Global Star Party 31

Transcript:

we see the whole thing presented you had it for like three seconds yeah i was hoping that i could uh split
screen it just to have my script as like a safety blanket you can uh i've done that it's um when you do share screen
you do share a window or something yeah it's when you hit share screen at all it
here let me try and see if i can do it go um if you hit do your screen yeah there you go
well so let's just make sure hopefully that works
still just powerpoint oh it was we are live right now but uh you guys can go ahead and get set up as
you'd like to let people get seated
alan i was just remarking to david and david i said i i just can't
imagine cannot imagine having a better group of people together
to talk about clyde tomba and to talk about the discovery of pluto
and the ongoing research of pluto i mean this is it if you had to you got your pick out of
all the people in the world to talk about it i think uh it would be tough to pick a better group
so it's gonna be great looking forward
okay hi mark hi everyone how are you doing not bad i i came in about a minute ago
but i i couldn't hear anyone so i had to in case you were saying hi to me and i wasn't responding i
was not totally ignoring you um or at least it wasn't deliberate
i see i didn't get the memo on dress code so i'm just going to stick with the t-shirt [Laughter]
if i'm in my very fancy north face uh fleece pullover it's uh
about as formal as i get these days in the pandemic my mom was very concerned about my
background and i was like this this is where the computer is sorry the people want to see the real
the real setting right yeah they get to see what we see you know [Laughter]
my second bedroom the only place the cat can't get i'm wondering if i can make it through the
whole talk without the cat trying to break down the door we're gonna see
although i don't think you guys can hear it because he usually does it during meetings and i assume you don't hear it so that's all that matters
now allison i can't hear then we're good
edward murray says hello dave and david and he also says hi hey allen
so
and everybody listening right now if you can uh this is an outreach effort so you'll want to share this
this program with your friends
armando is uh watching from the philippines
john adler from new mexico is on chris larson
thank you chris for sharing it's great
um
hmm
hello carol it's good to see you
oh david how are you doing today oh i'm doing pretty well thank you got some of those beautiful skies in
arizona again tonight it's gonna be a clear clearest night tonight i think so hope to use it a
little bit we got the type of snows in kansas city i like today it melted off after about
two hours [Music]
hey carol good to see you hi how you doing dave i'm doing keep hanging in there keeping busy that's
what we got to do i think
what an exciting uh lineup for tonight
this is going to be quite an interesting night and and a number of presentations so cloud would
be very proud he undoubtedly would be i think he would be yeah i think he'd enjoy this himself
if you were alive today yeah
but instead he's sort of patrolling and keeping keeping new horizons all nicely dusted
and keeping it all nice and nice and fresh for its next target and
whatever it's doing now
so david if anybody on earth would know this you probably
would did you ever ask clyde about um
the 1918 pandemic which he lived through as a kid
yeah in fact they lost one of their relatives in it we talked quite a bit about the 1918
pandemic yeah in fact i think in my biography it might even say say that that they lost one of
their uh relatives i think patsy is one of patsy's relatives was lost in it
so it was pretty serious probably not as serious as this one is but um
but yeah yeah they did we talked about it at length yeah my grandfather lived through it and
he he lost his mother due to the pandemic yeah wow and she was a young woman 40 years ago
and the fact that it happened immediately after the first world war actually during the first world war
and just extended on for two years we're now in the second year of this one
so i hope we're almost on the way out of it please let's be on the way out of it
well let's hope we're all vaccinated by this summer and and that will give us a window toward
some kind of normality you would hope again yeah we had a visit just a couple of
hours ago from our local fire chief and they're looking into building a very
small uh station on one of our lots and now for an ambulance and
which is kind of interesting and uh he's already gotten his vaccines but we haven't gotten ours yet
i'm on three different lists but none have called yet no yeah i was just getting kind of like
house arrest i thought magazine editors are on the a1 list
i'm a 1c which my physician may be right or wrong but i just had a virtual
uh annual physical as weird as that is went in to donate blood but then just
talked to my doctor remotely but according to him i'm supposed to get stuck in may whether that's true or not
i don't know that sounds about right to me i hope so and i hope that there'll be a lot more
um um vaccines out very soon now they've just we've just bought a whole bunch of
them so hoping that the availability will be
increased i understand the one that's on the horizon no pun intended right now is a
just a one uh shot situation yeah it is i think the astrazeneca one or is
it the i think it's johnson but uh still it would take it's going to
take a while to get it into the mainstream yeah i think so
in the meantime we look for people to get excited about the night sky
um okay i think we're i think we're all set
just got a couple of minutes here but uh if you guys are ready we can go ahead and get started
how do you think ready when you are and you're going to do an intro presumably scotty i will i sure will
here we go
[Applause]
well hello everyone uh it is my pleasure to bring together this group of amazing
astronomers space explorers authors and
just lovers of the night sky we all gather together tonight to celebrate the 115th uh birthday of clyde
tamba the discover of pluto and we've uh we have
clyde tamba's biographer david levy with us we have the entire editorial staff of
astronomy magazine headed up by david eicher we have
the principal investigator of the new horizons spacecraft and the extended mission out to the kuiper belt
uh
alan uh why am i losing alan stern how could i forget
and we also have kevin schindler kevin schindler is the historian at the
lowell observatory and he's inside the uh the pluto discovery telescope dome and
so i'm excited i all week long it's just been building
and building this excitement and thinking about these amazing people that are here with us tonight uh
i would like to think that uh clyde tomba would be
thrilled to to be here to watch this and we hope that all of you
have come prepared with questions and thoughts about our exploration of the outer parts of
our solar system and so i'm going to introduce
david eicher david is the editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine
and they are the that whole editorial staff they're the co-host of this program
uh i have had david on oh many times uh on the global star party uh he's a great
friend he is extremely knowledgeable about astronomy in many different aspects
he loves music he has put together some of the big events in this
astronomical community including starmus and um uh we're proud to have him on the
show and i think is this the first time that you've had the whole editorial staff on a
program like this this is the first time so it's very very exciting to me and not
only to have um old friends scott roberts david levy
alan stern who i've known uh kevin schindler who i've known practically my whole astronomical life
since before you can even imagine when i was young it's so long ago but to have the whole ass staff of
astronomy magazine is is really an honor nearly the whole staff was really an honor here to me and for a
long time i was the young guy my whole career at astronomy with a bunch of older people
and now i'm the old guy and so i'm taking a great great pleasure
tonight in introducing all the the incredible young people who i get to work with
now so so yes indeed thanks scott for having us all here yeah
if you guys can't tell i'm nervous i forgot alan stern's name so that's how nervous i am all right we have some
incredible people here and uh so let's get started
very good well we're going to go first to one of my oldest friends who i think i've known since i was 19 years old
back when we were all hanging around going to star parties and we knew that david levy would become one
of the great preeminent personalities one of the great discoverers one of the great writers one of the most well-known
uh movers and shakers in the world of astronomy and indeed he did known for
his comet discoveries known for his work with gene and carolyn shoemaker known
for his co-discovery of comet shoemaker levy 9 that impacted jupiter in 1994 in
a very dramatic fashion the discoverer of many comets as well along the way and one of the
all-around nicest and most interesting people in this field in the last um
half century plus so it's a great great honor to introduce
one of my oldest friends in astronomy who as scott mentioned was clyde's close
friend and biographer david thanks for being here thank you so much
david and scotty and it's good to be here and it's i really want to thank you all and i
bring greetings from wendy she's saying hi i bring greetings from carolyn shoemaker
who is saying hello and i wish i would bring greetings from clyde and if he uh if he were living
he'd be 115 today and we would celebrate his birthday today so um
i guess instead he is out there on new horizons uh keeping it dusted and keeping it all
set all set for the new generations of people who will be working with that beautiful
spacecraft over the next dozen years or so
i'm going to tell you a little bit about clyde i remember when i was a little boy
and uh just getting interested in astronomy and dad was trying to tell me not to
take too much ex interest in astronomy because he didn't want me to have my
head in the clouds and my feet in the clouds he said put them on the ground from time
to time don't make astronomy the most important thing in your life and i said to myself
okay i won't make it the most important thing i'll make it the only thing clyde would've liked that i think
anyway uh he didn't even believe what he said himself all that much
because i think the very next night at dinner he started to tell the story of the discovery of the outer planets
uranus with sir william herschel of the musician turned astronomer
the discovery of neptune and then the discovery of pluto by clyde tombaugh and of course i had to read about the
discovery of pluto because i knew right then that clyde tomball was actually still
living and he was still an active person in the field of astronomy
being an asthmatic i had to spend a year and a half at the jewish national home for
asthmatic children in denver colorado and while i was there i got a letter
from a cousin of mine who worked with who worked with a team that was designing the apollo
spacecraft heat shield and he said there was going to be a conference about the exploration of mars
in june and denver and would i like to come with him would i like to come with him yeah i'd like to come with him
anyway i met him in june we went to the denver hilton and the first speaker was dr willy lay
and he started with a joke that was really very quite funny i'm not going to repeat it now because it would be too
off color for today's society but it was pretty funny back then
anyway after he was finished they opened the room for questions and the first person
to ask a question introduced himself clyde tombaugh new mexico state university and i fell on the floor just
fell out of my chair onto the floor and i got up i turned to my cousin and i said
he's the only person living that's discovered a planet and he's with us in this room
and i remember he prefaced his question by saying for the last 30 years i've been studying
mars and so right away i thought to myself now i know what he's been doing since he found
pluto of course he was doing a lot more than discover than reading about mars in the
last 30 years but he asked a good question and it was really a good
meeting even though i didn't get to meet him in person that would have to wait until 1980.
i was giving a lecture at the planetarium here and while the audience was coming in
getting ready the director of the planetarium came up to me took the microphone and said
ladies and gentlemen clyde tombaugh is now entering the theater and once again i almost fell down
because this time i'm going to meet him i i introduced myself to him almost
immediately and we started to talk and he said he asked a few things about telescopes i
told him that at the time i had a little bit of a collection of telescopes and would be interested in coming down
taking a look at it during the time he's here in tucson and i said and he said yes i'd love to
and the next day this big van pulled up and out came cliff holmes may he rest in
peace now and clyde got out and we had a wonderful visit
and that started about six months later i started to visit clyde his wife patsy
in las cruces new mexico a city that would have a large influence in my later
life anyway we started to meet it was a lot of fun and we made about every six
months until one day and he was actually in tucson again
giving a lecture to our astronomy club i was driving him back and i said would you like me to write
your biography and he said no no absolutely no way i would not like to do that i'm going to
do it myself i don't trust anyone else to do it and patsy said oh clyde you'll know
you're not going to do it yourself let the boy try it
oh no no no no i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it and so nothing happened and then came 1983
1984 1985. i was visiting another close friend that some of you may remember
walter haas the founder of the association of lunar and planetary observers
and i asked him about it i told him i'd like to do it but clyde said no and walter said ask
him again said well i've already asked him he said you asked him a year or two ago ask him again
he said okay so i was back at his house and i said clyde i've asked you before bringing and
ask you again would you like it if i wrote your biography and he said when do we start
and i couldn't believe the answer we started like the next very next month
my visits to las cruces instead of being instead of being um
every six months we're now every month i would come out there i got to know los cruces pretty darn well
and it was a lot of fun and um
he told he told me how he found pluto and we went into other things and the
the interviews lasted about two years during which time i got a really good sense
some of the most important questions was tell me how you met patsy and that was a story
and um it was kind of interesting because in those days you didn't just
meet a girl and take her out to lowell observatory or on something and expect nothing to happen after that
and they met while they were students at the university of kansas
and they they started to to get closer and then clyde said you
know this summer i'm going to be going out to work at lowell observatory are there
a few things i need to do there would you like to come with me and patsy said well when he asked me
that in those days that was a proposal and that's about as close as he was going to get to proposing so i accepted and then
we got married anyway we got out to to uh to lowell and uh we got to meet
the people there the original people were still there from the time of the discovery
and it was really pretty very special and as after the book was finished it
came out in a first edition then in the second edition and then stein telescope
came out with an addition that turned out to be even more popular than the originals and
it was actually a lot of fun to do that and
we were talking about it but even after these books came out i'd come up to clyde and clyde says hey
wait sit down i have to tell you how i found pluto oh clyde says patsy you've told him a million
times how you found pluto is there anything possibly you could have left out from those times oh no no i left out
important things and i didn't really mind hearing again and
again and again how clyde found pluto and it really got to me
when the first of the um other trans neptunian objects were found
now known as the kuiper belt objects and i was at the time writing a column for a magazine which i better not
say the name of because david would have something to say about that so it was for another magazine brand ass
and um so i was writing that article about the discovery of
one of the first uh pluto sized objects in the kuiper
belt and i asked the discoverer to describe the discovery and what he said was really amazing he said well i
was having a pizza and just about ready to go to bed and i turned the computer off let it do its
thing and the next morning i woke up and there was this object that it found and i said well so tell me the story i
just did that's all that's all clyde tells his story it goes
on for an hour and it was it was really so very special and i think it says how the observing
has changed over the years how now very few people in fact nobody except
for maybe me and um scotty and dave maybe a little bit but other than that i don't
think anybody does visual observing anymore and
which kind of dates where i am but it's the kind of observing that i'm used to and it's kind of observing that
i love anyway i think the most important and precious
times was as we as clyde was getting older clyde started to explain
he started to explain how he was really worried
that his legacy his signature discovery was going to be
taken from him he was terrified that pluto was going to be demoted
he said brian marsden started it in 1980 at the 50th anniversary he said pluto
should not be considered a major planet and nothing happened until
1996 i guess it was at the iaea meeting clyde had already passed on but patsy
was still living when they finally decided to declare that pluto was a dwarf planet
and not a major planet and patsy made a speech in which she said
clyde was a scientist and he would have accepted it much as i love patsy and i miss her so much
i respectfully disagree with you patsy i don't think clyde would ever have accepted that
and when we talked with him about it he kept on saying how worried he was that the signature discovery of his was
going to be taken from him which is exactly what happened i think he would have loved alan stern's
article shortly after the planet planet status was changed
that where he says that this definition stinks for technical reasons and i've read that article over and over again
and especially just yesterday i've read it one more time and alan thank you for writing that it
is a wonderful wonderful piece of writing and certainly meritorious of the person
running the spacecraft that sailed past pluto in 2015.
anyway i want to show you my favorite picture of pluto i'm going to try to do this
let's see if i can share the screen can you see it
yes there's a picture there this is my very favorite picture of clyde it is a
five-second exposure time exposure of clyde with his cat
named pluto he had a number of cats he loved cats but this was his favorite this was pluto
and i said clyde that's a pluto cat and he says a plutocat for a plutocrat
and this was really very very special and uh let's see where
where i am now yeah i see where i am anyway
there is something and one of the things that it says on the plaque on the new horizon plaque
it said that clyde was a friend but he was also a punster i remember the puns that he and i used
to get into we just go on and on for hours i came back
after seeing a annular eclipse of the sun it was the eclipse in 1983 that i was able to see
from new orleans and right after that i visited clyde in las cruces and he looked at he met me at the door
he said i'll bet you had a ringside seat
and that was one of them but clyde's puns were not just we're not just his puns
you had to acknowledge his puns you couldn't just let them go you had to say so because i remember at
riverside one year we were walking him out we were outside with him
and one of us said there's jupiter up there and clyde says oh that's jupiter by jove
and none of us said anything and clyde said by jove and he kept on going until someone
acknowledged the pun and he kept on doing but some of the best puns were the ones
he did apparently he had no sense of humor at all when he was at lowell during his planet search
he developed a sense of humor at white sands with the army
there was one of the uh v2s that was they were preparing for lunch
in the late 40s and it was called a hanger queen because it kept on breaking down
they kept on they kept on finding problems with it and they had to do this they had to do that
and finally on the launch day that they finally set for it kept on having little glitches
and finally clyde picked up the microphone and he said if that missile won't launch fire it
and uh he just kept on going you can just imagine the groan
that the entire staff of white sands lit out after that one
and uh he just had pun after pun after pun there was one time he was part of a of a
um of a carpool that would take him all the way from
his home to white sands every day and they loved to clyde that he'd come into the car every day with his ever
expanding briefcase and each day it would get bigger and fatter and fatter and fatter
and they were gonna say one day something's gonna happen and then that day came clyde walked out
with two briefcases and uh this is
this was the way he did things and he had his own way of living his own way of
dealing with things
one of the things that happened is my mom knew that i was visiting clyde every
month in las cruces because after the book i kept on visiting him each month
she recommended that i might want to go out with a girl who lived in las cruces she described her as a
professor at the university it turned out she was something even more important than that
a teacher a middle school teacher at white sands
and so i didn't waste a second i wrote a letter introducing myself
and i sent it was it the next day no the next month no
it was seven years later at which time wendy had um
wendy had found somebody almost married that person broke up with that person
all that before i finally got around to writing the letter and the only thing that persuaded me to do that was when
mom asked me that year had i done anything about it and i said no
and she said well just forget the whole thing and that was the challenge and i decided to do that
we had a wonderful phone call and uh we we had our first date
in may i think of that was july of 1992. and we slowly became friends
and we slowly got closer and after the collision with shoemaker levy
9 during which time i really wasn't going out or dating with anybody we started to get a little more serious
i remember talking at her school about clyde and about other things
excuse me about other issues in astronomy and
they had an interesting questions one of them was are you rich and i said no i'm not but i do have a
brother named richard and this question the second question was even closer to the subject are you
married and one of wendy's friends said no but we sure as heck are working on it
anyway once we got serious of course i had to introduce wendy to clyde
and wendy i mean clyde just fell in love with wendy and at one point he said you don't have
to wait for david to come and visit us you can come visit anytime you want
anyway one of the great stories that i have about
about uh about clyde was that one day i get i had to give a
presentation i was honored to give a presentation at the unitarian universalist church clyde
and patsy were founding members of it and wendy was sitting right next to
clyde and she was holding her her wrist right next
right next to where clyde's hand was and so clyde kind of was holding onto her wrist for a while
well maybe we might maybe won't want to come and tell a story then well the story is too good to miss
and so wendy is now going to come and tell the story how she um
about her hand and clyde sand it's it's really a pretty delightful story
well we were sitting there just watching david speak and yes i was right next to clyde and
for some reason i just decided to take his hand and i reached over and i took his hand and we
were holding hands through the entire speech and then after the speech was over a
woman came up and declined to shake his hand to meet him and he took his hand out of mind shook her hand and then gave
me his hand back you tell it so much better thanks
anyway there were other stories i think one of the best ones
was one day wendy and i went to visit clyde and i had my little laptop
with the then just released hubble space telescope image of pluto
and i brought the computer was being run on its battery at the time
and i brought it over to where clyde was sitting and i said would you like to see what your planet looks like
not just as a star but as a as a world and clyde looked at it silently says
in all these years i've only seen pluto looking as a star this is the first time
i've seen it as a world and he was holding onto the screen and
touching the screen it was a beautiful beautiful moment that i've never forgotten
and certainly wendy has never forgotten that and as we got into his declining years and
his worries and he was so worried as to whether pluto would be demoted or not
and i'd like to close by talking about the probable emotion of uh
of the demotion of pluto that obviously did happen and
and how some people disagreed with it other people agreed with it i was one of the disagreers
and the reason had nothing to do with science because scientifically science is self-correcting
and i don't think it was a mistake however but science does change things from time to
time and we have to respect that my reasons are personal i was his friend
i knew him i loved him and i always felt that this was a personal
thing with clyde his signature discovery his planet his planet
and i'm going to close finally with a quote from my biography of clyde
it's from the chapter that ends when clyde is fired from lowell observatory
they gave him all these reasons about funding and everything but clyde knew he just wasn't wanted there anymore
and he was very depressed and sad when he was forced to leave los leave
flagstaff and move to the next stage of his life in las cruces
in the last paragraph of that chapter reads thus the telescope tombow was finally about
to leave stayed at lowell its long career not nearly over years later director arthur hoag claimed
that with its many projects the 13-inch had become one of the world's most productive telescopes
if it had consciousness that telescope might have wondered what would happen to it without the man it
had shared a life with a man who had never given quite given up searching one more pair of plates
one more pair of plates for hidden treasure a man who called himself a traveler
a traveler going over the next hill with an eternal hope thank you and back
to you david thank you so much david it's an honor to have you on and to hear
these extensive first-person recollections of clyde that only you had
really from any one of our of our generation if you will being astronomy enthusiasts um i i knew clyde
and i got to hang out with clyde and most of the time it was because i first knew david levy
and i was with you david most of the time that i ever encountered clyde and hung out with him so it's a an
experience for me that's really bonded with my friendship of with with david levy as well and just to
to if people don't know this is david's book that's the biography of clyde um
