Transcript:
okay i've used that gravitational wave background before it's a cool one
let's see i stole it of course so did i
this actually might be nice no yeah well i don't know i think it's out there for the stealing
though they want you to steal it yeah yeah space.com is where this came from but yeah it's i don't get it from kip
thorn that's for sure
well
ah there it is all right
i think next time i go on i'm going to do family member instead of me
and see if your information gets put into my computer that'll make it go faster for me for you
if i can get me okay next time
okay
so
hello libby good to see you hello
good to see you hi libby [Music]
now i'm channeling jerry he used to put these nasa things up
there yeah that's cool you gotta be monochrome though
oh gosh i have to make myself monochrome huh yeah you're right well i'm not going to do that i know how
but unfortunately zoom does not give you access to the camera controls so i have to start skype that's what i do in there
with that you know open up yeah it's dumb
okay well i think i don't know maybe i like this one better than that what do you think
or that yeah that's too crazy huh
what is it a neutron star so artist rendition of a
neutron star collision i'll go with this it's pretty you know that's cool
that's how we get gold silver and platinum and some other heavy metal elements everything pretty much past
iron if it's past iron it's that stuff that's good stuff colliding neutron
stars cruise jewelry among others
live so what in our body was not created inside of the star
hydrogen and helium in the early part of the universe so-called big
bang nucleosynthesis i see maybe some lithium or something a tiny and like a little taste of it just a
little and and deuterium but most everything else was later from supernovae and and other
massive stars like neutron stars we got 12 billion year old hydrogen water in our hydrogen
in our uh in our bodies is that what you're saying yep
so we're 12 billion years old we're old and mixed elements right just part of it we are a big recycling program i'm
afraid [Laughter] yes
i guess it's actually 13.8 billion years old yup
in 2013 they had to reprint a hundred million textbooks just to change it from
thirteen point seven to thirteen point eight oh my gosh i think that is that true publishers went through
that's how they sell new new textbooks that's how they sell them you know
the reason why there's probably more tablets in schools than ever update the web page
um
hmm
i just got a new telescope you did tell us about it libby yeah
um my dad's my dad uh his old home that he used to live in
when he was about my age um it's like full of like a bunch of old
stuff and he found the telescope there so we're hoping to get it cleaned up it's pretty
big it's actually the mount is made out of wood
well congratulations they all may you really enjoy using it
that's a good day when you get a new telescope oh yeah
it's it's a newtonian telescope and i was surprised because it was actually wood base and it
wasn't metal and a bunch of metal has a
uh i think it has weights on it
hello gary hi david hi everyone
hey gary how are you i'm well thank you hope you all are
yeah yep
i decided to go to scott's office and sit down what's that
and you can hear the vacuum of space outside yeah it's right outside my office
the vacuum huh probably a lot more
space really sucks it does it's relative
it's solid yeah the inside of the spaceship mm-hmm
[Music]
hmm
[Applause]
i'm stacking on popcorn i probably shouldn't but
what i did last week popcorn's good yeah the salt makes me thirsty so [Music]
i sat back and enjoyed the show eating popcorn is that what you did last time
all right i'm there
now if you're listening out there in the audience
you will see in the posting of this um you know this website or not this
website but posting this this event global star party we give you the link to log on to the waiting room
so and we'll open the waiting room right around 9 30 maybe a little bit earlier
than that depending on how things go and then you can join for the after party
i guess this is the before party this is the before party
that's right yes happy hour already
right here
we're celebrating libby's new telescope tonight hooray
we need to get it cleaned up though it's still very dirty and i'm afraid if
i get anything in the lens it might be dirtied up and i'll be like well dang it
bring it back here clean it up for you libby yeah we we uh we're actually going to take one of my eyepieces that's dirty
and my uh new telescope um
well libby what is the size of the mirror in this new telescope of yours
um i'd say it's about 16 like 40 millimeters or so
maybe like the size of the one behind me but a little bit smaller
and it's a mirror telescope it's a newtonian so yes huh
yeah very cool do you know what brand it is
i forgot the brand i'll have to look at it real quick what color is it
it's a black color it's like dark black all around and uh there's some silver parts on it i'm gonna
i have a picture of it uh i'm gonna see if i can find the brand on it
well today is the anniversary of supernova 1987a
you gonna talk a little bit about that tonight are you no
i'm just highlighting it we have a little video a little feature video that would be nice
yeah yeah for the hubble space telescope i didn't think i could top that so
okay the brand of the telescope is a tasco
okay a black one yes
i was reading a piece from facebook yesterday and someone said i got a celestron
uh four inch telescope for ten bucks and somebody just told me i wasted my money
what and i wrote him back i wrote him back and i said i don't believe there is such a thing
in the universe as a bad telescope i don't think it exists such a thing
that's not true richard grayson show you some pretty nice astrophotography done with the four
inch newtonian reflector oh yeah yeah it's gonna get better too now that i
replaced the mirror and the comet hunter the uh mirror from the common hunter is gonna become a donor to that one
i see
well are we all ready to go we are 41 seconds away yeah all set
let's do it that's right [Music]
brian fanning says he just bought a 16-inch david levy planosphere it's very cool
yeah i'm glad
and today is the anniversary of supernova in 1987a
the most studied supernova of all time
um
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so [Music]
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well hello everybody this is scott roberts with explore scientific and this is the explore alliance presentation of
the 33rd global star party so i can hardly believe we've done so many but uh
it's always a lot of fun and um we all of us friends get together and we talk about astronomy on all different
kinds of topics we see some great images uh we get to hear talks from iconic
astronomers um and on this these star parties uh as of late uh you two can join and be part of
it in the after party so if you look in the uh posting of this
particular event you can see the link uh that you can go into our
waiting room and that will open i think about maybe 9 20 tonight central time so
and you two can be part of the world famous global star party um we
have uh aside from it being the anniversary of supernova 1987a
uh we've got uh you know our regular lineup of speakers
that would include uh comet discovered david levy uh astronomy magazine's chief
editor-in-chief uh david eiker we've got uh jason gonzale of the vast reaches
with us uh in this first part of this edition of the show we've got libby and the stars on um
and gary palmer is here as well uh all the way from the uk
so you can see up on the hollywood squares like view at this point um jerry hubbell
jason gonzale david eiker the astro beard richard grace uh bob
denney david levy libby and the stars gary palmer of course and john glass
from the astronomical league uh former president of the astronomical league and jason's hiding at this point behind
his uh video screen but we will get started
with with some beautiful words from our dear friend
david levy uh david uh has done more than 33 global star
parties he he not only has done programs for us but he's done them for astronomy clubs across the country maybe around
the world by this time the pandemic has forced all of us to
get more online and figure out creative ways to share the astronomy experience with you
and so um and david has uh went into the deep end he
he has volunteered to be on so many talks and lectures that i can't even keep count
um i'm glad he's here tonight david you've got the stage
well thank you scotty and welcome to all of you at global star party
number 33. this has been one of the most fun things i've done and i've really enjoyed being a part of
what scotty has done here he's done a phenomenal job with it the longest one actually lasted um
almost 24 hours that's right when we had a star party to celebrate the
conjunction of jupiter and saturn it started at about 2 a.m and went right on
until dark that next night that's right it's really very special
well i usually begin these my presentations
and end them with a little bit of a quote and tonight i'm going to offer two of them
and the first one i just got yesterday it was written by
someone who i just met who lives in arizona his name is reuben and uh wendy kind of liked it and i kind
of like it and i'm just going to begin it it's a little bit of a um
it's just a little bit of a thing about distant worlds distant worlds with close
connectivity life in its own dimension is free for an eternity
transcending through space and time on my virtuous journey
when i look up to the stars in the night sky it gives me the feeling
that i found my home in paradise and this is uh
this is really a very interesting present a little piece of work by someone that i
just met yesterday so people are still writing poetry actually even though i have
been quoting poems and prose works from other people for
many years now in fact the first time i did this was
actually in the spring of 1960 at roslyn school i was in the sixth
grade and tonight's quotation
the nice little presentation that i'm giving you right now is
number one thousand eight and [Music]
and uh so i've done this a lot of times there's been an awful lot of
presentations that i've done [Music] but as i'm trying to uh
what is i am trying to um emphasize
i do i am not a poet in the sense that i do not write poetry most of the time
[Music] there is an exception however i remember i was on my i was on an
airplane flight from tucson through dallas to new york
to attend the funeral of my father-in-law and uh
i was just thinking about him and how much fun he was to have around and what a darn good father-in-law he
was i was i enjoyed showing him things through the telescope over and over and
over again how he sat at our wedding wendy wendy's
wedding in my wedding to look at a presentation about comments
and he said we went to a wedding and we learned something which is very unusual
for a wedding but anyway as we're going as i'm flying back to uh new york
i took out out my um a little pad and i took out a pen
and with tears flowing down my face the entire time i wrote this elegy for my father-in-law
and i'd like to quote it for you tonight it's not really astronomical but it's something that means a lot from
my heart that i'd like to share with you now it's called elegy for dad
to cherish dad i was so glad to join your family and i'm going to stop it
right here to explain the cadence of the poem
dad loved robert's service he loved the cremation of sam mcgee
and uh i think everybody loves the cremation of sam mcgee he particularly loved the uh rhyme
scheme and the cadence of it and so that's why i've written this poem in that cadence
so let's try again to cherish dad i was so glad to join your family
your love of what life and of your wife were wondrous things to see your sense of fun made everyone smile
when they heard you say a little joke that was the stroke we needed to hear
that day you'd always fight to do what's right no matter what came to you
but you didn't boast about the host of times this worked for you your sage advice was always nice for
family and friends to hear most of all you stood ten feet tall
in the hearts of your most dear dad and mom it must be fun to remember
your children for joanie and gail and wendy of vale and
sandy made one more your pride never hid in what they did but one thing you never knew
was that each one seems and hopes and dreams to follow after you [Music]
we sadly watched the terrible cost the years were to your health we shared your hell each time you fell
and did what we did good to help you lost your sight but not your fight
when we asked are you in pain you put on a smile that stretched a mile and said i can't complain
my dad you know from years ago when wendy and i were small when daddy died in 85 i took quite a
fall but 12 years passed and then at last you offered me once more
the chance to shout hi dad no doubt that feeling made me sore
i miss you dad i wish you had more time to spend down
here wherever you go i want you to know i feel you are still so near
the trips we took would fill a book but what was second to none was the pleasure
i felt that life has dealt me the honor to be your son
thank you scotty and back to you that's nice that is nice that was wonderful
wow so um let that soak in for a second here that's great
um our uh as we transition to our our next speaker
we're going to uh since it's a global star party we're going to do a little bit of a live
observing right now just for a couple of minutes we're going to switch over to jerry hubble
uh who will share his view uh through uh the mark slide remote
observatory i got the right one
looks like was it the uh was that the msro was i
don't know if i picked the right one let me go back just came back to you
yeah i know i i thought i'd selected the correct screen
um let me go to here
all right this is this is it all right that's the whole desktop from
the rock slade remote observatory very cool and uh this is a live picture
um i'm actually capturing frames right now that's a live picture of the moon uh
and here's a picture i took earlier described it with the other with the other maxum dl
and uh let me zoom up on the thing here
so this was when i first started when i first connect there's tycho you know tycho is a nice
creator to always look at now one of the things this is what i've talked about before i do these images of
the full disc moon with the astro camera so it's not a video camera that the frame rate's not very high it's like one
and a half frames per second but it's a it's a full uh
high dynamic image for each one it takes up a huge amount of space i i do like 2 000 frames and it takes up
like 30 gigabytes of disk space for the for the video and i'm doing it with sharp cap and that's what i'm doing
right now here with sharp cap and uh
i'll uh i could zoom up let me stop this capture
i've got i've got a thousand frames already so let me stop this capture and what i want to do is i want to zoom up
real quick just to show you what it looks like um [Music]
let's see here there's my auto zoom all right a lot of people think that
imaging the moon is easy you know i mean yes of course you can do it with an iphone but getting really high
resolution good good quality or great quality images of
the moon is not easy no so you can see here there's some that's a pretty close-up view of the moon
that's what it looks like and so i capture all these frames and then i use software to to pick out the
best of each part of the moon images in the video and then stack them and come up
with really really high resolution images which i'll
i don't have direct access to it right now but they're they're awesome images
so that's an example great okay
so let me stop my share yeah we'll come back to you now uh uh
jerry hubbell was operating from the mark slade remote observatory and he's written this book
on remote observatories for amateur astronomers this is a a great read if you're even contemplating doing
something like that also um you know our first speaker of course is david levy and we're going to
recommend that you read his life story in a night watchman's journey
you can buy this through starzona.com jerry's book is available through
springer.com and then our next speaker is none other than astronomy magazine's david eicher
david is uh author a gentleman who
has crossed all if there are boundaries in in astronomy
from professional to amateur to uh people who just wonder about the night sky
uh you know david eicher has has been in every every field of it and um has
brought so many of us together uh for um
events for uh his lectures for and through his books and one of the
books i really i really love is his galaxy's book because i just personally love galaxies
and the whole reason i got into amateur astronomy the way that i did was
learning about the distance scale of the universe and being able to look back into time across millions and millions
of years to see the fossil light of galaxies so this is a great book um
and you can find this on amazon.com it's called ins galaxies inside the
universe's star cities and i give to you mr david eicher
thank you scott so much and what a wonderful uh start by david and fantastic imaging jerry thank you so
much for that tonight i'd like to talk a little bit i'm sort of moving out talking about some random things farther
out into the cosmos and farther back in time and i'm going to go all the way back
tonight if i may and talk about the reason why we're here the origin of the universe the big bang um in 1964 a
breakthrough discovery proved beyond the shadow of a doubt uh that the universe began in the big
bang an original small source and it's expanding outward and it has
been ever since curiously there's tremendous evidence for the big bang
it's been conceptual evidence since the 1920s or even before uh of of the expanding universe and
there's been ironclad evidence since 1964 for the big bang but for whatever reason
