Global Star Party 30

Transcript:

this global star party
here we go
uh
um
um
so
just wondering if by rebooting it i get a slightly better signal
it's you sound really good right now yeah that sounded good yeah you sound good
yeah you're all sounding a little soft but it's better than it was
the internet plays games plays favorites sometimes
maybe it's those pesky cosmic rays playing with us that's what i think
i'm a dust
i'm looking forward to the uh the next global star party
i mean we haven't even done finished this one yet i'm very looking forward to the next one
i hope that's not a statement on tonight's uh performance i hope not
[Music]
well there's something special about every one of them
is this a 10 minute talk again yeah
now what was that joke that george carlin told david uh i don't own a telescope but uh
i'm thinking of looking into one [Laughter]
this is so bad that's a groaner
oh boy is it ever
libby do you know of any astronomy jokes at all
no not too many no i i usually just make them up as they go along you know so
they're very spontaneous
most of them are not that funny that i tell except i think so you know i think
they're funny it's not so much the joke which is the story with a humorous climax but um
just the way you talk and the uh turnings of phrase that really
really are can be so funny and so humorous [Laughter]
well and the true stories that you hear like the time that the pope the pope was um
in a crowd and he was uh shaking hands and there was this young girl who actually looked a little like
you libby and uh but much younger and she grabbed the pope's little hat
and took it and the boy's father i think was holding
him and uh got very upset and said you can't take that that's the pope's hat
and the pope just he's francis just started laughing hysterically he said
he can keep it i can get another one
that's a true story it's a true story yeah oh my gosh
it was a photo you know the bernie sanders means he was sitting on saturn's rings
yeah i have one of him sitting right outside our observatory yeah
except i don't know how to do it i um the person who sent it to me gave me the
website but it doesn't work for me i can't actually do it
bernie has gotten around in the last couple of weeks here yeah and because he's such a popular person
of course he's he's gotten around even more he's so well liked
i i i took a photo and i put him right by my cat
[Music]
oh here we go norm hughes perfect the puzzled astronomer stared and wondered
where the sun went then it dawned on him
oh that's good astronomer wondered where oh wow here we
go here's another one dusty haskins how does a solar system get ready for a
star party they plan it
did you hear that one wendy they plan it yes you have to uh how does
the solar system behind a star party they sit down and plant it
okay someone please answer a question for me is it safe to store a refractor telescope standing on in yes
most likely the aperture in with the cap on sure you just want it to be
reasonably dry and dust free you know but yeah
that's the answer josh
why is a moon rock faster than earth rock it's a little meteor
[Laughter]
i think hospitals could benefit from coma correctors oh
why is uh why is moon rock tastier than an earth rock it's a little meatier
tastier [Laughter]
great [Music]
[Music] the nasa esa hubble space telescope is named after the famous astronomer edwin
hubble he discovered that there are galaxies outside of our own and that the universe
is expanding however these remarkable discoveries wouldn't have been possible without one
exceptional astronomer before him levitt
[Music]
henrietta levitt was born in lancaster massachusetts in 1868.
she studied at oberlin college ohio and then harvard university's society for
the collegiate instruction of women it wasn't until her final year at
university that she began to study astronomy but this sparked a keen interest that
she would pursue for the rest of her life she began to work at harvard observatory
as a computer one of several skilled women hired to process astronomical
data she helped with cataloging the brightness of every measurable star and
was quickly promoted to be head of the photographic stellar photometry department
supplied with photographic plates of the stars in the southern sky levitt was tasked with classifying
variable stars ones that fluctuate in brightness
while studying these changing stars she noticed a pattern the brighter the star the longer the
period of fluctuations the easily measured length of the star's fluctuations
directly leads to its brightness and to its distance the observation of these seaf variables
turned out to be the key to a fundamental change in our understanding of the universe
edwin hubble used this measuring tape to determine the distance to what was then
known as the andromeda nebula the result showed that andromeda was
actually not part of the milky way but a galaxy on its own millions of light years away
edwin hubble discovered that our universe contains many more galaxies
than just the milky way hubble measured the distances to more
and more galaxies using leave its law these measurements led him to another
astounding deduction the entire universe is expanding
he gathered the first observational evidence for the big bang
henrietta swan levitt never knew the impact of her discovery
she died three years before hubble announced his revelation about the andromeda galaxy
however even today levitt's discovery remains a vital foundation of modern
cosmology and it is still used to determine the distances to galaxies
[Music]
so
[Music]
um
now that you've caught up with hubble make sure to get the latest from the ground too the esocast highlights the
best of the european southern observatory and its powerful telescopes that observe from high in the chilean
andes at the southern hemisphere's best known sites for astronomical observations
well uh everyone this is the uh global star
party and something's wrong with my camera let me fix it here we go here we are
and normally i have a grander grand opening than that but um
nothing could be more grand than all of the people that are with me tonight we have
dr david levy uh at the jarnak observatory uh we have david j eicher from astronomy
magazine chief editor we have uh chuck allen former president
of the astronomical league uh you are now the current vice president is that right yes that's right that's right
astro beard uh richard grace astrophotographer enthusiast uh
lover of the skies and libby and the stars if there's anyone that is more in love with space exploration and
uh astronomy than libby i i don't know who they are because uh that's that's all that's on libby's mind
is the day that she can explore more of the universe so i think it's fantastic we have more
people coming on later today and on this particular global star party
being our 30th the door prizes will be 30 millimeter eye
pieces so we thought that would be a nice theme also
we are going to open uh the global star party to anyone listening that is involved in
astronomy and has something to share with us okay so the final hour and
that's what i'm calling that segment is the final hour uh i will post the login to our waiting
room uh where you will have your audio and video checked by kent martz uh they'll happen about
we're at 7 pm central time right now but at 9 00 pm central uh you'll be able to
log into the waiting room uh kent will check check everything out and he'll also make sure that you're not selling
shamwow or something you know so this is about astronomy you have to have something to contribute um
so think of it that you've been allowed into a ted talk you have to talk okay so
that's the deal but uh we'd love to have you and uh so
we'll get started as we do every global star party and this is now of course the 30th one
um with with david levy uh who's a friend to all of us here uh he is um uh
he um presents every event that he goes to in just the right way
uh his um his poetry sometimes his songs his uh
his thoughts his his nuances about what uh each event is is so well
characterized by david that uh it i i can't imagine having a global star
party without him so david i'm going to turn the stage over to you and let you do what you do best
well thank you scotty and it's really good to be here to help celebrate the 30th global star party
i really enjoyed hearing about um
hearing about the wonderful women of the harvard college observatory
and the one we heard about today was really extra special because she
made a discovery that was crucial in the development of modern astronomy
and i think libby is especially a lesson for you because you will be
as you get older and you get more into what we hope will be the astronomy of your generation
you will learn more and more and the stage will be set for you to make this
great discoveries in the night sky and in cosmology
um the quote i always set the star party off with a quotation
and tonight i'm going to use hopkins's comet poem which i've used before on this star party in
fact the one that we did on the the conjunction of the planets i during one of that that run that
lasted an entire almost 24 hours um that was one of the quotes that i
used then and i'm going to use that today [Music]
it was written by gerard manley hopkins and i know that those of you who studied
hopkins in high school or in college probably hated him because his poetry was so complicated it
was so difficult and the rhyme scheme was very difficult to follow one of the most
difficult poems and poets of all of english literature except for this one
i am like a slip of comet he wrote while he was at oxford university as a student
at bally old college and uh i know that uh the person that i
studied under at queen's university for my masters was norman mackenzie
and after i graduated he gave a lecture about hopkins and he said
that he had never seen anybody more enthusiastic about a work of english literature than
i was about this crazy poem about comets
and i can admit here as i have done before that i have never taken a course in
astronomy legally i know nothing zip about astronomy
but uh but i sure love going out and looking at the night sky in fact just now wendy and
i went out at least looked through the window at the almost full moon rising in the eastern sky
absolutely gorgeous well here is hopkins hopkins's comet poem
i am like a slip of comet scarce worth discovery in some corner scene
bridging the slender difference of two stars come out of space or suddenly engendered
by heavy elements for no one knows but when she sights the sun she grows
and sizes and spins her skirts out while her central star
shakes its cocooning mists and so she comes to fields of light
millions of traveling rays pierce her she hangs upon the flame-cased sun
and sucks the light as full as gideon's fleece
but then her tether calls her she falls off
and as she dwindles sheds her smock of gold amidst the sistering planets
until she comes to single saturn last and solitary
and then goes out into the cavernous dark so i go out my little sweet is done i
have drawn heat from this contagious sun to not on gentle death
now forth i run and now back to you scott wow
that is beautiful that's beautiful wow so um
david that's i mean just perfect and and what better way to describe a comet you know and and
all of its splendor you know uh all of us that are amateur
astronomers and have followed comets in the sky uh there's so many moments where we see
uh special times where they the the shape of the comet or shells that are brought forth because of
its jet as it's as it's spinning or uh maybe it broke apart or you know just
a million things that can happen to a comet and uh who better to know those comments
than you david but um thanks for sharing that beautiful thank you scotty one interesting thing about
the poem is that um hopkins knew a lot more than he let on in the poem about comets because he was
an amateur astronomer and he loved it come out of space or suddenly engendered
by heady elements for no one knows he knew except when he he set the poem
the speaker of the poem was actually in the renaissance when they didn't know whether comets
were actually part of the sky or whether they were suddenly engendered
by uh earth air fire and water and then um
the other one amidst the sistering planets till she comes to single saturn last and solitary he knew very well
that the solar system extended far beyond saturn he knew about uh uranus he
was alive during the discovery of neptune in fact he was not alive when pluto was found
and i'm very much looking forward to joining that event on the 4th of february
to celebrate clyde tombaugh's life and you might be hearing a little bit about that when dave viker takes the
microphone but hopkins knew all these things he loved the night sky
in fact there was even one time when he thought he had discovered a comet turned out it was the
um beehive cluster in cancer that he was looking at which really
without a telescope can be mistaken for a comet so i just want to make some of
those clarifications scotty sure thank you thank you well wonderful so you know the way that
we do um the global star party it's to me it kind of it feels like a
fireside chat i mean this the you you are in uh you're in our homes well this
is kind of like my home the you know my office here at explore scientific and i love being in here because i'm
surrounded with telescopes and and all of my group and the you know all the things that go on all every day i love
it um but uh uh it's it's wonderful to see dave iker in his home and chuck
allen is his home and and richard grace in his home and libby and her home you know and uh
and we're here to share our love of the sky with you all right we're here to share some of our
knowledge but we're also here to inspire you and one of the guys has been doing an
amazing amount of inspiration for so many years is david eicher david
has done it through his writings in in all of the sacrifices made to uh produce
the magazines that he that he produced and the books he's written the lectures he's
given uh all the travels all the hard work to get all those people together all those
contributing editors and everybody to put forth uh an amazing publication
every month david i i i personally want to thank you for that
because uh um it's um it's something that uh
uh is not only i mean personally important to me uh to read uh uh you know the news
and and the information that's come forth from astronomy magazine every month but uh uh
knowing that that somehow served as a vessel uh for the entire
amateur astronomy community uh it's it's just really an honor to
have you on the show and you've been on so many times and i love it and i can't wait uh until
uh our next as i said before the next global star party which will be the 31st one but it will happen on the birthday
of of clyde tomba and so you're going to have david eicher
contributing editors david levy david levy who's great friends with clyde tomba uh celebrate his his birthday but
um it's it's gonna i it's just gonna be an amazing star party so i really i just
up front i want you to know how much i appreciate that you're you agreed to do this and that uh
i can only imagine we're gonna hear some amazing stuff about clyde pluto the
magazine uh it's gonna be it's gonna be awesome so i'll let you take the stage from here
well thank you scott and it's a great joy to and an honor to be with you and thanks for all that you say all the time
and and what you've done for the amateur community and we're thrilled uh to have
david uh with us as well who knew clyde better than anyone uh in the amateur
community and i think david will tell some stories about clyde in that uh event coming up on the fourth
which will be a clyde's 115th birthday by the way but but uh
for now i'll i'll limit myself to um the progression of things working out
into the galaxy that i was talking about last week and we talked a little bit about exoplanets last week this week i'd
like to talk a little bit about the milky way our galaxy um which we heard a little bit about there in our intro film
that's got queued up with with hubble and henrietta swan levitt
and others and i wanted to talk about a revelation that we've had uh just in
the last uh um generation only about 20 years ago here 15 years ago
um with the structure of our galaxy because it really so much of what we understand about the universe has
changed in just the last decade or two it's really quite striking
so just to step back for one moment of course it's coming up almost now on 100
years ago that edwin hubble on october 4th and 5th 1923
uh hubble was not maybe the most likable guy among his peers he was a little
brusque and a little arrogant but he was a good astronomer and he was very very interested in the early 1920s where he
was in pasadena researching so-called spiral nebulae his favorite kind of
object so of course as he made his way up to the largest telescope in the world
at that time the hooker 100 inch telescope at mel wilson he imaged
the andromeda nebula on that night and made a plate and was very curious about some
things he saw on that plate went back and imaged it in better seeing the following night and then had a puzzle on
his hands um as we know because he found what he thought was a nova at first on
that plate an exploding star but found out comparing it to other observations
that had been made both at wilson and other observatories that it was a cepheid variable it was a very
particular distinct kind of variable star whose pattern is like the prototype
delta cpi that's a nearby star but this star was in
a distant nebula he thought at the time and he was astonished when he made this
discovery because the absolute brightness of these kinds of variable stars is very well known so you
can gauge the distance of course by the apparent brightnesses of these variable
stars and this was so faint this cepheid variable that hubble was astonished he
thought he had discovered a new type of object which really he did a galaxy and
that it was a million light years away that was at the time three times larger
than most astronomers believed the extent of the entire universe was a
million light years now we know of course it's 2.5 million light years away
so he he only had a fraction of that distance correct but uh
he did discover both the nature of galaxies
and studied on a huge program of research than many other spiral nebulae that he