that is i believe it's still in print david isn't it it's called he's still in print quite
yes i'm sorry david it's still in print brand s has published it yeah well we we
love brandes we have many fri always have had many friends there it's a wonderful publication
um so this is this is the definitive biography of clyde clyde tombaugh discoverer of the planet pluto there's
an earlier book as well if you're really interested in clyde out of the darkness the planet pluto
which clyde wrote parts of and the english astronomy uh popularizer patrick
moore wrote uh some parts of it as well so it's such an honor to have you here
david uh recounting your first person uh experiences with clyde because you knew
him in a unique way thanks david thank you um clyde of course he lived to be 90
years old we lost him in 1997. uh as david you covered very very well
and exhaustively he loved puns um i remember sitting there with you and
clyde and you'd be sitting there at a star party with him late at night and
there would be one or two minutes that would go by and another pun would come and and they were puns you just i
remember this so vividly david you just have to go oh clyde you know
they were and and one example of an of a relatively early pawn of clyde's
that's in your book david was that he recalled no connection at the time that pluto was named
with the disney character which was also popular and new at the time
but he said maybe there was a connection because the planet was so doggone hard
to find and this is the kind of thing that clyde
would say and you just have to say oh oh man that was the only reaction wasn't it
david that you could have
so anyway his story it's a very american story the story of clyde
tom um he was born in streeter illinois uh between chicago and peoria to a farm
predominantly farm family predominantly interested in farming uh his family though emphasized learning
they brought home and gave him a book about mars when he was in his early stages of high
school and that electrified him so at age 16 then
the family moved to burdette kansas which was is northeast of dodge city and
that's where he uh got going with his astronomy interest in earnest he built
telescopes the the stories of how he built the telescopes he built what they were like are almost legendary um at
this time in in the 20s he made lots of drawings of planets and
other things in the sky he became pretty well known for that and really fixated
on that ended up sending a lot of those drawings to lowell observatory the director at
the time was none other than v than vm slifer um and he was hired in 1929 and there's
a wonderful passage that is reflected on in both of these books about the train ride that he took out to
arizona and just kind of discovering this new world of you know stepping off
into flagstaff it was from with this farm kid you know going out there to work um to realize his dream at this
observatory um he took countless plates of course with the 13-inch pluto camera which we'll see
shortly uh blinking i believe it was uh significantly more than a million star
images pluto was discovered of course february 18th 1930. well what do you do after you
discover a planet this is something that we've all talked about off and on for years
clyde finally made that discovery it wasn't planet x that percival originally thought was out there but it was pluto a
lesser a less massive body but what what did clyde do we went down into the city of flagstaff and he
went and saw gary cooper in the virginia you know so you got to have a little uh entertainment after discovering the
planet well his career spanned many areas actually of astronomy he earned multiple
degrees a little later than than the norm he discovered 15 asteroids a periodic comet
hundreds of variable stars anova deep sky objects to
in the 1950s he works it worked at white sands missile range and from 1955
through his retirement he taught astronomy at new mexico state of course and
i had the pleasure of knowing him late in his life um i think some others of you uh david of
course and and alan i think you knew him too um and could i interrupt for just a
second yeah the ones one thing i just wanted to say is that the um
the disney character actually i believe was partly after the planet because it was introduced just a couple of
months after the discovery and named pluto okay okay and there was something
else but i wanted to say that was even more important but i can't remember what it was well it was fun
jump right in and of course the planetary name you know followed the typical routine of roman gods and also
of course the initials in this case which made it doubly nice of percival will the first
two letters in the name pluto so that that was uh some of the nice pastiche that went along and
vinicia bernie was the one that came up with the uh with the name although clyde says that
they were seriously looking at pluto at the time yes they gave her the credit for it which was very decent of them to
do that but you're right it was an english school girl who suggested the name a very famous letter uh written to
the astronomers at lowell so he was really an incredible guy and
whatever was happening um you know he would make a big joke out of it and that was part of what was fun i think about
hanging around with him and david i don't know if you remember this but i was going to show just one example of
something that was that really kind of typifies how slapstick clyde could be
we were at the texas star party one of the times we were observing with him and this was in
1987 it was during the first kind of era of big dobsonians becoming really
popular there i think maybe we were with david higgins in his 25-inch scope perhaps it was
and i had a sketchbook i was really into drawing deep sky objects at that time
making big drawings of them through these large telescopes because their views are incredible
in this dark sky in west texas and i couldn't find the i wanted to make
a sketch of a galaxy and i couldn't find the book and so and and i it was lost and people
are wandering around and hear people's voices it's dark but so that was that and then all of a sudden after a while
clyde you know who at that point you know is he was in advancing age he was hunched over he was very short you know
at that time and oh you know oh dang i'm sitting on your book david
on one of these folding like picnic chairs that we had there we were sitting on and and so he got up and gave it to me
and and he had to write i sat on this book clyde w tombaugh 29
may 1987. of course david we were all very silly of course enjoying ourselves
under the start so david wrote it was my chair david h levy underneath and i
wrote it's my book dave eicher and so there is that that kind of silly
uh uh you know artifact of the past oh yeah
that kind of shows you what hanging out with clyde was like you never knew what kind of fun was
was gonna come kind of around the corner but i love the bottom signature and it's my book
it's my book well i had to write something you know and so mostly it had you know stuff like
you know the whirlpool galaxy seven but so there's a there's a clyde tombaugh memento from the past that kind of shows
it was a fun silly night hanging out with clyde wasn't it david yeah it was it really was special my best memory
with david is the night that uh before an astronaut
was to take place and david and i stayed up all night so that we were able to see
a very special event at dawn it was the blowing up of an expressway
right outside the door of astronomy magazine and we saw that together and i'll never
forget that it was in 1984 there was an astronomical league in fact convention in waukesha
where near where i live now and there was an elevated freeway in milwaukee that was old in fact it was the one that
was used to film chase sequences in on in the movie the blues brothers of all
things believe it or not and so they dynamited this thing to drop it and it
was you know a couple hundred yards away from the astro office at that time
and we were there and we were excited and this you know as this artist you know who worked for the magazine
shot right down on her bike close to the you know as the thing where there was they were counting down 30 seconds she
survived you know to the explosion but uh it cracked a bunch of the windows on
the front of astronomy's offices that that explo that blast so the joke was
that that actually it was a there had been a package sent by sky and telesco
you know silly jokes but uh
but anyway it is a great honor to be here with you guys old friends and also with the staff of astronomy i wanted to
talk for just a moment about astronomy magazine because we have the whole staff here before i hand it over to uh the
next event which will be very exciting um but it's been quite a time i'm
getting a little bit toward the end of the road here i've been at astronomy magazine for 38 years and and it was
when i joined the magazine i was the youngest assistant editor the green kid from ohio
i'd started this little magazine that david and others wrote for called deep sky and brought it with me and have been
there ever since and it's been a long fun ride of all sorts of experiences in astronomy and now there's this um very
talented and largely younger staff who i work with who are fantastic and
you'll meet them tonight one by one and i'm very proud of them and what they're doing the magazine sense before i joined
it which was in september 1982 when i was straight from ohio and
miami university it had become in the age of voyager the reporting on the voyager missions the largest magazine
about the subject that there is and still to this day it is so
if we have a lot of fun with this magazine this brand we're doing lots of things i'll talk just for a couple minutes about it before i pass things on
uh we have about a hundred thousand print subscribers still which is more than twice the size of our competition
whom we love as well but we have explosive growth one of the things that
this last year has done has really seen a renaissance because we're all
forced to be locked down at home and and bored out of our minds and after three and a half months there was nothing
really left on netflix so a lot of people have run out and rediscovered observing the sky this year and we've
seen an explosion of interest and i'm talking about particularly visitors to our website and
social media followers and so on so we have uh well over a million and a half
unique people coming to the astronomy.com website in addition to the print
magazine each month and also uh more than a million and a half social media
followers so we really represent the largest group of astronomy enthusiasts in the world and they are scattered
around the world which is exciting because as you guys know this is a golden age for astronomy and planetary
science as we'll hear shortly from alan there's more news going on now more
research more discoveries more exciting things than ever before
fortunately uh we've had some interesting things going on in the sky as well we had a nice comet this last
year we had a couple of nice planetary conjunctions but for a long time this has been a golden age of astronomical
discovery and we're very lucky to be alive and uh reporting and talking and
enthusing over all the things that we've learned in just the last of 5 or 10 or
20 years about big big questions that weren't known we didn't know much of anything
you could argue about pluto until dr stern's spacecraft showed us a very
close-up view and we'll talk in a moment opened up all sorts of amazing
facts and properties of the pluto system that we now understand so we're excited to uh to
have the magazine here and and be bringing you lots of big things with it in the future
uh it's still the largest most read by far publication on the subject in the world and we have a lot of pride a lot
of fun doing it it's a fun job um and i hope none of our editors here tonight
contradict me but we try to have a lot of fun with it and there's a lot to do of course because in
the olden times back when i was young you had the magazine you know now you've
got the magazine and a website and social media things to post and we're
doing products we have a product store myscienceshop.com
and uh we're cranking out science products so we're busy but it's a lot of
fun and we enjoy it and we hope that your readers and they will see you in the pages of the magazine
and we're lucky to have such uh great writers uh including david and alan and
and others who have contributed to the pages of the magazine over the past years
so with that um i will uh if i can introduce alan are you ready
i'm ready if you are dave allen stern is another old friend of mine i haven't known alan quite as long
as i've known david but for 25 years at least i think it is alan i've known you
and alan as as as most people know is one of the great driving forces in
planetary science um not only is he the the pi for the new horizons mission
um did he take us to the first close-up analysis and view of the last major
unexplored world in our solar system but it has gone beyond pluto of course
uh we'll talk about that as well and and conducted some of the most distant
astronomical and physics experiments uh in the his in human history so that's
very very exciting and we're honored to have alan stern not only writing for our
magazine but here as a guest tonight with us thank you alan for joining us
that's an honor thank you david can you hear me especially
i can can you hear me i can indeed yeah i think there was a little glitch for a moment there but i think we're good now
alan we're gonna do a q a um about you and your science career and new
horizons and pluto and clyde um and i think we have about 20 minutes or maybe a little bit more um so i'm going to
start right off if i can and ask you what interested you in astronomy originally as a youngster
well uh i was interested very early as a little boy in uh in everything
about space and space exploration uh and my parents supported that they
you know they uh they bought me lots of books uh on astronomy they uh they bought me a telescope from
sears and uh i never could get enough i
i could go to the library and read every book in the kids section and then i would find all the grown-up books on astronomy
that were there and read every one of them and then all the books on space and space exploration
and uh like i don't know if i was uh in the groove or stuck in a rut but it was all i was ever interested in
can you talk a little bit about how the new horizons mission which is so
exciting for many people how did it really come about well that's a long story um uh and i uh
i spent about 100 weekends writing this book with david grinskill chasing the horizons and the first half of it
is that very long story uh that uh that began in the late 1980s
and uh and i was there uh as a graduate student and uh the voyager mission was just
finishing up its last exploration of a planet at neptune in 1989 and uh
as that was uh coming to be i thought what a shame that voyager isn't going to pluto is
here and of course voyager's trajectory didn't allow it to do that at that point
um i kept to announce that you know with
happening they were going to mount the mission to please
and uh at the time i had written several uh research about the atmosphere
and uh was very interested in
some of the other community people like mark cooley
rick benzel and others friend bagging out and we finally decided that we would band
together form a little group and go ask nasa why they don't have a mission included
and i got elected uh to do that and i went to washington dc and went to the head of planetary
exploration his name was jeff briggs and and uh had a meeting with him and i
asked him and said i said why don't we have a mission to pluto and he said no one's ever questioned before
we should have to do that and he funded a study at jpl
of how to mount a mission to pluto unfortunately that study didn't go anywhere and there
were various attempts it took it took a long time all through the 90s
there was you know a whole series of different pluto missions that never happened never got off the drawing
and i was project scientist or head of the study group or whatever
it's about the six or seven pluto anymore we've been trying and
trying and trying and it always costs too much and uh
we're not gonna do it and there was a huge pump outlaw up there excuse me and uh also a community because there have
been a lot of advisory committees that had talked about how pivotal this is particularly
since the discovery of the kuiper belt had showed that this was a whole new class of planet pluto was the icon for
these new ice dwarves and uh nasa reversed its wealth
back to try a different way that they would open it up to competition which is really the modern way that missions are
are created now uh through the discovery program and new frontiers that they would have a competition it would start
in a month and to have full lead the teams that didn't even have it
back then um it just the included quicker belt mission team um at the johns hopkins
applied physics lab and uh we formed a very strong team lots of the most important players in the
kind of science the best instrumentation and in the end a year later we won we were selected um by then it
had a name new horizons and then there's a long story of how we got it built and uh flown across the solar system but
that's probably too much for you tonight that's terrific let me cut to the chase
with a big one here if i could ask one if i could mention one little thing here one of the things that i think maybe you
even noticed alan was that um there was uh the u.s postal service put
out a bunch of stamps after the voyager mission was completed to neptune
and they had a stamp for every planet and the one for pluto had three words on it not yet explored
and i think it was really a real challenge to get rid of those three words which thanks to new horizons you
did we did and in fact a lot of people here may not know that once we had the
spacecraft built and uh down in florida to put it on the launch vehicle and go fly it we actually
put one of those not yet explored stamps on the spacecraft and just as a kind of in-your-face thing
and fluid that's why
that's terrific yeah and of course clyde accompanies it yes indeed
alan let me cut to the chase if i can the question that everyone wants to ask you
should pluto be considered a planet
uh that that's um that's an easy one yes all right and we could talk about why if
you want i will point out uh that kevin schindler who's on this um is putting
together a uh a pluto conference next week and i'm going to talk about that for an hour
uh in fact i'm going to use many of the same slides that i used about a year and a half ago when i debated the president
of the iau and defeated him in a debate about that science
rest assured that there are multiple reasons though of logic though
and i mean we can talk about that i think we don't have to get into it all now and and i would certainly want to drive
people to the iheart pluto festival as well which is going to happen and is going to be a big big deal and one of
your talk is going to be one of the major talks there alan of course we're looking forward to it
yes they should check the certainly check i heart pluto festival which involves many
people and is going to be a big big deal david i i would like to ask alan a
question okay i i know you know it should be noted that uh the remains
of clyde tomba are on the new horizon spacecraft and i was kind of wondering what the
back story of that whole process was can i share something on my screen sure
yes right here you should be able to see this
um there are nine mementos that we sent to the ninth planet and one of them uh were some of clyde's
ashes here you see them mounted um and here's the inscription for anybody that wants to read it and turned
herein are the remains of american clyde w tombaugh discover of pluto in the solar system's third zone
adele and muron's boy patricia's husband annette and alden's father astronomer
teacher punster and friend and his dates uh and uh back in the 90s when we were
working on missions mission studies about how to go to pluto um i got invited to the mexico state
university where clyde was a teacher and uh and was asked to give a seminar
on the kuiper belt which i did and um he mentioned that if we ever got a
mission for pluto that he would like to see his ashes flown there and when we finally
were close to launching it i called patsy up and asked her um if they had made any arrangements for
that and she said she'd always hoped that i would call and uh and then she sent me
a little tray with some of his remains the ashes which i
took with me on a trip out to uh apply physics lab where the spacecraft was being built and they had
built this uh this container to put it in with this inscription that i had written uh and then we flew it to pluto and he
is now on his way out of the solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory to the stars
that's awesome thank you for letting me share that yeah thank you thank you fantastic can you talk alan a little bit
about what your relationship with clyde was like
um well clyde was uh you know my grandparents age i met him like you did late in his career
um i uh right after i went into the space business
i got involved with a group that was flying rockets from white sands
to do suborbital research missions and since i was in las cruces i knew i
tombow lived there and to rita bibi uh another planetary
astronomer at the university of new mexico state rather where clive is a professor um uh
i i made a habit of having lunch with him every time i went down there on one of these rocket expeditions
so half a dozen times um he and and uh rita and myself and sometimes one or
two other people um would have lunch and then i gave a couple of seminars i can't went to his office a few times but he
was in his late 80s by then and uh i remember when i gave that seminar
about the quicker belt um there are two things i'd like to tell you about that the first was uh it was only about a year before he
passed away and he was he was in declining health he was um pretty bent over as you
described um he had uh he had to have supplemental oxygen so he wore a
nasal cannula a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle um but he asked more questions in that
seminar than any other member of the astronomy department take that oxygen off and he would ask a
question and put it back on and then he asked another question and another question he was spot on i mean he was
sharp his attack and we i he went with us to the dinner that evening
some more to take the seminar speaker out and he told me a really interesting story that i want to tell tonight i'll
make it very brief he once um had a meeting with gerard
kuiper at a conference and this was in the 1950s and kuiper told him
that what he literally said what you didn't discover was as important as what you
did discover and clyde said that in the 50s he took that to mean the massive planet x that
that they were looking for but he realized much later in the 90s once the kuiper belt was
discovered that there was a second meaning to that sentence that he had not discovered all
the other kuiper belt objects that were out there um but it was out there and of course the poker belt was kuiper's idea
several other people had the idea as well like kenneth edgewood but workers got his name on it
and i just always found that to be a fascinating story right from tombow's lips amazing yeah
allen new horizons discovered an incredible system of worlds at pluto and a lot about them and not
just pluto and charon but also an origins story
as well and a lot of exciting things that no one would have guessed about pluto and sharon as well what were some
of the most exciting things for you that the mission uncovered
well um just sticking to the pluto flyby and not the flyby at the kbo aircon i i
think we were all blown away by how complicated uh that little planet is uh and it
really it really broke the mold because usually uh as we uh
look across the spectrum of bodies in the solar system smaller objects are usually less complicated than bigger
objects uh and pluto showed us that a planet much smaller than the earth
could be every bit as complex as the earth or mars uh and then it also surprised us how active it was just as
one example i think everybody knows the heart on pluto in fact i'm gonna i'm gonna share
my screen again uh and i have an image to show you uh here's pluto everybody recognizes it
that's in true color next to it is the map we made um mark bowie led
this paper with um data from the hubble program that i was pi of of pluto from the hubble space
telescope this is the same part of pluto and you could see we couldn't resolve the heart but we could see there was
something big there and we targeted new horizons to fly right over and it's a giant nitrogen glacier
when i say giant i mean it's a million square kilometers um in this convec this convecting
glacier which is totally active it has no craters on its surface um because it's so active it it
erodes craters it it um very much like the earth um erases those craters and we
know that this feature which is about the size of texas and oklahoma combined
is um uh turning itself over every few hundred
thousand years and we don't even know what makes that happen i mean we understand the physics
of the convection but we don't know the ultimate energy source there's a debate about that but somehow this little world
that should have cooled off over four billion years is one of the most active bodies in the
solar system and on a massive massive scale and that activity
along with um the level of geologic complexity i would put those as the two
top discoveries at pluto what are your feelings about the
possibility of microbial life existing in the pluto system
well um you know that's a that's a science fiction type of question uh in fact you wouldn't have asked me
that question before the pluto flight no no absolutely not but now we know that pluto's got uh very likely it has a
interior ocean of water liquid water very much like europa or enceladus
uh and uh and and so now that's a good question
um even more interesting um dale crookshank who's on our scientific team he's a nasa uh planetary scientist
uh and a quite outstanding career uh in planetary science
um has actually discovered uh places on pluto where water erupted
onto the surface and every one of those places um that he's found at these large fissures
or tectonic features on the surface um comes the water ice is associated with
some sort of a red organic material it indicates down in that ocean there are
organics um which further strengthens the case uh for the potential for biology in fact
that paper made the cover of astrobiology magazine when dale
published it a couple of years ago so um i won't live to see it but someday we'll
have a lander following an orbiter that will find the landing sites and uh someday there'll be the
technology to go down in that ocean and have a look and i wouldn't be surprised if we find
life i wouldn't be surprised if we don't uh but just the fact that it's a serious question blows my mind
david you have a question for alan
except we can't hear you david can you hear me now better i've turned on the uh translator
it's not so much a question as it is more of a comment it had to do with the uh not the idea so
much that there would be life on on pluto or underneath the surface of pluto and um
and tomball plunicia down there but uh but about the the the that often
considered question of the status of the planet um i felt so strongly about
the way you did about pluto not losing its status as a planet
and with great anger towards the international astronomical union until 2016.