this is something that a lot of astronomy enthusiasts tend to really
want to resist there's sort of an undercurrent in the world of astronomy uh practitioners um not professionals
but but astronomy enthusiasts of big bang skeptics which i always uh find
quite curious um science isn't selective here's one thing that's that's certain about
science you believe in scientific principles and observation and
experimentation and empiricism or maybe you don't
but you can't believe in science some of the time and then when you don't feel like it you
don't believe in empiricism that doesn't work out so well from terms of the philosophy of science so it's a very
curious thing that there's so much skepticism about the big bang because it's a very very well proven
um concept of the origin of the universe and of our cosmological model
of the universe so where did the logic for the big bang
come from in the 1910s and the 1920s vm slifer at lowell observatory with
this famous schleifer's spectrograph which you can see there now and of course edwin hubble and in the
1920s at mount wilson discovered that galaxies once they were identified by
hubble of their true nature are all expanding apart from each other generally speaking
running this universal expansion backwards in time of course leads us to
an origin a small infinitely dense infinitely hot
start and then along came the astrophysicist fred hoyle who wanted to upset the apple
cart on this notion he believed in the so-called steady state theory in the 1940s did a lot of work on it and
promoted it very carefully and he went on the bbc on a radio program in the
1940s and really attacked the big bang and there was hot and heavy competition at
this point in time as to which cosmological model of several actually
was the correct one well hoyle very derisively and pointedly called
his competitor the big bang model as an insult and the name stuck and we've
never gone back from it of course for many years thereafter many uh
cosmologists and astrophysicists battled with each other openly
with regard to the cosmological model that they supported until 1964 when arno penzias and robert
wilson bob wilson who by the way is active at starmis many of these years
and if you come to starmish you can meet him he they won the nobel prize of course for this discovery they were
working at bell labs in new jersey and with a large horn antenna they discovered a uniform radio emission over
the entire sky that was the of course the background echo of the big bang
so that turned out to be the ironclad evidence in 1964
of this origin of the cosmos
but that wasn't all the evidence a string of cosmological satellites the most important ones in beginning in
1992 and and going up nearly to the present discovered an enormous amount of
supporting evidence for the big bang and the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation
that resulted from it they included kobe the cosmic microwave background explorer
that is also wmap was the second very very important satellite the wilkinson
microwave eina anisotropy probe and most recently and most importantly
the european planck satellite and it was the most recent data release of plunk
going on 10-year not quite 10 years ago now that gives us our fundamental
understanding of the big bang and of the cosmological properties of the universe
and the model that nearly everyone universally accepts
now so from the plot data we know a lot of cosmological parameters we know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old
and we also talked earlier on another star party about old albert einstein slipping one to us
and explaining that matter and energy are two forms interconvertibly of the same
thing of course that's what e equals m c squared tells us because c squared the
speed of light is a constant so energy and mass are the same thing you can prove that by
eating a cracker and running across the room converting mass into energy and we
know then the share of the mass and energy from these satellites in the universe is about 69
dark energy that was only discovered in 1998 this fundamental force that is
pushing the expansion of the universe outward 26 dark matter
this uh unseen and mysterious matter that was hypothesized back in the 30s
and in the 1970s vera rubin and kent ford and their collaborators really
discovered the evidence for dark matter we still don't know what dark energy nor dark matter what they really are
made of suspicions but nothing more and a whopping five percent of the stuff
in the universe is the so-called baryonic matter the bright matter the stuff that we see and interact with
and know and understand uh stars planets galaxies cats dogs trees planets the whole rest
of that song a whopping five percent of the mass energy of the universe
so there's a whole lot to understand yet if they're any libby and other budding astrophysicists
there's some work to do yet cut out for the future to understand what's going on in the universe
most cosmologists accept also a a an add-on if you will hypothesis to the big
bang that was created independently nearly at the same time proposed in the
1970s by alan guth at mit and by andre linde so-called cosmic inflation
that's this period within very rapidly within the first second after the big bang of a hyperinflation of the size of
the universe that explains a lot of what we see today observationally if this
inflationary period so-called happened very very early in the history
of the universe and if inflation of course is indeed true it means the visible universe that
we can see is not the whole universe and in fact the universe may be infinite
which is you know one of those moments where science sounds like science fiction but that's
what mathematics and and inflation theory would tell us so that's something to
ponder on our next night out there under the stars whether we're together observing remotely here virtually or out
under that real sky it's an awfully big place we know that
it began with a big bang we're getting a handle on the cosmological parameters and properties
of the universe but there's a lot to learn yet and you can get yourself a nobel prize
by deciphering libby what what dark energy is or what dark matter consists
of so there's a very short history of the big bang
wow okay well that's great uh
jeez um you know the um there there's i guess there's so much
support for this this uh you know this model the beginning of our universe i
always think about you know what what was before the big bang you know what what uh
you know the the the early primordial universe and what was before that you know so uh
because i i'm i'm certainly one in the camp of cause and effect you know so
and i always think kind of an interesting question because it's it's kind of like what uh
you know what do you get when you divide something by zero it's infinity right so
but it's undefined as what it is there's nothing it's time didn't start till the big bang right so how can there be
anything before it that's right and this is something that albert einstein and niels bohr used to
sit around and argue about and enjoy themselves you know being cantankerous with each other and taking opposite
positions just for fun you know um and einstein this is really we get into
not the philosophy of science here but just into philosophy really and beyond the realm of science
because science is observational it's experimental we can tell what happened back to the big bang
we can't tell either what happened before the big bang scientifically as far as we understand
or you know so so something may or may not have existed before the big bang it's
not in the realm of science to to or its capability to answer that at least right
now just as it's not this mathematical hypo uh hypothetical possibility of multiple
universes say of we're in one universe that is in a bubble-like structure and there are
other universes outside ours but we have no observational or
experimental capability to detect other universes so they're
outside of the realm of science too so that really becomes speculation and
philosophy and we don't know the answer and so einstein's point was following uh
the the principles of science the the the simplest explanation always turns
out to be the correct one so-called occam's razor which was named after the
early german philosopher william of occum why do you need to have an extra step
then to speculate on something that happened before you know it that that's not in the realm of science so you can
you can decide anything you'd like about what came before the big bang or how many universes exist aside from the one
that we can observationally see and test but you're now not doing science you're
outside the realm of science and you're having fun philosophically yes
one thing that's really interesting david yeah about your presentation is how
fred hoyle's derogatory labeling has gone into the popular culture not only is the big bang
theory the favored scientific theory for the origin of the universe it is also
the title of one of the most successful television programs of all time the big
bang theory for within a decade and uh
ended i really love the ending when uh sheldon gets the nobel prize because the uh the
uh the sequel which is young sheldon is on now and uh and and it's interesting to
listen to the character as he is developing and getting a little more mature
in some ways and not in others but it's just so interesting to see
how it he develops into the scientists he is to become and the person who will eventually win
the nobel prize in physics it's i find the life programs absolutely fascinating
can't wait to see the next one wendy that's terrific david and a nice uh uh
parallel track of of science and entertainment uh coming together and
inspiring us in that way and i love it you know fred hoyle of course couldn't stand it when not only did his dirty
name for the competing theory catch on bang but people loved the name the big bang
you know fred oil crazy you know he couldn't stand that you know
wow you know maybe you should have never said it
wonderful okay so uh our next speaker is libby and the stars but we're gonna take
a peek through uh richard grace's uh the astro beards telescope uh for yet
another view of the moon
the moon seems to be the star of the show tonight it's uh big and bright and in the corner of the sky that i can see
it and uh one of my neighbors has their searchlight on and the other one uh they got a whole bunch of lights in the back
of the house so i kind of got to wait till it moves a little bit but uh let's see here with the uh the
aps-c uh sensor of the 2600 on the common hunter that's the field of view we're
getting right now yeah and uh
bring it in here it doesn't look as good as the of the mark slate observatory
well it doesn't look bad it doesn't look bad
taiko down here starts getting a little bit fuzzy and uh we're frame chopping at uh 10
milliseconds uh i don't think it's refreshing that fast but
something will come through look pretty clear and how many images will you
take and stack before you're satisfied um
i probably won't uh i won't okay i i i was uh yeah just
getting the moon up here and uh right it takes a lot of data you give us a live view that's cool i i looked at um
my ph d2 uh guiding and uh just the screen's completely whited out you know
what i mean so i'm gonna uh jump off of this and uh hopefully get on some stuff
towards um towards some galaxy clusters uh after a little while here once i get things uh
tuned in okay sounds good all right so our next speaker is young libby and the
stars libby is uh has now turned 11 years old she is um
it seems it seemed impossible to me that she would be any more interested in space and astronomy as she is but it seems
that the more she learns the more she wants to know and she has
she is refining her talks she has i know that she has appeared on other uh
programs and uh you know she's starting to spread the word and that's wonderful because libby is now doing a lot of
educational outreach and not only outreach and in education but
she's uh sharing her passion and inspiring people all over the country
and maybe all over the world um libby what's your program what's your talk about tonight
well uh i am keeping to my list that i made a long time ago and i'm talking about the
galaxy or the star cluster uh in gc
1769 and i made a powerpoint so i'm going to share that
and here it is let me be on present
[Music] so this is ngc 1769 i have a little
photo here um i've gotten really good at making google slides now because i'm in virtual school
so it's definitely a good thing to have as a talent um
mgc uh ngc 1769 is a star cluster um
as you can see there in the middle i'm gonna get my little pointer out in the middle there uh right here that
is a star cluster right there just under that little that dark line um
of a nebula and uh i'm going to be showing more photos but uh more show
some of the photos i'm showing are different colors too just because the lenses are different
a bunch of different photos um here's the photos i was going to show i was going to talk a little bit uh
about photos like doing astrophotography and sharing it um
because i know that was one way i got into astronomy when i was at school i had this one book that i really loved
it was like probably one of the most complex facebooks in my school library
um and i loved it since thinking much because the photos in it were amazing
and uh like they were so colored and they're different colors and i would learn about
like saturation and like the photos of colors
and um i think that was one of the books that got me um inspired and astronomy i
haven't i haven't uh seen that book in a long time because i haven't been to my
school library in a while but uh i'll have to go see if i can find it again and share it because that was an
amazing book and i think photos inspire people i mean visual astronomy is amazing to get
people interested in doing astronomy but uh
i thought the photos that were amazing i'm gonna have to find it uh but
like as far as showing you the unseen part of the universe things that you can't see
through a telescope even through very large telescopes uh the eye is very limited in what it can
see in its uh visual range and you mentioned the colors well there's you know these different wavelengths uh that
the human eye just cannot detect and that can be done through
um certainly through electronic imaging and uh you know the i think maybe all of these
images are are through off of electronic sensors you have on
your screen yeah and uh i also think that photo like space changes every like every
single second like all these photos they use different lenses it's different telescopes it's
different people taking the photos it's different times in space and uh
it's just all of them are very different you know some may be closer to the uh
that may be closer to uh the star cluster and some may be farther away
so i think that like the star club like everything in space changes
like every single second so like even if you're like into like extremely intuition we know
every single galaxy out there which none of us do but like no bunch of the pictures like every picture there is to
um be found of like space every single picture is different
and it's like the pictures out there
like there's different lenses definitely you can take the photos with there's different cameras
different times in space i know all these weren't taken on the same day the same minute the same second
um and there's just multiple things that you can get fascinated by astronomy over
and over again because there's so many things that you can do in astronomy um
one of my friends uh we used to take my little small telescope i have behind me
um he used to take it out into the yard and i used to show her
saturn and jupiter and she didn't really know much about space or astronomy but
she was still very fascinated about like what was in my telescope lens and i
think that's why visual astronomy is very important um there's many
ways you can share visual astronomy through different telescopes
different lenses and it's definitely i mean just sharing it to yourself just
like that's your hard work like that's your lens that's your telescope
that's your picture you have of the nebula and i know all these are definitely
certain distances from the star cluster you might see them faintly away
in different colors and it's just easy to get fascinated by
space over and over again for generations especially if you're new to space um
if you're new to doing space and astronomy and uh
like seeing images that's like when you're mostly impressed but when you're really into astronomy it
it just never stops the fascination of space and then and i just think we need to show this
generation of kids pictures of space and why it is important not just space travel but astronomy and
we need to teach the kids of this generation astronomy because there's
those are the people who are going to be working for nasa in the future hopefully
that's right yeah the people at nasa right now they're not going to be there forever i
mean that's right that's going to last forever so you got to carry the torch uh i remember us saying that uh the
beginning star parties i was on and carrying the torch and i just like to use that quote a lot now
because it's it's like we're the new generation of nasa
and we need to be able to like tell kids my age about astronomy because
i bet some of them will be interested in astronomy and space space travel working
for space like math literature i know literature
is another way you can get into astronomy i never thought about it but i've been
like reading a bunch of books and um i was super excited this week in
school because uh the perseverance rover that just landed my teacher did one
one activity about the uh perseverance foreverness i was super happy about that because it
reminded me of carrying the torch and being able to share the passion of astronomy to others