was so fascinated with and did indeed study their motions although i would uh
uh correct very slightly our introductory film and say that the first good evidence of radial velocities of
spiral nebulae moving apart from each other uh was done by vesto m schleifer at lowell
observatory in 1912 a decade before hubble the expansion of
the universe so anyway the nature of galaxies became very well known with hubble of course it
was a an instantaneous uh uproar in science because it was so
stunning the redefinition of what the universe was and how large it is and he immediately went into studying
all that he could in classified galaxies um ad nauseam of course what do you do
in the sciences whether it's butterflies or bones or minerals or rocks or
galaxies you classify them before you can really understand their origin and evolution
so he did that and he published a famous book called the realm of the nebulae in 1936 and had a very basic classification
of the kinds of galaxies he observed spiral galaxies barred spiral galaxies
spirals with a prominent central bar from which the spiral arms emanate
and big spheres of stars and gas elliptical galaxies
and a few other little types but really the classification of galaxies took a big big leap forward a whole generation
later with the french astronomer who came over to the united states and went to texas
uh the largest astronomy department in the united states uh there gerard de vacalor who i was privileged to get to
know a little bit near the end of his life maybe some of you too and he really at the end of the 1950s
and through the 1960s uh made the sophisticated classification system of
galaxies that we know today the divalcolor system
so for 85 years we went uh rolling right ahead with our knowledge of the universe
and galaxies and we thought that our galaxy the milky way was an ordinary spiral pretty much like the andromeda
galaxy which is a spiral the problem for us though is it's very
hard to determine the structure of a galaxy when you're inside it
all of our wonderful astrophotographer friends as far as i know have not yet been able to capture a photograph of the
milky way from the outside that's really going to make some noise
just seeing if you're still paying attention yeah that's right okay
so it's very difficult because there's a tremendous amount of dust and of course we're in a system of several hundred
billion stars and a lot of dust and gas so it's hard to determine the structure of the milky way from within
we do know that the basic components of the galaxy were understood pretty well uh if you go out of course you may know
and look towards sagittarius you're looking essentially toward the center of the galaxy uh the the position
of the center of the galaxy if you look uh and draw a line in your mind between the cluster m6
and the lagoon nebula uh just about at the midpoint of that line is the direction of the galactic
center um although visually when we look toward that position in our sky even in a very dark
sky we're only seeing about a quarter of the way toward the center of the milky way because of all the obscuring dust
well so we had a real conundrum on our hands trying to understand the structure of our galaxy but in 2000 the year 2000
that is astronomers in tenerife and the canary islands made a breakthrough discovery
doing infrared astronomy and found what they called evidence of a long bar in the
central region of the milky way and a few years later
more significantly and more thoroughly the so-called glimpse
survey using the spitzer space telescope made a
tremendous breakthrough and just to give you that uh that acronym glimpse stands for galactic legacy infrared mid plane
survey extraordinaire no astronomers never work really hard to
make really cool acronyms so anyway this was a this was an infrared survey of uh
220 million stars roughly and uh about 70 percent of the molecular clouds in
our galaxy most of the star forming regions in the milky way and it really mapped the galaxy uh in very thorough
detail for the first time ever and i can never do this so i'm gonna do it now
the project the the pi of this project the glimpse survey is professor bob
benjamin at the university of wisconsin whitewater
okay okay that's rare
a little satellite of in of the milwaukee school uh was the place where this project was headquartered that's
typically not the case for a major breakthrough project like this so this this project was actually headquartered
in wisconsin and it found a number of uh components of the galaxy so what i'd
like to do now if i can is to share my screen just for a couple of moments
um see if this works uh oh it doesn't want me to oh dear
oh no settings you want to share your image
settings are holding me up here uh scott i don't know if i can email this quickly to you scott sure
and uh let me i'll continue to yammer on just for another minute
they'll be over here um and maybe you can share it i'm sorry for this i
i downloaded a new operating system and i bet it is giving me
some trouble with my settings here that's what i get for going to what is
it it's uh um big sur yeah that teaches me for going to big sur now
i just emailed that to you scott so if you get that if you could share that that
would be great um but what the glimpse survey told us and this was only in 2008 this is relatively
recent here in terms of a major understanding of our galaxy is that there's a central
so-called bulgy bar that's about 23 000 light years across through the middle of
our galaxy there's a long bar that's a little fainter that's about 29 000 light
years across of course we the sun and planets are about 20
between 26 and 27 000 light years out from the middle of our galaxy in a nice
safe neighborhood um and this is this is a of course not a photograph but a piece of
art but accurately showing the glimpse data and the different spiral arms and
and bar in our galaxy so of course we know that the stellar disk in the milky way is is at least a
hundred thousand light years across as i mentioned our sun there you can see the position there it's about 26 000 light
years out and change the outer limits of the gas and star formation of the milky way are about a
diameter of about 143 000 light years the active star formation in our galaxy
and galaxies uh are very thin discs most all of them
the thickness of the milky way uh is principally 1500 light years
as opposed to nearly 150 000 light years across and there are outlying stars and a
little bit of gas to a thickness of about 3 000 light years so it's you can
imagine a spinning cd maybe on your player it's much much much much thinner even than
that would be turning round and round we now know that we are in an sbc that
little c uh bard spiral galaxy and the c the little c s b means bard spiral the
little c simply means that our galaxy has loosely wound arms
compared to many galaxies that have much more tightly wound arms you can see the principal arms are
are marked on this diagram the perseus arm which also has a couple of spurs
the scutum arm the norma and outer arm
or norma arm on this diagram the carina sagittarius arm or
sagittarius as it's labeled here and the orion arm or spur
which comes off of it and that's the position of our solar system you can see
circle there we are in the orion arm or orion spur if you like to call it that
and you can see that when we're looking toward um sagittarius we're looking in
toward the middle of our galaxy and when we're looking out the opposite direction of course into the winter milky way
we're looking outward toward the vast universe beyond so anyway it's a major
revelation just over a decade ago to map and understand really the
structure of our own milky way galaxy and thank you scott for having me again
i i will talk uh i think david and i both next time we'll talk a bit about pluto and about clyde and we will have a
large cast of astronomy magazine editors joining us uh for that next uh program
as well scott okay thank you so much david that's awesome you know it's it is
it is amazing to think that um that you know we often say that we're living
in the golden age of astronomy but uh to be able to map out the milky way
galaxy the way that we have it's it's just incredible i mean we're where
this this this little circle that you have that says the sun that's got to be i mean the entire
uh solar system's got to fit within that circle um probably a fraction of that circle
yeah because if you really a you know the diameter of a solar system if you look toward the to the edge of the inner
edge of the oort cloud say you know that's about a uh the better part of a light year so if you're going to be
generous you could say that the diameter of a of a solar system is about two light years
and so we're talking about a disk that's either a hundred thousand or a hundred and forty three thousand light years
across it's a big big big big big big place yeah
compared to with the the even the the exploration that we know in our little solar system here yeah and just recently
they i guess it was the new horizons spacecraft that is somehow
revised our population estimate of galaxies taking it from what 2 trillion back down
to less than a trillion galaxies some of those are are hubble extrapolations too
and and there's a little bit of a complexity there because there are probably about a hundred billion
galaxies which is extrapolated from the hubble ultra deep fields that were shot
and those tiny areas of sky that show 10 000 galaxies if you multiply that over
the entire sky you get uh maybe as much as a couple of trillion
but those are showing galaxies that are very young uh very close relatively close to the age of the big bang a few
hundred million years afterward so what do galaxies do of course over time but
they combine because gravity is at work as well as universal expansion so lots
of small galaxies come together and make normal galaxies like ours that are much bigger over time so maybe in the present
day moment if you will there are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe
at least that's in the visible universe we can see and if you go back to the early universe
there were maybe a couple trillion i see so that's a oh
that's a mind bender all by itself yes all by itself yes it is big big big
plays but thank you scott thanks for the great words we're very much looking forward to this astronomy magazine event
with you and we'll make some noise about it in the next few days it's going to be great it's going to be great
i asked richard grace to share some of his favorite images
so we're going to kind of do that in between speakers here richard you have what's what's your
what's the first of your favorite images that you wanted to show
i think you're muted there richard
oh the good one right after talking about uh the milky
way here yes right after uh talking about the milky way but uh this is one of my my
favorite images uh i took it uh probably about six months into uh
um starting the hobby and um i just wanted to show it because uh i
keep looking at the uh the big dipper as it as it kind of cranks around in the sky you know right before i go to bed
thinking uh just another month and i'll be able to shoot the whirlpool again and i mean you know you always got to
think about the targets that you have right in front of you sure but there's also the targets that are always coming
right around the corner and i i don't know i mean i know everybody kind of has their their little thing
but for some reason i i like galaxies and uh i know that they call springtime galaxy season
but to uh to shoot the whirlpool again um i mean because this was before i even had a guide scope or anything i mean you
know i was just polar alignment let it go um you know not basic equipment but you
know nothing too special and to get a shot like that i'm i'm very happy with it and just to come back around this year and
you know try and crush that one would be would be awesome yeah you got your new camera and your new telescope set up so
oh yeah yeah it's gonna be good and um i'm also really
really looking forward to redoing marcarian's chain
um [Music] let's see if this pops up here
this one oh wow look at that nice job
because all those galaxies
i can't get the thing to go away uh well we definitely see it moving around like that um so there there's a fair
amount more galaxies that just go up off the screen there um but again when i shot this um gosh i probably shot this
like last february or march it was cold outside i know that so this was only a few months
after starting and i'm just looking forward to getting that one again uh and as uh mentioned
earlier you know the spiral galaxies and the barn spiral galaxies and the elliptical galaxies like these guys
i have to say i i found them a little boring i was like oh no they don't have any
definition it's just like a big smudgy light that it's brighter than all the stuff that i want to see
but it's all fossil light you know and uh uh you know the billions of stars
there and it is when you look back into time like that
and knowing that those are especially if you're able to look through the eyepiece and see that visually
or any galaxy visually you know you're you're actually your retina is getting
hit by those ancient photons it's a real kind of contact so astrophotography is awesome because it
just brings out so much more uh detail color as in case the case of the orion nebula that you did here
um and this one is one of the ones that that'll really get you because this was shot with a a canon t6 which i believe
is the cheapest dslr that canon sells uh an ed80 on a sky guider
so i mean it doesn't get much you know
bear more bare bones than that um and it's still one of my favorite shots
because the uh with with having the um what the the extra infrared blocking filters and all that
you get so much more blue out of it because like you know when you let all the hydrogen pass through it almost
overpowers some things and sure i just love it so i figured i'd show a couple of my my
earlier shots and you know kind of uh maybe give a little inspiration to uh
you know what you'd eat or or maybe what you don't need well it shows it shows uh great progress
uh from from someone that just recently got started so that's great
so thank you can i interrupt for just a second scotty sure i just i think it is
just wonderful to take a look at these pictures of the nebulae because they
bring us back to house to an article that i wrote decades ago for
astronomy magazine called stars are people too they are born and they are born out of these nebulas
that we've just seen a picture of and they grow and they live like our sun does
and uh on very steady path of middle age with a few little outbursts but
essentially they live very calm lives and then as they get older they get weird again
just as we do there's the helium flash there's the red giant stage and for very
large stars they are um they're novi and then for the very most
massive stars you have the supernova where um the final collapse of the
star's core takes place in less than a second and then the stars outer layers are just
blown to kingdom come stars really are people too and i've never forgotten that and when i see
pictures like the one you just showed us i'm reminded of it that's awesome i've always loved that
line of yours david and it's absolutely true of course that that will be an
immortal article um and of course people in a sense are stars too because literally the atoms in
our bodies uh were created the lightest ones in big bang nuclear
nucleosynthesis but most all of them element elemental atoms in
the explosions of supernovae or the merging explosions of neutron stars
so literally we're made of the stuff that mostly was created from those
massive stars so it's you know it goes both ways and you know we get to see
that greatest uh recycling program we could ever imagine going on only one
frame at a time out there in our telescopes that's right well yeah thanks david and
uh you know that line that's one of the most wonderful
memories i have from our friendship the other one of course being that day when we saw
the uh explosion of the highway right in front of the offices of your magazine couldn't believe how we saw it and the
shockwave just went right through us david blew up
it was a highway of course but we got to see it and we don't want to hijack the discussion here but just very quickly
david came to visit it was after in fact a league convention in in milwaukee near
milwaukee um and they were planning to explode this freeway and drop it essentially right in
front of the old astro media building and so they did that and we watched it this tremendous it was like you know
nuclear bomb going off and a freeway dropping you know an entire a couple stories and of course the joke
uh going around then was that you know this had actually been a care package set by sky and telescope
but we were all friends of course the astro and snt editors we were good pals you know right you remember that that uh
young woman who employee of astronomy who rode her bicycle under the highway minutes before
they were expected to blow it up i think they blew a horn and sounded you know a
two-minute warning for for i don't know how much dynamite planted and this young
lady artist goes whizzing right past the police line down toward the uh you know
i think she survived though yeah she certainly did but we teased her about it for a long
time afterwards that was a wonderful memory
well a couple of people have joined us that are actually going to be on a little bit
later in our program kelsey poor from nova space galleries and
space artists astronomer and i for what i understand soon to be astronaut dan durda um
is uh is has joined us as well and you can see them here uh
it's going to be a fascinating talk and so um i look forward to our that our
next segment coming up next is libby and the stars and then chuck allen uh from the
astronomical league and then we'll we'll take about a 10-minute break and we'll be coming back to kelsey and dan but um
libby um uh it's great to have you on our program uh i think that uh i think you have
decided that you'll be giving a lecture on every global star party that we ever have so
i i i it would be it would do my heart good to see you grow up on this uh on our show
here and for us to do it for many years um uh so uh
but uh what what will you uh what will you talk about tonight i am talking about places like earth
which is super cool because it's like here let me share my screen i made a