and that day we passed at the end of april april 26
2016 the 400th anniversary of the death of william shakespeare
did cnn cover it i think they might have down at the bottom of something nobody
else did it was completely ignored by most of the news outlets
except one the international astronomical union came out with a bulletin
simply listing all of the shakespeare characters that were
commemorated in the night sky with asteroids moons of planets or anything
like that and uh someone sent me that uh bulletin and i read it i was overwhelmed by it
and i wrote to the author of it to say that and i even said to him that i'm no
longer unhappy about what you did with pluto even though i disagreed with it you really
recovered yourself brilliantly with what you did with shakespeare and he wrote back a very interesting thing
and he said quite honestly david i think we did the right thing with
pluto but we did it in the wrong way we did not
have sufficient discussion ahead of time we handled it very poorly
and um so we did the right thing but in the wrong way so
i'm glad what they did with shakespeare and i hope they'll do the same thing with pluto someday well i have to say
that it's rare but i disagree with you on this and uh i'm just gonna make one remark about this
uh my colleague at the university of central florida planetary scientist phil metzger has actually done
a massive literature research looking at papers and planetary science
since 2006 when the iau um made this ill-advised move
and uh you know at that time i said that the iu stands for the irrelevant astronomical union
and phil has proved that me correct it turns out that if you search the entire literature
of planetary science there are no papers no research papers that actually use the iau definition and
there are thousands of papers that actually use the geophysical planet
definition so they are truly irrelevant in this because the planetary science community
um just voted with his feet no one buys that because it's not really a good and
workable prescription for how to decide which objects or planets and across the spectrum of all the
journals in planetary science no one is using it they are relevant in this respect well
thanks alan and uh i do agree with you i'm firmly in your camp on that
and i just wanted to make sure that you knew that you're here i will i will mention something from the
chat um this this person chatting says alan stern when i
was in elementary school in the early 80s we were told in our lifetimes pluto
would not be explored thank you for proving several of them wrong
and i you know i think from all of us that are here tonight all of us watching we um we owe the new horizons team a
huge debt of thanks uh and uh thank you for leading them allen well thank you for mentioning this
uh 2500 people worked on that project and uh i get too much credit for it uh
they work uh they work themselves night and day uh for five years to build that spacecraft and get it launched and then
flight across the solar system took another decade and i appreciate you recognizing the
whole team you deserve that credit but david one of the
one of the articles i used to write for astronomy magazine and one of the articles was about
a new definition of uh planet and whether pluto should be involved
and i used the most important people i could find and that was a elementary school science class in
montreal canada and we had a discussion about the pluto and about pluto and the name and the
history and the debate we ended it with a vote and it was like 90 in favor of returning
pluto to planetary status and i wrote that in astronomy magazine complete with a photograph of the school
where i talked that day excellent and just for the record i
wrote a book chapter which alan was kind enough to look at and i solidly agree with dr stern as
well and and again there'll be much more discussion of the details of the logic of this
at the i heart pluto festival which is coming up in a number of days in
flagstaff so look forward to that again alan you mentioned the post-pluto
activities of the spacecraft those were really incredible as well the aerocoth
flyby the parallax experiment with proxima centauri and wolf 359 i wonder
if you could talk a little bit for those who may not know the the details
those were phenomenal and and uh unprecedented things that the spacecraft did as well
well thanks yeah when we were competing
to win this mission nasa's call for proposals actually required that all of the
competing teams design a spacecraft capable of going beyond pluto and exploring in the kuiper belt
so we built in the fuel the power the communications capability uh the capability for all the instruments to
work much farther out and even fainter sunlight etc and uh as soon as we finish getting the
pluto data to the ground uh we started milking that spacecraft as an
observatory in the kuiper belt on its way to erikoff and now since the era called flyby now two years ago
um as we look for another target and we have observed now dozens of other quicker belt objects
we have made discoveries about the sun's heliosphere uh we have made a
big astronomical discovery by accident just um by studying images that were made
um for other reasons actually to study quicker belt objects we've actually been able to set um a new and tighter limit
on the cosmic optical background that's a paper by todd lauer that just appeared
uh in the last few weeks in the literature and which suggests that the universe uh
might have considerably fewer uh faint galaxies at large distances or there may
be other explanations um and uh we have enough fuel and power and
communications range etc to continue to use new horizons as it flies farther
for at least another 15 years uh we have to propose every three years uh to nasa for
funding we're going to do that again next year for the years 2023 to 2025. um
hopefully we'll find a flyby target but we don't have that much fuel to get to one so it's it's a very dicey
proposition but we're looking with the largest telescopes on the earth and we have lots of other science to do
because we're the only spacecraft that's ever been in the kuiper belt and knew it was there the voyagers sailed right
through it before the kuiper belt was was known so they were unaware and then
there's no other spacecraft yet it's coming that way so we really have an opportunity uh to
do some things that will be very long lasting for planetary science and we're using the spacecraft to its maximum
extent in fact this summer um we're going to be putting up new flights off here but just like the mars rovers get
reinvented by putting new flight software up we are too it'll give us new capabilities for the exploration
awesome alan can you talk a little bit about the future possibility of a pluto orbiter
mission well i can um it's certainly feasible it's the right
next step for the exploration of pluto um uh it will be a much more expensive
mission than new horizons because it's it's first got to uh
as an orbiter um uh have a lot of capability that you just don't need on a flyby spacecraft
and in particular it's got to have the ability to come to a stop so we went screaming across the solar system the
fastest spacecraft ever launched it took voyager 12 years to get the neptune new horizons got
to pluto in nine and a half years and even greater distance um but for an orbiter with today's
technology it will take something like 20 years to reach pluto because you've got to spend half the flight breaking so
you fly quickly across the solar system that means you have to take a lot of speed out
and i led the first big study of how to do that there was a second study uh last
year funded by nasa that uh dr carly um at my group at southwest research
institute led with scientists from all around the country we showed it was feasible but it will take a long time with current technology
and they made the case to the decadal survey that's going on right now that that should be one of the top
contenders for the next generation of flagship scale missions it's got a
lot of competition and there are scientists plenty of scientists who think that there are more
important missions to do such as a neptune orbiter or uh such as missions in the uh closer part of the solar
system and i'm not on the decatur so i can't tell you how that's going to come come out but i suspect that there will
be a pluto orbiter if not in this cycle in some future cycle and uh
the planet is is as rich as mars where we set dozens of missions it certainly deserves another visit and a deeper look
one last question alan if i could what's in the future for alan stern
um well i'm i'm excited about new horizons and what we're going to be doing over the next 15 years
and i'm on a couple of very exciting missions that are that are um getting ready for launch one of them is called
lucy it's the first mission to the the trojan asteroids that orbit
with jupiter uh emission into the origin of our solar system led by
dr hal levison uh also here with me at southwest research institute
and uh it's launching this october uh and we'll uh
explore at least six um jovian trojans uh along its route of flight i'm also on
the europa clipper mission which is going to launch in the mid-20s and arrive in 2030
uh to explore that ocean world and then i've got an active program of
research and some of it is involving these new generation suborbital vehicles
and i was selected last year to fly on a virgin galactic space mission funded by nasa
to look at how well those vehicles can be pressed into the service of astronomy
so i'm going to be taking an instrument that i flew as principal investigator i
didn't go with it it flew on two space shuttle emissions and now i'm gonna be taking it on uh spaceship two the virgin galactic super
over the vehicle uh to try to see how well that vehicle can do astronomy if it works uh then we have a whole new tool
in our toolkit um to add to sounding rockets and orbital missions
uh and missions to the planets and that's pressing these tourist vehicles into the service of science and i'm
really looking forward to that i hope the flight um stays on track should be late next year
fantastic alan thank you again so much for joining us tonight and i look forward to seeing you soon
again at the i heart pluto festival great thanks again for having me thanks alan take care and talk soon and
scott i think i'm going to throw it back to you we're going to take a short break now i believe yeah let's take a little
break and uh we'll come back uh we have a special um
special recognition and uh a little celebration from our friends in brazil
uh when we come back thank you
great so david so you know um i'm gonna duck
out and get some dinner thanks so much alan great to see you and i hope with all the things you're doing
you'll have still have time to write the odd story for astronomy magazine oh you know i love doing it
yeah thanks sir thanks for accepting my proposal thank you thanks alan and i'll see you
in a week or two uh via flagstaff well that'd be great and hopefully see
you see you there at some point yeah maybe late this year huh yeah
what's up thanks so much ellen good to see you ellen see you kevin
see you next week next week on saturday right yep yep got my talk ready
scott i've got m42 when uh whenever you're ready for me to hop in
if you're still actually sitting at your desk it didn't get up yeah let's cool
bye
hey scott hey molly how are you good how are you good
good oh you got some you got to ryan there huh um
yes yeah and uh in h alpha when uh whenever you want me to show it sure
then i figure uh if you guys want me to um i have the monochrome camera on but i can go over to
um i can go over to mars or uranus you're happy here our thing
we are here to celebrate 115 years of the birth
of the clyde tomorrow
hi my name is anthony and i am part of the astronaut astronomically on campus
and and i'm here for congratulations and fumball
[Music] clubbing lois foolish i'm here for correspondence for
everything thank you very much
hi my name of louis is and perhaps
to to make a celebration for his anniversary
okay and now we are going to show a picture and we are going to make uh
together here i said we are going to celebrate his
birthday
our greetings for the celebration thank you thank you
well that was that was enjoyable that was the uh lewis cruel's uh uh astronomy
club uh headed up by marcelo souza he's a cosmologist down in
uh campos de caza uh and in uh in brazil so they wanted to
reach out and say uh a happy birthday to clyde tomba and uh to help us
celebrate this amazing day of celebration about pluto the
discovery of pluto the ongoing research and of course clyde tomba
so i'm going to turn this back over to you david um
and um first off i'm just still buzzing over
uh you know what's happened so far in this presentation so we've had we've
gotten to know clyde better uh through first-hand accounts uh we got to learn about his humor
his family life his what he felt was important uh uh his dreams and
aspirations um you know the hard work he did to uh uh to find pluto um and uh uh you know the
uh uh you know he threw his whole life and into uh science and um uh you know
inspiring others like alan stern and david levy and dave eicher to go on and
do what they did so um you know i i had just a brief uh moment
to meet him and had him sign my star chart which is so cool but uh
at this point i think david you're bringing together uh your editors and we
have um uh let me make sure that i have this down correctly
i think we go to carroll next for door prices oh that's right okay well let's do that let's do that so carol orange is
the president of the astronomical league and the astronomical league is the
official uh sponsor of uh the door prizes of the global global star party
and they uh start off by answering the uh questions um or giving us the answers
for the last global star parties questions and then they will ask
and they'll announce the winners of course but they will then ask the new questions and one of the prizes that
we're going to give away uh would be a pluto globe from astronomy magazine so
i'm real excited about that but we have lots of really cool prizes and carol are you uh are you ready to
roll i am thank you scott for uh what an
inter a great program we've had so far i thought i knew a lot about clyde tombaugh but i have learned so much
tonight yes just a little side light here uh clyde
visited our local uh observatory in kansas city pal observatory maybe 25
years ago and so we've got a picture of his on the wall and i think our observatory is just
barely in the state of kansas of course bernadette he spent some time there and even though it's a wide spot in the road
uh our visitors to the observatory when we're doing uh in-person programs
everybody knows about burdette cancer casper we pound that home every time when they come down and it's about 99.9
percent uh per the vote of our attendees let's say yes pluto is still a planet
so let's go to our questions of the night
okay now when you when you asked when carol asked the the the new
questions for the door prizes um that will be given away from this global
star party you will email those answers into explore alliance at
explorescientific.com and um you will not answer them in live chat
okay so that that's the deal scott are you putting that address also in the chat so they can see i am i sure am
wonderful yep and here uh is our warning that we always like to present on slide
number one just to tell everyone just in case you would win a uh
eyepiece or something similar that's going to be looking at the sun we want to make sure that you don't look at it without the proper
safety measure and so
from the last star party vice president chuck allen these were
his questions the first one was the iau recognizes five dwarf planets
how many total moons do the five dwarf planets have the answer is nine pluto
has five heiress has the one and the other three have uh
uh well the last one there serious has none and the winner is matteo castro
all right then the second one the 88 constellations represent humans
land animals aquatic animals flying animals and inanimate objects which
category is represented by the largest number of constellations
the answer is it's 28 it's the and objects and that's the right there's the
background of the breakdown on each category and the winner is tal
hopefully i'm pronouncing that correctly and then the third one
from last star party 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 the answer is fred hoyle
and the winner is angela miller congratulations angela
and now we go to this week's questions the first one
how do we know black holes exist when no light can ever leave them
i'll repeat that just in case anyone's having a little trouble reading the screen how do we know black holes exist
when no light can ever leave them and remember to send that to the uh
address scott just gave you it should be in the chat by now i just reposted it wonderful thank you
number two when the shape of the moon is like the letter d
why is the half of the moon's disk dark i'll repeat that when the shape of the moon is like the
letter d why is the half of the moon's disk dark
and our final question who discovered the law of universal gravitation
who discovered the law of universal gravitation so make sure you
send your answers in and the first person who gets the answer correctly will get a special prize
so thank you so much and scott now back to you yeah thank you thank you carol
and thank you to the astronomical league for doing all of this and and for being
on all of our global star parties so it's really great we thoroughly enjoy it thank you so much scott
that's awesome i'm going to turn this back over to david eicher and
we've got we've got another great lineup of speakers here thanks scott and we have an incredible
treat and unique opportunity here because we have another pal of ours kevin schindler standing by
i've been blessed in recent years to become closer with the folks at lowell observatory it was when i was a young
editor and went out and and worked at little quote unquote to do a story in the middle 1980s hanging out with brian
skiff that i really fell in love with a little lowell observatory and it's really a unique
amazing place there's no other observatory with the kind of history and heritage and current active science
with a four meter telescope going on all in this package so i like to call it
america's observatory kevin schindler my great friend is historian
at lowell observatory so he knows better than anyone the stories the tales the
history the heritage from percival lowell on up through uh the slifers
uh the clyde tombaugh years and right on up to the present
and kevin you're standing by in the dome of the 13-inch astrograph or
camera or telescope whatever you like to call it with which clyde discovered
pluto very exciting time here that is it you know i get chills
standing here and it's not because it's you know like 29 degrees because you know this discussion we've
had tonight with with the davis talking about clyde tomba and alan stern
um talking about taking you know taking us out to the far edges of the solar system exploring pluto up close
it all started right where i'm standing and and it just you know i've been working here for 26 years or so and i
still every time i come up here i still take pictures of the telescope and i come up here a lot um because it's
so special and it you know i think we all feel like we're stewards here
that we're caring for this for not only current but future generations and it's
it's it's fun to be able to share it so you know i i won't say ha ha you guys are all
sitting in your offices i get to stand next to this but it's pretty cool that's pretty cool you know and i also think
you know standing here i really think of all the connections um you know of course we're talking
about clyde um tonight but um you know when i look over this
this building i'm in is i'm on a second story um and
it's about 20 feet in diameter and the telescope or the camera the gastrograph
it's not that big it's it's a 14 by 17 inch glass plates the telescope um tube
is only seven or eight feet long it's not a big building in here um but if i look over this side of the
room i see a little plaque that talks about a time capsule and this time capsule
was put in a couple years ago and it was an effort led by ellen stern
to gather pluto related stuff pictures and artifacts
and and photographs and other stuff um to be opened when the first orbiter
goes by pluto and so you know that's over there and so you
know the ties with you dave iker and and alan who are both on our advisory board here at lowell
and then i think back of when i first started working here you know i'm just you know trying to
figure out how to walk straight and not run into buildings because it's so cool and and one of my first days here i came
up in this dome and there's a film crew talking to somebody and so i just waited
because i was doing some studying learning the tour and when it when it was over um an older
gentleman came over and introduced himself and he said hi i'm gene shoemaker it's nice to meet you
and i you know just blown away and of course david um levy wrote a biography about gene shoemaker
so you know the place has an aura it has a feeling
to it and to be able to you know talk tonight from here is really special and you know i think
you know this is clyde's birthday we go back to 1930 he's 24 years old i'm standing right
where he was and he probably observed that night because he observed every clear night and you just wonder
what was going through his mind this is his first birthday you know at lowell observatory i mean 24
years old he's he's got this dream job of working at an observatory and yet little does he know
in two weeks or not even two weeks um yeah i guess a couple weeks he's
gonna he's gonna discover a planet i mean it's mind-blowing he's 24 years
old he just turned 24 years old and and it just you know kind of blows your mind of all the stuff we're talking
about tonight and how this discovery of pluto really redefined
the solar system and our understanding of it of the size and breadth of it and composition of it
it started right where i'm standing here and where you're all standing or sitting right now as it were
so it's a pretty neat thing to be able to share it um so this the telescope here
or astrograph that astrograph is the type of telescope used to take pictures essentially
and there's no eyepiece on here this is the telescope it's got a triplet lens system that's in the far end and so
this is a plate holder and then the observatory starting in 1905
our founder percival thought there was a planet out there and off and on on through the next 11 years he searched
for this planet i mean did it both um mathematically trying to calculate
the location of this theoretical planet you believe there based on irregular
movements of uranus and neptune and he also did an observation looking through
different types of telescopes different sizes taking pictures um
he passed away in 1916 and with that went the search for where
do you call planet x but a decade later um the new leadership of the observatory
said you know uncle percy was onto something let's recommence that search
and see if we can find that planet he thought was out there and dave as you mentioned earlier
this kicked off this this project they they had this telescope built
specifically to take wide-angle pictures of the sky so they could survey the sky
and you know i just love the the american story this
of this thing you know the small kid making a big and all because like you said clay tombow was living on a farm
um you know kansas at night what do you do he looked to the sky and he built his own telescopes
and he got pretty good at drawing what he was seeing and so he decided to
send these sunday's drawings um you know to professionals to see what they thought
and low observatory decided to send him here because he had read about percival he was inspired
about his ideas about life on mars and the observatory was known as a
planetary observatory and so we sent him here at the same time
that our director vm slifer happened to be looking for somebody to help with this search project
you know if he had if it happened to been a year before or probably even a year after
that opening wouldn't have been there it just happened to be and it's great to look back at the records
and see how vm slifer had been writing colleagues around the country wondering if anybody had a little bit of
money or knew of anybody who could help out with the search project
because the staff of low was only you know three times full-time astronomers
um vm was now the director in doing a lot of administrative things his brother
was in the state legislature down in phoenix and and then carl lampton was not a
planetary guy um very much and so who's gonna actually do the work who's gonna come in here every night to
take pictures and then analyze those pictures on the blink comparator machine
he gets this letter for again looks at these great drawings oh my gosh this is the answer to what
we've been looking for the timing is just exquisite and so you know like you said dave clyde
um you know gets on the train in kansas and i love the story from um
from his book where he talks about the fatherly advice again this you know clyde is leaving
home and he's gonna go make it in the world and he he told miron who's dead
said clyde make yourself useful and beware of easy women and
near as we can tell he was pretty successful all around um
you know he he came out here he learned um and really mastered how to use this
instrument and there's a lot of stops and starts with it but he mastered it and within a
year he discovered this planet and you know the unlikelihood of it
you know it keeps building the because um you know they were looking in the sky
where a person of law had thought a planet should be pluto is really close to where he
thought it should be and yet as you said pluto is much smaller than lowell predicted and
they're looking for this massive plant which now today we know um the reason law was looking for that
that planet the reason it actually doesn't exist and because we didn't have a good idea
of how big the other planets were um they didn't find this big planet they found the small one
right where low fauna should be but it's not what he was looking for they you know that planet x is a ghost they
happen to find pluto and it's remarkable you know that the timing of pluto being
where it was in its orbit and you know if it was further out it would have been a lot smaller
um apparently less smaller you might not have seen it um so it's you know it's a real needle in the
haystack story and when you think about what he was these pictures
this is a copy of one of the pluto plates you can't see anything um but there's about 250 000 dots on
this and this this 14 by 17 inch glass plate went in
here um this represents an area of the sky by 15 degrees about the size of your fisted
arm's length so imagine at nighttime he comes in here and he's got this thing loaded in the plate in
the plate holder he has to load it in the dark because this is just like a big piece of film essentially
he loads this thing in here opens the telescope looks at a particular area of the sky
does an exposure for an hour and he's got to be tracking the whole time so he's gotta be looking through this guide
eyepiece making sure the telescope is tracking accurately if you don't pay attention
you're gonna get a blurry image you have to keep tweaking it a little bit that's the easy part
once he does that he goes in the dark room and develops this comes back several nights later
photographs the same area and then puts these things both plates on a machine
called a blink comparator and with the blink comparator there's a microscope eyepiece
and it looks at a really small section of one plate and there's a mirror that flips and you see the same small section
of the other plate and all he's doing is looking at all these dots
that's all he's looking at her dots um and seeing if any are changing position
because stars it's like driving down the road you know star you know the the ditch nearby is flying by but
the trees um off the horizon appear to be going a lot slower
so we're looking for something a lot closer like a planet is it going to change position relative to those background
stars mind numbing work um clyde was the right guy to do the job
because he was dedicated he was patient he was he was very careful um it would
be easy to you know it could take you could take a week to look at one set of plates and you're just talking about one
small area of the sky um he was detail-oriented had the right personality um to do the
job it's it's really just an amazing story when we think of how unlikely so
much of it is and also you know this is such a such an