and definitely yourself to like just seeing like
that is space and time real life right now you're viewing it
like right now in the universe now not me right now like you can't watch an explosive explosion in space
that was just like happening right now in space but maybe you can watch one that happened like a thousand years ago
if because of light years and stuff and so i think it's very important uh visual astronomy
to be able to share that with the world and share the passion of the show me through
visual pictures and being able to share that with friends family all over
the world just blasted off their your picture
wonderful wonderful presentation i have a comment to make if it's okay
libby as i listen to your um
presentations with each passing global star party the improvement and the growth in your
maturity is wonderful and it certainly is a lot faster than mine was when i was
starting astronomy when i was approximately your age but the real comment tonight isn't for
me it's going to be from my teacher and wendy it's all yours
my my wife wendy who was a teacher for many years would like to make a comment to you
libby and here she is hi i'm libby i taught school for 26 years and i taught mostly your age group
mid um elementary through upper middle school junior high and it is difficult to believe i
that you are only 11. happy birthday by the way um because if you keep up your
love of astronomy the way you do right now and it doesn't change as you get older which sometimes does and can
happen you are going places you are just at for your age you are better than most people
i've heard give lectures to so keep it up and i hope the enthusiasm stays there good luck
thank you so much uh i hope that i can carry on the good global star party for like
a thousand years and pass it to the next generation as long as i can
i'll show you how to take over and you can
thank you so much thank you libby congratulations and i have a quick comment if i may too if that's
yes you have the tarantula nebula here with your star cluster
and did you know it's one of the two largest star forming regions known in
the whole universe the tarantula nebula and it's a long way away of course in
the large magellanic cloud it's about 168 000 light years away but you know the orion nebula you've observed it
yeah it's 1305 light years away in orion much closer to
us if you put the tarantula nebula as close as the orion nebula is in our
sky it would cast shadows onto the ground wow of us
that's how large and bright it is that would be beautiful if we could see
it like that isn't that kind of cool to know yeah hopefully not dangerous though if
it was that way not dangerous 1300 light years is still a long hike
awesome all right so we are going to transition here um
uh the our next uh uh speaker is
known throughout the social media world is the vast reaches his name is jason gonzale jason's been
on our program several times but he has done amazing work
in solar deep sky planetary and his images are just every time i see uh
his work i i'm just i'm floored at the amount of detail the richness of of the
uh and range of his of his uh of his work um and when i say range i'm talking
about when you see uh the nebulosity of of some of the objects that that uh he's
captured where i mean just going down to really faint stuff to really bright stuff but it does it's he he's able to
spatially image process this stuff so that you can see all this rich detail
his image of um uh of the sun recently that he shared with me i think it was on instagram or got shared uh uh
inadvertently um maybe jason can tell the story but was viewed almost a million times uh on
social media so um you know normally i would uh have like a
transition of a live image but we're going straight to an astrophotographer right now so uh let's do this uh
at this moment jason i'm gonna turn over the stage to you all right well thanks scott thanks for
that kind words um yeah that um the image you're referencing the the
image of the sun um it got blasted all over the internet um
pretty much went viral everywhere with the headline nasa's sharpest image of
the sun ever released and it was a shot taken through my
solar telescope in my backyard and i appreciate the compliments but it would have been nice to have some some sort of
credit associated some credit yes i got all the credit the massive share but yeah that um
it was a very popular image but i don't have it uh pulled up to
share with you today so i apologize for that um intro and then let down but
uh you had started off the program talking about the supernova 1987 a which is a core collapse
supernova one of the more more studied ones in the universe because it was uh
accessible to modern astronomers but i thought i'd talk a little bit about
core collapse supernovas or at least a supernovae and at least
show some of the images i've been able to get last year around this time there was
a large supernova in the galaxy m61 and
fortunately for me um you know this was just a stroke of dumb
luck i was imaging that galaxy at the time um when that when that supernova uh lit
up and i actually caught uh before and after images of that supernova so i'm
going to show you some of those and i'm going to share off of a different computer so let me know if this works
are you able to see my screen here yes okay so this galaxy we're looking at
here this is uh messier 61 which is a face on spiral galaxy
and um this blue dot here which can you see my mouse
hovering yes yeah this is very small it's very small within the uh let me
make it bigger um this this
star here is the supernova which actually was completely invisible until it lit up
um i've got some before and after pictures here but this this one's labeled uh 2020
jfo and this was a type 2 supernova so a core collapse supernova was similar to
1987a
and this is a close-up of that galaxy before
and then if i step over one
you can see the supernova light up
hopefully that's coming through okay interesting thing about a
supernova like this is it literally outshines a galaxy you can see the brightness of this
it almost appears to be a star within our galaxy it's as bright as the core of the
of the m61 itself and so what i have here pieced together
is a time lapse of my luminance frames
playing in a loop and i've got the dates here i was capturing this through march april and may of 2020
and then i've got the circle there and it shows the supernova light up
and then this is the stacked image as it pulls the the video pulls back but i'll let this play a couple times so
you can see just how abrupt and and um
how bright physically bright that supernova is once it once it ignites look at this this is
cool
wow these um these images are spaced you know as i'm capturing this galaxy over a
few months you know i'll i'll i'll capture a few nights in a row but
due to weather the moon or you know other factors you know i'm not capturing it every
night so there is some spacing between these these luminance frames but um
it was very fortunate to be capturing it during this
and i just happened to hear about it and then looking back through my frames i was able to piece this together
to actually see that supernova ignite
that's what a supernova looks like in a um in another galaxy i thought it would be
interesting to show what a supernova looks like within our own galaxy in the year 10
54 i believe um chinese astronomers had noticed a
new star actually visible in the daylight and um
that is the crab nebula
and i got a picture of it here i'll show this is um
in x-ray this is the the crab nebula
um this is actually the nebula formed by the wind of the pulsar
that's at the core after the supernova event the core collapsed into
a neutron star and it's a highly magnetized spinning
neutron star which is classified as a pulsar and you can actually see this
this disc that forms around it and then the jet which comes out of the pole of the the pulsar
and so this is visible in x-ray if you look at an optical
and infrared you see different aspects of the
crab nebula but this is kind of what it looks like um through some of our best scientific instruments this is with the chandra
x-ray observatory to see the pulsar wind and then optical from
the hubble space telescope but what i had planned to show you then
is i was imaging this live tonight and then the clouds came
but this was image i captured just about an hour ago this is in hydrogen
alpha and this is the crab nebula
and i've got some additional images here of the
the uh crab nebula this was shot with uh near infrared filter over the last couple months
and what you can see here is um like you saw in the x-ray image you can actually
see the of the pulsar as long as along with the jets coming out of the top
and when you combine an image like that with uh hydrogen alpha you start to see all the intricate
structure which is within the the crab nebula so you can still kind of
see that uh the pulsar structure and you can then see the the filaments of hydrogen alpha which
are basically atmospheric layers of the star that it shed before it went supernova
so all this nebula here is actually created in that supernova event that the chinese
astronomers observed a thousand years ago and it's been expanding since then then
initially a point source of light which was visible
bright enough to be visible in the daytime has expanded over years and even with modern astronomy
if you go back a decade you can see the expansion of this nebula grows a year upon year
incredible
that's kind of what i had i just wanted to you know talk about supernova a little bit and
um i'm by no means an expert although i like to you know i like to image these things
and it's it's kind of cool to see them from two different vantage points from within our galaxy and and then also uh
extra galactic right yeah maybe uh david uh eiker you could
talk to the point of um how is it possible that a that the light from a supernova can
outshine a whole galaxy those are great images by the way jason
those those are fantastic we love to get them for astronomy magazine what's this dropping dropping a hint
there um but yeah supernovae are aside from a few
other very rare uh types of astrophysical phenomena supernovae for
the most part are the most energetic events in the cosmos um and so they very briefly you know for
a period of of days and weeks uh can outshine an entire galaxy
um in fact uh for for brief periods because there's so much energy in that
explosion and these are massive stars of course that live fast and die young you know they
only last a few millions of years and then and then produce these massive explosions and neutron stars and
black holes often um and you know your description was exactly on with with these thing you
know with the crab nebula and pulsar and and with the m61
supernova as well very nicely done thanks
the fun thing is you know the creative thing about modern astrophotography is you get you have ultimate freedom in
mixing these things and the colors and visualizations so um i was pretty pleased with the way
this came out in infrared i haven't seen very many images of it in the near infrared and
it's kind of a unique way to look at it because you can see this pulsar
structure in that in that channel and you don't have
you know if you look at it and say straight luminance or the visual spectrum you have
um this webbing of the hydrogen overlaying it and it's hard
to see those details so i was really happy with this i'm still kind of working on putting together this
image but i thought i'd share it that's really incredible and the guy who's done a lot of work on this and
showing the expansion over recent years in a series and in fact in a movie with
the crab pulsar's jeff hester one of our pals who writes for the magazine as well with the hubble um but you know short of
having the hubble space telescope i mean this is about as nice as anything you know
short of the the hubble can possibly show the crab here these are great great images and you can see you know the the
tendrils of gas and the overall shape of the object you know being being a a
you know a a combination of different velocities of the gas coming out um and
also hitting different densities of the interstellar medium you know that compresses and and shocks and gets that
gas to light up more so so that gives you these weird you know tendril shapes um as it works
to push against the interstellar medium uh which is essentially invisible you know dust cosmic dust and dark you know
dark stuff um so that yeah i mean that's for you know as amateur astronomy images
go these are phenomenal oh thank you yeah the supernova remnants are really
interesting things to image because as they as they continue to expand
um they get very filamentary and and
enormous really because these structures hang together as they expand you know through the through the medium
and they get like you said affected by you know interstellar forces uh either
gravitation or um you know uh radiation from these nearby
stars and they start to take on different shapes so definitely you know as these expand
it's a it's a continually evolving system and you start to see this evolution if you look at different
supernova remnants around the sky but the crab nebula is interesting because
it's one of the youngest in this in this form that we and closest
that we can image so it's it's really a unique object out there
exactly right and much older supernova remnants the veil nebula um
the spaghetti nebula if you will siamese 147 and others uh you know are
on the order of 10 or 12 or 20 000 years old at that point they're starting to
get very uh diffuse and pretty much returned um you know on the order of 10 to 20 to
30 times this age of the crab nebula which as you said is about a millennium old on those time scales that you're
starting to really see the gas dissipate and and get recycled back into the
interstellar medium and then eventually of course tidal forces and gravitational things depending on locally what's going
on we'll bring that together and and ultimately uh produce a new generation of stars from some of that
gas great
great about recycling huh all right and there's a question here maybe you know the answer to this one
this is from john paris chile he says how close is another pulsar to the crab
so i don't know i wouldn't know the answer to that one no i don't either yeah
not very close not very close but i don't have to check yeah i don't i don't know either you
know i tend to lean on wikipedia for these things yeah yeah right
right well wonderful well jason thank you so much for blowing
our minds again with some great images here um right now we're going to transition
with richard grace uh and uh as we go uh to uh john goss from the
astronomical league who is the official sponsor of our door prizes for the
global star parties and uh so i know that um
richard has been uh continually improving his work um and so let's see what you got
not sure if you're muted there richard it helps when that's on there we go
all right so we got a few frames uh stacked on the beehive cluster for uh a little intermission here but i also had
a a couple picks from last week here which are actually the same pick
and that's uh the the less colored uh variant of orion
and i also did one with just a little more color so oh nice those came from uh early last
week while it was uh good and windy and all that and i got one more uh from last week but i'll show that later
okay sounds good sounds good there's the button all right there it is
so up next is uh of of course uh john goss uh from the astronomical league
john uh has devoted uh much of his uh adult life towards the
astronomical league which is today uh the world's largest federation of astronomy clubs uh the organization
grows with more and more members all the time john how how many members does the league
have at this time and and how many clubs
well uh we have just over 300 clubs the number of members is some place i don't know the exact
number but it's someplace between 18 and 19 000. wow uh we've grown we've grown
quite that you might remember the great recession back in 2009 or so yes that
really hit us hard and for some reason we we dropped down to thirteen thousand
nine hundred and ninety nine and i'm thinking come on can we get one
one more over that mark but since then we've continually grown you know getting uh uh two three four
hundred members a year and so we're up about 18 000 now that's the long answer wonderful yeah
and you have the international membership available at this point your membership large program
and you guys are heading towards um uh the next uh
astronomical league convention this summer so that should be very exciting
as you know the way the way most things are are kind of up in the air and exactly what's going to happen oh yeah
there is a convention planned um well we should know more about it over the next
route well real soon i say the next month we ought to have everything pretty much defined and how that's going to be handled excellent excellent
i'm sure whatever you guys decide it's going to be awesome no matter what so thank you for your confidence
well you guys got have so much so many resources and so many ways to get the uh
your message out through your programs um we are
just so everyone's aware on our daily show which we run at four o'clock on what we on a show that we call first
light chronicles kent martz is going to start going through your universe sampler program and uh so that's going
to be nice and helping guy you know guide people through uh you know beginners through uh learning more about
uh you know exploring the universe so which i think is fantastic interesting you you brought that up and
interesting that that libby is also here tonight uh we have the universe sampling program but we also have something
called sky puppies which is meant for the for the younger set but
but there's a limit on on the there's an age limit on skype puppies which i think is 10.