presentation great yes they're very fun to make presentations
so here's our home right here earth this is
what we know right now is the only habitable planet that we know has human
life on it so that's what we know of right now uh back at space camp we did this uh we
were talking a lot about mars and how we'll be sending our generation
into mars and recently there was some new news that people were paying 55 million
dollars to go to the international bay international space station as like a vacation
and i thought that was crazy now they're just sending people up there
on like vacation for like spring break where did you go for spring break oh i just went to space nothing special
all right so it's very interesting to talk about like human life on our planet because i
know we're the only planet out there as we know right now but
nasa has found more planets that could be just like earth
uh so those are the planets that are just like earth
kepler 6 2 f kepler 19 6f and kepler
44 2b is a long name you know our name is just earth but
um it's very cool and there are more exoplanets like earth
out there uh but these are the ones that nasa's like focusing on
if we're ever going to send humans to these planets because i know right now we're trying to get to mars
and that will take three years to get to mars and if you look on the scale of the solar system
it looks like an inch away maybe a centimeter on some skills or something
but it takes three years so we're gonna send the astronauts into space one day
to go to the free exoplanet and we're gonna have to like
find some way to speed travel so there's a little astronaut there
and uh this is kepler-62f and it looks a lot like earth it's just
earth is like 87 water i think on estimate
um and uh it looks like there's more like
there's more uh brown on the planet like land more land than ocean
and i was thinking about that when i was researching this because uh in school we've been learning
about like trees and how and how they give off oxygen and i was thinking if
other planets have trees like ours then it can produce oxygen
and then we don't have to wear space suits so it's basically i was basically thinking about that
but like we would have terrible droughts there is barely any water so it's very cool to see like that word
of the generation that will hopefully go up to uh go out to
a bunch of different galaxies one day and i think it's crazy right now i never thought we were going to be at the point
where we were spending 55 million dollars to go into space
on a vacation but uh it is uh very interesting to think about
like life because growing plants that's like one of the most important things we do here on
earth because it gives off oxygen it's good for the environment it's really just good for a lot of
things around us so i was thinking about that when you think about kepler kepler-62f
and uh also i was thinking about how long it will take us to get there
and apparently it is 1200 light years from our planet which i mean it's not
too bad but compared to how far mars is away from us and that we have to take three years to
get there seems like a long journey uh over here is a picture of um some
space art and i was thinking about like growth on um
growth on other planets uh this is what the artist envisioned of
kepler 186f and um
it looks like in our sky we our sky is pretty basic we just have
the sun during the day maybe a couple of clouds and then later in the night there's so many stars
and to look at this planet and see the huge pink star
this huge there it looks like if you were on that planet that would be
crazy like to see a huge pink sun in this gap in the sky
and just like a bunch of other moons and uh it just looks so like fantasy
and thinking that we're in the generation that will hopefully go up to
at least one day to visit is kind of crazy thinking that like
we'll be on there one day hopefully if it doesn't take us too long to travel and i know nasa's working hard every day
so it's very cool to see that um this is kepler
44 2b and um it is in the constellation lyra i think
i'm pronouncing that right and um i was very shocked because that i was
like that does not look it looks like earth but there's a huge red spot just like
patching it and so i was like what why is that looks like earth was destroyed
that doesn't look like another planet like her that looks like her earth was destroyed
um and so it's very cool to see the different planets how they can be
just like earth like the same the same conditions but they can look
like this um and
i was thinking like about like staying warm and being cold and stuff
during like when you're orbiting around the uh sun our sun basically uh us
humans we've lived on earth for so long we're so used to being on earth that it's just
bad for us to be on a place that's i mean we could be on a place that's way too warm
but it would just be bad for us because we're so used to being in like
this water here on earth that isn't that bad so we could live on another planet that's extremely close to the sun
but we but not as humans because we're so used to it you would have to
it's just whatever you do you have to be used to you know going to something so warm
going something so cool uh kepler 44 2b is orbiting the star
kepler 44 2 which uh i was thinking
like how cool would it look if you were looking out into the sky
and there were like 10 moons and there was like a star and and you were so close it would just
be amazing like think about mercury that would be
kind of crazy to see like everything in your sky and jupiter
and so that's why i like to look at art a lot because i know we can't take our
telescopes all the way to kepler 44 2b but uh
in our minds when we can imagine like what it's like to be able to see
and what it like the conditions are there based on scientific research
it's crazy it just looks fantasy-like and um
it's just crazy to think that we're in that generation of technology so hopefully in the next 100 years or so be
able to go to these planets and hopefully just start like a new full
earth like new like another life
like more people just start a full other newer earth number two
um i hope you enjoyed learning about super earth
exoplanets it's very important in this generation because soon we'll be out there
well certainly with people thinking about the challenges of what
it's going to take to get there maybe living there they are so distant though it's it's
it's hard to right now imagine us getting uh much beyond our own solar system but uh
uh you know uh the uh humans have done some amazing things
especially when you think about uh it wasn't so long ago that a couple of guys were learning how to fly basically
you know a self-pipe powered kite off of a beach you know
so uh not more than just a 100 years ago so
um libby thank you so much for bringing this uh program about exoplanets to us
i look forward to your next program that's great okay so um
i will bring us to chuck allen chuck is as i mentioned before vice president of
the astronomical league uh and uh chuck will uh he's given programs
of his own uh to our group um and fascinating uh um
points about our uh our universe the extremes of our universe and and uh you know chuck is a
uh he's a master observer i believe he's done every observing program more than
what 80 programs no uh 38 so far a 38
not quite 80 yeah not quite 80. okay well anyways uh he is he's he is a master observer
i believe within the astronomical league and certainly in my book too uh you know he understands uh
the universe uh the way few people do and so it's it's great to have you on chuck
and it's great to have the astronomical league as our official door prize sponsor
great thank you very much scott hello everyone i'd like to add something if i may uh of
possible interest to david eicher's wonderful talk about henrietta swan leavitt a little-known
story four years after she died at a very untimely 53 years of age of stomach
cancer um the letter arrived at harvard college
observatory for dr harlow shapley famous astronomer at harvard who was actually the first president of the
astronomical league and dr shapley
opened the letter and it was from the nobel prize committee in stockholm asking for background information on a
nomination for henrietta swan leavitt for the nobel prize unfortunately he had to inform the
committee that she had passed away and the nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously as you know
so that's just a little addendum but she certainly uh would have warranted that i'd like to add in conjunction with this
that this year 2021 is the 75th anniversary of the astronomical league
and we are taking uh exceptional steps this year to recognize both women who've
been critical to the astronomical league and its history and also to astronomy generally we're featuring them every
month we have in fact recognized people like helen federer who was our third
president from 1948 to 49 and the three longest serving president excuse me the
longest serving officers including some presidents in league history are all women
and this year we've created a new imaging award to go along with our general
imaging award which is the william meena fleming wow sorry about that we had a power failure
yep i'm going to take us back live again here sorry about that
it doesn't look like the broadcast was interrupted at least on youtube really yeah
oh okay we're still streaming that is um that's great [Laughter]
i am uh it was really weird it was just like i heard this beep sound and everything
went uh blank but uh looks like we're all still here
um so um thanks for uh bearing with us if you
were watching uh our program and um uh we
uh i i had a little bit of a power failure here but uh we're back live um
so we were right in the middle of uh chuck allen uh uh in his talk and where did we leave
off chuck well i was talking about a new award that the league has initiated this year uh which is the william meena
fleming imaging award this is for female league members 19 and over and we did
this at the request of a number of people in the league because we felt it would be a way of encouraging
young women who are getting started in astrophotography to get started in this and
we talked to many of our female members and officers and former presidents and they all love the idea so we have
created that and some details will appear about that very soon
so moving on now i guess to the door prizes ah let me share the screen here
as usual i'll start with
whoops sorry there we go i start with the solar warning and i do
this because for all of us in astronomy and for those of you who know people who have vision
problems your eyes are invaluable and you must protect them it's the zero
tolerance type of activity when you observe the sun and going over these warnings especially
with equipment you may be receiving as door prizes is very important i've said before that
damage permanent damage can occur to your vision and about 50 times faster than your brain
can make you react to seeing something too bright through an eyepiece so it's over before it starts you have to avoid
the problem use only professional solar filters that come with energy
rejection filters that mount at the front end of the telescope never ever little welder's glass kind of eyepiece
covers at the base end where heat can build up don't leave your telescope or binoculars
around in a daytime especially if there are kids around who might try to use them to access the sun which they will
and i've seen it happen only the certified eclipse glasses and
viewing cards that comply with iso 12 312-2 standards and never use those to
observe the sun through binoculars or through a telescope there for naked eye viewing only
should always consult with people in local astronomy societies about how to do solar observing safely and always cap
your finder scope so you don't burn your cheek when you're using properly filtered telescopes
okay so moving on now to the questions for
this i'm first going to cover the gsp 29 answers we had a question that this object is
found in the constellation tucana in the southern skies what is its name the large object here the answer was the
small magellanic cloud and our winner on that question was israel monterroso
question question two was what is the name of the brighter object in this image here
it is also a messier object and what is its correct messier number and what is the number of the messy object shown in
the upper left this cluster the answers were this is m20 the trifid nebula and this is m21 and the winner on this
question was andrew corkell all right andrew's won a number of
prizes with us so congratulations that's great he's also submitted a number of uh
observing program submissions lightly for awards that's awesome and question
number three in global star party 29 was this nebula observed in the constellation cepheus is
officially cataloged as vdb 141 or sharpless 2-136 what is its unofficial name the
answer is the ghost nebula and the winner on that one is norm hughes
okay so now we'll go on to gsp 30 questions we have three of them
as usual right and you're representing you need to send your answers
to explore alliance at explorescientific.com and we will
we will choose the answers uh all the correct answers that are sent in because you're watching simultaneously on
several different platforms so uh in some of them uh broadcast a few
seconds before others do so to make it a level playing field we take all the
correct answers and then we choose the right or we have the right we choose
we choose uh a an answer at random from all the from all the correct answers so
again send it to explore alliance at explorescientific.com okay
the international astronomical union recognizes five dwarf planets pluto aeros haumea makimaki
how many total moons do the five dwarf planets have add them up for this purpose
sharon pluto's moon should be regarded as a moon
rather than a co-planet okay
okay question number two the 88 constellations represent humans land
animals aquatic animals flying animals and inanimate objects which category is
represented by the largest number of constellations 28 of them
okay okay make sure you got the list humans land animals aquatic animals flying
animals inanimate objects and the third and final question who was the astronomer and steady state theorist
who in a 1950 radio program derisively referred to the explosive origin theory
of the universe as the big bang a name that stuck hmm okay
and that concludes all right this round so send your answers
to explore alliance here i'll put it here at explorescientific.com
[Music] there we go
and um at this point uh we will we will take a um a 10 minute break uh
we'll be coming back to kelsey poor and dan durda and they'll be followed up by molly wakeling who's uh who normally
does astrophotography with us but she does a lot of our live uh spots that we
have on the global star parties but this time she's going to give a presentation so um and uh i look forward to that it's
kind of uh you know how do you get started in astrophotography but i think she'll take us way beyond that so it's
reading cats and dogs here so no live viewing tonight although there
is a cat over here all right so we'll take a short intermission we'll be right back
do we remain live yeah we're gonna stay live okay yeah
so the mics are hot okay but uh but you know if you need to grab a sandwich or something this is the time
to do it so
i was working on building a catio a little outdoor cat enclosure for my
cats i'm working on that in the garage it's a lot of fun
foreign
you
the
so
so chuck do you have a another presentation that you might give later or yeah if you need it
yeah i have one mountains in the solar system mountains in the solar system that's cool
so what we're going to do um uh for the final hour of the program
we'll we'll go through our next segment here and then i'm going
to release the login to our zoom waiting room i'll put it in chat
and people that are watching the show provided they have a good
video and audio connection and that they have something to present about astronomy whether it's a live view
through their scope or an image that they made or something something that they can share um
uh we're you know be kind of like an open mic towards the end and um we haven't done this before so it's
first time but they'll go into a waiting room they'll be checked out by kent mart's kent will
make sure they're all set to go and then he'll give them the link and the zoom credentials for this
show so i'm looking forward to that
so
and that is the strangest uh power failure i've ever experienced we
didn't go off the air i don't know how that happened so that's that's very amazing
my computer turned off completely off really yeah it had to reboot
it's really surprising that the stream stayed on wow that's very strange
so what did it look like was it just blank or something for a little bit or what happened or was it just
people in the chat were saying they didn't see an interruption at all so um i you know i suspect that possibly
depending on how you have the stream set up yeah that um it was running
like remotely and uh uh chuck was doing his talking and yeah
didn't really see anything according to people on on youtube just kept talking
yeah it said no change scott just disappeared as i often do
cameron gill says you've got an awesome multicast platform set up big contribution the global amateur
astronomy community thank you well it's all you guys that make all this happen so
you know i just sit here and uh i'm i'm the guy behind the curtain so with a big big loud voice sometimes
so yeah i should ask you uh at some point um how you have the stream set up
because what i have going for the astra imaging channel works decently but i feel like
it could work better [Music]
okay so here we go um we are back and yeah um
molly i would be very happy or to anybody that's watching the show you know uh perhaps you're uh uh doing some
astronomy outreach or you want to just learn how to do streaming in general um you know i'm happy to share what i
know uh about simulcasting and and you know i've made
lots of mistakes um so i i'm happy happy to help you avoid some of that stuff but
let's uh let's turn our attention to nova space galleries and kelsey poor
kelsey thank you so much for coming on to um to our program
and uh and bringing uh dan dirt out with you um uh your your um uh