important part of not only astronomy history but american history i mean because i think
you know maybe all of us as humans but i i'd like to think you know americans we have that that spirit of adventure and
discovery and you know to think that this 24 year old self-trained
um farmer um discovered a planet um and it wasn't
luck i mean it was luck that they happened to find something right there that that wasn't what personal thought
would be but but the search that thomas did was very systematic very
detail-oriented if you weren't paying attention you would have missed this dot that moved
from one day until several days later just a little bit it really is just such a great story in
so many ways it's been here as intel is really pretty neat
it's incredible kevin that combination of i mean he was really green
at the time going out there and starting his career there and yet as you say he
was methodical and careful and the millions of images that he looked at i've been fortunate enough to be um in
the basement there when brian skiff several times and a number of times over
the years and you were there a couple times with me in more recent time when brian's give you know
the b plate that one of the two discovery plates pulls it right out of his sleeve and
and you know my god you think if you know if you drop this we're all you know
going to be thrown in jail forever but i mean you look at it the number of
stars on one of those plates is astonishing so so the fact that he could do it
and do it so efficiently in the cycle of what he was looking at and and it was in gemini there where
in a suspect region the whole combination of things is incredible that this farm boy should
go out and and be so systematic and and so careful
in order to make such a breakthrough discovery it's an amazing story and you know it's neat because
you know where you've been in here dave the plate vault um it's row upon row thousands
of these glass plates in envelopes and you think about
the number of people involved with this search um there are a lot of other scientists and assistants who help
search for this body but nobody remembers their name but this this is their life this is
what they did clyde discovered pluto and thankfully we remember his name but you look in that
plate vault and it's just you know this legacy of all these careers and all these thousands of hours
um such hard work looking at the night sky it's amazing the dedication
it's incredible kevin and you tell the story so well and and of course when you're there on the grounds at low you
do you know and and i've been to other historical places but it's it's as good as any place you feel the the aura that
history that sense of clyde of the slifers of percival who's
in a mausoleum next to the clark you know that it's you just feel the energy
of that history it's unavoidable and if you could talk just for a minute
kevin about some of the incredible plan there's a a huge new era at lowell
observatory that's underway that people may not be aware of right
you know back when percival filed the observatory in 1894
one of the things he said was you know what's the point of doing science unless you share it with people
and we want to make them co-discoverers um so where it shouldn't be just for some people you know and science
organization should be for everybody and that's something that the observatory has taken seriously
especially over the last um several decades and we have a strong visitor program
that that works very closely with our research program to where you know
we are getting a hundred hundred ten thousand visitors a year um and that was
in a visitor center that was built to accommodate about seventy thousand and so you know there's there's so much
interest and the visitation was getting so great that we decided to really expand the
visitor program and phase one we opened a year gosh it seems like 20
years ago now but it was a year ago the geo volley open deck observatory which is uh
the whole building rolls back to expose six different uh modern telescopes
that um are completely for our public use i mean we might be able to do some research with them but it's designed
mostly for our our visitors up here and that's in addition
to being able to look through the 24-inch clark refractor which is a classic telescope we have another 24-inch
telescope we just bought a plane wave um but then this is all just kind of a warm up
for a new astronomy discovery center that we're opening i mean a couple years that's going to
have a visitor center that's three times the size of the current one and the top is going to be open
where you know we had talked about doing a planetarium but this is the first international dark
sky city in flagstaff arizona we've got the real thing here so
we don't want to enclose thing let's have let's see the real nice guy um complete with heated benches
because it does get pretty chilly in here in the winter and this is a really exciting time
um for you know for the observatory and you know we see it as an opportunity
you know as the world has evolved there are certain skills that i think
humans we've kind of lost a little bit you know critical thinking skills
um you know we look we take this seriously that we want to help you know educate people and make
science exciting and so there's just a lot of really great stuff coming up and you know an example of
some of the programs we're doing is something that you had mentioned before i mean that's our i heart by heart pluto
festival um again you know so much of what we're talking about tonight
started here but also continues here and charon pluto's largest moon was
discovered from photographs taking at the flagstaff station of the naval observatory just
four miles from where i'm standing and will grundy who works closely with allen on the new
horizons mission um and several of those team members have ties to little observatory so
you know flagstaff um kind of has been called the the home of pluto
and it's really neat to see because we have the science organizations but we have
you know just the community sees it that way at one of the restaurants the restaurant where clyde
ate the day discovered pluto he ate there a lot it was the black cat cafe at
the time it's now a sushi restaurant and every year they make pluto rolls
unveiling the pluto role again um another another partner um a local brewery mother road last year
made um pluto porter beer and and we didn't this year because it covered but we'll have that back next
year so there's there's a lot of really great connections the orpheum theater
where he went to watch the virginian i'm actually going to be there tomorrow
filming a little promo for next week and they're going to play a clip of that movie oh my god
just like clyde washed it so it's really great to be able to follow in his footsteps and and that's kind of the
genesis of the holy heart pluto festival that this year runs from the 13th through the 18th and includes
you dave i mean it's kind of neat because we have astronauts we have astronomers we have artists all
participating and it's all free and in this virtual if you have internet
connection you can see it so it's pretty neat stuff kevin thank you so much and there is an
unbelievably exciting future coming along at lowell observatory you'll hear
about it in the coming months and years and please do check out the i heart pluto
festival as well kevin i'll see you there along with alan and others in a few days here thanks so
much for watching thanks so much from such a historic spot
thanks kevin now um i mentioned this astronomy
magazine and brand that we have a little bit earlier and i'd like to begin to introduce you to some of the people who
are involved with the magazine and doing things with it one of them is not who's going to go
first here is not on our staff in wisconsin and of course we've been working for a year
at home all separated because of the situation going on in the world
but she's in oklahoma and she is an exceptionally bright young student an astronomy outreach
communicator who's interested in all kinds of things and so we latched on to her and she is doing a
magnificent job with our video series that we're putting out
there about all sorts of interesting astronomical subjects that is called infinity and beyond so now i'd like to
hand it over abby you're here aren't you hi yes hi dave so abby bolenbach um is
going to tell you a little bit i believe about our video series in which she is the host and star
infinity and beyond thank you so much dave it's so good to see everyone here so glad i'm so glad to
see you um i'm absolutely honored to be on here i always love getting to hop in and say
hi to scott and everyone i love this global star party and everything that you guys are doing
so wonderful introduction not sure if i have lived up to that hopefully i will
in the coming years of infinity and beyond but it is a fantastic series and it's taking a really good fire at least
i think with the public and especially the youth so what it is is basically it's about a five minute segment on some
particular uh astronomy topic whether it's um on research or upcoming
events and whatnot just something interesting normally a random slew of
a pick and i will um pontificate about a subject for just a
little bit with some interesting bits and the entire editing team wrangles me and of
course um all the time on certain points and that's partly why it's such
fantastic content is because of you guys but um it's created this uh fantastic
area for anyone really mainly about 18 some some high schoolers to
40s 50s about in that and that age swath uh it's created a great area
to learn in depth on a topic in a short span of time so whether it's on uh
let's see we had venus's surface um we've uh flat earthers and many many
others it doesn't matter i mean there's it's a the sky is the limit because it is the universe that we're talking about
um the next one coming up uh is gonna be about dark matter
and so i'm gonna give a little sneak peek of that but it's it's it's so cool for me to be able
to do this because i wanted something like this whenever i was younger whenever i was first
starting into this field i wanted there to be someone that was like my age of course a girl because i could relate
to that but i wanted something like that where i could see something really fast and get um absorbable
uh you know information that i could hang on to and that i could retain and so that's what
i'm trying to do and it's so cool because i'm learning so much in this process i
i can memorize formulas and things like that and i've been in this in this field for oh my gosh a decade now but
throughout this entire year with astronomy magazine i have obtained so much more appreciation
on certain things many more things than i could have imagined and i can't wait for the future
with you guys it's just it's been so fun well thanks abby it's great to have you
here we've enjoyed it the the videos are very very popular so i'm sure that you know
there's only one fundamental problem you know with everything that's going on in astronomy astrophysics cosmology and
planetary science we're probably limited only to about a thousand things to cover
so i don't think we're going to run out of things to talk about anytime soon you know i wonder if scott or if any of
the astro editors have any any comments any questions for abby about do what's
it like to work on a on a video production like this that's kind of bringing in a younger generation into
understanding uh a lot of what's going on in astronomy and and in a you know a reasonably
detailed way and you thought i well some thoughts i have is
that um it's it it really is unusual to have
someone of a younger generation uh kind of leading um
uh astronomy outreach in in the way that abigail does
you know we have we have seen uh you know you know david niker and i have been
around the block a little bit and uh we've seen lots of things but it's since it's uh it's a real inspiration you
bring the passion of your love for the night sky uh your knowledge of science
and your uh your ability to translate that and guide
people through some pretty complex stuff and you know a lot of people are when
they they are intimidated by astronomy or even by looking up at the night sky i i can't
tell you how many times i've taken people out to observe the stars and have them look up and and start to
describe distances and and scale and stuff and they they feel
maybe very humbled by that or they just can't wrap their head around these concepts
like you know the the speed of light and the distance light has traveled over a year and this kind of thing and you make
that very very understandable and that is super important thank you so much scott i so appreciate that
what kind of fuels me and what's fueled me throughout this whole process is getting to see that light in in the eye
of someone that's younger than me and how i've affected them in a positive way for instance with this video series
infinity and beyond one of my online friends contacted me via facebook and said that he has his
children his little girls watch it and they get excited they're like oh can we can we see abby all right is there an
episode and they're you know little uh maybe nine eight nine
ten and that just impassions me so much because that means that
they get to see someone that's pursuing their dreams that's a girl that's you know
closer to their age so they can kind of relate a little more and so they think oh maybe that could be possible or that
could give them inspiration to pursue something else and that they're interested that they might not have
thought could have been possible before that's right that's right and i think you're inspiring a lot of people
i often think about the benefit you you touched on something there about the benefit
of uh of astronomy and um uh you know i'm starting to hear i don't know david
you've you've been in uh you know from your position and all the
interactions you've had uh i often think about the benefit of uh exploring the
night sky reframing uh what we think about our world you know uh that it's not just this small
thing it's not just our neighborhood it's not just our town it's not just our problems okay
it's not just our problems it certainly gives you a lot of perspective it sure does it sure does and i think that that
i think that that is uh uh i must have real scientifically proven
health benefits mental benefits you know these kinds of things and so and i think
the community that we have and and the the outreach that we're just doing what we're doing right now you know we
have we have taken scientists we've had authors we've had discoverers we've had
historians uh and right now we have young abigail here with us but uh
i think we're giving everyone a good dose of uh what are the best of what our community is like and uh and there's a
lot more to come absolutely and i think you know one thing about abby is you know you can't
fake that kind of interest and enthusiasm you know the enthusiasm the genuineness
that abby shows and i you know i've she's very hard on herself you know we need to
you know allow her to pace herself because she'll rattle off you know in practicing
something you know 350 words and ah you know
word 351 is not quite what i wanted to say and i know that she doesn't have a teleprompter in her dining room there
you know she's memorizing you know it's it's truly impressive what she's able to master and just
rattle off um without you know
we should we should i totally agree with you guys we should put together a blooper reel um because the one that i
just recently sent to you guys there's some funny bits and it it does give something um i guess kind of to
uh show that no one's no one's perfect and it helps remind me too whenever i rewatch things like that it's like okay
you know it's okay i i do agree with you though dave um thank you better to make the mistakes
because that just shows how really genuine you are you know so and ridiculous
and ridiculous it doesn't yeah yeah it shows like oh she's cute and whatever but still
the i think the blue the blooper reel is the most fun part if if we just did these videos and it all went perfectly
it wouldn't be any fun at all yeah that's true and it also gives you guys something to laugh at me about
whenever you're like oh my gosh how could she oh that's funny it gives you something to reflect on
that's right and just for the record that will become public eventually we're working we've
already got our folder and that's going to be made public here uh once we have another delay in one of
the awesome well it's good to laugh at yourself and i'm trying to embrace that
this year i um at the beginning of the year i posted some pictures
on my social media platforms of ridiculous and whole red images of myself that i
wouldn't have ever dreamed to let anyone see but i decided i'm gonna remove my
filter and i'm just gonna i'm gonna let people laugh at me with myself because i'm sick
of my ego and so that's kind of what i think the bloopers will
will do i'm hoping probably later years i'll be like oh my gosh abigail how did you arrive at that
that's a that's a high wisdom uh realization thank you
it is i mean it's it's uh a lot of people never get there so i think actually it's probably from
years of performing on stage because i know what the audience sees and it's this perfect uh you know choreographed
image or musical piece or you know ballet or or these videos
um but you don't see the backstory and i've always seen that my whole life and so it's like crap
who am i fooling not myself that's for sure but you're doing a great
job and you know uh as as uh david said you know the
the honesty and uh that you can't fake the passion that you have for this you
know um that's true it really is everybody gets it so
thank you so much well abby you seem to be having a great time with this so far and and you're
producing fantastic videos that are very popular and we have millions of things to talk about so
we're very happy to have you on the team thank you i will be here as long as you guys keep me
so i i absolutely love doing this and i am still thrilled that i'm living in the
life where i get to work with you guys and i'm i have a part of something with astronomy magazine that's so cool i
collect my uncle he's uh he started it as a rocket scientist and went further
into physics and into laser physics uh and he collected astronomy magazine uh
throughout his uh childhood and career and college and i mean so did i i just i
never would have dreamed i wish i could have told my little 10 year old self whenever i first got into this
it's gonna be worth it it is good just keep persevering well you did you did
well it's certainly worth it and and the community is responding very well to these and and so we're excited about it
so thanks thanks for being here tonight abby thank you so much dave it's great to see
everybody i haven't seen you guys for a while thank you
thank you abigail scott i think we're next going to go to a little bit of live telescope
if molly all right well let's see molly wakeling has been
back there with back there in her backyard okay uh
imaging and um let's see if molly's got something in the scope yeah give me just a second to
switch over here there we go um so i we have the great nebula of
orion of course a very familiar object um for a lot of these uh star parties
it's been coming up too late for me to catch during the broadcast but now that we're much further into winter
it's uh in a good spot for me to image so this is a hydrogen alpha image of the
orion nebula and if you're unfamiliar with what hydrogen alpha is every chemical element glows in
in particular colors in a particular spectrum and one of the colors that hydrogen gas
in the universe glows in is this deep red when it's energized by nearby stars
so while i mean it's monochrome here because i have a monochrome camera but if we were looking at this um
you know with a color camera it would be this this deep kind of pinkish red um
the pink being because it's got white stars that are making the red look kind of pink right
so i yeah in the hydrogen alpha i like to image with that and some other spectral
bands like oxygen 3 because they're very very narrow slices of the
visible light spectrum which allow me to cut through the light pollution and just
grab onto that very narrow bit of light where not a lot of street lights are glowing so i can get a really nice high
contrast image and um you know with some post processing and stuff like that make a really nice image of it
wonderful fantastic it's beautiful and and uh of course the whole constellation orion is essentially is wrapped in the
the orion molecular cloud this is of course the the best hot spot
um of an emission nebula in it it's about 1350 light years away
and uh you know it's furiously making new stars of course as a mission nebulae
or want to do and uh of course hubble you know has shown these nice little proplids and you
know little little solar systems in the making here inside m42 so you know
everyone's ever certainly you know one of the favorites of practically every
amateur astronomer i think it's fair to say that's a gorgeous image of it thank you and it's so easy to see visibly in
the telescope or a pair of binoculars or you don't even have to be in very dark skies at all to be able to spot it naked
eye it's it's just so darn bright indeed
wonderful so go take a look at it it's clear where you are tonight thank you molly and will you be uh
perhaps uh latching on to some other targets yeah um if people are interested i can
go look over at some planetary targets since we're talking about pluto pluto is not up tonight unfortunately it comes up
in the morning right now um but we can go look at uranus and mars which are the
next best things excellent that would be fabulous sure thanks molly so much yeah you know we
talk about the sky it's nice to actually show this guy yeah you know so it is a star party yeah
that's right but uh this uh tonight this is a special night this is this is a celebration of someone
that inspired millions of people uh when uh clyde's discovery of of uh pluto and it
had not yet been named it made world headlines uh you know suddenly this
young man was thrust into the spotlight he was worried about
who might name it definitely wanted the loyal observatory to name it
so you know just reading the history of all of that and then trying to imagine you
know try to put yourself into a young man's shoes uh you know especially someone that that had come fresh off the
farm you know i used to work on a farm so i kind of can put some of that together uh a little bit
but wow you know and i mean here we are we're talking about
him today and he'll be talked about for many many generations into the future
he would be shocked if he knew we were doing this star party in his honor you think so i think he
would be really surprised and a little bit embarrassed you know he could be for all of the
notoriety that came he could be a rather modest self-effacing guy too
i see but now to continue the pluto theme alison klesman is one of our staff
members who has been at the magazine for several years and is a dynamo and knows a great deal about the science of
astronomy and uh in the last year has stepped into producing
the sky observing information in the in the center of the magazine as well as many of the
maps and she's going to talk tonight as senior associate editor
about uh some work that she did some years ago on pluto occultations and also i believe
she's going to talk a little bit about black holes tonight so i'd like to introduce you to
one of the dynamic members of our staff who is an incredible writer editor and
astronomer allison klezman well thank you dave that was a really nice introduction
um yeah so like dave said um i have done work uh so i started out as a scientist
and my science career basically started with pluto essentially um doing planetary science um longer ago than i
really want to admit um but i should preface this by saying that i had to go dig out some stuff that i had done um as
an undergraduate so this it was definitely a different experience um
but i had the opportunity to work um at the time i was working with jim elliot at mit um who was observing um basically
the first two pluto occultations that um we had seen since 1988. um so i've got
some slides here that i think will prompt me mostly but i've got some good pictures on it as
well um so i'm gonna pull those up for you now hopefully that works yell at me if it doesn't um so i started out
in planetary science basically studying atmospheres um and before new horizons
really the only way that we could study um and pluto's atmosphere in particular was through stellar occultations um and
that's actually how the atmosphere was confirmed um in the late 1980s before then people had thought that pluto
probably had an atmosphere um but there wasn't definitive evidence of it before we saw an occultation
um but to go over on the window um so what is a stellar
occultation um it's basically anytime a planet or any other object it doesn't have to be a planet it could be an
asteroid anything like that goes in front of a star it temporarily blocks the starlight it's
like an eclipse essentially it's exactly the same thing just instead of the moon going in front of the sun um or earth
going you know between the moon you've got an object that's blocking out a background star um and they're actually
really useful um they happen by pure chance but when they do happen you can
watch the starlight as it disappears behind this object and that actually tells you a lot
so actually on the bottom here i've got a light curve this is actually light curve of a pluto occultation
much more recently than the one that i studied but uh this is basically just the light level over time and you've got
the light going going along and then pluto comes comes by it blocks the starlight the light disappears and then
it comes back and the shape and the depth of the curve basically all these details about the
curve um really really tell you a lot so it tells you uh the size of the object which is really handy how long is the
starlight locked up blocked out for that tells you immediately how big the object is um it'll tell you if the object has
an atmosphere so again the shape if there's no atmosphere the light just drops off immediately very very sharply
but if there's an atmosphere you've got kind of this blurring softening effect and the light doesn't drop off as quickly um so again you're looking at
pluto and immediately you see that the light you know isn't just immediately dropping out so you've got an atmosphere there that
you're seeing it can also tell you if there are rings and that's actually how the rings of uranus were discovered um is if you've
got your light curve going along and there's a little tiny dip and then it comes back and then you have your real occultation and then on the other side
there's another little tiny dip that's the rings basically going in front of the starlight as well um so again really
really useful information um and even beyond that uh related to say again the atmosphere
of pluto the shape of the light curve will tell you information about the temperature and the density and the
pressure of the atmosphere um all things that you would never be able to get any other way unless you're sending a
spacecraft by which doesn't happen so often so they're really really handy
and like i said there there was a kind of a big occultation in 1988 and then there was
nothing until 2002 um but in 2002 pluto had two occultations it went from in
front of two separate stars basically about a month apart um and during that summer i was an undergraduate
and my job essentially was to go to our off-campus observatory every single night uh and take pictures of these
stars um using our 24-inch telescope at the time which i believe is still there actually uh and so then the next morning
uh probably very very late morning i would take those images um back to the lab and you basically feed them into a
computer into a program to get astrometry on these stars which is just basically telling you their position
relative to other stars and their position in the sky and why you need that why you really really need this
this really detailed astronomic astrometry is because uh if you've seen the solar eclipse paths you've you know
especially with the the recent solar eclipses and the upcoming one in the us there are these paths showing where the
shadow is going to fall and that's pretty big when you're talking about the moon when you're talking about pluto going in front of a
background star it's a really tiny shadow relatively speaking and you really want to pin down where
that's going to happen because you need to put a telescope there if you want to observe it um sometimes you get lucky and there's a
