons change all the stuff about that are about why the stars change and why
uh we have the change of seasons and go through that and we just make uh three
or four stops on our hike along the way in and just hit those little points and then do a green laser pointer tour of
the night sky and as we're walking since we're there's no lights in a park whatsoever it's all a natural park and
because we're using red light flashlights now their eyes are adapted to the darkness and so we can talk light
application and you can see the light pollution that's coming from the city
because we're right next to the city so there's a lot of light pollution we're missing a lot of the stars that we can't
we can see if we go just a little ways outside of town and so and we'll encourage them hey you just did this
activity after this on another night that's clear go to another up into the
mountains somewhere 30 miles away get outside of the light bubble of town of Colorado Springs and see that all the
additional stars that you're able to see so and uh and so we complete the hike
and then we just do a few minutes of observing through our telescopes and uh
on December 21st I couldn't let him go home even though we started it pretty
early and uh you know you know it's taken a little while for things to come up I couldn't let him go home until
Orion was up high enough we could see a Ryan nebula and I could show them another thing I like to do with uh with
crowds is um to show them the Orion Nebula plane with no filter at all and then add an
Orion an O3 filter uh so that they could then see how the addition of a oxygen
filter or an ultra high contrast Filter Works as well how that makes a difference in making our observations of
these objects so so anyway that's my uh that was my uh my
one uh Girl Scout activity got the I know the kids were really excited about it
um one of the girls got out their telescope uh the next day and was getting it set up to to be able to go
and observe again because you know we still have Jupiter and Saturn there for next uh well we only had one more clear
night before we had a snow come in but uh but they were able to get out and do
start getting into observing and uh and now they're going to be getting involved in uh working on their space science uh
badges there uh these are older girls at the uh ex researcher and expert levels
for their Girl Scout badges but uh so we're talking right now about working
out what can we do on zoom on these activities uh no do we need to go and
meet you know someplace we don't have an observatory here in Colorado Springs either so I have about a 10 000 square
mile geographic area that we cover if somebody asks for us to do something
with them um and we could depending on you know how things go with covid we can get into
uh reserving like uh maker spaces in the libraries
um and and things like that where we can get together and do some of those activities on hand but uh but but that's
our biggest challenge is finding a place to go to do those Hands-On activities versus the ones we always do which are
the you know looking through the telescope um activities and and we're also looking
into as much as we can with the um using the cameras in the monitor
screens to be able to remotely you know look at the stars um besides the Sun I do that all the
time but but you know doing the the night photography that's longer duration that we can put on a monitor up on a
projector screen that we could still do safe social distancing green laser
pointer tours of the Milky Way and talk the Star Stories you know of the different cultures and so on and so
forth all we can do that safely you know by social distancing and mask wear and you know frequent hand washing and all
that good stuff like that I there's a lot we can do in Outreach even in these covid times and that's kind of been a
lesson for us too and for everybody I think uh across the country and okay we
can't do in-person Outreach or we can't do these large groups of where a thousand or two thousand people come to
our event and are all packed together but we could do one-on-one events or you
know I did a bunch of those in the last several months where somebody contacted me and they said hey I've got this
telescope and because of covid I'm really bored and I want to get it out and use it but I don't know anything about it can
you help me and I would do uh one-on-ones with those families I had
one family on Halloween they that instead of going trick-or-treating and being put at risk by going to people's
houses they wanted to look at the stars and they had a telescope a pretty decent
telescope but didn't know how to use it so I went out to their house outside uh
we set up their telescope I set up my telescope next to them and after I
showed them how to use their telescope and pointed at different objects in the sky and get their finder scope set up
with their telescope and so on then I would point to an object with my telescope and then they would duplicate
what I did and then we'd repeat and they had a really good time with that and so now I've repeated that with the number
of people I'm not advertising that so people online don't call me but but we are doing you know we're
trying to help people that that have new telescopes or that uh have old telescopes that they're getting out of
their closets and want to use again um to get looking at the night sky and get in get involved uh in in enjoying
and probably the biggest thing and biggest piece of advice that I give to anybody out there is practice practice
practice it doesn't seem like a whole lot but when you get out there if you
haven't been out there in a while you're like well what is that star again what is that and and so on but if you're out
there on a regular basis it pretty soon becomes second nature to you it's like
doing scales on the piano or something if you haven't done it for a while it might it might be some something but uh
if you're doing it every day or a couple of times a week anyway um it becomes second nature so so get
out instead of watching a rerun of friends or uh you know going to tell
city five on a Star Trek rerun you know go outside and look for Tau City and uh
that's really good advice there's there's a lot of opportunities that is clear outside you just gotta bundle up
nice and warm and get up there and enjoy their practice so that's what I have for