you know your gallery was started by your father kim poor and
i'm still learning about his influence on the space art community and the uh you know
space exclamation exploration community as well you know i know that uh you grew
up around uh astronauts and um space explorers of all kinds and seen
incredible art uh from you know the the far reaches of the aesthetic to
you know highly technical um very super realistic art you know so
um you know uh so it would be uh you know it would be interesting to uh
to learn more about that and i know that you have a uh an event uh called space fest is that
correct that's right i'm wearing a space bus hoodie right now awesome okay
that's awesome so but you were mentioning that maybe um uh you know that uh
there's there's still coveted concerns and stuff like that um uh and this is this is a concern for
everybody that's running uh events uh right now whether it's astronomy events
or any kind of event um at this time we're all kind of teetering on whether or not a summer event can still happen
or not and so um you know i wish i wish the best of luck to space fest and you know i i want
to go i want to go to space fest and i want to be there and uh you and i kind of already talked about uh maybe i could
be the um live cast arm of that so i'm i'm i'm excited about that because uh
i've never been i've never been to the gallery i've never been to uh
you know rub elbows with all these people but you're bringing them on one by one and uh
and this time you have dan durda i do i have dan darda with me and if you don't know who dan durda is you're gonna learn
real quick because he does so many things and i've written an intro for him and it's pretty
long so bear with me because he does he he's got a pretty lengthy resume
awesome he's our he's our artist of the month for january for nova space and i'm going
to put a link in the live feed for facebook after my introduction so here it goes
dr dan durda is a professional astronomer an author
a public speaker a physics chemistry astronomy and geology teacher
a pilot a cave diver a scuba diver a planetary scientist and a space artist
he was a research associate at the lunar and planetary lab at the university of
arizona from 1994 to 1998 and that was when he met my father kim
poor who encouraged his artwork he is currently a principal scientist at the southwest research institute in
boulder colorado with an affinity for asteroids dan was a finalist in the 2004 nasa
astronaut selection and is one of the three southwest research institute payload specialists
who will fly on multiple suborbital space flights with virgin galactic and blue origin
you can find him speaking on the science and discovery channels and he has a ted talk on youtube if
you're ever so inclined to look that up hmm wow [Laughter]
you know there are occasionally you run into people that have done so much it's like any one of
those things could have been a lifetime career right so uh i'm blushing
it's humbling it is it's humbling um it uh it reminds me of uh
some other people i've met like uh story musgrave who is a lifelong learner you know uh he's i think in his late 80s
right now and i think he's supposed to be seven phds i think yeah i think he's
still going after another one and uh you know and he's an artist um you know and
uh you know uh neuroscientist and you know fix the hubble space telescope
and and on and on and so uh it's it's awesome to have uh
people like you and him uh in this world alan stearns another one
uh you know that i can think of um yeah and there's several uh uh dan how how do
you fit i mean i'm gonna ask you several questions but how do you fit all of that into
into growing up and and uh going you know of course going through
school and all those but i i'm very very curious how you have the energy and the
mind to do it uh i don't know it's just life it's just
it's just life just doing things i enjoy right right hi kelsey hey thanks for the intro that was great i appreciate it
um great to be here thanks uh yeah scott i don't know it's just uh you know you just you just do you
you do what you like and it comes easy right so um you know i got i got scuba certified
when i was like what fifteen or sixteen whatever the i can't right it's so long ago and i can't remember what the with the
legalities of you know how old you could be when you could be certified but i could swear it was about 15 when i when i did the certification jacques cousteau
was a big influence so i was like i knew i was going to spend a life under water one way or the other sure sure
um and you start off as an astronomer where are you working yeah uh yeah so that you know so yeah i i i
going back to the cousteau thing i wanted to be a marine biologist for as long as i could remember uh growing up that's what i wanted to do but then
carl sagan's cosmos premiered in 1980 and that
sutured together the multiple interests i had in just about every aspect of science you could think of and through
cosmos and the way carl and uh you know his wife ann the way they wrote that that that that series and the way it was
presented it really it occurred to me that you know that's what i really wanted to do because that
seemed to be like all science wrapped up together i could do that in astronomy and and with
you know because of carl projecting his interest in exobiology and alien life and so on that
taught me that oh gee you know my interest in biology i could still bring in my interest in the physical
sciences too and do that to astronomy so in 1980 when i was in 10th grade i decided that's what i'm going to do i'm
going to get a phd in astronomy i'm going to be an astronomer that's what i'm going to do so that's and so and i was pretty
single-mindedly focused since then so that is one of the things that i hear you know that that would be something
that story would tell you that's something that allen would tell you so it's it i think it is it is having them
uh you know maybe a a lack of confusion okay where so many young people are very
confused as they go through their uh teens and twenties you know well that and that but that's but that's okay too
i you know this is the thing i i i the lesson i learned personally was yes i was very single-mindedly focused
growing up that way but then you come out the other end of that with you know doing what you love
to do and that's great and all but then you realize yeah but there's so many other things to learn about and see and
do too that it's okay you realize later on as an adult it's okay to not
necessarily know exactly what you want to do when you're in 10th grade right and so i i you know i when when kids
come and they know what they want to do in 10th grade i say that's great that's wonderful when other kids come they say
i don't really know what i want to do and i say well that's fine too because that means that you've got a whole universe to explore and figure out and
you'll find what you love so either way you don't worry about it yeah right right so
uh and so tell us a little bit about your your professional astronomy experience
what was that journey like sure yeah so um yeah university of michigan for my undergrad work um i uh i had an coming
fresh out of cosmos i had a really intense interest in exoplanets and uh seti search for extraterrestrial
intelligence um and i i was pretty sure that coming out of undergrad that's what
i was going to be focusing on doing was some sort of work uh with seti and you know extraterrestrial life and
things like that i i really wanted to go to cornell you know for grad school work with carl right of course right um
didn't get into cornell but um but i ended up um with a great offer from the
university of florida for graduate school um and it turned out that a fellow there that i ended up working
with worked with carl at cornell and um but the difference was that uh
stan stan dermott my advisor my phd advisor at florida um had uh was uh responsible for
discovering the iras dust bands the uh the infrared astronomy satellite that was launched in 1983 discovered um dustbands
uh out there in the solar system that appeared to be you know um circling the
sun and stan did some interesting dynamical use you know stan's work was primarily celestial mechanics and
understand the dynamics of dust and little things out there and he made the connection the mental connection understanding where these bands are
observed in the sky that they corresponded with some big clumps of asteroids in the main belt
called asteroid families the hiroyama asteroid families these are our are uh
basically you know clouds of of of debris of asteroids that
were um broken up eons ago and stan made the connection that these dust bands are probably associated with
the grinding down of those families of asteroids over time so he sent me to work on on problems related to that and using
those dust bands as a way to calibrate how much total dust the asteroids were making you know all the other asteroids were
making compared to comets say and so from that i got very interested in asteroids i got very interested in collisions and impacts
and that took me uh to work uh at the nasa ames vertical gas gun doing some
actual impact experiments hyper velocity impacts and so most of my career
in astronomy ever since um has been dealing with asteroids and the
way they evolve and how impacts and collisions dominate their lives and most recently
that has brought me to being very interested in what's going on
on the surfaces of little asteroids the near-earth asteroids that we're now in the process of exploring with the nasa
osiris-rex mission and the japanese have just uh are just just come back from with hayabusa 2 bringing samples back
from ryugu and um my fascination as an astronaut
wannabe applicant um was what's it going to be like when we actually go there in person to these little objects
right because you know this is um it's a very alien environment right
right we've been to the moon we've done the space walks on the moon you know tromping around in the lunar dust in the
dirty environment there you know one sixth g field but still substantial gravity we've done the space walks in
microgravity or zero g outside the space station uh outside the you know fixing
the hubble space telescope and so on but we've never combined the two together in the sense of doing
work in microgravity but in a very dirty dusty environment like the moon right so so what what's
that work gonna be like on the surface of these little objects it's a very alien very non-common sense sort of
way of working and i've just had that one the science interest in the processes that go on
microgravity geology which is something we really don't have any hands-on experience with but also the the
operational perspective of working there as an actual person part of the you know working with your tools and you know as
a cave diver i'm very interested in checklists and checking through your gear and that also is a very
you know it's an analogous environment right it's neutrally buoyant you're working in a dusty dirty environment in the bottom of
some of these caves and so i i brought that interest with me from cave diving too of the the operations
aspect of working on these little objects and so all that's tied together for me and um so my research now is
primarily looking at you know that microgravity geology i'm doing a lot of microgravity experiments launching payloads on blue origins new shepard um
basically boxes of rocks if you will carrying up little payloads that are the next best other than going to an
asteroid the next best thing we can do is take an asteroid simulant to zero g environment and start playing with it
and learning what it's like right so that's kind of what i've been doing that's uh that's a lot recently
that's a lot and so um uh you know
i i i want to talk also about this the this these things that you'll do with blue origin and and your the sub-orbital
stuff that you're uh looks like is in your near future here um but uh
uh you have a creative side uh you i've seen your paintings they're beautiful uh
you do yeah you paint uh you also do digital uh painting you know you do paint with the
wet stuff and and also um digitally um and uh you know what influence did um
you know kim poor i mean what did kim see in you and and did you know that you had this creative
side about you or was this something that was kind of uh you know someone said hey
you know you should you should try this or you should uh you should express yourself this way you
know and why did you yeah yeah did you choose painting you could have you could have done
it yeah um yeah long story there i i sketched as a kid i did little drawings
in here and there my sister painted and things like that so i i kind of had that little bit of a creative side a little bit i suppose
um but um you know
it came out
sort of um
grad students in this far away land called call tucson and uh i grew up in michigan and went to
school in florida um and uh for you know for years i you know
catalogs for all these great artwork and things like this well in 1989
[Music]
i think maybe it was pasadena i just i found like
and um
uh you know kind of kind of setting the side up here at least when i moved to
daniel you're freezing up in
what night oh well
how are we doing are we back we're back now we're kind of yeah we are back okay yeah hopefully i'm not freezing up too much
um yeah i moved to uh move moved to tucson as a for postdoc work january of 94
uh took the took the opportunity to walk into nova space galleries in person for the first time it was just you know a
jaw dropped to the floor uh just absolutely stunned with the artwork in there and at that moment decided you know what i
want to try this i want to see if i can do it and uh i went to the art store and just bought a bunch of stuff and started doing it
and somehow or another whether i was dumb enough or naive enough or whatever i after you know a couple of little
test paintings that i did for myself for fun i i took him into the gallery and talked to kim about him and he was like
you know he was very encouraging he's like well these these are these are these are you know not bad keep keep at it kind of a
thing you know and right i kept at it i brought another batch a couple of them in there and uh kim said well hey yeah
let's uh you might if we take this one in this one and i'll put them up in the gallery see what happens it was like awesome
you bet sure you know not expecting anything to happen and yeah so no it was it was all cam i i
it's just it's a kim was incredibly [Music]
um
[Music]
that's family you know it's family so i just get more uh that days and
working with the wet stuff um but i always had an english
thing digitally playing around in photoshop and so on uh where that went to was um um
i'm talking about avatar and avatar struck me in a particular way at that time it was
the first time i had seen in a photo real way
a section of the biology on the planet
we've been thinking about this kind of like extraterrestrial life for years and to see it finally done where i felt like oh my god i'm actually
in one of these worlds and seeing what it's like it just hit me so strongly i ended up seeing the movie like 15
times in the theater just because i couldn't get enough of the visuals and that really pushed me over the edge to
finally go digital so that's that's where that came from uh i'm attempting to do a share screen here i don't know if i'm getting it going or not i don't
know why it's um i don't know if you're seeing anything at all oh i know a second
not yet okay let me let me keep selecting some stuff here and then do something and see it i'm on
my ipad in case you haven't guessed with all the jiggliness going on here and sharing things on my ipad i've not quite learned all of the details
of that yet so let me see what happens when i do this okay are you seeing that
yeah and that comes across really nice you know okay very good unfortunately the video has been a little freeze frame
uh from time to time but this is this is coming over very very nice as long as the audio is coming out okay then you'll
be able to see these pictures uh hopefully that'll work so um this is an example of one of the one
of the early digital things i did when i first started i think i did this right back in about 2009 um or about about
2010 uh just after i got my you know digital art computer sort of thing dedicated and it's like let's see what i
can do with digital stuff where this started out i did this a couple different ways this was this is the this
is the base picture this is what started it
this walk on the canaveral after one of my zero
imagery when i go on travels and this was a just a picture i took as reference for waves and things like that well i
came back home and decided let's see if i can doctor up this photo a little bit remove the sky
um change the color palette a little bit render in some other stuff
and um and imagine a an exo world so that's that's an example of sort of matte
painting techniques that are you know that you can that you can play with that way so um similar thing here right uh uh
top little frame there is a set of images i took in death valley on one of our international association of
astronomical artists workshops uh middle frame is what i ended up doing with it by rendering in some new stuff the
bottom is just a close-up showing some of the little alien plants i stuck into the landscape here's another example
from uh moab uh not every place is gonna beautiful
living rich world full of life some are going to be pretty poisonous and noxious that started as just a picture in goblin
valley um that i tinkered up so wow um looks very another
one from death valley another one from death valley the
astronauts weren't there of course uh i pulled out the leaves and the weeds digitally and put in some astronauts and
imagined ourselves on mars this is actually mars hill in death valley um a place that has a terrain actually very
much like some of the basalt lava flows and broken up stuff on mars so it's a great place to do mars art
alien life always fascinated with the idea of of life on the moon of an exo
jovian planet someplace i mean it just it's this it's the standard sci-fi thing right and i just think there's i just i
would love to have the experience of being able to stand in one of those worlds and look up and see a beautiful gas giant planet in the sky just
dominated the sky uh and so that tends to dominate a lot of my artwork oh yeah right