major observatory there and you know it just happens to cross right over a telescope a lot of times you aren't and you're taking a telescope out into the
field usually in the back of a pickup truck or something um and and trying to chase down this
eclipse so you really want to know ahead of time where it's going to happen if at all possible um
and for example over on the on the left there i've just got the august eclipse path that that pluto or the occultation
path that pluto took um again these were the first ones really observed since 1988 um so in terms of pluto's
atmosphere you've basically got 13 14 years where you don't know what has been happening to it we had that one
observation and then we have nothing uh and there were thoughts that um so at
that time pluto was starting to pull away from the sun so it came closest to the sun in 1989 and then it started
pulling farther away it's got a very elliptical orbit it gets very very far away from the sun it's going to get cold as it gets farther away from the sun and
there were thoughts that the atmosphere could actually freeze out and snow down to the ground if it got cold enough
and then the question became if that happens if we send a spacecraft there is there even going to be an atmosphere to
observe uh and that was a big you know ongoing question so you get these two
occultations in 2002 and just some of the results are that there was actually
something complex going on the pluto's atmosphere was still there spoiler it was still there um which was interesting
in and of itself um the atmosphere was still there so that basically proved that if we were you know to send a
spacecraft in the next you know decade or two it would it would have something to see um but it but it was undergoing
changes it actually between 1988 and 2002 had increased in pressure by about
two times um and that kind of translates to probably increasing in surface pressure at the
surface of pluto and the temperature as well by about two degrees celsius um so really really interesting things going
on um the idea is that at that time and actually still currently pluto's
northern hemisphere is facing the sun and that's got a lot of nitrogen frozen there and as the sunlight hits that it absorbs
the sunlight it heats up it sublimates turns directly into a gas basically becomes atmospheric gas you're adding
material to the atmosphere that increases its mass and its pressure and at some point that's going to drop
off at some point it will get cold enough that that's not going to happen anymore but um and probably soon if not already
actually there are some recent occultations that showed that maybe that's starting to happen um but again these are this is the way that you kind
of can chart what's going on with pluto's atmosphere even if you aren't sending a spacecraft by it um you can wait and get lucky and there was this
period kind of between 2002 and i think about now when it was in a really good spot in the galactic plane that it was
going in front of a lot of background stars you have you had a good number of occultations and again that's going to
start dropping off again but that's how you learn about an atmosphere or a lot of other aspects of
an object be it a planet a dwarf planet whatever you want to call it um anything that you can't observe directly or
easily um so it's really they're just really really handy they weren't something i'd ever heard of before i
started working on them i don't know that you know they kind of come up in common parlance a lot but they're really useful they're really great things
um so yeah um so after that i ended up going to grad school to earn my phd um
and no one there was really doing planetary science at university of florida so i actually ended up switching
tax entirely which is why this talk is going to change completely right now so now i'm taking us away from pluto kind
of transitioning away um and just to talk very briefly uh kind of very big overview on the the subject that i then
went on to study which are super massive black holes so that has nothing to do with pluto it's no just
no tropic transition i'm sorry about that but um so i then went on to study supermassive
black holes um question one is what is a supermassive black hole um these are the heaviest black holes that exist so there
are three basic classes of black hole and these are the heaviest these are the ones weighing in at like a million to
several billion times the mass of the sun uh we also believe that every galaxy
at least every large galaxy probably every galaxy even if it's small has a supermassive black hole in its center
that's where we find them in the centers of these galaxies um including the milky way we actually have
a 4.6 million solar mass black hole in the center of our galaxy called sagittarius a star that was pretty
famous and you've probably heard of that um and so they're all over the place uh they're really really cool and i'll just
kind of walk you through a little bit of science behind them uh so the first thing is what do they look like um
artist rendition of course we do actually have a picture of one so that famous picture of a black hole is a picture of a supermassive black hole um
but to kind of get you in a little bit closer into some things that you can't see um over on the right
is kind of where we're going to start really really close and you have the singularity which basically is the black hole itself that's so that's what is
sucking in everything or what or where the where sp where the curvature of space time is infinite basically all
that cool stuff where physics breaks down that's the singularity so the first thing we can really talk about uh that
we can really observe essentially is the event horizon um and that is
light hours across so that has an actual size that is a couple light hours across to put that in context that's about the
distance of pluto from the sun let's say so kind of that distance is what you're talking about when you talk about the
event horizon um and the event horizon is basically the point of no return anything that crosses closer to the
black hole than the event horizon is is going to fall in no matter how fast you tr you travel go the speed of light
doesn't matter you're gonna fall into the black hole um so that's why that part is kind of cool but that's really the first part that we can see
everything beyond that that i'm going to talk about is outside the black hole outside the event horizon these are things that we can see
first one is really the accretion disk so that's kind of this spinny area around here you can also see it in the
other picture as well um so material as it's falling into a black hole it can't all squish in at once it just doesn't
work physics doesn't let that happen um it ends up forming this really nice disc that's a lot like water kind of going
down a drain like a whirlpool it's a good way to think about it um and as material in that whirlpool or in this
disc kind of gets closer and closer it clumps together it starts moving faster as it starts to
fall in and it basically generates a lot of friction you've got a lot of material rubbing up against each other um that
generates friction friction generates heat and if you get something hot enough it will shine um and so the accretion
disk will shine uh usually in optical light sometimes in even brighter light than that um more energetic light than
that and you've also got this corona of gas that's kind of right outside that um that's also shining the corona is even
hotter it usually shines in like x-rays really really hot and this is light days across so now
you're talking basically the entire size of the solar system or a little bit larger than that depending on where the end is essentially
um but solar system size does just this this accretion disk in the inner portions of the black hole
and then you can start stepping outward there's still more parts to go um we've got this region of fast-moving gas
clouds and this is called the broadline region i'm not really going to get into why it's called that but basically it's just a bunch of fast-moving gas clouds
kind of spinning around the black hole um and once you're out there you're about a hundred light days out so now you're starting to get a little further
out um past that you have what's called the dusty taurus um taurus is really
just a fancy word for a donut so it's kind of this donut shaped bunch of dust um we've drawn it really kind of solid
here it's probably not solid it's probably cloudy hazy it's not a solid object but it's a bunch of dust
basically surrounding the black hole and that's about 100 light years out so now you're getting really really big
basically the closest star to the sun is four light years so several times that distance is kind of where this dust is
sitting beyond the supermassive black hole if you keep moving out because there's
still more parts to go you have slower moving gas clouds called the narrow line region um you might notice this is kind
of similar to this broadline region that we have again it just depends on what the spectrum of the gas looks like
but it's basically slower moving gas clouds those are about a thousand light years out um and then you have the best
part the most fun which are these jets that are shooting out from either side of the black hole um again these are
coming from outside the black hole this is material from the accretion disk we think that some some interaction with
magnetic fields probably is launching these off the accretion disks so it's not coming from inside the black hole
it's not material you know that's already disappeared this is stuff that never made it into the black hole but it's being shot out on the order of a
hundred thousand light years um that's basically the width of the milky way so if you've got a galaxy
that's a hundred thousand light years across and it's got a supermassive black hole in the center that is shooting out jets a hundred thousand light years on
either side you can see these outside the galaxy and we have observed these so it's a
really cool way to to see you know something that's going on in the very center of a galaxy that maybe you can't really zoom in on but you've got these
jets being launched out from the center of the galaxy that are very very energetic and shooting out way past the
boundaries of the galaxy um so even though the supermassive black hole itself is you know
is basically sizeless and its event horizon is light hours across you end up with these jets that are you know 100
000 light years across um i mentioned that every supermassive
black hole is pretty much inside a galaxy and every galaxy has a supermassive black hole um so we've actually discovered these really cool
relationships between galaxies and their supermassive black holes one is called the m sigma relation all
it says is that the mass of the supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy scales with something called
the velocity dispersion of the bulge so what that means is the way that the stars are moving inside the bulge inside
the center region of a galaxy is related to how massive the supermassive black
hole in the center of the galaxy is um and this graph is just showing that this is this is observed so we aren't like
putting galaxies on here intentionally you're just observing the velocity of dispersion and the mass of supermassive
black hole you put them on this plot and they fall on this really nice line um it's a really really tight
relationship which is really cool another really cool relationship that we have is that the mass of the
supermassive black hole also scales with how bright the center of the galaxy is how bright that bulge of the galaxy is
basically very similar looking relationship um so that's really cool i mean so if you can't observe the the
mass of a supermassive black hole but you can observe how bright the center of a galaxy is or how its stars are moving
you automatically know basically how how big a supermassive black hole is uh the real question is why
why is this happening um when you hear the word supermassive black hole it's got super massive right there on the tin
it's really massive right uh this is millions or billions of times the mass of the sun but if you compare it to the bulge of a
galaxy it's 0.5 of the mass in the center of the galaxy there so even
though it's this really massive compact object it's it can't compare to the other you know 99.5
uh of material in the bulge so it's way way way outmatched um and the real
question is so why do these relationships exist um we're not entirely sure but we know that somehow
the galaxy and its supermassive black hole must know about each other somehow
and that's really important for how galaxies evolve um and it's really important for how supermassive black
holes evolve the question is what kind of which came first is still a bit of a question did the super massive black
hole come first or did the galaxy come first um and we do also know that they can influence each other so just to kind
of end real quick um we know that they evolved together so supermassive black holes inside a galaxy can influence
what's going on in the whole galaxy so i told you that it can have these basically galaxy spanning jets that it's
shooting out um those are very energetic and they're basically injecting energy injecting heat into the gas of a galaxy
um heating up a galaxy and actually that turns off a galaxy's ability to form
stars so stars form when interstellar gas gets very very cold you know a
couple degrees kelvin really really cold if you heat that gas up at all too much it's not going to condense down and form
stars so this is a way that astronomers think that you might turn a young galaxy that's forming a lot of stars into an
old galaxy that's not forming a lot of stars the the supermassive black hole in the center has something to do with
eventually heating up the gas in that galaxy turning off star formation and ending that galaxy's life essentially uh
on the other hand you can get these crazy mergers uh this background picture is a merger of at least two galaxies
possibly three you've got three super massive black holes that you can see here actually all in this kind of merging mess and
that can actually funnel material into the center of a galaxy and give the supermassive black hole a lot more food
and can make it again much brighter make it shoot out these jets when maybe it wasn't doing very much before uh so we
know that supermassive black holes and galaxies definitely evolve together even if we don't know exactly how but clearly
that's kind of the next step is to figure out what what is the relationship and why do they know about each other and which one came first so ongoing
questions um but that's that's all i have oh cool so cool yep
fantastic thanks alice and then part of that answer might come hypothetically from the web space telescope that is the
hope yeah so the webspace telescope will be able to observe some of these really early galaxies um and
basically see them you know and hopefully see they're forming supermassive black holes which would be really cool
exactly that's fantastic thank you so much i feel like allison just thrust us
through the whole universe you know from pluto to yeah
everyone else just fell quick 20 minutes i mean and now like i got awesome it
that's fantastic now we're going to go from science to some observing uh of the sky um and what's going to be
going on in the near future in the sky when you look at the history of astronomy magazine it was founded by
steve walther in august 1973 was the first issue um and uh he he was a very interesting i
never met him but he was an interesting guy who started the magazine when he was in school had the idea for it when he
was in school in wisconsin and his brother who was an attorney he was a very nice guy he's still around he's in
arizona um funded the magazine and when you think of sort of the whole
tapestry of the history of this organization this brand a few names
really stand out in terms of being real powerhouses in terms of making this
magazine what it has been and certainly richard berry and robert burnham would
have to be there and and one of the other guys who's one of those powerhouses has just recently certainly
rich talcott too but michael bachach is certainly here for 16 years
on staff and he's just recently retired he's also a comedian
but he's a pal and and uh we're actually working on some projects together
in fact we can tell you in the near future it may be about a
book that we're writing together but for the for the time being um we're gonna be michael's gonna be talking about
things that are up in the night sky and i think you're simulating in the room that you're in michael the night sky it
looks like to me too i am an astronomer it is true okay let's see
uh are you
sharing my screen
are you guys getting this yeah yes okay so
you know it is a star party and i thought well let's talk about the stars
um but first a little bit about clyde i lived in el paso texas in the 90s
worked at a museum there designed helped construct an observatory
and a huge well the full museum astronomy exhibit
we lived on the west side of el paso we were 42 minutes from clyde and
patsy's house and i used to visit him every now and then
and um he was just great and like you dave i endured
hundreds of puns i think on each visit
were you like me mike i mean some they were some of them were so bad all you could do you literally had to have your
head sink into your hands oh god i was great at fake laughter oh i
learned that fast you know i was so enthralled i mean you know i i didn't
get to meet uh william herschel you know or johann gal who discovered
you know uranus and neptune but here was a planet discoverer i was in his house i
was drinking tea and stuff like that on the second or third visit
i remember bringing his book out of the darkness with me and
i said oh um mr tomba could you could you please sign this and he said yeah hand it over
so we chatted and i noticed that he was writing in it and we chatted a little bit more and he's writing in it some
more and i thought man this is going to be the greatest dedication of all time so after i'm not kidding
several hours and another 100 puns clyde hands me the book back i said
thank you sir and shortly after left and i went home and i thought wow i
wonder what he wrote and opened the book up and there's to my
friend michael you know clear skies clyde tombaugh i don't actually remember
my books in storage right now um and i thought what in the world so i
started paging through and i realized that
oh yeah that's not too it's not michael something like this probably yeah
something like that let's see if the rest of it holds true because in my copy
he went through and corrected all the mistakes oh
that's what he was doing for two hours and i got home and i went oh my gosh
that's just crazy did he possibly do this to the entire press run i don't
know yeah yeah yeah he probably would well he actually uh some of you know ray shibinsky he's a contributing editor to
astronomy been a friend of mine he also lived in el paso for part of that time and we'd go up and
visit clyde clyde did the same thing to his copy it was just like are you kidding me i
mean first of all how do you remember all that but you know it was clyde he said uh one time to us that
in his career in searching for pluto not just uh as far as the discovery but the entire
uh place that he took and uh and compared he figured that he scanned about 90
million stars oh my god that's a lot of stars
so anyway on several of those nights two or three nights at least
i had the chance to observe at clyde's house with his telescope in back
and it was a little um i was a little nervous because
clyde had this huge monstrous dave knows the telescope well
16-inch telescope and he would climb on it and he's pulling off the mirror covers and he's
and i mean you know the guy's 400 years old and um
can i help can i no no i got this and he's swinging down on it and we're looking at stuff and oh his enthusiasm
was just spectacular so i thought well i'm going to talk a little bit about
the sky that clyde loved so much and i'm going to start with the moon
and i picked a point two days past first quarter which in this month is about
february 21st now if you're an advanced amateur astronomer
this might be a good time to go get a cup of coffee or a snack or go to the bathroom or whatever
allison stock was spectacular i'm gonna take it down a notch
two notches ten notches okay this is gonna be very simple so let's
look at a picture of the moon and the moon is so cool when you observe the moon with a small
telescope the best place to look on it is follow my cursor this line that
separates the dark and the light area it's called the terminator
and the terminator is where sunrise before full moon or sunset after full
moon is happening now i picked out a couple things to look at
first take a look at this crater it's top center of the moon
real dark bottom okay very very fresh volcanic
surface down there let's take a close-up look at it
and here we are down here and this is uh i mean this view is an easy view through a
three-inch telescope with a magnification of only about a hundred okay you can see usually this
much this much uh scenery around this crater whose name is plato and here's some of
the other things around it very close are two mountain ranges the tana reef mountains down here and the
alps named for the alps mountains here on earth and one cool thing to look for
is this large i call it a scratch in the lunar surface valles outfits
really cool and uh again plato is great right at first quarter or several
days before or after and it's unmistakable because of that very very
dark floor in it okay let's take another look at the moon can you find plato okay we can see plato
now it goes straight down from plato down to the other end of the moon bottom
center and we're going to take a close-up look at this region
this is really cool because you have this one big crater in the center here
and inside that crater are a series of smaller and smaller craters in this
curved line okay the big crater's name is clavius
and this curved line starts with rutherford and then these craters get
smaller and smaller and smaller and you have some really small craters in fact if a crater doesn't have a name or if it
has only a letter associated with it it's called a crater lit a small crater
this is a really cool part of the moon that you can observe through just a
small telescope at only about medium medium magnification
unfortunately clytamba does not have a named crater on the moon
he does however have one on mars tombak crater it's about 36 miles across
which places it about midway inside the biggest and the smallest craters on mars
now your backyard telescope will not let you see tombak crater mars is just
too far away and although 36 miles is quite a span at that distance not going to see tomba
crater but i thought you know when we know he has a whole large area tombaugh regio on pluto
he also has a crater not on the moon but on mars
okay let's look at the starry sky this was a picture of the big and little dippers do you see them
yep you mean by one of our contributors here they are
the big dipper and the little dipper parts of two constellations both bears
ursa major for the big dipper is the great bear and ursa minor the little
dipper is the bear cub and the two stars at the end of the scoop of the dipper called the pointer
stars if you take a look at that distance and go about five times that distance away
from them you'll become to this star its name is polaris
the north star this is a better photograph of the little dipper and here's the polaris
polaris is not the brightest star in the sky but it's one of the brightest the human eye
can see well depending on where you are between 5 and 8 000 stars all over the
sky polaris is in the top 50 as far as brightness goes so although it may not
look so bright you know if you're near a city it is bright appearing stars in the
sky but if you take a small telescope and you point it at polaris
split it into two stars polaris is one of those stars we call a double star or
a binary star and polaris is uh not unusual in that regard in fact
if you look around the sky about 60 percent of the stars you see
are double or multiple stars so our sun which is a single star
is actually in the minority okay this is the constellation taurus the
bull and the easiest part of taurus to find is this v-shaped group right in the
center of the picture here with the bright star aldebaran marking one of his eyes
but what i want you to look at is something that is a great binocular object and it's called the pleiades or
the seven sisters because people a long time ago when their skies were
very clear and very dark saw seven stars there and they made up a uh
a myth about those seven stars how they were being pursued um by orion the
hunter and how the king of the gods placed taurus the bull between the
hunter and the stars to kind of uh help them keep their distance
but the pleiades through binoculars is a really great object and the bigger the telescope
unfortunately the smaller the field of view gets so you don't really get the full impact of the pleiades through a
telescope unless it's at very low power but here's a nice close-up view of the
pleiades and the gas in the same field of view as the
pleiades okay moving on probably the most famous constellation
in the sky is orion the hunter and the easiest part of orion to see is the
three stars in his belt in fact if you draw a line up from those three stars
you'll get to taurus the bull and then continue that line past that v and you come to the pleiades
if you draw a line down from those stars you'll come to the brightest star in the nighttime sky sirius the dog star but
we're not looking at sirius here we're looking at something that molly pointed out in fact a live view of it this is
just a picture of the orion nebula if you look at the sword of orion it looks
like it has three stars in it to your eye but the the middle star seems kind of
fuzzy well it's not a star at all it's actually a nebula and here's a picture
of it um nebula is a word a latin word that means cloud so this is a cloud of dust
and cold gas in space that because of gravity is slowly
shrinking and forming stars and it's forming stars in this center here and you can see how bright that area is and
in fact if you crank up the power of your telescope just a little bit more
and look at that area you can see four and if you have a big telescope you can
see a few more stars but mainly four stars in that area called the trapezium
okay this is the trapezium and it's the four stars
that have all four of the many stars that already have formed in the orion
nebula and their light their radiation is helping us to view that gas
this is the constellation auriga the chariot driver or charioteer and it's
made up of these stars and this orange one here and this bright
star is the sixth brightest nighttime star it's called capella but we're not
looking at capella in fact we're looking at this object it's called the salt and
pepper cluster because a wild and dave loves how i love these names of deep sky objects
if you need a name for a deep sky object any deep sky object michael's your guy
yeah [Laughter] but this is the salt and pepper cluster
because an amateur astronomer looking at it through his telescope realized that wow it looks like somebody
spread out a piece of black velvet and poured salt all over it not sure where
the pepper comes from but take a look at this glorious object
and even through a small telescope you can see between 50 and 100 stars and
it's not as big as the pleiades in fact at a peak well it's as big as in real
life but as far as its distance go it appears much smaller so you can capture
all these stars in this a single view through your telescope so this is the
salt and pepper cluster in aurica the chariots here
okay remember this constellation this is taurus the bull again and we can see the v and we can see the pleiades up here
and we can see the tips of the horns of taurus the bull i want to point to
something you can't see in this picture and you can't see with just your eyes you need a telescope it's called the
crab nebula and if you look at it through a small telescope it looks like
a puff of smoke okay it's not real difficult to find but you know it doesn't have a whole lot of
uh of detail in it through a small telescope large telescopes however wow so this is
the crab nebula and it's anything but a gentle puff of smoke
this object was once a star much larger than the sun that came to the end of its life
and blew up in what's called a supernova explosion and now
the material from the crab nebula is speeding outward into space in all directions
at 900 miles per second so every second that goes by
this object is growing by 1800 miles that's just amazing that is an explosion