you so thanks thanks for inviting me I appreciate it thank you so much Dave it's been such a pleasure having you
here all night I've been chatting back and forth with you and I'm really glad that you joined us well and I am going
to try to take up that challenge on uh setting up my telescope for uh observing
the Moon that one of your upcoming Star parties uh I don't know if Tuesday is
going to work out weather-wise for us but uh I use uh I use some CMOS uh
astronomy specific cameras uh color and black and white I have a bunch of
different ones that you know I can hook up to any number of for the moon I'd
probably use my nine and a quarter inch SCT and uh you know tracking Mount you
know and put it up there and uh have live views of the moon at least if nothing else
thank you Dave much appreciated very cool stuff you're doing and I know the Girl Scouts are
loving it um so I know that it's nine o'clock my time which means it's midnight on the
east coast and I am uh really thrilled that there's anybody still listening watching
um I before we go I just wanted to give a shout out to my friend Luana who
um right-wing coven started and everybody was like oh what are we gonna do we're never going to do Outreach
again um she took up the call and created the
most amazing event and I was thrilled to be any small part of it um and hi Luana are you can you um can
we hear you hello oh good there she is excellent do you want to tell us a
little bit about the event that you held because it was kind of amazing Oh thanks thank you so much for having
me here um yeah so when the covid hit and we all
didn't know what to do we were actually really excited about participating uh with the service learning program at
city college and I was also in touch with clubs and uh Chiapas Mexico and
Itachi in Brazil and we kind of got together and decided to do this
translation this Mutual translation and a presentation of the solar system
through zoom and you were amazing and super open about this idea that none of
us knew kind of how that was gonna go and it was just so much fun getting together and all the connection you know
back then we didn't know anything about this whole Zoom world we were all like okay how's this gonna work how are we
gonna do this and it was just a lot of fun and it felt like you know friends
after for the the whole uh webcast and
like the live recording it was just so much fun that we are still in touch and we use a neighborhood websites uh we
have the next door in San Francisco with 270 people that we're still doing
Outreach and through WhatsApp groups which is like a really good way of still
stay connected with the two different countries and so it's just a lot of fun getting everybody together
it was one of the coolest events I've ever been a part of and there was translation and Sky stories
um and you know looking at were we looking at Orion I think there were a couple of different constellations you
were looking at um yeah and we used the same presentation that we had ready at city
college that we used to do in person and we just translated in in Spanish and
Portuguese and we had members from out of the U.S participating with us in the
translation but not just translating because you you had to turn it upside down too
I mean it was really cool to do all of that Orion and what it looked like from the
Southern Hemisphere and um uh so it was yeah that's right I couldn't remember
award in Portuguese live it was so funny so it was a lot of fun but like really
mind-bending for sure yeah it was great and it was the San Francisco City College and then some universities in
Mexico and in Brazil so it was a lovely lovely event and I was so impressed that you just went right ahead and did it
without um you know know it was some of the first Outreach that I had seen working
like that in this period so thank you Vivian and thanks to you for holding the
space for us it was just like so much fun having it together and it just made it happen it was a blast so thank you
thank you and I want to thank everybody Scott especially you just to share all
of these stories and hear from everybody oh it's awesome yeah it's really there's
so much happening around the world I know in astronomy Outreach and it's great to hear from this crew
um what can happen even in times when you think it's not a great time for outreach maybe it's the best time it is
it's as good as any other it's what we've got right that's right and we're learning
all these new tools and everything and when we can go back and do you know uh
you know in real life or person to person or whatever we want to call that uh if you add these other tools and
you're sharing it like that you're not just sharing it with 100 or 500 or a thousand you could share it with tens of
thousands of people and all over the world to people that could never ever get to your Outreach event you know so
um you know the I I I love uh I love what's happened uh it's great to see all
these night sky network uh clubs and organizations and individuals uh doing
this amazing Outreach work you know so and doing it pretty inexpensively you
know so always leave it up to an amateur astronomer to figure out how to solve a
problem and do it for almost next to nothing so
that's right I always have our soldering irons around [Laughter]
and I think a John Dobson grinding uh mirrors out of uh uh
ship's porthole glass of beet sand I mean you know so yeah never you know you
never tell an amateur astronomer no yeah true that that's right
yeah okay so um you know I I'm uh really pleased to I
mean it was an honor to have the night sky network uh co-host this event
um we have um we have uh uh
um another event coming up tomorrow which will be
um the astronomical League live two uh that will happen at uh start at six
o'clock Central Time so it'd be seven o'clock Eastern and
um so they'll be Terry Mann will be co-hosting that so she's been on like almost every day with our shows which
has been great it was great to have you on earlier too to kind of help pump this up and um
so really um uh uh enjoyed it and looking forward
to the next time we can do it so yeah Libby I'm so glad you joined us I
loved your presentation thanks keeping us on our toes thank you
thank you very much thanks to all of you okay all right so the end of the sky the
night sky thank you good night have a good night good night doll thank you bye
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