uh pure digital render in this case not one single photo element in it it's just all mathematically created landscape and
some sculpted weird alien plants question mark i don't know are they plans i don't know what they are
but they're whatever they are they're alien yeah the fun thing about digital's allows me
to actually do some of the hardware art that i was never able to do painting just because my painting skills never
got to that point but i can build things in 3d texture out lighting
uh come up with with fake exploration companies i actually made a logo for my own
new fictional company i made called exploration systems incorporated and i thought well what should the logo of
this fake exploration systems incorporated look like and maybe some of you can
guess as what i'm getting at with the three circles there but uh and that turned into this uh just a
idea of some interstellar spacecraft being constructed in low-earth orbit and getting ready to depart so i called this
one starship departure and uh fun stuff like that i'm a huge star wars
geek and uh love star wars and now that i can do digital stuff i can recreate some of the things in star wars
like the the hallway of the rubber rubber uh rebel blockade runner and just go there anytime i want to and look at
it from any direction i want to and and just so you know i am i am detail
oriented enough uh so in case you're guessing every single panel and every switch and every button in this is
exactly screen accurate from um uh as they were on set so um
i never i never do anything like this uh halfway so i researched every panel on every part of every frame so
make sure i get words how many hours do you have uh that was a couple of weeks worth of work to get this one done
wow and then that art has been transitioning lately into the physical i've been
building a lot of models uh lately and um uh and again doing what i do which is uh usually like
anything worth doing is worth overdoing is kind of my motto so um if i'm gonna do models it's gonna be like the actual
studio scale models um so this is uh my reproduction my replica if you will of
the gold leader y wing from the original star wars movie so it's built um with every piece pulled from the same models
that they built the original from uh painted to the same detail that the original was built to the same scale of
the original was so this is like 20 almost 28 inches long so it's pretty darn big and just to give you an idea uh
there's my model on the right compared to the actual v gold leader filming model on the left
just to give you a sense of what those things were like here's a back view of it and then just again to
give you a comparison of what i'm trying to replicate the the actual filming model on the left and mine on the right just trying to kind of
capture the spirit of all the all the you when you see these mod when you see the real models up close for real you
realize they really they really a lot of those details don't read on screen so they have to like over
emphasize them when they build the model so that they kind of you know read out right so that's where the art's been going lately so yeah the creative side
wow i can see you working for lucasfilms or dreamworks or something like that that's
really really cool um uh you uh uh you you you touched briefly
about blue origin and uh you know from what i've learned
tantalizing details that you would be uh one of these people that would be doing some near-earth orbit
you know space uh exploration and so what what can you tell us about that before we let
you out uh anything you want to ask um so again luckily enough when i started here i hired on at southwest research uh
alan stern hired me on uh in 1998 uh with the offer that you know hey look we're going to be i'm
starting up this project to go fly basically we're going to be flying telescopes cameras imaging systems in
the back seats of some of nasa's aircraft and i know you're i know you're into aircraft i know you're thinking about being an astronaut and all that so
it's like hey i want you to you know come on in and uh come on and help me with this with this project um you come
on in we'll be flying f-18s in a couple months and i was like okay so uh and he he did not lie i hired on
uh came in in august of 98 and air force base uh
training to fly the f-18 um what that what he had in mind back in those days was basically using the aircraft as
flying what it evolved into was it put us in a position
the
are very similar to what was getting ready to do with they want
to go and meet with bert and talk about flying spaceship one and uh that evolved into um
our work with virgin galactic
what ended up um evolves into the suborbital science game and um
uh basically uh with our experience with zero gravity flights and high performance jet
aircraft flying and pressure suits you know an allen interviewed to be an astronaut as well and all that it put us
in a position to be kind of the bearers of recognizing that these
earth do this next
generation of commercial suborbital usable vehicles uh that were
you know tourism entry reckon
the opportunity to get in the field um this is our chance to get up into our environment and and do our work there
and so um we really southwest uh primarily through
allen's vision pioneered this idea of researchers flying to space on these vehicles that's
awesome yeah and what you he will be doing so uh with uh
um with with alan's you know allen's uh first nasa select e uh to be able to go
and fly um our funded research on on virgin galactic and uh i'll be one of his flight backups for that uh kathy
olken also at southwest is our third flyer um and uh eventually alan and kathy and i all three will be flying
both uh virgin and blue origin so um i can't wait it's uh you know i
it's it's the one it's the thanks it's the one piece of the space flight
puzzle i've got actually get to see the earth wait to do the research hands on it's uh
it's really amazing to get your hands on something in zero g it's a neat feeling and uh yeah
it's yeah can't wait it's gonna be it's gonna be amazing that's awesome well that's that's fantastic i think
we've run out of time dan uh and kelsey thank you so much for coming on and
showing kelsey thanks for the invite on and scott thank you thank you so much dan very much like to have you on again so
we'll have to uh we'll have to talk about that um and um
so uh um until next time kelsey thank you very
much thanks for sharing dan take care our next thanks thank you thank you our
next speaker is molly wakeling molly is she's a scientist astronomer
student still i think she'll probably be again one of these lifelong learners as well and
you know always a pleasure to have molly on the global star party um
uh she is uh i had the pleasure of meeting her briefly at the advanced
imaging conference and she was showing a beautiful image of rojo futus that she had taken uh with a uh with those i
think it was a relatively modest lens uh but the the print was so colorful so
beautiful uh that uh you know i really wanted to snag it from you and hang it in uh in my uh
office here but i'll have to get a signed one from you or something um
but uh uh um molly typically uh shows
live images from one of several telescopes she that she owns that she operates in her backyard
she is she is a regular on other social media that's focused on
astrophotography and you know i'm sure she does much much
more but tonight she's going to talk about
kind of how to get started in astrophotography um and uh to give you the tips that uh
uh that a lot of us are are hungry to learn so molly it's all yours
all right um thanks i have to follow uh dan here [Laughter]
hey put in a good word for me on the astronaut selection committee would you i haven't heard back from them yet
[Laughter] um uh yeah so um
it's raining like i mentioned during the break it's raining cats and dogs here so no live imaging tonight
but i figured i'd put together a quick presentation on how to do some master
photography the cheapest and lightest weight way that one one more or less can and a couple of
different ways of doing that and what you can do with a camera on a lens so go ahead and share my screen here
um let's bring that back up okay uh yeah so um the background picture here
i'll be showing another copy of it later on but i i got to go to chile back in 2019 and this is with like
uh an el cheapo nikon 35 millimeter f2 lens
uh and yeah awesome awesome milky way there for sure out in the atacama desert
um so uh when you when you think of of astrophotography when you think of
gorgeous space images you might think of things like the hubble space telescope or
the enormous uh ground-based telescopes that are uh
on the earth or really fancy like professional semi-amateur
setups or even a nice telescope setup and you can get great images in all of these ways
but all these ways are of course rather expensive you don't have to have any of these to
do some kind of astrophotography and to make some really neat images so i'm going to walk through what you can do
with just a camera a lens and a tripod um oh yeah i was going to say that on
this slide so dslr plus tripod equals happiness
yes goofy slide there's a lot you can do uh with just
those tools without needing to have a telescope so for one thing you can make killer
time lapse videos of the milky way going behind some hills or
people moving about at a star party or a telescope tracking the sky over the course of the night
sunset uh orion setting or rising something like that um
and that's just uh it's just a matter of plopping a dslr onto a tripod and letting it run all night
so the way that that's done is um for 30 bucks you can get an intervalometer you can get a reasonable
dslr um i i really like my nikon d5300 it runs about 400 bucks
for the body and then the lens is you know another 100 or so bucks for
probably both of the kit lenses um for 30 bucks you get one of these intervalometers and you can set it to
take 15 to 30 second exposures all night long and
see the milky way go across the sky and make a really cool video out of it the next day
so no no special equipment needed just dslr tripod shoot jpegs um
intervalometer so that you don't have to sit there hitting the camera button all night uh having an ac power supply helps with
this as well and you can get those for 20 or 30 bucks on amazon or other places
very cool you can take star trail images so uh this is a shot from the southern
hemisphere again from the atacama desert when i got to go in 2019 so we're seeing the south celestial pole here which was
really wild to be polar lining to the south and watching the sun cross the sky
to the north it was wild [Laughter] um and what is this trail that i see
kind of going across uh that's me walking by with a headlamp on okay okay
either me or somebody else i think it was me i can't quite remember but yeah anytime you see those those kind of ghostly trails that look like that it's
somebody walking by with with a light on
um so the way that's done is there's a piece of free software called star trails
and that's the software that you use to make the star trails image once you take
a couple hours worth of 30 second or 60 second exposures you might think that
you do one long exposure like a couple hours but you're gonna you're gonna saturate your camera if you do that so
really you just take a whole bunch of 30 second or 60 second or whatever exposures back to back to back to back as closely
spaced as your memory card can write and then um it's always nice to have some some cool foreground in there i had
the observatory domes or a cool rock formation in zion national park or
a barn you know what whatever you can find and uh
just like with with the time lapse um you want to set that to manual mode and
you know pick your iso and pick your exposure time um
in order to prevent dew from forming on the lens i picked up a neat trick uh you can use those hand you know those hand
warmers that you bring with you when you're um you know going out in the cold to work on stuff
you can rubber band those to your lens and it will keep the lens warm enough to not form dew or frost over the course of
the night if you don't have a dew heater so that's a cheap and easy way to keep do from forming
and again if you can get a ac power adapter highly recommends you don't have to go out there and change the battery and have a gap in your star trails
so what the software is really doing is uh is um any of the anything that moves in the
image gets summed together and you end up being able to see the stars move
uh this is back in the northern hemisphere here and i made a little video of it just to kind of show what the summation looks like and the red
streak there is an airplane in this case
another thing you can do with nothing more than a dslr and a tripod is do some really cool wide field or skyscape or
nightscape images this was my first attempt at it back in
2016 i think i was in albuquerque new mexico for for
a work trip and convinced the the group that i was with uh the rental car were
coming back into the city convinced them to stop about 40 miles out of the city and write about sunset and i was
prepared i brought my dslr plopped it on a little tiny like six inch tripod on
the ground on a on like a side road just off the freeway and took about 20 15 second exposures of
the milky way and used the free software deep sky stacker to stack them and got a
really nice shot of the milky way from the side of the road thank you
this is i processed it in photoshop to get a nicer look than the original image that i posted but you can use deep sky
stacker and which is also free or photoshop's like 10 bucks a month it's not not that bad
um but yeah just dslr and a little itty bitty tripod
amazing oh look at this i love this yeah this is one of my other favorites uh again in chile um with that 35
millimeter f 1.8 lens i i can't remember exactly how much that line cost i think it's like it's definitely i think it's
less than 100 bucks it's just a cheap f2 lens f 1.8 lens look at what you did
with it it's amazing yeah i mean it's got some pretty significant coma out toward the edges but if you crop your frame um then it looks alright
especially when you're you know 35 millimeters is pretty wide field of view so you're not really going to notice unless you go pixel peeping
um so you know interesting foreground i have a uh this is a um
a 45 inch dobsonian that had was in the process of being built when i was down
at in san pedro de atacama i did get to look through it at the end of the week which was really cool
um and uh yeah this is a single 10 second exposure and then i just did some post
processing in photoshop to increase the contrast and fix the colors and whatnot
and yeah came out nice dslr on a tripod that doesn't uh inspire awe i don't know
what does this is you know when i'm at a really truly dark
site you know like the nebraska star party or bryce canyon or yosemite or many of these places like this or yeah
also i i've been to chile and seen the milky way like that uh it's just it just takes your breath away
it really does and it's seared into your mind and um really gives you the
the feeling that uh you are you know we're on this spaceship earth we're flying through space you
know so and here it is it's amazing we can just breathe the air that we breathe and
live the lives that we do and look through uh look back into the universe with the instruments that we build it's
it's amazing yeah absolutely love it and in the southern hemisphere you can see
even more clearly that that the milky way is a galaxy because you can see
um the bulge at the center and you can see how it tapers out at both sides as opposed to here in the northern
hemisphere where we only see like the top half of the bulge and then it kind of fades out right um so really you
really get the sense that you are in the plane of the galaxy and
that's really cool the professional astronomers that i was meeting at in chile at uh
and i uh ctio were saying uh you guys do not have a milky way in the northern hemisphere
yeah yeah it's definitely something else and when those sagittarius objects are at zenith uh you get much sharper views
on them uh through the telescopes and uh jupiter was at zenith which gave me the
best view of jupiter i've ever seen i threw like a 24-inch dobsonian
just incredibly sharp yeah it was it was i'm i'll i'll be going back uh to uh to that same place
and near saint peter.com for sure wonderful uh here's that that shot i
showed on the on the intro slide this is again a single 10 second exposure on an
even cheaper nikon um that uh that i i still use sometimes it was my
first dslr um bring it along for doing time lapse and wide fields and stuff like that
uh again a 35 millimeter f 1.8 lens and i even got a little meteor streak uh
there in the in the background there so wow knocked out on that one
the other thing you can do is you can even do some deep sky uh this is still a camera camera on a tripod no tracking
this is um and this is from a portal 5 sky site actually um so to have my d my
nikon d3100 plopped on a tripod with a 70 to 300
millimeter lens that had been given to me it's an older fully manual lens i had
it at 70 millimeters and at 70 millimeters i could run about six seconds before the star started to
streak so i took over a hundred six second exposures and just kind of i
just readjusted the tripod every 20 minutes or so to keep it more or less on target then i stacked it in
mosaic mode on deep sky stacker and lo and behold we have the constellation
orion with the orion nebula here and the flame nebula and the horsehead
nebula and of course a nice star field to go with it um so yeah you can do deep sky
without tracking at all or without a topic at all that's that's the best mount of all isn't it yeah no periodic
error no backlash yeah exactly no electronics nothing to fail yeah yeah
exactly um yeah so just if you're gonna stack shoot in the raw format uh if your camera has
dark frame subtract subtraction built in then that can be a handy feature to use uh or else you can take dark frames and
load those into deep sky stacker um and uh you know just uh do a little test run
see with whatever focal length you're using i think there's like the rule of was it 400 500 something like that um but i
find it's easiest just to test it out so like all right let me try 10 seconds all right no streaking yet let me try 15.