and it's uh among the largest explosions in space a supernova
okay i want to end with a bit of a challenge object okay this is the bottom
half of orion the hunter here's the belt up here okay and here is the brilliant star really
nice bright blue star named rigel that marks his left foot his left foot it's on our right side
so if you take the top star of the belt whose name is mintaka and draw a line
uh through rigel and keep going about the same distance you'll come
to this object it's one of the reddest stars in the sky it's called heinz crimson star it was
discovered by a british astronomer john russell hind back in the mid-1800s
that it looked like a drop of blood on a black field and indeed it does
uh it's about 6 500 times as bright as the sun believe
it or not but it's very far away it's 350 light years so the light that we see
if you find it tonight the light you're seeing started on its journey toward the earth 350 light
1350 years ago it's it's really red because what
happens is that dust or soot made of carbon
collects in the atmosphere of the star and that blocks out the blue light
that's coming from the star and so it looks redder and redder and redder and it gets fainter and fainter and fainter
until the heat builds up enough that poof you know it it blasts the carbon
away and it begins the process again of building it up so because it goes from
bright to dark to bright to dark it's also called a variable star so not as
not only is it intensely red but it's also it also varies in brightness
and that as they say is uh what's up in the sky tonight
thanks for uh thanks scott thanks dave for letting me uh participate that's awesome that's awesome oh michael you
use you've given planetarium shows i think many of them is that right
thousands thousands yeah yeah i i think that uh
i think that we got a great uh planetarium experience tonight so thank you very much
you are welcome now how do i uh stop share okay there you go there you go
thank you although michael has retired from the staff and made his way like any logical person
would to tucson he is still very involved with the magazine he's still
writing a lot for us and he's producing products and all kinds of things so he's still very much a part of this brand
thanks for joining us tonight michael you are welcome thank you a pleasure as
always i think it's dinner time so i'm gonna say goodbye to everybody thanks michael enjoy
i'm going to suggest that soon we take another short brief break
okay but first molly has a live image if you still have it i
believe molly for us of uranus to share
excuse me i do indeed um so again this is my this is my monochrome camera my zwo asi 1600 um and
i have the focal reducer on the eight inch scope you can see in the picture there so
uh it's not a super impressive image of of uranus but it's uh it's this guy here in the middle
um we can uh uh zoom in on that a little bit it's just you know
watch the um the dots
that was a little further away from it let me zoom back out here um this dot is a star
um and get the number on that again here uh it's just it's a magnitude
uh 6.9 star hd one four two seven eight in case you really wanted to know what
that star was called um yeah so so if you look at uh uranus
through um through the telescope with your eyepiece or if you look at it with a color camera on there you can very
easily see the the teal kind of blue green color that it has and you can see
that it's not point like like a star if you have a telescope with enough um magnification on there
uh i don't have a number offhand to say how much enough magnification is but an
eight inch uh schmidt cassette grain will definitely do that for you like like the one that i have here
um and yeah it's really cool to see a planet so distant through the telescope and be able to actually look and see
like oh yeah that's definitely not a star unlike pluto which can be rather hard to distinguish from the stars it's
still very point-like indeed thanks molly that's one one big
step out toward pluto there then yeah yeah yeah
fantastic scott how about we take about a five minute break and then we'll do the uh home stretch with the talks with
the astro editors after that is that okay yeah it'll be fine um i do want to
mention too that we are going to have a after party i will
put in a link so that if you are interested in attending the after party
we will start that at roughly 10 30 something like that
if you have a live view through your telescope if you have a cool story about astronomy
if you met clyde tomba or have some sort of special thing you'd like to share about clyde
that would be great uh we know that uh i've been reading the chats i know some of you actually had some interaction
with him so i think that's fantastic um and it is a way that you can be part of
this outreach program so um i will post that uh uh that
that link here in the in a few more minutes okay and scott that may be a little later i think though
um because we still have three speakers from the magazine well it could be yep so whenever whenever our talks are done
that's right and we're astronomers we should be staying up that's right we're just now getting
going so that's right that's right okay all right so i think this one is about a 10-minute break and
we'll be back okay excellent all right thanks thanks everyone
well the talks have been fantastic um really great
so i can go ahead and
excuse me get the uh crowd nebula pulled up as well for uh in between talk view sure
excellent molly thank you for doing this this is awesome yeah no problem
um
you
you
you
you
you
um
now
this
okay
while we're still here on this break i wanted to take the time for all the good people at cloudy nights
who are visiting and watching and supporting the global star party
every program that we've been broadcasting has been on the home page of cloudy nights and it's been very nice so
thanks very much and we are also looking and talking about maybe having a cloudy nights program that we would be
broadcasting so are you only going to do that on a cloudy night
the good thing is dave is asking it's always cloudy somewhere okay okay
i don't want to cause trouble just checking always cloudy somewhere right that
planet you know geez right
you can see where all the telescope equipment the world is sold you know because it's cloudy wherever that might
be
well we we had quite a little snowfall today in wisconsin and
that wasn't the worst of it the worst of it is i think by sunday morning it's going to be minus 12 for the oh my
goodness that's the kind of cold that hurts yeah it's been so nice to have a break from
winter since i've moved to california it's yeah it's been really great
i've decided to bite the bullet and just buy a snow blower it's gotten to the point where
i'm out there with a shovel and i see every single neighbor in the neighborhood finish their driveway like
one by one just borrow your neighbor snowblower that's what they're good for yeah yeah neighbors are good for to
borrow things from exactly i guess i could just ask i was kind of expecting an offer from one of
them at some point but i think maybe everyone assumes that the other has offered [Laughter]
well goodness so i i've got us in gallery viewing right now and our audience can see all of us including uh
mark's uh a companion there yes he's got the hiccups so he's uh
he's being a little needy but he likes the stars too he likes he likes to be outside at night
wonderful you should share his name mark his name is gudy gguri hi bud yes i'm talking about you
excellent well maybe uh in libya with us too maybe at one point uh libby and the stars can
get hired by uh astronomy magazine and and write some great articles like you
guys do so yeah yep we'll see about that so where do we go
from here david are we ready to go well i'd like to introduce you to another young dynamic editor and writer
and uh force at the magazine who is going to talk
something that's a little bit different than than purists of course a major allied subject
of interest to all of us is space exploration and especially this new era of space exploration and adventure um
that really captivates a lot of of younger people as well and and so jake parks has been with us for
a number of years and has done a lot of work on the magazine and you know mind you the people who get our print
magazine by and large they want the print magazine still you know they're they're a lot of them are almost as old
as i am um but there is also of course an evolution going on uh that at a rapid pace of a
lot of people who only read things and want them digitally and so our digital online content is becoming more and more
important and jake has embraced and taken on a role as a sort of a central coordinator of a lot
of that digital work as well so he does a lot of things on the magazine on the brand and he's going to
talk tonight about the new era i believe of space exploration
yep so let me go ahead and share my screen real quick
all right can you guys see that yes all right so perfect today um like dave
mentioned uh i really want to talk about a new space race that's kind of right we're right on the precipice of starting
right now and that has to do with space tourism so first off what i want to do is just
kind of get into a little background first so some of you here tonight probably remember the thrill and
excitement of the actual space race and especially the apollo missions as they
unfolded live on your big kind of bulbous bunny ear tv but i missed out on that i was born
about a decade and a half after the last apollo mission and that's not to say that i didn't
really enjoy my share of human space flight over my childhood but i didn't quite get that same thrill that some of
you might have had so i saw numerous space shuttle launches as a child and a teenager and i also saw
the construction of the international space station which has housed astronauts now for 20 consecutive years
and then in addition to that i've seen you know what i really haven't seen much
else besides space shuttle international space station and that's about it
but fortunately i think in the next few years especially and definitely in my
adult life hood um unless something goes terribly wrong i'm going to be right on the precipice of
one of the most exciting eras of human space flight that i think can basically
happen at any point so this era is not going to be led by nations and superpowers though like the
last one was instead it's going to be led by commercial companies and whether those are private or public um they will be
innovating and making advancements in the name of profits and yes that last
part seems a little sketchy but it's not necessarily all that bad of a thing because a lot of times profits can
really drive progress and they can drive it a lot more quickly than you know pretty much anything else
so tonight what i want to do is i want to talk to you a bit about this new and exciting era of human space flight and
specifically commercial space flight now just a heads up this is going to be pretty basic and i'll just discuss a few
things in brief detail but for instance what i want to talk about are who are the major players in
commercial space uh tourism what can we expect in 2021 and then i want to get a
little bit starry-eyed and i want to touch on just uh what the next few years and even decades
could literally bring to humanity and in my eyes i think that these next few
years are going to be pivotal and really changing the course of humanity's future moving forward so before that some real quick
background on the original space race so for decades following the launch of
the soviet sputnik satellite which went up obviously in 1957 that really kicked off the space race
and for decades afterwards sending things into orbit meant the nations had to throw huge amounts of money at the
problem and that's really really true when you started talking about sending humans and just
flinging them into space because you know you got to be a little more careful when that kind of stuff happens
so that's why only two superpowers first the soviet union and then the united states were able to send humans into
space using their own homegrown technology in the latter half of the 1900s
for the record uh czechoslovakian did fly up becoming the third nationality to
actually make it to space but they went up against a or they went up in a soviet craft uh in 1978 so it wasn't actually
until 2003 that china's national space uh administration finally launched their
own astronauts aboard a chinese built craft so at the time that made china only the
third nation to develop a full-fledged fledged human space flight program but by then private companies were
already kind of kicking off their own space space race so let's go ahead and dive
into a few of the major players that are going to be part of this huge space race to come
uh there's three main ones and i'm pretty sure all of you know about them first is spacex next is blue origin and
then of course we got virgin galactic there's many other players in this industry and this whole game but these
are the big top dogs for now at least so first off it's hard to deny that
spacex created by the multi-multi-billionaire and tesla founder elon musk is the most famous of
this trio and there's a few reason reasons for that the first is probably explosions
and then next we got explosions and then we got really rapid progress but you know finally we got explosions again
so why does spacex really like push forward despite all these seeming
disasters that kind of happen and disaster is not quite quite the right word but let's say catastrophic failures
so the reason is because spacex is truly a fearless company and they're constantly blowing them stuff up just so
they can keep pushing forward with the next bigger better more effective thing
so frankly blown stuff up has been working for them and out of all the commercial space
flight companies in my opinion spacex is by and far the definitive leader right now they currently have two functioning
wash launch vehicles a third one that's getting pretty close to being ready
and they have the only privately built crew capsule that nasa has actually approved for human use
so really quick we'll dive into what exactly is spacex's arsenal of products
so first we have falcon 9. this is kind of their bread and butter right now and
falcon 9 um can carry a payload of about 34 000 pounds about 16 000 kilograms into low
earth orbit and make it sorry it can do that for a cost of about 50 million dollars which boils down to
roughly 3 000 per kilogram that's expensive but it's only about a
third of what it actually cost to send that same amount of material into space just a decade or so ago so that's a
dramatic reduction in launch cost and that reduction in launch cost is due to the fact that after uh falcon 9 in
all of spacex's rockets for that matter after falcon 9 deployed
uh-oh did we lose jake oh maybe now he's still broadcasting his um his
audio cut out for a little bit earlier but not for this long
well he can just log back in it's okay worse things have happened on this
program it is the internet
should we give him a minute to to restart he said his power just went out
oh maybe i lost [Music] do you power power yes what he just said
yeah there's a winter storm going on right now this is where he was getting
blasted here yeah um well maybe he'll come back on you
know so back on and we can continue yeah but if caitlyn is ready we'll go into a
very abrupt transition you know transitions i don't really use them if you you know
okay i also have an image of the crab nebula if you need a transition you like to show the crab jake said he
can his powers he's been doing a lot of transitions for us for the last few star parties so it's been good it's been good
did you say his power is back his his power is back he's got to reboot his computer so give him some time so the crowd never would be perfect
right and excellent all right
iss is rising all right um oh let me actually
molly have you ever photographed the iss with your scopes i have yeah i've gotten a couple really nice shots and i'm kind
of honing my technique yes yeah it's like practice precision fly fishing i mean
it's crazy yeah and i've actually i've had more success
um uh hand tracking it than trying to get the paramount to track it like it's
supposed to mainly because my alignment models are never great i'm still working on the alignment model but
um i'm just resizing my windows here for y'all's uh viewing pleasure
let's see oh no come back it's the crab yeah i'm uh i'm working on it hang on
there we go okay it's nice thank you um yeah so this is the carbon
villa i thought about doing uh hydrogen like i did for um
for the orion nebula but i thought it'd be fun to take a look at it in oxygen uh there's a um
a transition uh electron transition and oxygen that we call oxygen 3 or o3 for
short and this transition is actually really interesting because um it's called a forbidden
transition because here on earth that transition never really happens because of the chemical
environment that oxygen is in but out in space there's not other
atoms or molecules are nearby the oxygen you know any given oxygen atom because
of the sparseness of space so that this uh a transitions atomic transition can actually occur and
release this blue green shade of light that um is what we usually see when we're looking at nebula visually since
our eyes are more sensitive to that to that blue green color even though it is actually dimmer than the hydrogen um but
our eyes are a lot more sensitive to it uh so as mentioned earlier this is a
supernova remnant uh and let's see let me grab some some fast
facts on it um yeah so so it's really cool because you
can see so much detail in the camera in your eye it looks kind of fuzzy but with
the camera it's really easy for that detail just to pop right out let me zoom
in a little bit um and you get such an incredible structure
that you can see especially in excuse me especially narrow band and the star that
that the supernov that went supernova that generated this nebula you know it's not some ancient thing
from from thousands or tens of thousands of years ago it was observed by uh by
the chinese and probably other cultures as well they're just the ones who recorded it in in 1054
a.d so this is a relatively recent supernova that made it into britain records of of humans since it wasn't
really that long ago it reached a peak magnitude of minus six
which is even brighter than venus gets by uh by a couple times you read a book with it
yeah it was like uh you know like having a second
tiny moon or something like that in the sky um but yeah and it's still it's still so
bright today because of that star that really fast spinning uh magnetar that
pulsar in the middle that was mentioned that's emitting tons of energy and
that is causing the gases to glow uh primarily the hydrogen and oxygen and
sulfur that we can see easily but plenty of other gases that glow as well on other wavelengths
that's very cool i would like to share something too i
have um and i didn't do this but a very talented astrophotographer detliff hartman
if that rings a bell with you debt lift hartman did a 10 year time lapse
of the crab nebula and you can see the spinning okay
yeah so i'm going to share this right now someday i'll have one too if you will
but now you can see look inside there and you can see the crab nebula growing
you can see not only it growing but the shock waves coming off of that that
pulsar incredible yeah and you can see the clouds moving down here
looks like there's a jet coming down this way and pushing out that way
incredible that's fantastic and one of the guys
who's done the research on the expansion of the crab with the hubble space telescope is our own jeff hester that's
one of his projects with hst so he's written some of the definitive papers on it
wow yeah yeah an incredible incredibly violent
and uh beautiful object you know that we can still see uh expanding today so you know it's a
living universe it's not you know it's not like this uh you know i've had some astronomers refer to the
stars as the thick stars and the fix this and you know
humans have a tendency to try to organize harden and solidify things you know so
that they maybe they feel some comfort in that but my take on
our universe is that it's interactive we're part of it it's constantly changing it's alive
because we're alive you know if you want to if you want to
say that uh humans are made of star stuff well that means the whole universe is somehow
alive and kicking absolutely and we only see one frame of the cosmic movie at a time in many cases
just because of the vast distances but but looking at things that are closer or
a nearby supernova we're overdue for another nearby supernova of course we do get to see motion and and that
really is uh it's kind of neat because uh people do think of of the stellar
backdrop as fixed and it's not i still don't see jake
so so maybe we want to see if he can get back in but caitlyn i don't know if
you're ready to go yeah he'll just when he does come back and he'll just pop in so ah he's popping
in now i think bobby and now
all you had to say is let's pull on someone else [Laughter]
are you are you there jake yeah i'm back sorry about that nothing
calms your nerves like a power outage no problem i'm glad it's back on and and
uh two observations we had a quick uh tour of the crab nebula uh thanks to
molly you had a very nice image that she showed us while you were gone of that and uh
secondly we should have known that you know you were talking about elon blowing stuff up
there you go he probably got mad you know i used to get him
but i don't know if you can take it away again where you were more or less jake yeah let me just uh i'm getting that
powerpoint loaded backups okay no problem this is like live television people you
know yeah it is live yeah all right all right and you guys can see
that right yep okay perfect so i believe i was just
talking about falcon 9 launch cost being about 3 000 per kilogram and how important that is for um
the future of spaceflight dropping that launch cost is huge because it allows you to to
do so many more things than you would otherwise with the same amount of money so anyway the reason that that uh
dramatic drop and launch cost has happened is due to the fact that after it deploys its
payload the falcon 9 first stage falls back to earth restarts its engine kind of makes sure it's aligned vertically
and then it safely lands back on the ground meaning it can and does get reused as often as possible
um the first falcon 9 test flight was way back in 2010 so they've been at this for a while but it still didn't deliver
its first payload until to the international space station at least until 2012 but since then it's had all
about a hundred launches altogether and most of those have been successful landings
so the next craft in spacex's kind of arsenal products is the falcon heavy which can carry about 140 000 pounds or
64 000 kilograms into low earth orbit so that's roughly two times more than the
falcon 9 not quite two times and it does that for a cost of around 90 million per launch which isn't two times the cost of
falcon 9. so that equates to roughly you know 1300 pounds or dollars per kilogram to get something up
into a low earth orbit aboard the falcon heavy so the falcon heavy itself is basically
just three falcon 9 rockets strapped together and all three of those are intended to actually
separate fall down to earth and land vertically just like the falcon 9s do
so yet again those can be reused um then moving on there's the crew dragon
which isn't actually a spacex rocket but instead a crew capsule so crew dragon can seat up to seven
astronauts or people tourists whoever apparently i mean supposedly animals if
you'd want um and crew dragon made history last may when it actually successfully became the first privately
built spacecraft to send nasa astronauts or any humans for that matter to the space station then it ended up doing the
same thing again in november with a new crew proving that you know it's pretty reliable and trustworthy at
this point so both times at the crew dragon launch by the way it launched the top of falcon 9
not the falcon heavy and that's mainly because falcon 9 is their really trustworthy rocket they have so much
experience with it that i don't think they wanted to risk it with the falcon heavy and they didn't really need that
heavy heavy payload capability to get crew dragon up to the iss
so then last but not least we have starship and in typical spacex fashion
um the falcon series isn't it sorry in typical spacex fashion
they're moving forward so quickly with their ambitious plans that the falcon series both the nine and the heavy don't
really meet the needs that they expect to have over the next five to ten years so with starship they're hoping to
bolster the size of the rocket carry way more material up into space and do so
for a way less cost so starship will be able to do about 220 000 pounds 100 000 kilograms
into low earth orbit as you go further out geostationary especially lunar obviously that payload capability is
going to drop a lot but most estimates suggest that starship should be able to get those payloads up
into low earth orbit at least for as cheap as 300 per kilogram wow which is
absolutely insane i mean that's 10 times less than the falcon 9 even and
to push it a little further elon musk has even said that he thinks eventually starship prices could drop as low as 10
per kilogram which i have to just admit and say that is
probably a little far-fetched and won't happen but who knows it's really hard to bet against elon over the last decade
um so for now though starship is only in the prototype phase there's still a lot
of work to go but they have been making really quick progress like they usually do
so for instance start uh spacex did their ninth uh test of starship their
ninth iteration of the starship which is sn9 earlier this week
and it largely went off well but like sn8 the previous prototype before it it
ended up um crashing in a pretty explosive fiery um
death so most notably though spacex aims to use uh starship to ferry astronauts and
tourists not just to earth in lunar orbit but they actually really hope that starship will help them get astronauts
and not necessarily nasa astronauts it could be private astronauts to mars and beyond the first step is
mars for elon first major planetary step is mars and then after that there's chances you know
maybe cinder crude or europa maybe enceladus any of those
so i've talked a lot about spacex i'm already kind of hogging time so let's go
ahead and move on to blue origin and i'll try to summarize blue origin about it as simply as i can so if spacex is
the hair blue origin is definitely the turtis tortoise but at the same time that doesn't mean
that spacex is necessarily going to win the race and it doesn't really even mean that spacex or blue origin one or the
other is going to win this is a kind of a space race that can have multiple winners simultaneously
so for blue origin like spacex it's a private company that was created in 2000
by super billionaire jeff bezos founder of amazon and unlike spacex blue origin is a bit
more focused on suborbital flight rather than orbital flight even if the comp so technically the
company still uses the same sort of approach they have a standard rocket and it's a vertical lift vertical landing
approach to you know take off and reusability so blue origin's two main vehicles
though are the new shepard in the new glenn so the new shepherd it's
that that's it's uh the company's sub-orbital space flight system and new glenn or yeah and new glenn is
its orbital space flight system so first off real quick on new shepard obviously that's named after uh american astronaut
alan shepard the first astronaut in space for america um and that sec successfully carried out
its first test flight in 2015 and within a few months of that first initial test
flight it actually reused the same booster and was able to
successfully carry out that test flight which was a pretty big deal for just a couple months turnaround however since then new shepard has only
launched about a dozen times which is not nearly as much as spacex for
instance however i should note that blue origin has managed to safely land their new
shepard almost every time i think there was a one out of 14 that crashed if i remember
correctly but most recently just a few weeks ago new shepard actually launched to an
altitude of 67 miles 107 kilometers which by most definitions is space
almost every definition and it also successfully landed back on earth
so real quick new glenn is there named after astronaut joggling is their two-stage orbital rocket that they hope
is going to be ready soon but it's still been in the works since about 2012.