so i don't know if this has been really announced much yet but we started a new program uh from from for kids that age up to 17
years old and so we're going to have getting started real soon if it hasn't been already so we're trying to reach as
many young people as we can in cert in different ways wonderful wonderful is there a name for
this program yet or i suppose there is no i i should probably know this i could
put you on the spot or anything it's it's the the youth program that's what yeah that's a good there we go
there we go the team program yes that's right awesome well i'm sure it's fantastic so
um uh as always uh the astronomical league comes on to our program to
uh to read off uh answers to the last global star party's questions uh
uh to win prizes and to announce winners um and to read off the new questions now
when you put in your answer you're going to send your answers off to
it is explore alliance
at explorescientific.com so you're not going to answer it in chat if you're watching this program for the first time
um we have some you know we have great prizes uh so you should certainly take a
stab at uh answering these questions um and um
i don't have a drum roll john but uh you want to get started oh by the way
how about the uh uh let's not forget about the solar warning
the [Laughter]
okay one moment please one moment please
there we go is that the solar warning or what that's the solar warning that's the soil i think about this because i was looking
at the sun today so yes well yeah uh we we like just showing
this just to keep it in people's minds and uh looking at the sun is pretty fascinating but you got to make sure you
you do it the right way you got the right filters that uh you you know what you're doing
and especially if new people join in you have to make sure that they know what they're doing too but if you do have the
correct filters in place it's completely safe and you can certainly see a lot of stuff
on the sun with the telescopes we have today
first question here um this is from from last week
um um at the last star party chuck allen our vice president posed three questions number one is
average over time what planet spends more time it's the closest planet to earth than any other
and it turns out that it's it's it's mercury it's not venus it's not mars uh
in fact mercury spends more time as as the closest planet to all of the other planets than any other the winner
was uh our begged on us so interesting question there
question two from last week that chuck posed uh who who postulated an inflationary
origin to the universe in which it expanded by a factor of 10 to the 78th times in less than a
i don't know what that is undecillious undecillion and that sounds like something dave iker
might might know since he mentioned that like something i would make in the show tonight
um the answer is ellen goes yes and the winner was andrew corkill from last week
all right there's something all the time under sicilian
that must be pretty big okay um third question is what constellation
covers more north to south degrees of of any in the sky uh than any other
constellation eridanus as most of you know a redness is a long
skinny constellation that starts around orion and drops all the way down close to the
southern celestial pole again that was our beg mcdonald's thank
you okay now for this week's questions hopefully i can do this right
all right question number one standing on the surface of what rocky
body in the solar system would a person weigh the most in other words of all the rocky bodies
in our solar system which one has the highest surface gravity
and of course you can see where to send it right there explore alliance at explorescientific.com
question number two now before we really get into this i want to say that
this is something i i this is my fault i thought of it last week after hearing a news story
uh and some people would say that this is a trick question but i really don't think it is you just have to think
of uh you have to think outside the box so neptune is always the seventh most
distant major planet from earth what is the eighth most distant major planet
we're talking major planets we're not talking dwarf planets minor planets whatever these are major planets what's
the eighth most distant
okay you just need to think of what that box is okay yeah yeah think of what that box
is i'm afraid if i say any more i'll give it away but yeah don't do that okay
all right i really want to say more okay get off this one okay
question number three about the astronomical league the astronomical league offers up to 10 youth awards each
year thank you explorer scientific for your sponsorship of the national young
astronomer award and thank you for comer charitable fund for your sponsorship of the youth award youth service award imaging and
journalism awards okay on most years what is the deadline for award nominations
now i'm uh i put this in there just to make it clear that we do have these awards and we do like people
entering and you can bet that i wouldn't uh choose an answer that has already
happened already so uh think about these
another hand for you okay that's excellent yeah and so i mean to that end uh
if any of you out there uh can think of uh worthy candidates young
young people that uh have done amazing work in astronomy and should be
considered for one of the youth awards from the astronomical league most definitely uh uh nominate them and
get them uh through that application process yeah i'd like to add to that and and
just saying that believe it or not our sponsors we have explorer scientific we have
um american astronomical society we have uh the horcomber fund we have
astronomics and we have somebody else which i'll get in trouble because i can't remember who it is but our sponsors really don't really do want you
to answer these to enter these uh award processes and they really do want to
give away [Music] uh prizes the awards whatever
so please enter if you can yeah thank you scott that's great
okay well that's great we're going to go to a 10-minute break but before we do um
we're going to transition one more time to one of our astronomers jerry hubbell and richard grace right now have been
alternating back and forth uh so we're going to go back to uh jerry and the mark slade remote
observatory thanks scott i'm um i'm getting it going
here um can you see this it's coming up
so what i'm showing right here the the seeing's not very good tonight as you can as you can tell by this image this
is copernicus okay and what i wanted to do is demonstrate we do get good seeing here in virginia
every once in a while i wanted to show what it looks like tonight in terms of these raw images coming across so i
gather a ton lots of these images through two to three thousand at a time and then i do stacking but then uh
when you have good good seeing and and a good night uh i wanted to demonstrate what that looks like with one of my
images here and hopefully i can bring it up here quickly
let me bring that image up first and then i can share it
directly i think that's what that's what i needed to do first
here it is
all right so what i want to do is zoom up on this a little bit
so this this is what copernicus looks like this was the same same exact um
configuration uh actually slightly sharper image than the one we
were seeing now slightly sharper actually i'm trying to get it to uh
can i scroll over i don't know why this thing's not letting me
i got this uh little so if you can look here in the upper right that's what that's what it looks like
and then there's a little crater i'm trying to zoom up on it a little quicker or a little closer so you can
see this uh i can't scroll over it won't let me scroll for some reason
i don't know what that is but anyway this is what you get when you get really good seeing
and compare that to what i was showing before and you can see that even with the configuration i have now it's really
very good and of course you can hear my dogs
barking of course and when i talk they always have to bark i thought that was just a sound effect
so wonderful okay all right well thank you
jerry uh we will take a ten minute break um so now's the time to go get a
sandwich or you know a beverage and uh uh uh come back and you know stretch your
legs a little bit and we'll see you in 10.
hey caesar
hi it's god yeah good to see you yes
thank you good to see you that's great we returned to the baipunny again
balcony astronomy and when it's farming yes awesome i have a college from austria
from last week now that he worked very well for the balkan with very huge equipment
yes yes hey scott
yeah i have a couple of um stories to tell
with regards to supernovae great um i don't know at what point
but one of them is having dinner with alex philippenko who is one
of the cac slash berkeley supernova cosmology people um had dinner
with him as well as the guy i really wanted to talk to who is a guy named steve vogt vogt
who designed the spectrograph and um i have a link to that
excuse me the spectrograph for the keck instrument yes that was uh steve vogt
and um and also we people may or may not know about amateur
astronomer tim puckett i have a wonderful story about him i
visited his cabin in lj georgia at which he had
built a 24-inch telescope from ground zero and it's it was a work of art and
for 20 years he ran a team of people who discovered supernovae and turned those
into the supernovae cosmology projects and other people other projects
it was a they took images he would hand out
grids of images to take every night to like 10 people around the world
in australia and here in the us and south america and he they would take pictures
and then they would blink them to find supernovae because even today it's difficult to discover
those automatically and uh and tim is an amazing person and he finally retired
just a few years ago and is now floating around in his boat
in the caribbean but after 20 years and he did it every single night
he put together these these uh grids and sent them out to people it was an amazing effort all to discover supernova
his team discovered over 350 supernovae oh my goodness wow
i know a couple of the guys that were on that team and uh one of them uh
yeah newton was involved in that um i don't know how many supernovas he's got
under his uh belt but quite a few yeah i did a little bit i did a little bit on
that team i didn't discover anything but i got to learn the process and and that was very cool uh
yeah i didn't realize tim had retired already so tim puckett uh alex filippanko
saul pearl mudder and uh again i'm a technologist right so the
guy i wanted to talk to was the one who designed the equipment not the people who did the observing
so uh and steve vogt who i was it was a fascinating dinner with him to discuss
the evolution of that spectrograph the high-res spectrograph that's at keck
it's amazing back in those days they discovered uh their their exoplanet work was done
by spectral shift not occultation so it was high
really very careful stuff [Music]
anyway okay and the cosmic background microwave background the story of bob dicky at
princeton when they talked to the guys at bell labs and he got off the phone and his guys were trying to find
something like this and he got off the phone and said boys we've been scooped
anyway if you're interested you can call on me otherwise i'll just sit here in kibbits
you
you
so um
you
you
well hello everybody this is uh scott roberts we are back after our break
um i was trying to share uh the after party
uh link but if you do go into our post um you'll see that a couple of links
down the bottom of that page and they belong uh the the first one is um
i believe this is uh join the after party and it would uh have the
um zoom link and you'll be put into a zoom waiting room with where you'll meet up with kent martz kent will
check your audio and video and everything and then give you the link for the uh for this live broadcast um
but uh coming up here uh is our next speaker
and uh we're going to bring on uh cesar brollo who's set up on his um
his uh patio his balcony in buenos aires here
caesar are you with us hi scott how are you good good
well i i try it again now i i have some pictures of
oreo nebula between the buildings actually i have i can share
um i can share the process because i i have only
uh audio only appears maybe
a couple of minutes between two weldings but let me check
if i have something to show you
i just stepped outside a little while ago you know arkansas has had terribly cold
weather we were well it is this is the the single uh exposition
between the welding oh wow really yes it is
sometimes you know that we we talk about the impossible astrophotography well
this is something that i made here but i i took maybe
10 10 pictures uh like this of only 10 and 15 seconds and
maybe i can make something because i have stack it here
and i don't know if is this this screen share to the of the deep sky stacker you
can see uh we just see the image of a building with you okay okay uh yes
this is a typical thing that i need to to share to change the sharing
okay it's me again
let me check if i can show you yes this i don't know if i can make something
with this here do you have it over the stacking of of the nebula here do
you have a layers that are the
the positions of the position of
the welding i can put i can move the
the instagram the levels sorry here
oh okay oh huh yeah it's something yeah look at that
yes i i don't have darts yet or flats it's only experienced the raw image yeah
yes yes and how many how many of you stacked
here how many uh i think that no more than 10
i have 100 seconds no more i see
this is the the original deep sky staggered that is really easy to use and normally
the people uh start to use with program like this very easy it's free it's
you can get this from from internet and it's
it's not a illegal copy it's totally legal because it's a it's free
you know what is there an historic
well we can make something like this
maybe it could be a disaster or no okay i i need to move the blue oh you got more nebulosity yes
yes you know
it's fun to image from your balcony you know yes it's very convenient
yeah do you have the the quantity of exposures do you have here in the in
layers and layers of of the side of the welding i see
oh i don't have flats of this well it's something terrible but you
know
well you are uh it's a case
i'll find a a a cluster or something in the south side
okay maybe i'm maybe i can make something with the moon but
now i have only uh a camera over a a quattro amount
um very easy very very simple like this but now i don't have like now for
for sure to show you what are you using now but it's very easy it's a
it's a it's a mount for after photography with a tripod normal tripod
i don't know if it's possible just to show you this
maybe yes we can see it yeah something
normally i have in my my balcony the exos 100 but uh
i sold it yes yes my knife
yes it's but yeah but you know i have more in miami and they are coming toward
it very good we are we are the the oh we are um
rich because we we have 100 exos 100 that anybody have
that's probably true yeah yes the last six people
right one for me again yes you know they the in in the in the
san miguel astronomy club or or the the people that i told you the last week obviously
story observatory and they are impossible because the old people
to tell you all time can you can you can you uh come on solve
give them to me you don't need this you don't need it yeah okay yeah yes
the people don't understand that the the telescope leader sometimes we are we
have the same hobby that's right that's right yeah it's nice it's nice
well it i know that it's it's a little horrible this this uh i'm not horrible
it's not horrible well it's something that that only a camera reflex camera yeah
it's not a telescope it's only a mountain yeah we're seeing uh
the uh orion nebula 1300 light years away you know and yes yeah
and do you have like an eclipse or an occultation yes
a side of of a building at only 30 meters or
yeah because this is in of course that this is a it's a it's a vertical line sure okay the
position is it's not this of course this is in this in this uh i can rotate yeah i
can see the steps it's repeating as uh yeah yeah yeah
tracking the object right yes yes this is interesting to to to
to show to the people that normally don't know how we make