okay yeah now there's some streaking you know um so it depends on the focal length you're using how long you can shoot for but
usually like with these wide fields you can tolerate a little bit of streaking because when you zoom out you're not really going to see it
right um now i if you if you want to put out a little bit of extra money to really
enhance your capability you can get the star tracker devices that i'll show on the next slide that let you uh just a
basic little sidereal tracker that you can throw your dslr on and you can take longer exposures so this is a seven
panel mosaic from the texas star party uh each each frame in the mosaic is 60 seconds long
using the kit lens that came with it no nothing special um and this is my favorite shot of the milky way i've like
ever taken beautiful thank you all right so these all these um the
skywatch star adventurer the iaftron and the vixen polari here they each run about 400 bucks so a lot cheaper than
your standard telescope mount they're very lightweight toss it in a backpack carry it with you take it on a
plane i brought my skywatcherstar adventurer and my vixen polar with me now the chile and had no issues doing
that they run off little five volt power supplies or also off of double a batteries um the little five volt power
supplies like the kind you can charge your cell phone with uh will run all these um and you just throw your dslr on there
and you can use a longer camera lens since this thing tracks and uh the star venture and the and the
ioptron have counterweights so you can load it with even heavier lenses
and i you get it roughly polar aligned using the little polar scope on the back
and uh point that camera wherever wherever your heart pleases and take a whole
bunch of exposures and and you can create uh you can do deep sky imaging for less
than a thousand dollars total so there's a lot of a lot of closes we can do with that the omagon mini track over
here is is even cheaper and even simpler if you want no electronics in your life at all this thing well besides the
camera i suppose this thing is um uh just wound and it and you wind it and it
unwinds at the sidereal rate over the course of an of an hour and then you have to rewind it um and uh it'll it'll
track the sky for you like a little barn door tracker that's amazing can be totally off grid yeah exactly
uh so um if you're gonna use one of these it's good to have a sturdier tripod uh since um it needs to be able
to handle the extra weight of the um of the actual tracker
i actually i have a little carbon fiber tripod that folds up to be about two feet long that i got for when i went to
chile and i actually um i got a tripod weight bag for it
and i put one of my telescope counterweights in it or sometimes i put uh just whatever you know some rocks
from around or whatever i can find to weigh it down to lower the center of gravity so it's more stable
the tracking's not as good as a telescope mount of course so you still have to keep your exposures relatively
short and the lengthier exposures will depend on your focal length but i've been able to get away with two
three minutes generally up to about 300 millimeters of focal length and if you
if you're really good at polar alignment um then uh you could probably go for for longer and be five minutes at 300
millimeters so here's an example of what i've done uh deep sky-wise with a star
tracker so this is with the vixen polari my nikon d5300 i took a hundred two
minute exposures at 85 millimeters and this is actually in a portal 5 sky
believe it or not um and at a pretty slow focal ratio because this lens is not a particularly fast lens
and uh this side processed in pixel sight and i was able to pull out a lot more detail than um when i used to
process in deep sky stacker and in photoshop but you could still do reasonably well
using those cheaper bits of software slash easier to use bits of software and i was able to pick up quite a bit we
have m78 over here of course we have orion and the flame in the horse head and i
even picked up the witch head nebula which blew my mind
i'll pick that up from portal 5 with two minute exposures and a slow
lens so uh yeah that this this image was very exciting i despite the fact i'm using
unmodified camera unmodified dslr i managed to pick up some of the red as well and got some
nice red in the horse head so um yeah you can again less than a thousand
dollars for for this image i love the nebulosity in that whole region
yeah yeah there's there's dust there's nebula this this whole area there's there's there's something filling in
every pixel that's for sure uh here's another one where there's something in every pixel um this is with
a nicer camera and a nicer lens uh down again back in the atacama desert this
was using a modified sony a7s mirrorless camera my star adventurer
and the rokinon 135 millimeter f2 which i was borrowing at the time but i just
recently purchased my own thanks to the latest round of stimulus checks so
plugging that back into a worthy uh market um
you know i i recognize m8 here and m20 and you know the milky way
incredible thank you so detailed here's that row of fiat that scott had
mentioned yes this is my favorite right yeah it's it's my favorite too i have that print that i got printed um at aic
in 2019 is i got a frame that is hanging on my uh on my living room wall at the moment
uh again with that sony mirrorless camera the rokinon lens uh which is a really fabulous lens it's fast it's f2
and it has a really good optical quality and it only costs 500 bucks actually
which um if you're into camera gear you know it's pretty cheap for a lens and it's certainly cheaper than telescope
than a good telescope so um i again still i you know keep keeping it
on the cheap side here and still able to get some some incredible images now i will say i have attempted this this
target from the texas star party so from a dark sky site um using my regular dslr
with a cheaper lens and have never been able to get a result quite like this so sometimes putting out a little extra
money for better equipment it's highly worth it um but i got some reasonable images of it before with my uh cheaper
stuff uh one final note on focusing because this is a question that a lot of people
have this is an issue that all people have trouble with when they're shooting with a dslr and a camera lenses how do i how do
i focus at night because autofocus doesn't work when it's dark the camera has to be able to see the target in um a
video type frame exposure like 1 30 of a second which you can't see stars at that
short a time so uh it to focus
if you're uh if you're trying to image uh trying to do some master photography what i do
is um well if you have the moon available to you then that's very helpful but if not because you're imagining
somewhere dark then i point it at somewhere where i know there's a lot of stars you know maybe toward the milky
way and um take about a five second exposure uh and then i i zoom in
and like when i'm looking at the picture on the back of the camera and if the stars make little donuts or big donuts
then you know that you're out of focus and when they start to look pixelated then that's when you know you're in
focus with the shorter focal length with with any pretty much any camera lens you have you're going to be
over sampled uh sorry un uh under sampled on um
because you have more more pixels per area of sky
for that focal length where um the stars are really like smaller than a than a pixel so
um your stars will look pixelated so usually i take a guess i put it
um at infinity which for an automatic lens it's not all the way at the end all the
way where the where the focus or stops usually back a little bit so that when the camera is focusing it doesn't slam
into the end of it when it's auto focusing um so i have a good idea now where infinity is on on most of my
lenses but you know take a guesstimate take a picture and then fine tune from
there until your stars look pixelated and you need to refocus anytime you change your um if you have a zoom lens if you
change the zoom you need to refocus and if you pick up and move your camera it's pretty likely that you've dropped out of
focus right unless you have the type of focuser that you can tape down uh in which case i highly recommend
taping down your focuser um so yeah um if there's uh any
questions i'll be checking the chat or uh scott scott is on it right now if anybody's asked me already but um yeah
space stuffy from the texas star party here yeah just some comments here i mean uh people are very inspired uh
by your work um you know the uh
norm hughes mentions that you could make a mark with a sharpie once you reach focus for future reference
that's if you don't mind a sharpie mark on your camera lens you know so um yeah but um
uh you know i think that you gave some great tips there and i would recommend
before you go to some place like chile or someplace that's very very dark skies
that you do a lot of this in your backyard uh yeah and you practice and you practice you know until uh it
becomes second nature for you and then when you get out there you'll do awesome work just like molly does so
you can practice the whole procedure from from your yard uh you know your picture's not going to be as good but
you can focus you can learn how to polar align the if you're
using one of the tracker rigs um you can practice uh figure out how to use the intervalometer figure out how to use the
manual settings on your dslr if you don't do that already um and you can do all of that before you
go back to your dark site so that you're not wasting precious nighttime hours trying to get your camera to work
molly may i ask you a question yeah i've had some good luck with eclipses with this focus issue
by simply using the back screen and enlarging the image and without actually taking a picture
and enlarging it um have you ever had that and have any luck with it if if there's a if there's a bright
enough star like if i have sirius or um if i have uh vega then the video mode
on my camera at a high iso is enough to pick that up and i can use the live view feature
and and get the star in focus live but i don't always have those um so that this
shirt so doing that the take a picture and check method works for when you don't have either of those two stars or
uh if you don't have a moon to focus on either but yeah you can use your you can use
the live video mode on your dslr if um if you've got a bright star available to you and that works very
nicely as well if it's daytime you can use a really distant object like if you're going to
do or put a solar filter on if it's coming up on solar eclipse time
it can't speak for all focal lengths lenses or um or f ratios but i've actually managed to
auto focus on stars oh really yeah i think possibly some better
cameras might be able to do it um for instance that that sony mirrorless camera
because it's mirrorless uh you can see stars on video mode
on on the sony camera so it might be able to autofocus although the rookie non lens doesn't have autofocus so i
didn't test that out um uh so yeah some of the more sensitive cameras may be able to autofocus um
it might be about the autofocus type too yeah yeah and you have to have a lens that autofocuses and stuff and like only
like two of my lenses have autofocus all the rest of them are manual my uh my sigma 150 to 600 i've managed
to um autofocus uh with the canon 90d oh wow that's awesome i guess it's dual
pixel autofocus just i had to turn the iso up a lot though yeah i won't clarify that i turned the
iso up like a lot to make it work but yeah yeah it's worth a shot you know just wanted to throw it out there it's
worth a shot yeah yeah and that's that's the thing about astrophotography is like if you hear people say that you can't do
something uh take it with a grain of salt because just try it it might work for you you
never know yeah that was like in portal six too oh wow okay i was uh messing around with it
when i was trying to get neowise but unfortunately neowise hovered right above baltimore right in baltimore's lights
sorry um uh let's see uh so um
clearlight 58 says he uses a baton off mask on some of his lenses to focus and
you can buy them in 77 millimeter and 72 millimeter sizes for some lenses
that's true i forgot to mention that i do own a button off mask at the like 77
millimeter size and i used it i use it on my rokinon or use it on my longer focal length lenses um where
i have it on a tracking mount so that um that star stays steady and i can see those those spikes um
yes i use that for my longer lenses for sure and bottom off masks are are excellent and i can just use uh
when i when i have one of my astro cameras attached to the rokinon lens then i can run it in video mode and stretch the
histogram in sharp cap and then i can see that star really easily with a super
overstretched histogram you can buy them in the uh the largest lens objective that you have and use uh
some uh step up or step down rings to um
oh yeah like um
looks like you have the whole set yeah i think the whole set on amazon's less than 20 bucks there you go i mean very
good you know just little rings that just step up from one sorry
yeah okay so uh what's going to happen next here is that uh we're going to
take a uh 10 minute break we'll come back with uh chuck allen who's got a presentation of the mountains of the
solar system right okay and uh and then those of you who
have logged on okay to the waiting room uh uh
i'm about to post a link to our zoom waiting room here in chat okay and if
you have a presentation about astronomy uh you have you know live view through your telescope uh
image that you would like to show us something like that that'd be great we do ask you that you stay on topic about
astronomy this is not a place to to sell personal views or you know the i mean
you can certainly talk a little bit about it but uh it's not not a place for politics
or you know other things like that so um but
definitely we want to hear about your astronomy um and uh we'll take on as many of you as
would like to be on the program tonight um this is kind of an experiment for us but you'll
go into a waiting room first you'll have your audio and video system checked out
um and you'll be meeting with kent martz and he will he will vet you and then give you
the log on for this program uh which is of course another zoom meeting room so
i'll post that now so you can see what the link is you just click on that link it'll take you if you have
zoom on your computer it'll take you straight to that uh
that waiting room and um we will see you in about 10 more minutes so
thanks very much and molly i thought that was an awesome presentation beautiful images thank you
thank you
okay i'm going to go ahead and and take off
and keep working on building my thank you my catio
take care molly your catio is that what it's called yeah i'm i'm building a um
an enclosure and a six by six enclosure in my backyard is gonna have a tunnel
leading from my bedroom window out to the enclosure with a uh with a cat door
yeah in the window and then they can just come in and out and cause they they really want to go outside but i want to
keep them safe so they'll be able to hang out outside enjoy the sunshine and enjoy the
wildlife and um yeah so i'm building it out of a bunch of two by twos and chicken wire
so the assembly is going pretty well so far excellent
excellent yep we'll have to have a full rundown on that with uh plans and uh
you know uh 3d drawings and uh interviews with the cats
oh my gosh that's a great idea that's going to be my next video on my channel all right
thanks thanks molly yeah thanks for having me i'll see you next time yeah it's awesome
have a good night all right good night
all right chuck i'm gonna get some water and uh we'll be back and we'll see who's uh
joining after after this break here okay
you
you
foreign
uh
uh
uh
um
do
well we are back and it looks like uh
for right now it's uh it's uh uh myself and richard uh
um the astro beard and chuck allen from the astronomical league but i know that that uh kent has at least one person
that's going to be coming on with us here in a few minutes but uh chuck i wanted to
i'm very intrigued by your presentation
the audience absolutely loved uh all the presentations you've given so far so
thank you yeah so let's uh let's turn it over to you okay let's
start screen sharing here
all right slideshow current slide okay this is uh going to
be a program about one of my favorite topics mountains i used to do a lot of mountain climbing in
the late 80s 1990s and early 2000s including some in south america and
it's a an activity i loved and so we're going to talk now about mountains not just on earth but we're
not going to exclude the earth we're a planet too so we're going to be looking at planets all excuse me mountains all
through the solar system we're going to start with this one the highest mountain on earth of course
mount everest 29 029 feet above sea level it was first climbed
on may 29 1953 at 11 30 a.m by these two gentlemen
edmund hillary on the left of new zealand tenzig norgay on the right from nepal
and they got lucky history was lucky for them
they were a backup team not intended to go to the summit unless the summit team of charles bordillon and charles evans
failed and bourdillon and evans got within 300 meters of the top of mount everest and had oxygen
tanks freeze up on them and had to turn around that close to the top and so hillary and tenzig norgay got the
green light to go for the summit and they made it becoming world famous as a result in fact there are mountain ranges
on pluto named after both of these guys it's always nice to be remembered in that kind of way
it's not necessarily true though that mount everest is the highest mountain on earth this is a mountain that i had the
opportunity to climb in the year 2000 it's called chimborazzo in ecuador
and it has a claim to being the highest mountain in the world also because its
summit is further from the center of the earth than any other point on the earth's surface including the summit of
mount everest that's because the earth of course is somewhat oblate jumborazzo is very near the equator and
hence its summit is further from the center than the top of mount everest
but the real claim for being the tallest mountain on earth belongs to mauna kea
it's actually a 35 000 foot tall mountain the only problem is 21 000 feet
of it's underwater it rises off of the seabed and we see the top 14 000 or so
feet of it on top of which we have some nice observatories as you know right
looking at our moon we of course have significant mountains the highest of which are in the apennine mountain range
and the most significant of those is mount higgins and huygens is
a very significant mountain about eighteen thousand feet tall that's about four
thousand feet taller than pikes peak above sea level um and
nearby though in the lunar highlands we can find some higher terrain it's in the leibniz mountains this is really an
uplift it's not a mountain range as such but these mountains the live mountains