so blue origins actually hope to carry out their first test flight of new glenn uh just last year but the pandemic and
perhaps a few other issues ended up throwing wrenches into those plans still the companies finally got new
glenn into the air or plans to finally get new glenn into the air sometime in 2021
and after that bezos has plans to you know use that powerful rocket to carry
anything that needs to make it to orbit and beyond whether it be cargo astronauts space tourists again anything
but finally there's one more thing to blue origin and that's their blue moon which again is not a rocket it's more
like crew dragon except this one is a crew carrying moon landing capsule so
crew dragon is able to dock with either the lunar gateway the international space station
blue moon is going to be an actual lunar lander that will carry crews uh hopefully for the artemis mission and
that was kind of the goal but it's looking more and more like the artemis mission is not going to make its
2024 kind of initial first steps and that sort of takes the pressure off blue
moon to really get finished really quickly um obviously blue origin is
going to be working on that pretty hard but i it's
if i were a guessing man i'd say we're a good five years plus out before blue moon is fully functional and carrying
crews i hope i'm wrong on that though so recap we got spacex blue origin they're launching vehicles in the same
way traditional upright but then there's one more company virgin galactic that's taking a completely different approach
so virgin galactic got its start back in 2004 by fund founded by i guess
billionaire multi-billionaire actual actually richard branson so this public
uh company's approach to suborbital space flight is based on a pretty radical design that was first put forth
in the 2000s early 2000s by aerospace engineer bert rutan
and that actually that design actually won him a 10 million dollar uh x prize
which is pretty huge deal um so like i mentioned virgin galactic
whoops is not like the other two this one is a suborbital craft like blue origins uh
new shepard but it instead of launching vertically it takes a unique approach
where it's actually mounted in between the fuselages of one connected giant
ultra wide aircraft and then that aircraft climbs up to about 50 000 feet
drops the rocket plane attached in the middle the rocket plane drops for a few seconds or a few moments and then all of
a sudden in the back it has a hybrid liquid solid fuel uh engine that kicks
in and shoots it up into space uh well space it makes it up to about 50 miles
80 kilometers and that's pretty close to space but technically a lot of people define space
as a carbon line which is 62 miles 100 kilometers so virgin galactic for now
doesn't quite make it to that karman line but nasa's actually changed the definition of space so that it's at 50
miles now and that's partly because they were really hoping to honor and consider
the uh early test pilots like chuck yeager those types as astronauts so it's
i mean space is a nebulous kind of boundary but either way virgin galactic's getting
very close and it's high enough for passengers to experience kind of that inky black star-speckled
sky and several minutes of weightlessness so they're gonna be astronauts for about
seven minutes all right so i am taking too long so i want to keep pushing on i will just say
that 600 people are currently signed up for virgin galactic flights and they each had to put down thousand a thousand
dollar deposit towards their total 250 000 price tag for one flight
and even at that price there's hundreds if not thousands more that are just clamoring to get on the wait list
so finally i i wanted to talk about what we can not quite finally
i want to talk about what we can expect in 2021 and i'm actually going to skip this a
little bit and direct you to an article that we have on the website that's called six ways to buy your ticket to
space in 2021. that kind of outlines a little bit what i'm going to talk here and i just want to save us some time
since i already delayed us with the blackout so the last thing what i want to say is
all right so what we have rich people and yeah a few lucky scientists um alan
stern by the way is like you mentioned going to be fine on virgin galactic which i'm incredibly jealous at
um so they're going to be soon venturing into space while everyone else here is kind
of grounded and deals with all these problems that we're experiencing on earth so the question becomes what is
the real benefit of space tourism and why do i think this is such a exciting time
well the real benefits are kind of hard to you know really quantify right now
this newer era of commercial space flight is sure to help researchers carry out affordable cutting-edge science at a
much lower cost however perhaps the most important thing in my eyes about the new space tourism race is that it has a
power to change everyday citizens of earth how they actually view our planet
and not just our planet but also its kind of place in the cosmos so i wanted to bring up this real quick
astronomy magazine has done multiple interviews with famed apollo astronaut jim lovell famously played by tom hanks
and also the nicest guy you'll ever meet in your life and what i found interesting is that each time we
interviewed jim he ended up stressing how much his perspective changed when he was orbiting the moon and he put out his
thumb and realized he could block out the entirety of the earth he said that that like really changed his perspective
on humanity and it drove home this profound realization to him that in the scheme of
the universe earth is nothing but a tiny kind of fragile speck so to me one of
the most valuable benefits that comes with falling cost of human space flight is that it will allow not hundreds not
thousands but eventually millions of regular people to venture to space and get that new perspective that jim got
and just maybe that might sway to humanity itself to treat both earth and
our fellow humans and creatures and whole a little more carefully and with a little more respect than we currently do
so if that happens of course if we start treating people right we get a new perspective on
this fragile blue marble that we live on then we might entirely avoid this really kind of
apocalyptic version of our future where we're too late to save our species from pollution global warming asteroid
impacts anything like that if we become a multi-planetary species over time we
might be able to actually create a backup copy of humanity that
lives on another world so that earth isn't this only bastion of life
that we know of so to me just last thing is that space flight for the average person is more than just a wild
adventure it's something that has the potential to really change our entire outlook and ideally that change itself
will make humanity and humans and earth and i mean it's hard to deny that it will
make almost everything better if we can really step outside and kind of gain
this new appreciation for our little blue marble here here
oh and i kept missing slides fantastic jake thank you
they come sooner rather than later yeah yeah i think that um
moments or or presentations how do i say it
david but like uh when carl sagan convinced uh a science team to turn
voyager around and photograph the pale blue dot you know the
photograph just a one pixel wide earth and you know that takes i've heard a lot of
things about carl sagan okay but this man had vision he had vision he was an
incredible scientist he could have just been steeped in academia and
really just blocked out everything else but he
asked the science team to make an image that they said had no scientific value at all
to take a photograph of earth okay from this this most distant uh
position that we had sent any spacecraft before and you know i for for a while david and
i really did this for two months straight i woke up every morning and read pale blue dot you know just so that
i could get just reframe my whole thinking about humanity
and what we're doing here and what's important you know and these words are i mean being resonated by
in different ways by all of your staff you know so i think that this is
this is why a magazine like astronomy magazines not just for amateur astronomers
this is for understanding who we are where we're going what we should be doing
well for 2000 years a thread going through the intellectual understanding
and education of humanity has turned up the same answer over and over
and over we're to our utter shock and horror we're not in the center of everything and the most
important thing there is and we're you know on one planet orbiting one of
400 billion stars in one galaxy out of 100 billion galaxies that that certainly gives you perspective
and uh we need a lot more of that as you say jake to get along and and
have a civilization and a society that's trying to help everyone out and be good to each
other so let's hope that that catches on thank you jake for that
and as i say i don't do transitions doing space now we're doing science
journalism okay there's the transition but uh the
another young talented editor and writer and science journalist caitlin bongiorno
came along and joined the magazine staff after
some experience and and education and internships
involving fermi lab and the european southern observatory and garching and
and some other experience and joined our staff
right when the pandemic struck basically so
she's not spent a day yet in the office at astronomy magazine
and so is undergoing uh something of a of a rebirth of science journalism in this
part of your career in a very peculiar way but caitlyn i think you're going to be
talking a little bit about science journalism to us tonight yeah and um i
guess i can kind of transition where jake's talking about how space travel
and looking at earth from space can really give you some perspective but i think science journalism and
communicating science to other people really can do that now that's something that everyone can a work on and b do now
um so like dave mentioned uh my background
is relatively new i guess compared to other people on the magazine but i think um one of the biggest things
i really wanted to stress was hearing everyone talk and hearing a lot of people talk about astronomy is it's
something that's kind of been with them their whole life and my experience was actually a little
bit different and you don't hear those kinds of stories as much obviously i got to look up at the stars
and i loved doing that i didn't quite know the constellations but whenever we would have a dome lesson in class where
we'd bring the inflatable dome i loved going in there and learning the different constellations
um but really for me astronomy wasn't my first
introduction physics was i learned physics in high school and took two years of it and was like okay
i want to do something with physics went to college undeclared because i had no idea
what physics i was interested in really the only thing i knew was engineering at that point and i quickly learned
engineering was not for me um and then i took an astro 101 class where
one of the big professors at the time the head of the department of astronomy at
university of illinois was teaching it and he was probably one of the best
professors i've ever had in terms of bringing astronomy down to a level that everyone could understand
um and it was like that moment that something clicked where i was like okay astronomy is definitely the subject i
want to learn it's the coolest physics for me and i think many people in the audience and on this call would agree
um but there was also the secondary thing that i wanted to do my entire life which was
writing i've always been a writer i basically as soon as i could write was writing stories
so i convinced my parents to let me do a creative writing major along with my astronomy major
and for about three years we tussled back and forth about what my job
could possibly be because science writing science journalism wasn't even really anything we
knew about too much of course i'd seen astronomy magazine and read it
um but i wasn't a subscriber i'm ashamed to admit [Laughter]
but it it wasn't until my senior year actually my last semester at uiuc that the head
of the astronomy department gave me an opportunity to help him write
a astronomy newsletter or help him write a textbook and so of course my
first inclination was i'm definitely more interested in writing a newsletter than i will ever be writing a textbook
and as soon as i sat down to do my first interview and spoke to someone who was
actually a scientist actually doing research and was actually excited about the research he was doing something just
clicked that it was so cool to actually listen to someone who a knew what they
were talking about and b was in it and loved what they were doing and were so
eager to share it with the world um and when i got to actually try to
write the correct the right words and figure out the ways to communicate that in a way that would get other people
just as excited as he got me i really realized that this was like an aspect of science and writing and
communication that i wanted to pursue um and it was
surprisingly not too bad for me to get started from there i mean i was a senior
and i graduated and was kind of late to the party in terms of internships to some degree but
fermilab gave me an opportunity which i will forever be grateful for
and i freelance for them for a bit and then like dave said i got an opportunity at the european southern observatory to
write in germany which hey who wouldn't do that and b it was such a great experience overall
unfortunately coveted kind of interrupted it halfway through but i still got to finish the internship even
if i was in the us um and then i started with astronomy very shortly after that and
it's if and if i've learned anything from the few short years
i've been doing this it's that communication is so important and so
many people miss out on science because scientists and people who are
experts in their fields don't know how important communication is i
can not tell you the number of times would be engineers and astronomy majors
and whatnot kind of poked fun at my creative writing degree they did not understand
why i would bother with it as if loving it wasn't enough but
they didn't really get why it was so important to be able to communicate and
it's something that working with government facilities who have to this their scientists have
to be able to talk to congress people and explain why they need funding for this experiment and why it's worthwhile to
get that funding all the way down to just i want to talk to my nine-year-old
cousin about black holes because she has questions and i need to be able to explain that to her
because she doesn't even know what an atom is so we have to figure out
how exactly to explain things um but that's fun honestly it's like a puzzle
almost it's it's fun to do and it's also fun when something clicks in the other person you get to see that excitement
light up but on the flip side being a creative writing major i would sneak in my physics homework
into creative writing classes to work on that sometimes before the class started and the number of people who just
immediately looked at the math mostly and just was like nope i don't know how you do that and like to be fair math is
hard don't get me wrong um but when i sat down and said no but like
this is why this is cool like i'm i'm solving how like how big a black hole's
event horizon is and this is what a black hole is um like allison talked about earlier supermassive black holes
and it was you know black holes everyone knows captures everyone's imagination in and of itself
but it was something that when you brought it to their level science was suddenly accessible again
um and i think that's something i think we can all agree on is so important right
now it's it's frustrating to scientists and anyone interested in science how
i don't want to say anti-science but science shy the world has seemed to gotten
and a lot of that it's not completely obviously the science community's fault there's a lot of educational issues but
just making it seem scary to so many people that a lot of people as soon as
they don't get math that's it they're done they can't get science it's out of their league
and that's what makes our job and just anyone who is passionate about science
that it's so important that you take that time to share that passion
whether that be through a magazine article or a blog post or a really cool image
you can share on social media and get people talking about um
it's there's no limit honestly to what you you can do whatever you're passionate about we we
have a great art department at astronomy magazine so if your hobby is art you can
be an illustrator for science too um you don't have to just be a writer there's different avenues you can take
um and so it's just i think science journalism and just
science communication in general is just so important to our current
our current environment in this country and not so much around the world hopefully but
around the world as well that we need to to work on that and so how how can you go about doing that if
you don't a have the training or b this is your first time doing it as simple as okay so this is the topic i
want to talk about um you have to think about the so what if
you're explaining to someone who's very shy about science kind of easily
thinks they're out of their depth you got to think about how can you connect it to them
very simple what makes it cool what's actually the thing that excites you and
then how it will affect them so for example like okay the big bang happened
13.8 billion years ago but tell them why they should care about it today why are people learning about it
why does it matter there's a reason that the phrase as scott mentioned earlier we're all made
of star stuff is such a like permanent phrase in our consciousness that
everyone knows that it's basically like it's not a meme but it's everyone you talk to like you bring into astronomy
really loves to hear that they're made of star stuff it's an inspirational quote at this point um
so then if you figure out why the people should care you also need to be careful about jargon it's a very easy pitfall to
fall into that something as simple as
supermassive black hole that it seems obvious maybe to us but it's
something that isn't immediately understandable to everyone else and it's very easy to forget that there is this
beginner's barrier of jargon in astronomy or any science that
we have to overcome in order to explain that to other people and communicate it
and you don't want to dumb it down but you can make it simple and figure out the different ways
allison did an amazing job shout out to allison explaining everything and making sure
she broke down the jar the jargon and that um and it
an example of something that might seem very obvious to a lot of amateur astronomers but wasn't
i used to volunteer at the adler's a planetarium as a telescope facilitator and i had someone come up and ask me
during daytime observing if they could look at a star and they did not mean the sun
and i had to after taking a moment to to take it in because i wasn't expecting
that question um explain why you couldn't see stars during the day that that was something that person had never
considered before and then i talked about like but we can't observe the sun
so that's something very simple but not everyone knows right off the top of their head um
and i think the final thing is like i talked about earlier is just be excited about whatever you're talking about if you're
talking about an article or an experiment you're really into or doing you can you can other people can see
when your eyes are lighting up they want to learn more even if they have no idea what they're talking about or what
you're talking about they want to know and they'll ask questions and they'll get inspired inspired just by you
talking about it um so as long as you're especially if they're as passionate as you are about
it i try thank you um but yeah so if you're
enthusiastic and you can find the ways to explain it and if they don't they're not getting it find a different route a
metaphor whatever you can you can really get stuff across and bring the world and the universe
into perspective for people who might need it right now that's right
awesome that's fantastic caitlin something occurred to me hearing the collective
wisdom that i am tonight from all of you i'm being thinking that we need to keep the magazine going
all of you into congress somehow that's right that's right no
well think about it okay that's right well thank you caitlin and i think we'll
keep things rolling right along because it's it's getting a little bit on the late side even for astronomers now even
after caitlyn joined us we had another editor mark zastrow
joined us as an experienced science writer as senior editor and his journeys and his work
have taken him from wisconsin to south korea and back to wisconsin
now and he also has never really sat in for a normal workday in the building at astronomy but
we seem to be getting along very well and having lots of fun uh with all of the events that have
happened this year uh nonetheless working remotely however there was one very sad event
that of course happened recently and that was arecibo the great dish in
puerto rico collapsed and i had the uh great privilege of being down there in 1998
when there was an eclipse in the caribbean and toured it and saw it and it was an incredible
place it's still there of course but mark is going to tell us i think tonight about arecibo and a little bit about its
legacy yes thank you dave for that introduction and thank you to everyone who is here at
this party and uh thanks especially to scott and everyone at explore scientific
for organizing these fantastic events and inviting us to be a part of this one
this is really great thank you mark um so i know kevin's not on the call
anymore but uh it was really really great to see him out at lowell uh actually when i was a kid maybe
first or second grade my family brought me out to lowell on a vacation we were
in tucson and drove out to flagstaff and up mars hill and i don't even know if we
went inside anywhere but i saw the domes and i saw the view and i knew i was in a
really special place and i just think it's so wonderful that a facility like lowell is accessible to the public it's
close to the public it's really a people's observatory um and then later when i was a graduate
student in astronomy at boston university i got to go out again to lowell this time to actually use the
perkins telescope as part of my observing class and
we also got a tour of what was then the brand new lowell discovery telescope the four meter telescope which is a bit
further out from flagstaff i think at that point it had just seen or was about to see first light
um that was just you know an incredible experience uh and i mentioned this because
the topic that i'm talking about here is another observatory uh that
like lowell is it has an incredibly storied legacy both scientifically and also just in terms of
its inspirational impact and its outreach now let's see if i can actually
share this screen
how's that
not yet let's see what happens here it's just a gray
seeing a click to exit full screen here it is it's loaded now we can see it now but it's a
presenter view there we go here we go yep all right
so here is arecibo observatory it's uh one of those telescopes that doesn't
really need any introduction because it's a pop culture icon it of course helped ellie arroway search
for extraterrestrial life in contact uh it gave james bond an assist
in the film in the film goldeneye by collapsing on top of and killing the
villain it's of course heavily associated with carl sagan not just because he wrote
contact of course but his university cornell actually designed arecibo
proposed it and operated it for many years but the scientific legacy of arecibo is
really you know just as impressive as its imdb page for one it discovered the first
exoplanet that was confirmed nowadays when you think of exoplanets we often you know think of habitable worlds being
discovered by the kepler space telescope or tess or optical ground-based observatories
that are doing radial velocity surveys or even direct imaging but in fact the first confirmed planets
around another star were found by aerosibo around a pulsar and that was announced in 1992.
now we've already seen this object tonight this is the crab nebula and there is indeed a pulsar
inside there which uh is essentially a neutron star that's been so fast it twists its
magnetic field into knots and emits radio waves like like a lighthouse as as it spins
and um it's funny because pulsars weren't even discovered until 1967
which was four years after arecibo opened so it just kind of shows you how
even at the time that they were building arecibo uh they didn't fully know the possibilities uh that
were going to be enabled by it when arecibo opened in 1963 it was actually
called the arecibo ionospheric observatory because when it was first proposed it was more thought of as a way
to study radio waves in the atmosphere it was actually developed and run by arpa the forerunner of darpa the
military research agency because they wanted to use it as a huge radar to
detect nuclear missiles as they re-entered the atmosphere but of course it was also designed to be
able to do astronomical observations and fortuitously jocelyn bell discovered pulsars
even though she wasn't recognized for it but pulsars became a key part of arecibo
scientific portfolio and one of the most exciting projects arecibo was involved in up until it collapsed
was actually leveraging pulsars to detect gravitational waves which are the waves in space time of course that
einstein predicted could occur now you're probably familiar with ligo and virgo which are the gravitational
wave observatories that in 2015 made the first ever detection of gravitational waves and they did that
basically by measuring how a gravitational wave compresses and expands space time as it passes by
so their detectors consist of lasers that run for three or four kilometers
like you see here and if two neutron stars or black holes collide somewhere
in the observable universe when those waves reach earth then ligo can measure
how the length of that laser beam changes by about 1 10 000 the width of a proton
but a detector like ligo is really only sensitive to those really
big events when something like like black holes colliding occurs that is like setting off a explosion in space
time it gets you these gravitational waves that are very high amplitude and high frequency
now there are also gravitational waves that are emitted by other incredibly massive objects but at longer
wavelengths so for instance uh as we heard from allison a galaxy with
supermassive a supermassive black hole say there are two supermassive black holes at the middle a supermassive black
hole binary these objects are so massive they will also etch waves into space-time as they
orbit each other but say one orbit takes maybe a thousand or ten thousand years so they're going to
emit a gravitational wave with a long wavelength that takes 10 000 years to
wash over you to go from crest to crest uh what's nice is that there are way
more gravitational waves like that being emitted continuously by objects like
those then there are these rare black hole collisions so it's almost as if there's a background
sea of gravitational waves that earth is bombing in and which ligo uh and virgo are not
sensitive to so if you actually want to study that background sea of gravitational waves
uh the best idea astronomers have come up with is to use pulsars across the galaxy
to basically create a galaxy sized version of ligo but instead of lasers it
uses the radio waves from pulsars because the timing of pulsars as they
spin is so consistent it's so metronomic you can use them
to detect gravitational waves because when they pass by if they stretch or distort space-time say space-time gets a
little bit longer then a pulse arriving from from a pulsar in that direction
will have to travel a little bit farther and arrive a little bit later than you'd expect and you know some of these pulsars are
they're so accurate they're more accurate than atomic clocks so they allow you to do that kind of thing if you have a telescope like arecibo
that can observe pulsars uh and so one team called nanograv just
announced a very exciting result a couple weeks ago at the american astronomical society meeting
and that was that they think they're actually beginning to see hints of this gravitational wave background they've
actually been working for 12 years now taking observations with arecibo as well as the greenback
telescope in west virginia to measure the timings of pulsars across the galaxy
in this sort of timing array that you see here and the set of papers that they published says that they are now they
think they are now starting to see some of those variations in the timing of those pulsars and so far it looks
a bit like noise or static so they're not claiming they've detected it yet
uh they they can't say that there's a gravitational wave signal there yet but
you know it's just like taking longer and longer exposures of an image they think there's a signal there and they
just need to build up more data to get a better a better picture and confirm that
they think in fact that they only need a few more years of data and they have
actually two years of data that they haven't processed yet from before arecibo went down
so that's hopefully encouraging and it's just one area of cutting-edge research that
arecibo was involved in right up to its collapse
now another aspect of varicose capabilities that really set it apart was the fact that not only could it
receive radio waves it could also transmit them so that platform in the middle that you saw suspended over the over the dish was
equipped not only with receivers but also a transmitter and so that means it can act as a radar you can send out a
radar beam to nearby planets to take radar images of them that is a capability that even the new
chinese radio telescope uh the 500 meter aperture spherical telescope which is even bigger than a receiver is
305 meters it doesn't have that capability it can receive but it can't transmit yet
so for arecibo that means that it could see things that you know might be obscure obscured in
visible light like the surface of venus which is here on the left it could cut right through all those clouds and see
through to the surface it could it could also map out near-earth asteroids like phaethon here
on the right um and that that is really important for the field of planetary defense so
studying these near-earth asteroids that could potentially one day hit us and wipe out
most life on the planet no big deal uh phaethon here is six kilometers
across and it's actually the second largest near-earth asteroid that's classified as potentially hazardous
so when it comes to understanding and characterizing these near-earth asteroids you know getting a good
sample of what they are like what they look like in case we ever need to send bruce
willis up there to blow it up that's really important uh arecibo also
very recently played a key role in discovering a totally new class of astronomical
event called fast radio bursts we've just begun seeing these in the past 10 years there are incredible bursts of
radio waves that last only a few milliseconds and they're caused by some incredibly powerful astrophysical
phenomenon that we're we're not entirely sure what it is yet maybe magnetars that's the the leading hypothesis
at the moment but this is another field where arecibo was right on the cutting edge um of
course arecibo also sent out the famous arecibo message the the message devised
by frank drank and carl sagan uh to an alien civilization uh it was really more of a demonstration of how we might try
to send a message to an alien civilization than a serious attempt to communicate but it was something that