this and well it's interesting
this is that actually i i don't have the nebula because it's it's uh
how do you say well it's back of uh of the wilderness now
but this is the the pictures that i i can took from from
oreo nebula in in tonight i try i try uh something in the the
southern cross you know um because it's i
today tonight is very it's not easy to appoint to different
objects because the most interesting interesting interesting
objects are in back
out of the view beside the wilderness
right maybe maybe next week next week we are going to to
to make the soon from the all observatory because we are trying to install internet in the in the
observatory and electricity in the in the in the in the first telescope that i showed you
because actually is only we need to
to do we have electricity but it's not a
installation uh make how
you know installation that is it's okay it's only
an emerson emergency installation of electricity in the in the observatory we
are we're making next week maybe the the first one to have electricity in the first
wheel of with the the telescope and
well we are making in this
wonderful thank you for sharing thank you yeah yeah yeah
okay so we will transition to molly wakeling next um
do we have molly do you have uh live images going on at this time i do indeed give me just a second to
flip over here it's grabbing the wrong way we got plenty of time uh
to i send you the image molly to just take again and make something
some miracle [Laughter] yeah you know you can get stuff out of
uh out of a lot of uh interesting things
sorry hang on let me grab the correct window here
why is it grabbing that one okay i'll just come back there we go okay
there we go um let's see i'll just bump that up a little bit
yeah so um on my uh eight inch schmidt cast of green which
is in the picture there uh below my face um i have so it's my eight inch cast green
reflector telescope with a uh a 0.63 focal reducer so it's taking it
from being a 2 000 millimeter focal length telescope to a 1280 millimeter
focal length telescope which um is it gives them a wider field of view which is really helpful for
doing deep sky targets and it also um speeds up if you will the um the focal
ratio of the telescope so that i can kind of those photons more concentrated
onto my chip and it also lets me get the moon the entire moon into one field of view as
opposed to it kind of um filling up the field of view so we have a nice shot of the um
actually i think i need to flip this this way
there we go because the moon is waxing right now right [Laughter]
um so here's a it's not rotated quite right here but um
yeah so we have our wax and give us moon with uh the easily recognizable taiko
crater here with all of its its rays as they're called um basically when
the rock that causes craters slammed into the moon it all the material that
was ejected from it settled down in kind of these these lines here and we call those rays and it makes it really
distinctive and easy to see especially when the moon is full those are nicely well lit
and you can see some craters here along the edges i like to zoom in um you know if i'm using a barlow lens
on here instead of the wide field of view zoom in on these craters that are on the edge and if you're observing the
moon visually this is where it's it's most fun to to observe things on the
moon is because when you have this high contrast these deep shadows
you can see uh much more detail on the craters on the moon and you get
this really kind of 3d feel to it and um it's like the coolest part of the
moon to look at it's right along the terminator that difference between where the where is daytime on the moon and night time on the moon basically
awesome and i'm working on uh on my other telescope my refractor that's set up
back there i just recently got the optilong lx stream filter for it which is a duo
narrowband filter and i'm currently livestacking an image of the
horse head and flame nebula but it needs more frames before you can actually see it so we can come back in a little bit
and check that out as well i'm curious molly um a lot of people are
starting to go towards filters like the lx stream what are your exposures like how how
long before you're starting to get uh detail so i'm i just got it so i'm still kind
of experimenting with exposure times um i keep wanting to do longer exposures but then i remember that i have a cmos
camera and i should try and stick to shorter ones um actually i guess i guess we'll find out
as i'm i'm trying to do one minute long exposures right now on the horse head and flame um and i'll find out whether i
can actually see anything with it or not my light pollution level here in the san francisco bay area is pretty high plus
the moon is pretty bright and not too far away so the image is probably going to appear a little washed out um but we'll see what we can get
great great okay all right so up next uh
uh you heard uh bob denny talking in the background a little bit um i'd like to have
bob always says he's not an astronomer that he's a technologist but he's very
involved he's very involved with the workings of observatories and allowing
astronomers to uh you know do some of the really cutting-edge type
of work with remote observatories and uh i would say that uh
that you know bob denney certainly is one of the uh iconic um
individuals uh that uh will probably be referred to for a very very very long
time about one of the people that enabled so many amateur astronomers and i guess professional astronomers too to
uh solve their remote uh connectivity
challenges and to allow astronomers to observe from around the world you know across
state lines or from your living room to your backyard you know so
bob i'll turn this over to you well i first have to apologize i thought when
i was talking about my dinner with people and all that it was the 10-minute break and i was
talking to you privately behind the scenes and then i looked over at the comments and said hey
i love your stories oh my god these things mics are always hot
sorry about that no that looked to me like it was a 10 minute break and you know you know so you can embellish my
apologies but i will say steve tim puckett
deserves some uh note note and let me just put up for a moment
the wikipedia uh let me uh do this and i'll i'll somehow i'll have to figure out how to
uh there okay
is that showing yeah yeah i can see that it so when you go to wikipedia and you look up puckett observatory you'll learn
about the world supernova search this is the birthday you know the
anniversary of the discovery of supernova 1987a so you know people have been looking at
these things for all sorts of reasons and i talked about alex philip panko and
the supernova cosmology project at berkeley and all of that but tim
and his team discovered over 300 supernovae over the years and it was all
volunteer and all amateur which is what makes it quite different and
his you know it's it's an amazing accomplishment so i just wanted to point people to that
this is kind of a cool picture of him uh let me see if i can make this big enough
well that didn't help too much hold on um anyway
am i showing yeah this is showing that the telescope in the background he built himself and i went to visit him in
elijah georgia in 2000 and he had this in his backyard under a shed
he rolled that thing off and i was just blown away yeah we're sitting out in rural georgia rural northern georgia
and it was just quite an experience anyway bravo to tim for all the stuff he's done
i i just have to say it's one of my really amazing life experiences what's
behind me by the way whoops let's see that way is an image of 1980s or
the supernova we're celebrating the br the birthday of tonight scott mentioned remote observing that
was kind of my thing early on um and i don't want to try to turn this
into any kind of a you know pitch for what i what i do but
the probably the thing that i spent more time with that has a broad appeal to astronomy is interfacing different
instruments in sort of universal interfaces so you can plug one brand of focuser and another brand
of mountain everything into software and have them work without special code
but my i've spent a lot of years managing and helping people
achieve astronomy remotely and one of the things you have to be able to do to really get it going remotely is to have
an automation system of some kind there are a number of programs out there that can
accept your inputs of requests sgp being one my acp there's a bunch of them and
having that out at your remote observatory so that you can set everything up in the evening and let it
go and then not have to be there pushing buttons over and over and over again to
do the job is one of the keys to remote observing so um i'm not sure what else scott
you uh would like me to talk about but we we talked a little bit earlier today on on
a telephone conversation you were talking about you know this the the people that are successful with remote
observing a lot of a lot of people want to do it you know and it is something that um
uh you know i remember people trying it as early as like the mid 1980s you know trying to
figure out some way of remote controlling a telescope you know um
and uh by by the time we roll into the 90s you know i remember going to santa barbara
instruments group instrument groups headquarter headquarters in santa
barbara california and uh richard the the founder of the organization
uh was showing me a prototype of a new camera called that would be called the
st6 and i showed him a prototype of something that would be called the lx200
and that was meat instruments first uh
computerized go-to telescope and so we put it all together in his observatory
he had a pier that was already set up for a mead he pulled his old meat off we put this one on and
i then connected it to my laptop i had i think an early version of the sky on
there and uh i was able to sync it up and slew over to objects and we were able to
image deep sky objects just one right after another you know and so
i i was uh at that point i made a phone call to um the founder of meat
instruments and i said uh mr diebel i've seen the future you know and uh it was
shortly thereafter then i met bob denney and um uh and then he showed me what it could
really be like uh by running a um his uh his program uh at
the riverside telescope makers conference and that was something it was something
it was quite quite an event at work i was like oh my god you know so there have just been these moments you know
there have been these moments where uh you know i was privileged to see uh amateur astronomy take this next what
i would say this great leap and uh certainly uh bob uh helped many many of
us uh take that next great leap and and it's still still working today so
you mentioned software bisque they really were a pioneer in this too they had a thing called interactive astronomy
software and they installed uh a system up at um mount
wilson and it was really a pioneering thing
uh it was a single system and what i tried
to do was build pieces that other people could contribute software and connect and plug
into each other and then be able to implement automation
the guys at main sequence software right now are just cranking with sequence generator pro
and they're really they could not if you talk to them they could not have done that software
without the common uh inter universal interfaces between the programs and the devices so every
mount looks the same to them otherwise if they had to program software for every mount out there and
all the the things that remember the old lx 200 protocol right and then the celestron and
the los mandy and all that you couldn't do that um my experience over the last it's been
20 years of astronomy remote astronomy has taught me a couple of things
one domes are the number one source of pain in astronomy pretty much or roofs
roll-off rifts and domes they are an extreme source of pain a roll-off roof that requires your scope
to be parked before it can be closed is an extreme source of pain for remote
astronomy if you have one of these in your backyard don't try to automate it just put a horn
a klaxon horn like dive dive right you've heard that thing on tv so it wakes you up and you can run
out and and close your roof you don't want to automate that because it is too much claptrap the chances of rain
getting on your equipment is too bad so really especially remotely you shouldn't do that so all
the really um successful remote astronomy farms have
large roll-off roofs that can open and close without regard to the positions of
the scopes within the the pods or the the buildings that's essential
or if you have your own dome that's greater your own clam shell that's fantastic that's important though
and uh the other thing i'd say is the idea of putting your equipment on a
snowy peak at ten thousand feet feet a thousand miles away
forget it you have to have somebody there to take care of the equipment and that means
a telescope farm of some kind and they are all over now they've really proliferated
in the last five years and really mike rice mike and lynn rice at new
mexico skies were the pioneers of this concept but they've multiplied now
and they're all over the country and in fact all over the world that's the way to go if you want a truly
remote observatory where you can take advantage of a site that has better seeing or darker skies whatever it is
that you need put your telescope at a professional uh
telescope farm with people who can help with cable snags you bad usb plugs
there's just no end to the things that can go wrong with consumer level astronomy saw equipment
and there are a few really great observatories that are
pretty much hands off they go down once twice three times a year to do service but they are also
multi hundreds of thousands of dollars in high grade industrial everything so
most of us can't afford that it's beyond all of our uh capabilities so just go you know with
the usual things and let someone you have to have somebody nearby who can go out and work
on it so that if things don't go right they can make it work again right or do
do it just in your backyard so you can be your own knight assistant well that's a run out and close it
yourself or you know whatever that's the key molly i have a question for you do you is your observatory right next to
you or is it somewhere away from you i got the idea that you're somewhere in the bay area and i don't exactly know
where but where is that yes so i'm in i'm just north of berkeley and i have this itty-bitty backyard and it's right
outside my back door and it's not even really an observatory because i just throw telegizmos 365 covers over top of
them uh i don't have a structure yet uh primarily that's good i i'm a renter so
it's a little bit harder to do such things um yeah go ahead go ahead i'm sorry the weather
is mild enough here that just using a cover on them and you know giving them a good dust off once in a while works
pretty well i had a customer in cincinnati ohio for years
that their whole thing was throwing a space blanket in a in a uh
[Music] what's the elastic hook thing i'm trying to think
of the name of it anyway huh bungie yeah a bungee cord around it
a tripod and that's what he did the snow would go up and down and everything else but he'd
whip that thing off start it up and it would run automated all night it was he was a fabulous guy and he wrote some
articles for guiding on guiding and things he finally got kind of over the hill a
little bit but he was a good guy and so having a simple telescope in your backyard
that you don't need a you don't even need a peer if nobody comes along and kicks it appears better well all my
stuff's on tripods i just you know every couple of months refresh the alignment models and double check controller
alignment especially because we get earthquakes around here so i lived in socal for most of my life so
yeah i just i i every evening i put my my two laptops outside and i control
them remotely from inside just so that i can sit inside which is nice and i can check them check on them from my phone
while i'm watching tv in the evening and um yeah they run all night and then
on screen they park themselves and i go cover them up and take the laptops inside i'm actually gonna build some
kind of enclosure so i can leave the laptops outside too but haven't done that yet that's really inspiring thank you i'm