rise to a height of about 35 000 feet above the average radius of the moon and
so that would really be the highest point that we know of on the moon's surface
on mercury we have the caloris basin and it has a very significant central uplift
which you see here and that uplift rises to a height of
about 10 000 feet higher than the average plane of mercury which you see out here
which is pretty significant venus though has a much taller mountain
this is maxwell montes maxwell montes is 36 000 feet tall
uh we can't see it visually of course this is a radar image we we can't see it visually because of the cloud cover but
we certainly have imaged it and the surface temperature on venus of course
runs at about 863 degrees fahrenheit and the pressure
of the carbon dioxide atmosphere is about 90 atmospheres that's the equivalent of
being 3000 feet deep in water however if you're at the top of maxwell
montes you're in less pressure and in a cooler environment so it's at the top of maxwell monte's up here
you would be in a nice balmy 716 degrees fahrenheit and only about 1500 feet deep
in water as far as pressure is concerned now the
mountain that seems to hold everyone's record for being the the highest mountain in the solar system is olympus
mons on mars it rises 69 841 feet above the average radius of
mars and about 85 000 feet above this plane that lies below it it's a very
very large flat sort of mountain would cover the entire state of arizona
if it were placed there and so it's not steep by any means
now here's a comparison of olympus moths with mount everest the base of mount everest is about 17
000 feet above sea level and then it rises 29 000 feet and here's olympus mons by comparison so
it's quite a significant mountain now the question is will this hold the record is this going to end up being the
highest mountain in the solar system when i'm done here so far so good let's see what happens
we go next to series and on series the largest of the
asteroids we find uh hula mons at 13 000 feet above the
average surface plane of ceres this is a cryovolcano
very similar to ones that we have found on saturn's moon enceladus and on neptune's moon triton it outgasses water
and methane and ammonia but not hot lava it's cold material and this is the closest cryovolcano to the sun
on this particular world not very tall but there's another asteroid out there
called ria called vesta vesta is one of the largest asteroids
also and on vesta we have a mountain called riya silvia and ria silvia rises 72
178 feet above the average radius of the asteroid vesta
that's our winter that is the highest mountain in the solar system it even beats out
olympus mons saturn's moon mimas
well excuse me this is another image of ria sylvia taken from a distance you can see this
huge bulge here on on the asteroid incredibly tall
now on jupiter's moon io we have a mountain that's been produced by
volcanic material of course io is very close to jupiter so
as it rotates it gets stretched one way and then stretched another and just like you would take a piece of metal and bend
it and re-bend it and re-bend it it gets hot and so i was a very very volcanically active moon and this
mountain has built up to a height of about 59 664 feet above the surface plane or the
average radius in this case of io saturn's moon mimas has a very
significant crater it makes it look like the death star and that crater called the herschel
crater is 86 miles in diameter which is about a third the diameter of the moon and it has a tremendous central uplift
as you can see it's shadow here and that central uh uplift is 21 040 feet tall
above the average radius if this were if this mountain were in the united states it would be taller
than even mount mckinley or denali in alaska
saturn's moon iapetus has also a very tall peak that you see here it's on
a ridge and it rises to 63 360 feet above the
average radius of that particular world now uranus's moon oberon has what's
called a limb mountain it's detected by its position on the limb it rises 36 900
feet above the average radius of oberon this is higher above the plane than
everest is above sea level and that maximum location is above the average radius of venus so again very
significant especially considering it's on a small moon this should not be surprising though if you were to sit in
your dining room and pour salt on a table uh in a pile it would only get so high and then the grains would begin to
fall off because of the of course gravity on mars that pile would get a lot taller on oberon it would get taller
still so it's not unusual to find these very tall mountains on very small worlds like
vesta and oberon one of the really interesting mountainous features that you this is
just an example of what i just stated as far as piling up salt grains
one of the most interesting features you'll find in the solar system is this cliff
on uranus's moon miranda now miranda is only 300
miles in diameter it is a collection of blocks that many people think are the result of miranda
being destroyed and re-collecting again gravitationally leaving very sharp features like these
cliffs that are known as verona roofs these cliffs are 33 000 feet tall
it's about 12 miles tall so the question i have is wouldn't it be fun to jump off of these i mean after
all a 150 pound person standing on miranda would only weigh a third of a pound
so if you jump off these cliffs you figure well it's going to be a very long slow ride to the bottom it might be kind
of fun and sure enough if you did jump off of it after 10 seconds of falling you would
have only gone 50 feet off the top um the trouble is it's a 12 mile drop
and you're going to pick up speed there like you would anywhere else only at a much slower rate than you would on the
earth unfortunately by the time you got to the bottom you would hit with the same impact you would feel if you jumped
off a 25 story building so it's not advised
pluto of course has ice mountains tremendously tall mountains of ice that would crumble under the pressure of gras
under gravitational attraction on a larger world but on pluto they
managed to get much taller there are ice mountains here as tall as 20 500 feet uh picard mons is the
highest of those and it lies in a mountain range that's named after tenzig norgay so he's got a mountain range with
the highest mountain on pluto and there it is right there uh very interesting little world so
that's a review and this is kind of the summary of all the mountains that we visited
during the course of this a little presentation uh mount everest is here
and as you can see it beats out the moon it beats out pluto beats out ceres
uh maxwell montes beats everest mauna kea though if you take it from the base
of the ocean it comes very close to maxwell mountains not quite
the limb mountain on oberon a little bit taller and that io volcanic
mountain buoy salamantes almost 60 000 feet the equatorial bulge on the apotus
olympus mons and the winner riya silvia on vesta at 72 000 feet and here's our
little verona roots down here if you want to take that jump do so but you're going to need some awfully good springs when you get to the bottom
okay that is it
goodness so uh i think that there's probably some
presidents of astronomy clubs watching this one they're going to be asking you to do these presentations all over
well mark helton thank you for joining us um uh it's great to have you on the
global star party uh we this is uh we we asked for you know uh
people to join us for the final hour and um uh you know i think it's uh uh
was it was it pretty seamless for you to go into our waiting room and i guess uh
kemp was waiting for you over there oh yeah this is great and kent uh kent is wonderful and i want to thank
chuck i have absolutely enjoyed all of his talks in the last i think at
least the last four star parties you took us on a tour of the universe uh the largest and smallest uh
you've yeah every one of those uh has been great i love watching astro beard's stuff
um i'm a beginner so not as a camera person but as an
astrophotographer so um yeah and it was very easy kent's wonderful very nice
happy he's done with kovid and uh you guys have all been really very
welcoming i'm very happy to be a part of this it's great it's great is there anything um uh have you already
made some astrophotographs have you started um can i share my screen yeah
sure all right well first of all this the shop behind me i took in 2017
beautiful i went to tennessee uh westmoreland tennessee uh
my friend and i i went to cincinnati where i grew up and stayed with a friend we camped out in kentucky
at a lake and then i said let's find a place we're not a hundred million people aren't going and we found
this little town called westmoreland to shoot the uh the eclipse and um i
i think i commented in one of the meetings that i had had i had four cameras set up and i will never do that
again that was a big i remember yeah yeah um yeah because you can't experience the eclipse when you're just
running from camera to camera well the coolest thing though was that i did i facebook lived it i'm not on
facebook anymore but back then i facebook lived it so i had a bunch of my friends and friends of friends watching
and i had a monitor set up to my camera so that all the kids that were in the park that we found
which was in the middle of westmoreland could come over and watch the eclipse as
it was happening live because i had my camera i was tracking it uh with one uh
i saw molly talked about the star star watcher um i had one of those going and um the
other cool thing was that i never would have thought of the mayor of the town sent the electric
company over to shut the lights off around the park
and i i actually interviewed the the uh the uh not the mayor but the electric
company i said who told you to come over here and do this ah the mayor said there's a bunch of people over at the park go shut the lights off
and i was like oh yeah because when it gets dark and sure enough when it went total
the lights around the neighborhood came on and the lights in the park it was dark i
i thought that was the nicest thing that you know yeah so if you're ever in westmoreland
tennessee uh which is north of uh nashville say hi to the mayor and tell
him i think he's in astronomy better yeah
all right so let me see if i can so do you have my screen now oh no
no yeah you have to pick wow you're a beginner really that was taken
three weeks ago wow that's with a sony a7s
okay uh excuse me a7 iii i don't have the s um that was uh and a uhc
what is the filter it's a uhc
uh hang on i gotta put my glasses on uhce filter ultra high contrast
and i i did the the beginning of the uh the processing i have a friend who i've
gotten hooked on astrophotography in the last three months and he went out and bought a bunch of equipment and
but he's really good at processing so he put this in photoshop and and
if you saw the original photo of this it looks like a green photo with stars
and a smudge and what we were able to pull out of it is just amazing yeah the image
processing is uh the other half of astrophotography that's for sure but uh you got the data
and that's what counts yeah so this is an unmodified this was before i got a coma corrector okay i now have a coma
corrector which makes the outer stars a lot better and let's see this is this was taken two
nights ago beautiful um again this is
you can see a little bit of green tinge because we're still having trouble pulling the uhc filter out but um we're
working on it but yeah the detail from the the sony a73 is just
i i am actually going to buy a designated camera i've i now know which one i'm
going to get and um but i'm amazed what i can do with the
dslr it's just uh phenomenal yeah and it's fun that's great and then
the last one i'll show you is this this is the m51a
um i took this about two weeks ago um this was with the coma corrector so the
outer star this is cropped in a little bit but i don't know what galaxy i'd like to figure out what galaxy this is
right here i have to look at the chart but again just to be able to get a shot like
this with a you know i have a celestron mount sorry
no that's fine uh which i'm having some problems with but um and then i have a six-inch newtonian
um that i've been using uh and it's been so much fun this this the
pandemic has been horrible but uh it's given me time to really work on this hobby of mine
that's great i have a bunch of others but i won't bore you with them i have uh
i have a lot of stuff that i've been doing let's talk a little bit i mean so that people can get to know you a little
bit better mark um you uh i know you've watched our programs uh
and you have uh uh you've been involved in astronomy for a long time i mean i i
realize you've been doing astrophotography for not a whole lot of time but uh
you must have had an interest for for a while um i actually started in cincinnati when i was a kid uh
i i went to the um and i actually just read about this uh telescope it's in downtown it's in
actually right outside of cincinnati and supposedly it was one of the first i'm trying to figure out how not to share my
screen oh there we go stop sure i'll worry about that there we go here we go um i it's a refractor it's
it was actually designed before the one that they built in
at the harvard astronomy harvard astrophysics um and i went there as a kid and i saw
saturn through that refractor and that was it i was sold that was
um and then i started i would go up on the roof of my house in uh outside of cincinnati and i would sit
with binoculars and charted the moons of jupiter and then i ended up taking a
college level intro to astronomy class when i was in high school
um but never really i mean i'd always been into astronomy but it was only in the last
few years that i actually started getting more serious about it so i've been into astronomy for most of my life but
not at the level that i've gotten to in the last you know three or four years so
right well there i mean people are commenting in chat right now and they love your
astrophotography and they think you've done excellent work i would have to agree with them
so you know we're going to be looking looking forward to seeing more work from you
is there anything that you'd like to any more you'd like to share or anything i just really love to say that i this is
you guys putting this together i'm serious i do a lot of work for companies i do a lot of marketing work and i do a
lot of advertising work and the customer service in this world right
now is the most important thing that you as a company can do and to be able to reach
out to people not just for you as a company but just to bring people together i mean i've
learned in just the last four or five months that i've been watching these
i have learned so much and you know
i mean molly's been great to watch uh um astrobeard i just you know everybody
um and the comments on are friendly uh i don't live far from vermont so getting
up to cellophane was something i was planning on doing for the first time this past summer
hopefully i'll be able to do that this summer um the gentleman from quebec uh
norman fulham oh norman fulham oh yeah yeah anybody out there that wants to steal my
idea i'm i want to do a documentary on him i just think that he is he's
an incredible not in one of the shows yeah he he's an incredible character he's just like you know he's
just somebody who basically is self-taught and now he's making 50-inch
mirrors with a with a home built essentially oh yeah i took a dairy truck
and i turned it into a i know i know i mean when i heard him talking about that
i'm like he took a musician he's you know he blows me away because i know
you know i know from being in the industry and being in the manufacturing side you know how difficult it would be
i i mean i watched people reconfigure uh vacuum coating chambers
that were designed for making silicon wafers to convert them for optics it's
not easy okay this is not easy stuff he built his whole system from scratch oh i
know when he said well i used to go to pittsburgh to get my mirrors done and they they closed and i was gonna buy
their stuff and they wouldn't sell it to me so i went and got a dairy truck and threw two pieces of a dairy truck together and now i'm pressurizing
you know and then i figured out how to make a mirror that's you know thinner than what you would normally make you
know when we when you guys did the star party on the wilson and you see the truck taking that mirror
up the hill and here this guy is building a 50-inch mirror right 65-inch mirrors even really so bigger than the
wilson bigger bigger than mel wilson yeah i mean you know he's kind of like uh i mean
elon musk is uh self-taught completely self-taught and most of the stuff he's doing uh you know
and i look at i look at norman norman uh i mean he he bared his soul on the
show you know he had he had drug problems as oh no that and the guy you had on last week carlos
right callers aragon another guy you know being homeless and
you know strong strung out on painkillers and uh you know and then found through
astronomy really is you know a salvation for you know to revive his
life and he pays it all back by you know giving away thousands of meals
to homeless people and giving them inspiration from uh through his telescopes even
during a coveted pandemic okay uh you know he gets approval from the
city of tucson to to uh use uh plexiglas uh shields yeah
the little shields to put over the yeah i was like wow this is like yeah i mean it's just amazing you know
i hear a recurring uh story a lot how how astronomy helped people in many
different ways just completely allowing you to reframe you know all of you what you thought
what your problems were or whatever you know you look at these these pictures of galaxies
and you know the the uh the model or the the uh the visualization
that david eicher had on the show today of the uh of our milky way galaxy you know with
a little you know showing where our little dot of the of our solar system is and and the
orion spur you know and we're are galaxies flying with
billions of other galaxies yeah yeah it's just this amazing incredible
expanding universe it's it's amazing and it's it's still it's amazing how many people still don't know i mean i
i i wouldn't say that there are people in the club that i'm a member i'll give a little plug for my club it's uh the
app mob which is uh amateur telescope makers of boston i joined them about four years ago and
they have some heavy hitters and you know uh it's just amazing you know there's
people in that club who can sit there and look up at the stars and tell you exactly what everything is and where i'm not like that but even if i say to
somebody oh that's orion or that's cassiopeia you know they're like oh really how do
you know that i didn't know that exactly oh the other okay so that's the baton off mask that i was
commented on um so all i did was took a like uh
astrobeard said i took a um just a this this one doesn't have any
filter in it but you could just use a regular uv filter uh and these bat enough masks fit right