really you know captured the public's imagination just like the golden record on voyager
so unfortunately despite this scientific legacy this incredible scientific return
arecibo head for the past couple decades been severely plagued by
budget problems the telescope was for a long time owned by the national science foundation
and over time it began to de-prioritize funding for arecibo uh cut its budget
and for a while even considered selling the observatory and so
along with that have come some you know nagging concerns about the the structural health of the
observatory it had to undergo maintenance it has been hit
by hurricanes and earthquakes its transmitter was knocked out by hurricane maria a few years ago and so that damage
was actually still being repaired as of last august
which is when this happened one of the auxiliary cables that supports that receiving
platform over the dish broke it actually came clean out of the socket
on top of one of those three supporting towers uh surrounding the dish and of course it flailed around i mean
it had it's it had so much tension in it it recoiled and hit the dome over the on
the receiving platform over the dish and then it crashed to the ground through the dish which is the damage that you see here
these are actually some plots of the uh tension in the wires at the moment
that it happened that were recorded by by the equipment at arecibo
um so you can see the moment that it snapped it set the entire telescope platform
vibrating for you can see down here for for several minutes afterwards
so this auxiliary cable break was really really bad but it seemed repairable
the problem was that in november one of the main cables the big cables that really bore the brunt of the structural
load also broke and at that point i think everyone's heart in the astronomy in the
astronomical community just sank because it then became very questionable as to whether or not it could actually
be stabilized in time to save it and about two weeks after that uh nsf
announced that it would in fact be decommissioning the telescope because it could collapse at any time and therefore
it wasn't even safe to attempt to repair the telescope they didn't want to risk workers lives to go up there to try to
stabilize it and instead they plan to conduct a controlled demolition of the receiving
platform but before they could on december 1st
this happened so this is actually footage from the
control room at arecibo
so you can actually see one of the supporting towers falling down the hillside there being dragged down
by the collapse
do we know what time this was i guess the time's right there isn't it
there's also some footage now from a drone
that actually happened to be up inspecting that supporting tower at the moment it collapsed uh just by
coincidence and you as the cables snap i mean you can see the incredible tension
that's in them
so both the announcement of the decommissioning and the collapse itself were just
tremendous blows to to any lover of astronomy um you know first the science impact was a
it was a huge blow for nanograv the gravitational wave observatory project
because about half of their data or their sensitivity came from arecibo and about
half came from the 100 year greenback telescope and you know they felt they were so close to getting a detection uh
it was absolutely crushing for them to know that they would not be able to continue to to get more data to strengthen their
to strengthen their hope hoped for detection it also of course knocked out nasa's
best planetary radar nasa had been funding arecibo to do that planetary defense work
but there's also a very real human cost to arecibo's collapse i mean first of
all for the staff of arecibo who now no longer have an instrument
um but then also in the wider community in puerto rico and in the general public
after it was announced that arecibo would be decommissioned i think there was just this huge swell of emotion
the likes of which i don't know if i've ever seen in astronomy for a piece of equipment
people took to twitter to talk about what arecibo meant to them sharing their experiences of how they
were inspired by arecibo maybe how they learned to observe on arecibo
it was incredibly heart warming and heartbreaking to read just how people were inspired by it
especially for those in puerto rico because there are now generations of researchers from
puerto rico who were inspired by arecibo to go into science not just astronomy but but all sciences
this tweet was one that actually moved me the most what are sibo means to me is that
every puerto rican learns about arecibo i even saw i saw it in some of my american textbooks growing up and when i
did it showed me that i could be a great scientist like my ancestors are sibo was more than a telescope representation
matters this person isn't an astronomer they're actually a hematology and oncology
fellow in florida according to their twitter profile
so and that's why i mentioned at the beginning that air receivable is really not unlike lowell in that it's it was a true
people's observatory um it's so so often observatories are often
you know some far off remote locale they're difficult to access it's a privileged few who get to go
actually you know observe on these incredible pieces of equipment um or sometimes you know even to go visit it's
it's difficult so arecibo was you know completely and entirely embraced by and integrated into
the community where it was located um and i i just think that that's so
important and it's something that our friends at lowell understand so well
as well and and you know frankly as more people pay attention to the environmental sensitivities
around citing telescopes the cost both financial and in carbon of actually
traveling to them in a world of remote observing and a world of zoom calls
and then also the cultural sensitivities about where we place telescopes it's becoming more and more crucial to
ensure that observatories are engaged and integrated into their communities like
arecibo was and like lowell is not just because it's the right thing to do but because otherwise we may not be
able to get to do it anymore so the story in legacy vericebo is you
know tremendous scientifically but its legacy is also about expanding who gets to participate
in astronomy and science and stem so uh thanks again to to all of our our
friends here at explore scientific and at lowell uh abby all the work you do as well
because you know the more efforts like this that can reach people who might not otherwise come into
contact with astronomy and science the better off we all will be right
thank you mark thank you mark very nicely done awesome
and let's hope we can learn everything that can be learned from the arecibo story and turn it into a
positive next generation result in in this area too which is critical as you
outlined in in multiple ways scott i think you had a a uh a final
break yeah let's do a final break if libby is still with us i'm not sure if she is
but um yep she's here she's still here wow okay she's she's a she's uh she's a
real astronomer so okay all right we're going to do it we're
going to do a final break um i'm going to also post for any of you that wanted
to be in the after party you can join
and log in and i will but we're going to have libby on first
and um libby thanks for hanging in there with us it's getting i know it's a little bit late but
hasn't been fun it's been really great so yeah it's fun to stay on late on the calls
because it's just so like it's like the stars are coming out as we're talking about the stars so it's like
that's right that's right great okay so um
okay uh we will take a break and we will be back
okay everybody we are opening up the waiting room to be in the after party if
you'd like to join i'm going to go ahead and put in a link right now and chat um
and uh you can click in there and kent martz will meet up with you and check
your audio and video topics have to be about astronomy you've seen the programming on today
these can be personal experiences it can be views through your telescope it can be
any topic but have to has to be on topic with astronomy so
hope you join us and um and up next after this uh this short
break here will be libby and the stars and then we'll turn to uh i think molly wakeling is
still with us and uh some of the others but it's going to be a little freeform
and we will uh i look forward to seeing some of you log on
thanks i've got a nice shot of the rosette nebula in hydrogen alpha to share
awesome
it
it
hmm
you
okay well everyone we're all back um we uh
took a short break and uh libby are you uh are you with us still
yes i am i have a poem to read oh i love that yeah i've been doing some reading and um
some more literature side of astronomy okay
so uh definitely tonight we've been talking a lot about pluto and um
i've been reading a lot of books when i was in the second grade i the year i
started getting into astronomy i didn't know i was very good at poems
or reading or doing any spelling and i always thought i was very into
math and um i just thought i i was pretty i i just
thought i was okay at literature and stuff until i started seeing my classmates work and started to
realize oh snap i am pretty good at this maybe i should try some more stuff with this
so when i was in the second grade i decided to read a lot i did a lot of
reading on astronomy and i also when i was little two i used
to write little own stories because i thought i was super good at descriptive and
being you know good at just writing something long
and i thought i was like amazing at doing poems i still
i'm pretty good at doing poems and reading and a lot of stuff like that
um i would say i'm more on the reading side but i decided to put together a
poem for a star party because i thought it would be you know i i had some
inspiration from david levy and i was like great that's great i'm gonna do something different and i'm
gonna write a poem so that's when i wrote about the full solar system
and so um i i was trying to rhyme it more uh my teachers when i was in the second grade
they're like you don't always have to rhyme your poems all the time and i was like i must write my poems
it doesn't care they rhyme almost all the way but they will rhyme a little bit
um but i i s when i was in second grade i started uh before i was into astronomy
and reading astronomy books i was very much into being like
literature and so i was like i'm gonna write little stories and i'm gonna make like a little
library well i got halfway through that um
but anyway here's the poem i wrote mercury and venus scorching from the sun
our planet earth the only one having fun and though we ever know there is life on
mars and of course jupiter with the stormy scars saturn when the beautiful rings
a blue sword a pattern on neptune's surface and a new sort of satellite going around
uranus but we all know pluto's not being a planet is very untrue
so it was kind of short but i just wanted to summarize the solar system
a poem that wasn't very long and i always wanted to talk about like
pluto because i know it's very funny some poems can be like very in-depth
like descriptive about pluto and you know about the planets and i kind of wanted
to be a little bit funny because client bug was uh
he was a very funny person so i mean i was like you know what i'm gonna make this one super fun it's gonna be
very fun to write and i had a great time writing it it's very fun trying something different
on these calls because i know every time i do a talk i get a little bit more confident and what i do
and it's just very fun to try something new to see if it works out good if i'm good at it and
do some more writing on it and of course uh i read the reflector magazines
and yeah i do i uh i have one on my guests an astronomical league right the
reflector yeah and i always read them and i always think
you know i had a dream when i was in second grade to make my own library full
of a bunch of poems and i read a lot of books about
astronomy and i still read a lot of books i um
more in my books now um i read a lot of astronomy books uh i
like to go hardcore when i'm reading books you know when i was uh
when i was in uh like just reading all these astronomy books there was one book that i really liked because it was at my
level of astronomy and i had kind of dreams to like you know
read like i had dreams to write my own stuff like that because it was so amazing that was in my school
library because most of the stuff in my school library was scholastic books and
a lot of those like books where they were just each book on a different planet which didn't
most of the books didn't go really in-depth about the planet because you know they're kids books but there's this
one adult book for astronomy that i really liked and i kind of got sucked in by that book
and i started to go hardcore on astronomy reading but i had very fun writing this and i decided to make it
kind of funny i thought it was awesome i thought it was awesome uh you know i've been talking with david
levy and i know that you two have had a kind of a connection recently and i know that he's uh he's sending you one of his
books um are you a subscriber yet to astronomy magazine
yes i am i have um when i joined the astronomical league i subscribed to
reflector and i was i think i subscribed to maybe about three of them and they come and i always
get super excited i'm like yes they're coming uh i actually asked for david levy's book for christmas
because um most of my astronomy books it's not about an astronomer they're just about
astronomy and you know it's very nice to hear from someone who's had experience
with astronomy and tips because i know me just starting off from a 60
millimeter me telescope to a 10 inch dobsonian could be kind of hard and hectic to do so it's
good to have some tips and know what it's like to be michonne yeah yeah well you're learning uh you're
learning and being mentored by one of the best in the world so um
you know i i think that uh as much times you can spend with uh learning from david that would be
very beneficial for you you know and i'm glad that you're here with the staff the editorial staff of astronomy magazine
um you know and i love you know your poem was great it's awesome so
thank you yeah yep you need to get you need to get one of these books though from david eicher so i'm going to
buy you one of these books and we're gonna have it sent to you okay all right
okay so that's great that was a great job libby really nicely
done good humor in it too pursuing my second grade dreams
[Laughter] yeah libby i just want to say that was that was awesome and i love that you
are combining a love of science with a love of of literature and a love of of
writing and creative writing um actually in my spare time i am an editor at a literary
literary journal called the offing and i edit their science section so it's a
kind of unique in that it's a literary journal that also um has a as a science section we call it the back of the
envelope um so if you ever want to submit your work uh just get in touch with me and
we'll uh we'd love to we'd love to read it so please keep writing thank you it was very fun to try this
out i've been wanting to try poems out but i've not been sure about what to write about so thank you
anytime good inspiration i think so that's good okay all right so um
david where where do you think we are right now we have uh we have molly here we've got uh steve
houser um has joined us as well so i i think molly molly do you still have another
telescopic uh object i do
maybe we can look at that and did i see abby raise her hand too
i thought you had something that was crucially important i thought you had some breaking news from
a pulsars okay we just came in
fresh off the line i'm getting something
nope sadly so how did you guys all feel about uh tonight's presentation i mean
we've been going on for it's uh almost 11 45 right now and we
started at seven o'clock actually a little bit before that um we've had some
amazing incredible lectures and uh presentations um
i thought i i don't know this is the best this has got to be one of the best experiences i've had you know with all
of this so i really appreciate it i really appreciate it well thank you scott and
thanks to everyone who's been involved i this has been absolutely the best online
astronomy event i've seen so i i congratulate all of yeah really you guys made it really remarkable yeah
yeah and we're not quite done are we scott no we're not quite done no we still we have uh an amazing it looks
like the rosette from uh molly wakeling here so another of those
star factories yes yeah yes so we've this is the core of the
rosette nebula here since the field of view of my telescope's only about half a degree the
whole thing is about a degree across by a degree it's about
the area of four or five full moons in size on the sky of course it's actually
much much physically much much larger than the moon um
something on the order of uh i had the number up here well it's it seats
okay i don't have it on hand but it's big it's like probably a couple light years across and it's about 1500 light
years away so this is a again in hydrogen alpha so we're looking
at the red the deep red emission from hydrogen gas in the nebula it's in monochrome
from my monochrome camera but there's so much incredible detail in
this nebula lots of little uh darker dusty spikes
and regions that have been carved out by the by the by the stars in the center
because a lot of the stars in the center they're they're hot young stars uh o type stars where they're blasting out
tons of ultraviolet radiation and that's first of all carved that hole that you see there in the middle but it's also
shaping the areas of the gas around there and because of that compression of the gas
uh being pushed by that stellar wind new stars are being formed by all that
all that energy and all that movement going on in the gas so it's a
star-forming region gorgeous gorgeous nebula the whole thing really looks like a like a really pretty rose especially
when you give it that red color and um yeah it's a it's a fun object uh you
can't with your eye on the telescope you can really just see the star cluster you can't really see the nebula because
we're not very sensitive to red our eyes aren't but the camera picks it right up
and molly it's actually several dozen light years across and the in the central star
cluster ngc 2244 you're right you can see it's excavated that hole
and actually is ionizing the gas that's causing it to glow in a brighter ring
there too and if you get down you can see very nicely here the these little
dark areas of dark nebulosity there if you go down inside the smallest knots
in in there there there are these so-called bach globules and that's where little uh
protostars are forming inside those those tubes of of uh dust and gas
there's so much to say about there's so much stuff going on there yeah yeah our old pal bart bach here's
another guy we knew at the end that's right who basically you know figured out the modern uh
structure of the milky way um for much of his life and was at harvard and in australia and and ended
up in tucson with david and david wrote about bart as well
5200 light years away correction on the on the distance there got too many numbers floating around in
my head and 130 light years across which is just mind-blowing
yes great yeah great well thank you molly
yeah wonderful beautiful shot what somebody's remarking that it looks uh let me say it looks kind of uh
there's dimension in that shot of the rosette it's amazing it's one of my favorite new targets that's what i love
about about h alpha like when you just have it in the monochrome you really get kind of that 3d effect sometimes because
it's just so sharp and you have the shadows and the light and that's also how you have that shot frame
too yeah yeah i'm i might have to actually image this at some like i've imaged it
on my refractors and and with a much larger field of view i've not imaged it on this telescope so i might have to uh
let's try that this winter just this little this little center view here but uh you know what once i
get off the call here i'm gonna cue the telescope back over onto my my nightly series of other targets that i'm
currently imaging on this scope and let it run all night while i sleep
awesome thank you thank you so much i look forward to seeing the finished uh
your finished shot of this too so that's great all right so um next up here is uh steve
hauser and steve has decided to join us in the after party here um
uh we're getting uh uh you know we've had a wonderful night uh
i want to thank you know dave eicher and the entire
astronomy magazine editorial team uh you guys brought on a
an event that i've never experienced before i've been going to astronomy events and star
parties and putting on events and doing all kinds of stuff and i've really never experienced anything quite like this you know um
really wonderful it should be done again for sure [Music]
but and uh you know libby thank you again for your
wonderful poetry um alan stern if you're still watching
thank you very much uh it was incredible i hope to have you on the show again uh
one day i won't be nervous when you're on so uh that will that will settle down with me at one point
um but that's just the way i am so um but steve let's let's uh let's hear
about uh your outreach uh plans i know that uh you mentioned that you're retiring but
it looks like you're starting up a very busy second career in educational outreach
well i i'm hoping to thank scott thanks for having me on in the first place i did what a great show tonight
really uh you know the presentations and and uh and the fact that uh you know we
get to uh it's just lay folks out here we get to listen to
really all of these experts that you know the these world famous incredible astronomers
uh talk to us in small groups and and now the fact that i'm i'm actually
seeing myself in a window with all these folks from uh astronomy magazine whose names i recognize because i read them
monthly and uh i just really thanks for letting me be here i i just wanted to mention that you
know um now that i'm uh newly retired i'm really looking forward
to doing uh expanding the outreach that i've been doing with uh grade school kids and middle school kids for the last
few years um really mostly uh um solar uh astronomy more than anything else and
uh uh in fact that you can kind of get a little uh look in the back there a little lunch 60ha
and an astrotech 115 that i put a lunt uh wedge on and
and uh uh i'm now just starting to uh i have cameras
and uh monitors so i'm i'm looking to move into a little bit larger format so
i can show more kids instead of just having long lines of kids
probably they i think the most fun experience i ever had was uh i spent an entire day
at uh an elementary and middle school in aberdeen idaho for the mercury transit
and i had two white light scopes and uh
and the ha scope all on uh manual mounts
and i was by myself and i i had a couple hundred kids looked through those scopes that day i don't
think i'd ever been that tired um and i'm a regular participant in the
craters of the moon star party i'm a member of the idaho falls astronomy club
and you know we regularly have hundreds of people look through our scopes those nights
but um it's spread out between 30 or 40 of us but uh
i've never had more fun than i had with that with those kids and uh i i've i
i've done solar outreach with some high school uh kids too uh that they're kind of fun you know i
taught at the university for nine years and uh i left academia because uh
um i there were too few kids for me to get
that uh that teaching enjoyment from you know that i used to call it my you know
my teacher jollies and uh and if i was lucky to get one or two students out of a couple hundred in
you know in a semester that actually seemed to be interested especially in the the freshman classes
you know that wasn't quite enough um uh feedback for me i i left and went
into the private sector but um i've been finding that with these kids and i've been so looking forward to
um to where i can put my you know 60 almost 70 hour a week job
away from away for years now and uh start spending time with uh kids of
course not really sure how it's going to work with covid i'm hoping just to get some uh
some internet stuff hooked up and then uh work with some local schools
i've made some good connections with the local science teachers i'm really looking forward to that
uh and i'll probably be calling you scott for some equipment suggestions in the near future because
i'm still missing a couple of pieces sure but uh you know what's what's inspiring is is to you know when when
you hear someone that has really found what it is that they maybe that they were meant to do you
know and uh um i'm glad that you're honing in on that and focusing on that
because uh you're going to inspire so many young people you know and that's great
you know most of us to go to star parties and and and i've been doing this uh since i was eight years old you know
i mean my folks bought me a little you know sears three-inch reflector scope for the metal mirror
and uh um and i've been doing this really as a hobby all my life but
i really didn't start doing it socially until about 15 years ago when i went to my first star party in
and uh the first time someone looked through my telescope and said wow
i i was hooked on that and uh i i it's just such a pleasure to
uh to go out and share that stuff and i'm fortunate enough to uh to have collected some pretty cool equipment in
the uh in the few years that i've been doing this which uh makes it even more fun to go out and share that
you know with the other gear heads and nerds like me oh sure out there anyways that's that's another
whole facet of astronomy too so i know that well that's wonderful that's wonderful
any other thoughts that you might have anything else you'd like to share with the audience we have we have a worldwide audience right now so
a worldwide audience well that's frightening enough in itself i you know i'm i
i'm actually fascinated by a gravitational wave theory um and uh
you know um my phd's in ecology which uh it really kind of makes me
a a statistician at heart and and you need a lot of physics and
mathematics to uh to be an ecologist so um i do like to do differential
equations in my head for fun and i i know that's kind of weird but so look look at all of the heads nodding see i'm
not alone i appreciate that uh but um i you know
[Laughter] i would i would just like it's something that that i just like to throw this
question out there and maybe somebody has an answer for me sure but i think about these long period gravitational
waves and um and it occurs to me that that means that we cannot depend on the
consistency of time is that correct um
is that an allison classman question here don't ask me [Laughter]
i want to say we can still depend on it i mean it warps the fabric of space-time
but temporarily the i guess it depends on what's causing the gravitational waves if it's just an event then it will pass
if it's not then that's very different or would we or would we notice it i mean because the
time would compress for us and or and or expand for us in response to the wave
but if you're in front of the wave or behind the wave
um how does that affect light would we see the doppler shift from the gravitational wave anyways i
just lots of questions go through my mind i can do a little plug that we have an
ask astro section that i am now in charge of so if you want to submit the question to our magazine we can find an
expert to actually answer that for you that will hopefully have an answer better than we can
that's very interesting i don't know yeah well i'm not sure that there is an answer for it um i i i think it's uh
just one of the fun things to think about that maybe it's tough for us to get our human brains around
but that's the kind of a thing that we could pitch to kip thorne and see what he says you know i mean it would be very
interesting to get his take on it's a good question
see that's the kind of thing that's the that's these are the kind of people that astronomy magazine can
make the bridge for people that want to get answers like this you know so
kip thorne's a very nice man but everyone's trying to
to get uh some time with him to talk to him and find out what his insights are but
uh it's nice that that you have a publication like astronomy magazine uh to work with
people like this so well and he's a starmus guy scott too oh there you go
yeah there you go well hopefully there are hundreds of post docs out there trying to answer a question like that
yeah wonderful thank you well gosh steve thank you for coming on
man thank you um well uh we are
i believe we're kind of towards the end of our program i haven't had anybody else log in for the after party so far
one day you know maybe 100 people log in right now it's one at a time but that's okay
um uh is there uh oh and john adler's on with us right now okay
all right john do you want to you want to uh
are you there let me ask him don mute here yep i'm here
you're there john how are you not too bad good
good so um uh what are you bringing to the global star party tonight
well not much of anything right now i i sent you a message earlier that i'm still working on the uh historical
observatories uh i don't know if you saw that uh friends of the historical observatories yeah
not not only now do we have a facebook page but my wife took it upon herself to do a website
so there's now a website up there called historical observatories.com right and right now there's links to
about 60 of the observatories around so if someone wants to learn about
lowell or yerkes or griffith or any of them they can go right to that website and get a link
um a lot of those pictures that people have been seeing i know i recognize a few names here folks that are members of
that facebook group so a lot of those pictures are now on the website
so uh we'll keep adding to it wonderful wonderful one of these days so i'm kind
of looking to put together presentation on just that showing some of the
screenshots so that that's in the works please do yep and come back and visit us you know
we do these every week and um this one was an extraordinarily special one um
you know with the celebration of uh clyde thomas birthday and um
uh you know the discovery of pluto and the research of pluto but uh all the contributions that everybody's done here
it's just uh i think it's left everybody breathless really so thank you for coming on
and um i think at this time we'll uh we'll start to wrap it up is there anything
that you'd like to say in closing remarks uh david thanks to you and thanks for the whole
staff and and it's great to meet you guys here at the end the two of you i think we're facebook friends one at
least one of you john um so it's good to hear you and uh it's been a great night and and
uh we'd love to i think i i you know maybe you'll scream at me some of you on here but i i think i could say we'd love
to do it again sometime scott so oh i'd love to have you on again yeah we'll we'll find another uh very special
moment to make that happen so okay sounds good and remember the i heart pluto festival next week also
will continue the pluto discussions wonderful wonderful well clyde if you're out there somewhere
and looking down uh we wish you a happy birthday so thank you everybody and um
and uh keep looking up and we'll i'll see you all tomorrow at uh four o'clock
uh you know central and um and then we'll have we hopefully have
some clear skies over the weekend uh so have a good night and thanks everyone
thanks thank you again thanks so much everyone see you soon
take care be safe yes thanks everyone
thank you guys i so enjoyed listening this has been fantastic
everyone [Music] good night
[Music]
[Music]
and now folks it's time to say good night we sincerely appreciate your patronage and hope we've succeeded in
bringing you an enjoyable evening of entertainment please drive home carefully and come back again soon good night
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wow
you