sure the people who are watching tonight have gotten a lot of inspiration from that you don't have to go big
to get a lot and the automation is the key yeah having something that you can dial in
and then have that thing go to work and get the data you pay a lot of money for an
observatory and to have it sit there doing nothing while you're fiddling with knobs and
pushing buttons and that sort of thing it's crazy you can you can get so much
more data if you automate and just turn it loose yeah and it took me it took me a while to work out all the bugs and and
get all the com ports mapped correctly and get everything working but uh it runs pretty smoothly most nights now
and i use sequence generator pro it's it's cheaper well it's a great it's a excellent
program those guys are great i talk to them regularly so yeah the one downside is i
have to um modify the the the start time and the end time and
which targets i run when the moon is here and there and stuff i do that all all by hand every day
that's great but it's uh you know keeps me on my toes i guess it's super well i hope people have
gotten some inspiration from you and what you're doing uh to automate your uh observing that
that's really the key wonderful so worth it i can i can just sleep all night it's great
i think it comes down to the key to all of it is consistency if you can have repeatability in your your system
and your results that goes a long way to getting the best out of your equipment
well jason you're amazing um and i will say listening to molly about getting the usb ports and all that stuff together
imagine if you weren't able to do plug and play at the software level
right so the ascom compatibility the universal software compatibility is the key to
that and if you ask the guys at main sequence csgp authors they'll tell you they couldn't have done it without
that and that's really true yeah as com is is awesome and since most
of the manufacturers have gotten on board with it and a lot of the software developers
uh yeah it's definitely made things much easier than i think they would have been otherwise and everything just kind of
works together once you get all the connections sorted out we have a second generation that goes
across platforms to mac and linux that's been out there for a few years it took
ascom itself about five years to take hold so you know
the alpaca is in its early infancy right now but it's taking hold
also a lot of people have already um investments made in wi-fi
connectivity between um ipads and telescopes and they're talking me
you know uni not any sort of universal but they're talking well we'll make it look like an lx200 or a celestron
whatever or whatever and that'll only take you so far so
anyway thank you for the opportunity scott and um if there's anything anybody have any questions for me i'll try to i
will stick around until the after party so to speak okay all right well we're getting close thank you party now but uh
our next uh transition will be to richard grace he popped in and out
earlier in the program showing some live images and uh some images they'd done before
but we are um [Music]
yeah richard are you uh you're all set to go great
it was really windy uh after the star party last week be kind
be kind okay well let's see what a windy image looks like
this is what a windy image looks like oh it's still about that little egg shape there
yeah they're not very round stars not at all but uh i'm glad uh first whirlpool of this year
uh and uh though they'll definitely be some more um you know it's uh coming up uh
i don't know midnight i mean i guess it depends on what type of um you know position you have what what
your horizons look like but uh well one of my favorite targets and look forward to putting a lot more time into it this
year um this was shot with the uh the common hunter the 2600 the uh the new secondary mirror etc
same as everything else since last week and we've got a new target that is just
popping above the roof so i'm going to send it back to you guys and start working on that all right sounds good
sounds good okay all right so we are uh uh
i think we're going to transition back to jason gonzale the vast reaches um
he wanted to uh talk a little bit about uh something that was inspiring all of us
this uh this last few days and that's the perseverance uh rover and you know
mars is on everybody's mind right now that's uh in you know interested in space
exploration i mean how could you not be at this time it's it's just been amazing
um jason i what what was your impression of the uh the video of the uh
of the landing of uh perseverance yeah i mean you can see how some people
think that's cgi right i mean it's like it's picture perfect i mean it's amazing
the the uh the clarity of those shots um
i don't i don't feel like we've ever seen anything um from
from nasa like live footage like that come back from uh that was a they of course they were saying that was a first
but uh you know the thing that really hit me jason was uh when the shoot popped open
that it was against a blue sky you know and i that that was unexpected for me
you know i thought that i would see a you know a light yellow or dirty brown
kind of sky you know so i i guess what hit me the most is it
feels like we're we're doing planetary planetary exploration and high def now like for
the first time right i haven't seen that that's true
yeah it was uh it was cool to see so it inspired me to go back and um
look at some of the mars images i had um collected back in the in the opposition phase in
october and i have one of those to share here
they coming through oh wow look at that detail this is uh oh
my god this is my best um shot at mars i would say that's one of the best shots i've
seen of mars period this is i mean from an amateur astronomer this is uh
it wasn't too many years ago i mean you guys can tell me different but it wasn't too many years ago that
people would have said this could have only been done by a spacecraft and this is incredible
yeah it's um the modern technology is something else i mean
you take a look at the live video feed that comes you know
in uh compared to you know the final result you can get is pretty pretty incredible
transformation that'll i don't have the live to play i should
have probably played let me see if i can find something yeah so you know looking at this image you
know obviously you know you can see a lot of the surface features and everything so i
had gone in and pointed to the perseverance landing
location here so this is where jezreel crater sits
on the martian surface and that that location was picked by nasa due to the
uh i think it mostly due to the evidence of liquid water in the area and the possibility of micro microbial life so
yeah i landed there and um i was gonna
at least i pulled it up we can watch that yeah video i don't know if it's gonna come
through all right um i know they're capturing sound and and
uh you know so we could hear wind wrestling through yeah i don't know if you're even gonna
get sound from my computer but we can play this should i try to play it yeah try to play it
seems to be coming across okay i'm not getting sound here no sound now
i don't know if there's there's a message a lot of people uh might may not realize this but there's a message
encoded in the pattern inside the the the
parachute itself and so that that was uh
recently decoded so that's the heat shield separation shield yeah it drops you know so the the
rover's on parachute right now so when they release that that um heat shield that just takes a
dive you know yeah it's away you know it's i was sorry that uh
the heat shield just goes just out of frame and i i wanted to see like the dust kick up as it
as it hit the ground you know but the the message that was encoded in
the parachute is um let's see what was it it was uh dare
mighty things and then the gps coordinates of nasa jpl
and the the ones and zeros uh for the binary for for that message are the red and white um
pattern on on the parachute
look at that look at i mean just so much detail there
and i guess if you're a geologist you know there's just i mean this is so
so much more meaningful but to me it's just incredibly beautiful
is the audio coming through at all just a little bit it's like a murmur yeah i can turn it off most of us
most of us have have seen
what's important is that the video is really smooth is there an echo
no i don't hear
[Music] one you start to see the
dust kick up here
this part's cool
i'm so happy that they finally put some cameras on that because i've been wanting i think a lot of us are wanting
to see what the sky crane drop looks like right yeah look at this i was so excited
cameras on it
it's probably really hard for all the uh folks that uh the nasa folks in the control room to not hug each other like
they always do you know oh yeah oh yeah
just amazing
so what did the what did the uh the the parachute uh what was the the
code on the parachute dare mighty things ah and then uh it had the coordinates for
nasa jpl uh yeah they keep um uh putting their message
all over the place um you know before the uh the wheels on uh
uh was it it was a spirit and an opportunity had a morse code actually on the wheels as it
would as it would uh truck along so oh that's so cool
yeah but they found that you know i mean the the soil and the rocks and stuff are
pretty sharp on uh yeah on uh on the planet and uh it's it really has worn on
the wheels quite a bit
and the uh the um the descent vehicle or the rover itself i'm not sure um
it used uh i think lidar to do this uh terrain relative
navigation where it mapped out the terrain and then essentially did it like a terrain plate
solve and figured out where it was at and looked for it was like autonomously
looking for um you know don't sit down on on all the sharp jagged rocks and don't sit down in
the sauce oh right yeah it autonomously located a landing zone like they had kind of an ellipse
area planned for it but um it landed itself in a safe place
autonomously and it was just so cool right right you know half a million
lines just killed or something like that yeah this ellipse uh from the first landings to now i mean it's just gotten
smaller and smaller and smaller yeah um you know of course
right here going to be able to throw down a posted stamp and make it land on that you know so
yeah so this part right here is where the back shell
and the parachute separated and that's when it course corrects itself
to the landing zone so you can see now it's look how
stabilized it is it really is yeah like before the on parachute it was
rocking back and forth but once it went up went under rocket power it was
just incredible yeah and then uh in the next couple
months i think we will um see them activate the helicopter that rode along
with perseverance and yeah yeah the first right the first flight on another
another world right i know the first controlled flight i
guess i should say i guess it only has a camera on it right now but just yeah just to see you know
just to see what it's going to see you know yeah it's like a pathfinder kind of thing to you know let's um
they built this this because mars has an atmosphere it's just like a tenth or something of what ours is and um
and so you can fly in it it's just a little harder you gotta have a lot bigger bigger blades and stuff like that
um but yeah they've got the camera on there so we will be able to see that video too like basically drone video
flying around the surface of mars right it's gonna be so amazing because the rover can only go so many places and
i think they're just only gonna fly at a couple hundred meters but um yeah the river moves slow the helicopter
will move much faster it'll be really cool
yeah so then there's the the audio i don't know if i should play that
over here it's it's pretty subtle yeah it's difficult to hear even when it's on your
own machine yes now uh
we talked a little bit about the ingenuity helicopter i'm going to post the link to
the mars ingenuity helicopter 3d model and you can download uh maybe it's use a 3d
printer to print one out um but uh there is a link right there and
uh so if you got a 3d printer at home uh you could build
one of your own ingenuity uh drones it'd be cool to see one
you know made that flies here on earth too but
yeah i saw that it's already taken some panoramas and stuff like that
and yeah the pictures are incredible we are living in the golden
age you know of space exploration and astronomy i say it almost every show but
it's like almost every week something happens that just still tops that whatever it was last week you know
it's kind of like you know i pinch myself thinking i'm so lucky to be alive
yeah nasa further delayed their um their decision on who they're going to
interview for the first round for this next class of astronauts so i'm still
still waiting on my phone call oh yeah molly you're up next
i hope so though he's so cool that would be so cool okay if you get chosen molly you
have to actually call me from the international space station and we get to do a live interview okay
it'll have to be on the way to mars but yeah whatever it is okay
once you're up in space all right oh that's cool that's that's an amazing
shot there yes oh yeah right yeah that was really cool to see the
high rise satellite imagery come back down to with with pictures of it landing just because they actually changed the
orbits of high rise and maven to to capture the landing
which i think is really cool that's super cool that's the rubber with the parachute on
it during descent
and it's important to remember too that you know uh when when you see the the folks in the
control room screaming and celebrating afterwards you know it it feels like a sure thing now because we've landed on
mars successfully a number of times now but it's still
there's still always that unknown and yeah you know it was just you know
it was almost as likely to crash as it was to succeed in the landing you know despite all the engineering something
can always go wrong there's a thousand different moving parts and um i think only only half of the
of all the countries in the world uh only something about half of the attempts to land on mars
in the soft landing have succeeded um so space is hard and don't get complacent
yeah wow that is just a spectacular mars image though jason
i love that font too what's that font called martian
martian light yeah martian light
um that's all i had if you want to oh that was quite a bit so i really appreciate
it i appreciate it but i helped pay for it so yeah
that's right that's right well wonderful so let's see who else we have on our program right now uh pekka
has joined us uh we have cameron gillis uh with us as well um jerry palmer's back gary how are you
doing yeah so gary you were patient you were on earlier and
and now you're you're you're back uh yeah no it's just uh the computer is getting a bit jittery i've been uh doing
loads of stuff in the background so it's easier just to reboot it and log back in again
very good very good what do you have to share with us today um i was gonna look at a bit of solar
stuff as it goes uh we did see the sun this week uh made a change can't remember the last time that i actually
saw it to be dead on this it's been that bad um so yeah um
what i was gonna look at we had quite a nice prominence a couple
of days back um which is what we call phillip filler prom yeah where it's half on the surface
in half uh on the on the leading edge in the sense
so what quite often happens is depending on what equipment you use the
data gets lost what's actually going on there is really really hard to pick up
and if we use it more standard equipment um standard solar scopes some of the
double stacks will pick it up but they generally can't get in there at any high resolution
um it really sort of struck on me as uh what we're losing in a lot of the images
and how much work it takes to bring some of these bits out we're doing this all the time on deep sky we're stacking multiple images
um but just in the nature of the sober it's quite hard to get on and image some of this stuff so if i share this screen
over work out which one i'm on first there we go so we should be seeing that
um two sunspots here if we go back about a decade
um just got from where i am there we go that's a shot for i took about a decade
ago and that would have been on something um i think it was a solar max 40.