inside you just stick them right inside the filter so this is for a 72 millimeter so that has a filter in it
that's cool uh and then this one is a 77 millimeter um
the other thing that the sony a73 does is it has a hyper gamma type of a
setting where and it really helps with focusing some of the newer cameras have this where you
can go and you can put it in on one of the uh the preset buttons on the camera where
it hyper you know it expands the iso greatly so now all of a sudden a very
dim star becomes very bright star so that makes it a lot easier to focus um
i'm i'm very sold on baton off masks now yes me too i i've used them and it's
just so it's such a precision way to focus you know yeah that's right the only other thing
i'll say is once again thank you for everything you guys you're it's oh there you go there you go
mister himself that's right can i ask you about the clear ones uh do they work the same
way as the um they not only work the same way i would say that they work um
quite a great deal better really uh because they let through all the light and
uh as opposed to knocking out half the lights so you can still use them on dimmer stars
or less exposure time just makes it faster easier um and if
you're trying to focus in real time you almost want as close to video as you can get
you know what i mean so you're not like move the knob wait a second for the exposure to happen move them you know
that's if you're still moving the knob not pressing a button i'm i'm still moving the knob
it was 15 degrees out here the other night and i can now run my camera from ins i can run everything from inside via
uh usb cable so sony told me i couldn't do it they said we don't ha we don't know how you can
run us i have a 60 foot usb cable and i run a usbc into my mac
and it it runs the i can use the sony program for for image capture i still
haven't figured out how to get my sony into nebulosity or one of those yet um but uh the the other thing uh
oh i lost track but anyway yeah so that's that's been it's it's just been cool because it was
so cold out there the other night but i still have to run out i have coyotes that literally were running up the
driveway this past they were out last night but i was i wasn't out last night but i've had coyotes i've had skunks i you
the guy from wilson he talked about the cougar i think that yeah chased him down the mountain that one time
um yeah oh the other the only other guy i want to talk about that i just thought was fascinating was when you did the
verna von braun uh club meeting right and the guy
the older retired gentleman who built the frankenscope oh yeah
that awesome i absolutely loved that that was the most rube goldberg
i but it was perfect because he said yeah he said i have a problem i have an a a dobsonian i don't know how to track
and instead of sitting there going well i'm going to just get rid of it and go out and buy one i mean i've never seen that kind of
[Laughter] that was amazing i looked at that and i saw people coming kind of like oh i
can't believe he did that he's reinventing the wheel well yeah but somebody had to invent the wheel
that's true i just never tell an amateur astronomer he can't do something you know because
they'll figure it out so oh no with 3d printing now and all the other things that are out there i mean i can't tell
you the amount of stuff i've got you know being in the tv business i i've had
to jury rig and rube goldberg more more uh
things than you know just doing what i do for a living i i've worked on this i worked on this show zoom on pbs for
seven years so um so the only other thing i'll do is plug my my new instagram so i'm out there
with the billions of other people on instagram it's great great neck observatory
and all like one word great oh like one yeah i live i live now in a place called
great neck which is in ipswich massachusetts and i went from bortle
one to portal five awesome so it's a lot darker out here but the
coyotes can be a bit of an annoyance well thank you very much this has been
fun i love you these meetings i really do thank you thank you it's helped me through the pandemics
we're going to do the final hour program
every global star party from here on out so you know if you want to join you want to share your story share your images uh
you got a live image to a telescope something like that uh love to have you on the global star party uh it's the
this program has been watched by a worldwide audience um oh that's the other i love that the the
guys from down in south america have been yeah they weren't on today but uh i love the guy i also love the guy and uh
he's on his 12th 12-story balcony in uh is it saballo or
yeah it's caesar he's in uh he's in buenos aires buenos aires yeah i'm like
hey just goes to show you know you want to look at the stars if you're
stuck on a balcony 12 stories up in the middle of a big city yep he got us uh he
got his live images of the total eclipse uh from you know the 2020
eclipse from argentina you know when a lot of most of the other places are actually clouded out it wasn't great
resolution but we got the excitement which was really cool you know so um
and you know it's also awesome to have uh you know richard grace has been on
all of our programs i think uh tuesdays yep the astronomical league has been
with us to uh support our programs and be with us with the global audience
they're now doing their own uh astronomy astronomical league live presentations
which was totally cool uh you know we've got so many more of the programs coming up
next global star party and you can be mark if you want to join us anytime i
love your enthusiasm and your insight but we will be on next thursday not tuesday
but thursday because it's clyde tomba's 115th birthday okay and so
the editors and the contributing editors of astronomy magazine are going to be co-hosting this uh the astronomical
league will be there dave levy will be there um you know so it's it's going to be a real who's who of uh contributors
to uh the amateur astronomy world which will be a lot of fun um but
please join us so i will i was actually doing two things tonight because the app
mob just got a new 17-inch telescope that they're going to be using for av
aavso work and um so they had a thing i had one screen
tonight with you guys and the other screen was they were teaching people about the new cmos
camera that they have for the it's it's going to be totally remotely operated it's it's ready to go they've got the
pillars ready to put everything up on they just uh can't do it yet because we're on the same we're at the mit um
haystack observatory that's where the club house is and the mit right now we can't go up
there because of covid but as soon as that breaks they're going to be mounting the telescope up and it'll be open for
um scientists as well i guess is part of the thing with this new scope um
but yeah they were teaching us about the cmos cameras and so it's been learning a
lot that's great thank you mark that's awesome all right well i'm gonna keep watching but i'll uh
stay with us here uh uh richard wants to share a little bit more before we call
it a night so right on
i guess first we'll start here mm-hmm um i got the uh the ed80 uh
secured on top of the uh well it's common hunter good and solid now
it's very solid yeah we still got some some work to do overall but we we got that one on good and solid here
and uh let's see um here was neo wise this was my variant of
it um pretty up close and personal aqua green
color of the comet head there it's beautiful let's see uh
quick here a little horsehead image that we did uh i believe that was on stream
um yeah this guy this guy wasn't on the stream but uh we we got a good shot of that and
all the rest of these were all from uh the stream here uh since august this was from the uh the first
show yeah look how sharp that is and that was the uh
uh the great globular cruster and hercules and then we had the western veil what we
did on the show and the eastern veil on the show and the second one that we did was the
dumbbell and one of my favorite ones not the best but that was still shot
with the first light 130. so yeah got to put that one out there
and then overall i got to thank explorer scientific because uh this one here was one of my first shots
that i messed with on the moon and it uh it helped uh to get my new scope that's going to be coming soon um through the
astrophotography contest i love this shot because this one uh came
um oh gosh about an hour after the sun came up just to get the blue and everything
and yeah just the way i wanted it and i still love that shot yeah it's beautiful
just a little uh you'll have to enter into the astronomical league um uh uh
astrophotography contests you know we're sponsoring that at this time and uh
um so that will uh is that the one that starts in february uh the deadline would be
to be determined at this point richard uh because we we've just scott's just offered to help us with it
and we're trying to get it back on track yeah that's cool we're trying to figure out the rules
by the way nice job picking up 6207 in that m13 picture it was a nice
moderate view a wide view thank you
worked out well mark if i can add something uh first of all thank you for your very
kind remarks earlier i really appreciate that um your work is fantastic uh can i ask you
what you how you your tracking is just superb what are you using uh i have a
well for those shots i'm using a celestron avx um
which i bought used and i'm i'm having some slight it's drifting i have to figure out why it's drifting but it's
been drifting it could be my polar alignment this is what scott i will say that
um that's one of the things that i you know and and i've been i'm very interested in
in your amounts um is that no matter how hard i try to polar align
and i know that this is a it just seems like that is the the one thing where if i don't get it
exactly right it messes up the entire night and now right now i'm using a full-frame camera yeah so i don't have
to be super accurate when i'm looking for you know stars to sure right
so you can you can be a little off on pointing maybe but uh um you know getting getting uh uh you
know a great polar alignment does make everything just a lot better um
uh you might consider things like a pull master uh device qhy sells those um
uh uh you could learn how to drift a line that that's typically the way that i go you know just because i
you know it takes time to do drift alignments but i just love the process of it you know the hardest thing that i
have right now is that i'm kind of forced to use their program
i haven't figured out how to get the celestron program to talk talk to either stellarium or
one of the other because it's it's kind of a rudimentary program it doesn't have really good you know the charts aren't
really good um so what this is what i would recommend to you that you learn how to
manually pull our line okay yep all right then you can use your electronics
but just go through the motions okay uh because if you did a good manual puller
alignment uh that is uh you know that's especially if you do a drift alignment
and you know that you're the proper offset from the pole and everything um
you know any any misgivings that uh uh that you might have had in doing
electronic alignment or are you know mitigated because you've you've got a
great polar alignment what you can do is just kind of go through the process of it of
of maybe doing a two-star alignment or even a one-star alignment get on something
more or less overhead don't don't try for things near the horizon because you have atmospheric refraction right okay
get a little overhead gets get on a star that uh that you feel is um
you know not too close to the pole uh maybe not straight overhead uh
and then just sink on it all those all those uh go-to mounts have a sync feature sync on it at that point it
should be able to find everything else from there okay and um
that's my recommendation so are you guiding uh i'm not i i
i had this i've had to sell a number of things and i sold the friend that i was telling you about out in india and i
sold him some of my stuff that would have you know just to get me through this time but um i had the uh asa or pro
and i had a camera that i was going to be using for guiding
um that'll come back eventually and i'll start to do that as well um
but uh i i have also been i've learned about stacking that's one of the things i was
learning about tonight in terms of doing flats and darks and um
you know that's that's stuff that's new for me but um the drifting for me just so you know chuck when you were asking
about you know i'm my tracking is really good once i get that set it's just it's
slow you know as i take exposures they move across
the stacking programs if it doesn't get too far off can bring it back but um
you know this like i said this is all stuff that i've been learning and um
it's interesting uh how i find that um
with all the forums there's 10 000 ways to do all this stuff that's right and it's trying to find someone or or a
group of people who kind of you know i mean there's cloudy
nights and there's a few of these other sites that i've been trying to learn from and there's and there's a youtube
video for everything now but but i've really found that there are a thousand ways to do the same thing and
it's just figuring out which one works for you so um
yeah it's fun it's frustrating i mean there are nights when i waste the entire night i get the stuff back and i look at
it and i'm like no that was you know but that orion nebula was shot uh the
30 mile an hour winds the other night i was shocked wow i was out and i said you know what it's
clear i haven't had a clear night in two weeks i'm gonna go and set up and the wind it
was howling and i was shocked at how well i was i mean the atmosphere must
have been turbulent too so the stars if you look at that photo the stars are not
super super sharp but i'm like hey 30 mile an hour winds i'm i was very happy with that
right you know the camera i'm looking at is the the five five five three three the zwo five
three three it seems to be the one that's gonna match my my scope the best um
so that's that's my next position yeah can i i just show you one
other or one or two other and i don't want to keep please all right hang on
so that's that's neowise um wow that's beautiful that's
why i can tell you're a pro photographer uh very nice yeah the the i actually have one i i
couldn't find it but i have one shot with the space station going through the shot it just happened to it's not in
great focus because i swung around right when it was coming by but um
and then let's see and then this was my closer view of
and you can see a little star drift on this one but i was okay there's you know it's it's the comet and and you got the
you know you got the dust tail you got the ion tail uh it's beautiful yeah and the thing is
is that i'm shooting to the north and there's a not a big city but it's big enough that there's a lot of sky glow
and neowise never really got very high in the sky at least not not here in new england
so fighting the uh the sky glow to get decent shots was you know and and again
i am not the best at processing so i think i could get even more out of this
i do shoot everything with ra raw uh raw photos um
and then this was the other night uh you have to look carefully but that's
um [Music] see what was it it was mercury is mercury is here okay i think
no this is saturn this was the three of the uh planets when they were in conjunction
uh jupiter jupiter let's see which one's mercury mercury's
this one i think it's going to be way down yeah this is jupiter this is mercury and this is saturn
so i was just and that's a jet going into logan airport that just happened to be going by so
anyway there you go i i mean i i've been doing all the geeky stuff too i've been trying to you know i have a really
really great south my view is mostly southeast southwest to
southeast i have almost clear all the way you know all across that my north
east to northwest is blocked by pine trees so i have to wait till things like uh
some of the galaxies get really high before i can shoot that so but uh anyway yeah thank you there's
there's some comments here um norm hughes is recommending that uh you
download phd and do driftaline uh that's what i used on my avx when i
had it okay a guy named tal he says i polar aligned with sharp cap's polar
alignment tool i've heard that's good too and the capture and the and the capture
off of the tracking scope uh has been working amazingly well
um you know the guy chiming in too with phd2 just really likes it
uh john says i bought a celestron vistapix i am imaged lunar eclipse and looked at
this on my television i think you need a memory card because the memory slows uh so much okay
anthony mount joyce says having to sell your equipment to get through these times is an all too familiar story these
days stay focused better days and nights ahead okay that's right
um chris larson says thank thank you uh thanks to you and the astronomical
league for such a consistently great program this is my fourth or fifth time at this meeting and i learn
many things each time i join the astronomical league at the end of december and i just started the universe
sampler observer program i'm in quite a rural uh in quite rural northern
california and you guys and the astronomical league is how i get my astronomy education
hoping to start a local club with like-minded people one day early work day tomorrow but can't bring myself to
sign off okay um
let's see uh norm hugh says welcome to astronomy never perfect every time
exactly right uh guys it's it's awesome uh you guys
are a wonderful audience tonight um i look forward to more of you joining us
for the final hour uh you'll get your shot uh february 4th uh
with the uh the with um astronomy magazine editors and
with the astronomical league so uh please join us um i think you'll find it's a lot of fun
mark thank you very much uh for breaking the ice here with our final hour program and
richard thanks for hanging in there with us throughout the whole program and chuck what an amazing uh you know presentation
again i just love those you know yeah those are the best i am a uh
uh subscriber to a uh a company called status statista i think
is what it's called and it's statistics on all kinds of things okay and this
this program that that you did i was just going this this is perfect you know this visualization of all those
mountains and everything i was just you know i was thinking of that so but i loved it it's great thank you very much
i appreciate that great stuff well um anything else that anybody else
wanted to add before we go it looks like okay just thank you have a
good one thanks scott forever thank you very much thanks and martin i will try to unzip
your um uh your file on my windows machine tomorrow i'm sorry i couldn't do it
tonight and we'll try to show that on on the program tomorrow we will be back on
as we are every day at four o'clock central and um until then uh keep looking up we'll see
you take care bye
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