quite a small telescope would have been a standard sort of view of the sun and as we've moved along at the moment
um equipment has really really progressed in solar imaging
and it's enabled me to get in close very very close like this so if i just stop sharing for a
minute um pieces of equipment like the cork yeah that enables us to do
some quite close-up imaging now you're seeing everybody doing close-up imaging um
i have some slightly different equipment that's my top-end piece of equipment
these are very rare there's only a couple of these in the world that's a 0.2 armstrong unit
wow so um probably somewhere around 25 30 000
we'll get you one of those and it's used to look at the outside of the sun so we're looking right up in the
atmosphere of the sun um also other things we've got
things like these these days yeah this is a solar telescope so even though it is a hd edge
yeah it's got a proper coating on the front of it so if we take the lid off you might see
that shine in the light oh yeah that's a totally different coating on this huh
and that means you can do images when you start combining the two pieces of equipment
um like what i was sharing on the screen so we'll go back to the sheen screenshot
well it was there there we go um that enables me to get in at around
seven meter eight meter focal length into the sun yeah so
while most people would be interested in the two sunspots i'm not interested in that in this image but they're totally
irrelevant um they're all good yeah there's lots of detail you can see a lot of the light
bridges and the other structures here what i'm actually after is
information about these little white dots in the image here they're what i'm after because there's
something we haven't seen before and we don't see so if i play the video this is the
actual capture video you can see these little white dots appearing
as the video clears as the atmosphere moves around okay
so we're after that i'm not really after anything else so we're doing a standard stack there's
2 000 frames in there and we've stacked the image yeah and i've taken 400 of those frames
out and then brought them straight into registex and this is the the stacked
image so what we've got to do is start sharpening it and bringing out some detail um
generally on something like this we want an initial layer somewhere around two or three because of the focal length that
we're in at and we're just going to use slider 2 and just bring it up a fraction and there we go that's enough
so what we're after is is more information on these this is the whole sort of key to this so what i've done is
already brought this into photoshop there's one of the images in there
there we go and if we run back up that's how it's coming so by doing some processes in there um
first thing cropping off the stack lines yeah and then we're starting to run down through the image
yeah and we're going to turn it into grayscale yeah because
a lot of the times even though we're using mono cameras the actual software sees it as a color image
so it's recording it as a color image and we don't want that using hydrogen alpha you really want to
use mono cameras anyway and never use color cameras for it you're only using a quarter of the sensor
yeah so um most of your data is going to be out the window and you're going to find it really
really hard um certainly out on the prominences to get a good balance in contrast between the two
and that's because the color camera is just going to show it as red like the hydra and alpha filter
so we switch this into greyscale and into 8-bit mode yeah and then we've rotated it around
now the reason i've rotated it around is because naturally
there will be an imbalance so even if we've taken flats with the image there will be an imbalance in the image and
that's how close it is to the center of the sun so if we're right in the center of the sun we'd actually get a very flat image
but 99 of the time when we're imaging our objects are not near the center of the sun so there's going to be one side
darker on one side lighter and that depends on what way we're looking at the sun so if we're on the
left hand side of the the central line on the sun then we're going to see the right hand side
darker and if we're on the right hand side we'll see the left hand side darker and that's quite evident in some of the
other images so this image here while it looks perfectly flat when we actually do some texture work to
it the whole of this area here will go dark and that's because it's nearer the limb is furthest away from the center of the
sun so we need to balance that up and there are a couple of ways of doing that in
here yeah we can make an extra channel so we bring in an extra alpha channel
here and then we start making some uh different alignment points across the image
and then we use the gradient tool yeah and we actually make another layer in that channel and then
we bring that back in so it's actually acting as a mask on half of the image and you'll see there
so we're actually going to switch that over and then when we do some levels on it we
balance the image out doing it like this now makes the image more acceptable to
the eye because when we've got an image that's half dark and half bright it just looks horrible
that's the uh the main sort of area so once that's due selected we can go through and then start doing some hdr
toning to the image and that starts to bring out what's going on in this area and then we
can start to track these points and see whether they're running above below or in the actual ribs and
what what's occurring there so eventually we end up
with a finished image something like that we could add color to it as soon as you add color to these
you have to decide whether they're going to be used for scientific value yeah or whether they're going to be for
art on the wall and posting around the internet because as you add the color into these yeah you you will remove
detail from the image it's pretty straightforward so if we actually look at
this was one i posted up the other day so this is done with the cork now while it's okay
and i know it's a 3d structure you can't actually see that because the cork won't allow you to see it
at the wavelength it's looking at which is about somewhere around 0.5 armstrong
it's really designed for more looking at sunspots or prominences
it's not designed for bringing out three-dimensional objects and i know that this filament here is
actually linking to the back filament and there is a nice structure there so
if we actually look at this using different equipment we can now see that but again if we look at the raw image
that comes in yeah we can only just see it we can just see the connecting structures there
so you end up having to go through this and do quite a lot of work and inverting the surface and then balancing out the
different areas in it so that we're actually starting to get where we want to go and we're after
seeing the ribbons come down right the way through the structure but again this is another one if you add
color to the image then you will lose that so that's going
to be the end the end image that's as good as it would get for you so that was about two days ago something
like that so if we've got images uh let's just
have a look at that one something like this they're really easy to bring out some texture and
structuring so we can just crop this out here we're not really interested in anything up the
top there so we're going to just take that straight out and crop it
and again we're going to switch this now into a grayscale image and then make
it an 8-bit image and then we use something like hdr
toning on it so it comes in quite aggressive to start with yeah you actually need to do some work
in this panel here to start to pull the image back
i never have too much detail in them because i'll do sharpening later on so i always drop the detail back
and then we can start to bring it in here a little bit of exposure
now there is a thing uh a little check box in here called smooth out the edges
if we use this and we're using a greyscale image we can actually use this to pick off some of
the magnetic connecting structures it will pick out element bombs all of this is in the image
it's just that when you actually take the image and when you stack the image
it's not in there so if we actually bring that on what i'm going to do is just zoom in and
come back out that second just zoom in a bit closer
and do it again
there we go so we just make a couple of adjustments again wow
look at all that detail now these would be a lot clearer normally in mid-summer i mean this was this week yeah so um
we're doing this through um loads of cloud and different other bits that are going on
so and the sun's still very low at the moment so just bring the camera over a little bit to balance the image out
and then bring the highlights back and that will stop the overexposing in the center so we start to bring some detail
out there this checkbox here is quite good
but it only works if it's in a grayscale image but if you actually bring the check box on you'll start to see all the
other structures appear so if i turn it off yeah and i'll bring it on so if there's any element bombs or
magnetic connecting points this will draw them out in the image
then if we bring that back we can start balancing this up we can
use some different techniques so we can make another channel with this for instance
we just make a new channel just keep it at one percent once that's in there
make sure it's active yeah and then we'll use uh the eyedropper and we're just going to bring in about this area
here we're just going to put a shift point in there shifting a click in there
and then we use the gradient tool and we're going to run out to that area
so we can see it masked in there and all we do then is is load the selection in
once we've done that need to make sure that you select your main image and then we can go into the levels
and adjust this out and just use the central box and we can darken that side of the image up it won't produce an
exact line here by using this masking system it will balance the whole area
you can play around with this quite a lot that just gives you an idea once you've finished with it
delete your channel yeah and then deselect and then we could just de-speckle this
and sharpen it for instance and play around a bit with the brightness so if we um do speckle that and then just go in
for a bit of sharpening something like um unsharp mask and it would work quite
well there we go
gives you a rough idea but what this is doing is it's actually turning the surface into a three-dimensional object
rather than the flat surface yeah so we go back to the beginning the image is dead flat
yeah beautiful now you're good wow so it's as simple as that right
[Laughter] it's so amazing
that is amazing it takes a lot of work and obviously images in the summer are a lot better
the sun's a lot higher the atmosphere is a lot thinner so you um you know you can
really pull out the big guns on the telescopes and uh get in quite close these days and as i say the the
equipment that we got now is phenomenal it really is
well not only that but the the techniques that been developed by amateur astronomers
you know leading solar astrophotographers like yourself have really
you know pushed the envelope uh so to speak and um the three-dimensional stuff i've been
working on for about five years what i'm more after at the moment is um
a lot of the uh the plasma balls and the other uh bits
that are around these large sunspot groups so the element bombs we've been able to image for quite a long time but
some of the other stuff that i've been working on um over the last or three years
that we can't do until we get large sunspot groups around because if you don't get a lot of sunspot groups you don't get the
the ribs around them and in between them and it's looking in those areas um some of the
other three-dimensional stuff that i've done of um solar flares
so actually imaging the exit point of the flare through the photosphere that's um stuff that i really want to
continue and have come up with a lot of new ideas while we've been in solo minimum so um just hoping a lot of those work
out but they should i mean we did the groundwork for it just before we went into solar minimum
so that that will be quite interesting um and we've got lots of new toys out now
you've got magnesium out now that's giving us different structural detail on the sun
uh shapes in the different layers there that nobody's seen before we've been imaging so it's quite an
interesting period with the equipment and again it's coming up with new techniques for that new equipment so you
don't get it right straight out of the box it's something you've got to work on and take lots of images and then
come up with different ways to extract that data sure and you need a mentor to
help take you you know to help you progress faster than what you might otherwise just kind of struggling and
and doing it all on your own uh and gary palmer certainly offers that kind of
one-on-one uh tutoring so i i've posted a link to a page that we we put together
for him it has a video you know interview with him but also
links to his website for his astra courses and uh his solar
system imaging so um thanks for you know coming back on our
show gary um yeah and uh we are looking at putting
together another european edition of the of the global star party uh perhaps to
come off this friday or are you thinking it's looking like it it actually looks like we've got clear
skies for two nights this week as well so um friday would be nice
instead of sitting here working on uh stuff that's captured throughout the week excellent excellent so okay
uh we've had uh as i mentioned earlier we have uh
pekka haltela from stockholm sweden is that right are you in stockholm yes yes indeed cameron
gillis you're in uh you're out there in seattle as i recall is that correct
yes sir okay all right so i think it's probably a little bit later for pekka here so we're going to let you go on
first back up it's uh 30 past four
a.m oh so that's not so bad it's a morning it's about to come up
it's morning he's dedicated look at that i'm dedicated yes
indeed thank you for letting me dean and uh
yeah this is this is uh very um how do you say uh addicting
yes that's great okay yeah first of all i have some questions
about uh imaging and that's
first for gary gary can you
chromosomic filter they say that you can't use it below
minus fem celsius so okay winter time is
as good as summertime yeah no there's um what you do is
about to get it without knocking everything over
wrapaju heats around it okay yeah we're getting the same thing here
so last last week was -10 okay um put the juice heat around it um
and what i generally do is warm it up in the building yeah so you know stick it
in your the edge of a building if you can so it just gets a little bit warmer and it heats up a bit better
little bit longer but there's nothing stopping you putting one of these at the back of the telescope as well
and that will just gradually heat all of the air around right good
then i will order it and then the the next question is uh
photographing also imaging with the dslr which is full modification
and with the octalong l enhance ml pro filter
yeah how long is the maximum so that it's really there isn't really a
maximum it's about the stars it's keeping the stars in shape
which is going to be the key thing so um using the the dslrs the dslr is
generally quite like quite a longer exposure so yes something like that
so i would be saying somewhere around three to five minutes okay but full modifica full mode
it's it's quite fast yeah but at the end of the day it's
still um a one-shot color sensor yeah okay later on
onto the unit and it is even though it's modded it's still imaging in those colors
yeah yeah so you're only removing the filter off of the front of it yeah exactly it's gonna affect the red
okay so once you get back to balancing it out in the software yeah you'll still be able to pick up the
other colors yeah good that was my questions and
i want to share you coming weather
let's see where i am that looks nice
what do you see what did you see uh
the temperatures aren't that bad in celsius oh you can't see that one
okay good that's coming up coming so i have a little bit hurry to er imaging
for saturday yeah awesome all right because there is uh
i can show you those i am teaching you know learning
peace insight and molly
has offered to get me over the hump so for imaging processing with pixie
site and that's not a small thing
so i can just show you quick three different
pictures this is with the deep sky stacker and hey pekka uh
you're not sharing your screen at the moment okay sorry sorry
hey let's see where i do have this there you go okay this is the first one this is with the
dss and okay now these are thumbnail images that we're seeing back up oh my god
let's see oh i have tried to learn this
now anything nothing yeah i think you have to stop sharing
and go back and find your image and reshare okay he's sharing the whole screen it looks
like though it should should be on top okay uh
i tried this though so many times already that's why i need i need more
i need more time with you okay now i have my
um can you minimize the folder i minimize everything
i have four screens so four screens yeah four screens
there you go we're seeing the moon we're seeing your destiny oh okay
okay that's my last week's moon and then um i can see the icon down at the bottom
of your photo viewer um are you using two screens four and you'll just you might just need
to drag the image over to uh another i think we're looking at a different screen than what you think we're looking
at okay let's see that's a good idea yeah there yeah
let's see
okay let's see i have to open it again oh my god
this is not easy you're doing great at what 4 30 in the morning yeah true yeah
yeah ten past five no ten ch ten two five i mean number
five huh gary does it all the time if i was up that early i would be
flipping around screens as well let's see if i
ever clicked that and then oh my god oh my god you know you know
maybe just share the screen like you added before and then that that shows the thumbnails and then just drag the uh
yeah output and the output into the thumbnail uh yeah yeah if you share one of your
screens and whichever one it shows up and click and move the image to each screen one of them will be the one that
we can see yeah that's that's the screen for now
and now i will drop that
let's see if i do like this no okay i do like this
i open the folder here on this screen
by the way cool cool shirt you got on cool yeah your nasa shirt t-shirt ah t-shirt oh
okay thank you thank you um
nothing oh my god okay well let me yeah
i will do like this i shut down every screen
well you're not you're not sharing your screen at the moment again okay i shut down this one and then shut
the screen and then i take screen i take this screen
no just choose one and then move your image around until we can see it
which image whichever one you want to show us okay i have to move this here
and then maximize it and then open it here this is difficult one
oh my god why
no see you know nothing now you have to share your you're not sharing your screen
look for the share screen button on the bottom yeah i see that green one and i have this number four
that's the blue and then hit okay okay share ah that one
okay beautiful now yay okay that's what the the dss and
and next one now you're cooking that is beautiful
i think we're looking at the raw data set that you sent me pika i think we're going to get a really nice result out of
that i hope so i hope really i was going to do a little bit of a pre-work on it
to see how it looks um
that's not the one this is with this is with the seal
and okay and now we come into
pics insight and no that's not no that's not
it's the picks there you go there he speaks inside oh wow okay
yeah look at this a lot more beautiful yeah but as smaller say that there is more weight
but i can't throw them out i can't i i
i pulled i think we'll be able to i will mess around with it a bit um
send me your can you send me your calibration frames as well your lights are your darks and your flats if you
have them you got them i sent you four folders oh i only got the lights folder i didn't
get the others didn't you no i will i will send them today okay thank
you i will send for the folder because they are so big so it takes because i have only 10 megabits
up upstream so it takes some oil but
this area there is missing a lot of red gas
and the blue one shouldn't be as blue is it is
but i think the molly will will pull out something i think so we'll see and then it's the
last one i want to show you if you don't have seen this before
oh yeah what does this say uh it says along with antimatter and
dark matter we've recently discovered the existence of doesn't matter which appears to have no effect on the
universe whatsoever it's almost like uh like me
okay that's that's all for me thanks becca thank you next
okay molly we have uh i will try i have now uh friday and saturday friday night
i will try pull out as much i can okay and i'll mess with it before uh saturday
as well so that yeah but i have to i have to make a polar arrivement first because i
i got the new mount last for two weeks ago of on monday
but after that i there's clouds clouds closed
[Music] yes of course yes
of nature yeah it should be a surprise so so even mother nature didn't know
that i will get the new you know the nature always knows yeah
yeah yeah to see this uh you know i i know that uh uh pekka's learning uh you know
directly under uh your your tutoring there molly and and uh you know uh although pekka's uh he's
he's been in this for a while and he's he's not uh he's not a beginner astronomer but it's great to see
him go these next levels you know i'm a totally beginning uh in astrophotography
oh i see i see i i took my first image a nice only images for a beginner on june
last year i took my first image so it's it's june july august september
october november december and january 8 months you are you're in the fast lane
[Laughter] i'm i'm totally isolated so i have time
i i i'm looking now youtube videos i'm reading eight
hours that's the less i can make on pigs inside pigs inside
and when you do wrong there is nobody is correcting you so you i have i have
protested that orion maybe 30 times and almost ready and then i have done
something wrong with some layers or some something so you have to shut down
everything and begin from beginning but i i i have registered registered
pictures so i i have done all those so i can begin
from there so the biggest work uh stacking us on they are
in there so i can begin from from there well but
it's it's quite steep
um learning yeah from uh from and serial
yeah yeah to picks insights is very different than how and photoshop and those other programs
operate um but i we'll we'll we'll walk through a workflow on yeah yeah but your image and
i think it'll come out real good i i see like those the the serial and
is like a volvo v70 as i have and dodge wiper
so difficult to control
on the gas pedal the accelerator is hard as you would yes yes and the result is the same
but the pixel side is wonderful it's so powerful powerful so
thanks molly to encourage me to to get it
without you i didn't i would never try it so we yeah
yeah thank you everybody thank you pakka thank you yes yes thank
you yeah so uh we are we have uh cameron cameron you've
been uh patient there uh what what's been happening out in seattle
well i'm happy to say uh well first of all i'd like to really thank you scott and this whole community for uh making this type of
thing possible it's uh it's awesome it's a very inspirational and i think it really uh lowers the
barrier of entry for for a lot of us i mean i've been a visual astronomer for like uh 37 years
i guess and um and the barrier of entry for astro imaging
was you know astrophotography was quite steep um and the time uh consumption so
to be able to do this now with the technology that we have and have these meetings and inspire each
other and at all different levels is fantastic so uh so anyway to answer your question
um uh yeah we are uh yeah here in seattle it's been really weird um
we had our biggest snow uh two weekends ago um uh a foot of slow in less uh less
than 24 hours wow but uh um the amazing part was uh last star party thanks a lot
for giving me the opportunity it actually cleared up uh and you gave me a chance to kind of
muck around and try my first uh you know foray in here and and i really
appreciate your patience for letting me play with that but anyhow uh and then you wouldn't believe it uh then it
stormed the storm quite a bit over the last weekend and then it just we had strong winds and also it cleared up last
night so i have some fresh pictures to share with you all uh and again uh
this is uh this is coming from a total newbie uh i have no i don't have an
imager i just have a smartphone and uh you know again being a visual astronomer
uh my my goal is to kind of you know i love the images like what pack is doing is awesome and
astro beard richard you know and of course everyone here molly fantastic i
want to get to that stage i'm i'm just enjoying the journey of getting there yeah yeah um
little steps yeah uh so i'm learning all the the lingo and and all the the different terminologies and stuff
but the core part is uh i think i have something that might be uh helpful and kind of create a
bridge you know as i go in this journey so uh i'll share my screen
okay can you see my screen here yes okay so i have stellarium up i'm just
gonna pop back and forth and i have my uh presentation the last time as you know i was kind of trying to do everything um i'm mucking
around but uh i love orion nebula especially in seattle when it you know
it's raining and storming most of the time it's pretty much the main excitement anytime there's a clear night
so um so what i've done is i've taken some pictures uh some just snapshots of these objects
last night uh so pleiades uh double cluster eskimo nebula
prab nebula orion nebula um m81 mb2 m51 and the moon
um all the deep sky objects were uh two to thirty second exposures um
and uh iso 1600 and the moon uh was one twenty one two fifty a second
at iso one hundred um so that's basically what i've observed this is the quest i'm using i'm really
happy to say that i got just yesterday actually two days ago i got the 26 millimeter eyepiece
in the mail so thanks for that it's a perfect match for my mac
because it has a 27 millimeter field stop giving it a maximum field of view
and it worked with this uh view with the uh with the smartphone and also it with a nice eye relief gives me a good wide
field view uh for my knock so i'm really enjoying that and then the main thing i want to
highlight here is uh what what you'll notice in this picture is the most expensive piece of equipment
is the bottom right i have a samsung i luckily i work for samsung so
so i have this phone subsidized but this is a thousand dollar phone and it's basically an imager it's it's
an imager right i mean it's uh you pay about a thousand bucks for an imager and i do want to get one
eventually that's really the barrier of entry i think a lot and but now with so many people having smartphones
and one of the things i really like about that this particular phone is it it increases the expo the custom exposure
uh from 10 seconds to 30 seconds so i can actually go up to 30 second uh exposures with this which
is the magic number uh for a lot of deep sky objects um anyhow so this is my configuration and
uh just you know what i did is uh if i go back to stellarium
sorry what's going on here it's uh
my uh i think there's a delay here sorry for
that okay let's go back to still there so yeah so basically i i i
started off with pleiades and then if i uh click on that then i have my eyepiece
view here this is what i i saw so i have this match with my um
with my sky watcher and my mac 102 and the third 26 millimeter eyepiece yeah this
is the eyepiece view field of view and if i go to my presentation again
oh sorry i'm just trying to get rid of that yeah here we go this is a double cluster
yeah so so what's interesting is you can see a kind of a visual plate solve this is uh at 10 30 at night and it happened
to be the route about the time that my alt hazmat took this picture here so you can see it has the same orientation
uh a couple of things i want to highlight in most of the pictures is i found this out later but uh you'll see
these uh artifacts um two artifacts in particular one is uh this one here which is all the different
uh moon actually if you look carefully it's it's the partial moon reflecting between the eyepiece
and the second image yeah exactly and exactly so these are all the elements
and they're all reflecting at different stages and then and then you have you have your ir i want to disable this i
haven't figured this out but on my phone there's an ir thing i put a piece of electrical uh black electrical tape
otherwise this would be all totally washed out but this thing causes a pain because you can see there's a little artifact over here and you'll see that
around but you know it's it's okay uh you know i'm just trying to get the general idea but the beautiful part of
game you can see the eyepiece uh you can see that field of view right it actually uh nicely uh encap
absolutely and what inspired me in this and what i want to do more of is uh you know david eicher and sue french you
know who who did a lot of the sketching yeah of eyepiece objects i love that and
as a visual astronomer and i want to be able to do something where i'm i'm taking images and you basically see what
it's going to be like uh you know with different apertures and different telescopes you know so it
would be really nice to be able to kind of have a guide for that so i that's one of the things i i want to do
um so i'm just starting this is my first uh attempt at it but uh anyhow that's basically that um and so if we look at
double cluster same thing you can see it's a little bit rotated because this is at a different time
but you can see that came out pretty nice fits nicely in the field of view very nice this is a 10 second exposure
here's eskimo nebula a little bit earlier in the day or in the night i should say eight second and
a 15 seconds zoomed in the nice part about the smartphone is you can you can zoom in now you know forget about uh
pixel size you know i have to check to take a look at this uh the sensor size you know obviously the stars are all
big globs and stuff like that and so i i gotta match that with the right eyepiece and focal length and all that i can
optimize that but this is again just the first shot and um here's the crap nebula really faint but
it came out you did getting harder yeah i did get it yeah you can see the eight second and the 15 seconds starts to wash
out the background and i'm not doing any stretching this is just like no stacking no uh no flats no nothing this is just a
direct and these are compressed pictures i emailed to myself at 10 compression so that they're not nothing about quality
just to get the general idea yeah um and then here's the orion nebula again
these artifacts really showed up because it was the 15 second and you can see the orientation of the moon
um and then uh and then here's here's how i started the or i love orion so i just have tons
of pictures but just to give you an idea of my evolution you know this was with before i i was kind of anxious and i
just wanted to take a picture so i did a two second uh test test image without tracking of course this is what you get
right it's no good then i then i i set up my calibration on my altars
go to mount and they've got four seconds pretty good and then 10 seconds so you
know it's starting to get better but then the moon artifacts started to show up
and then these are more pictures uh i can't get enough of orion but here's an interesting one thing i wanted to show you this i did the orion nebula at the
beginning of my sequence and then i did orion at the end and you'll see that it rotated here so this is this is a
wonderful example of if you did a long exposure the effect of field rotation right right in altasmus
um so so that was kind of interesting um and then if we look at the
zoomed in i try to get the trap trapezium and orion that the less exposure but you can see it barely
you can see the stars but again big globs i need to figure this out to optimize it but you know it gives you an idea trying
to learn about the capabilities on the galaxy side because it was a moon uh there was a that was really tough um you
know much tougher but i was happy to see this at 15 seconds you can see my m81 and m82 pretty much
what you'd see in the eyepiece uh you know and remember this is only 102. there's only a four inch map right yeah
um so this is amazing i mean this is what you'd see probably in a 12-inch or something uh
you know in a normal background and this is something this is a four-inch with a smartphone
okay yeah i mean this you can see that you can see it's amazing it's uh amazing
it's awesome i mean i don't think and this is just zoomed in you know so i'm thinking this is cool you know
and and in all tasks right i mean this is an ultra okay yeah this is yeah yeah
and then um and then this is m51 and i and i have an eight inch uh
schmidt gasoline so i i got a better picture uh i'll do another day of m51 which shows his fire alarms but
you can see you know spiral you can actually start to see the spiral structure tiny a
little bit which you need to weigh in about a 10 or 12 inch uh in the backyard to be able to see that visually so uh
it's it's pretty cool right um and then uh and finally the moon uh i ended with the
moon uh so here's the big picture i changed my exposure settings obviously uh to get
the maximum sharpness and all that still was tracking but uh and i'm pretty happy you know this was
just the the wide field view framed up and then i i did some zoomed in shots uh
here uh around the perim uh the terminator and along the edge just to get a general idea
so that's basically it that's what i wanted to share awesome it's inspiring it is because
uh you know there's a lot of people that they don't think they possess all the tools
to make astrophotographs but in fact they do and it's it's right in their smartphone so
you know uh cameron you've done a very nice job excellent work and uh it's it's nice to
see i mean i i can tell you've uh um you know you had to spend some time to get
ready for the presentation for the for this uh program which was awesome and um
uh you know there's there's people here in the audience you know that are responding to
your work with a smartphone and they're one of the people is uh reminding us
that richard gray started with the smartphone he's now using a pretty nice
astra cam but he says he's gonna go back to the smartphone pretty soon i you know it's
just the joy of doing it and it's so fun to see images come come up uh right in
front of you so yeah i mean you you're right exactly and what i what
it's amazing is like if i look at this uh this equipment list right i mean uh yeah
let me share my screen again um where is it share my screen
yeah i mean this is it this is everything i mean and you know for for under you
know whatever under a thousand bucks if you have a phone you you can get a nice uh you know you can get started and it's
it then it's just experience right and then that's what you gain so i i have to say that a big thing and
one thing that you have said in in the past much is i think it's very important even with all these go-to systems um to
learn the your way around the sky that's one of the things i really gained a lot of knowledge i had an 18-inch job
in my past and i really was able to cruise and find things just easily by star hopping once
you know where everything is then you start you can get a little system like this and it's wonderful you know you can
just whip it out and have a blast yeah and are you doing a lot of this on your
like the balcony of your apartment yeah actually you know i i have uh sky glue i mean all those
pictures i'm on my front i'm on the front front patio there's uh street lights and there's uh everything this
this is all like uh you know uh you have the sky goal of seattle bellevue uh right there yeah
facing the west everything's setting uh otherwise i go to the backyard and and uh that has a narrower view but i
could have a good south view um and to the east is is uh probably portal
six to the west is portal eight i would say that's kind of what i'm looking at
sure um yeah so it's it makes a difference if if i i bring my eight inch um to the
backyard and then i can when things are rising in the east i have some i can see the 12th magnitude
galaxies for example which is which is nice very nice very nice wow thank you so much thank you
okay so um uh molly i i was i intended to kind of
transition having you show the crab nebula because of uh you know it's been a topic uh supernovas uh
tonight but uh uh you do you still have the uh crab that we can check out
i do let me get my screen switched over here i'm sure it's going to be better than that the one i took
there you go i was impressed you got it you know like wow
that's what it looks like though in my eyepiece you know yeah i'm wanting to mess around a bit with smartphone uh
photography just to like you said to show people that they can do it with what they have um and i i
also have a i have the the note 10 5g version and i really want to give
that a try on on my telescope that's a good one what we're seeing here is uh so i wanted
to look at some since we're celebrating that that supernova um
sn 1987a it's unfortunately in the southern skies so i can't show that one
in particular so i said to go find some other supernova remnants that are up right now up here in the northern
hemisphere so i've shown this one on here before but you know it's always fun to look at again because it's just so
intricately detailed and incredible and uh really cool to see so this is the crab nebula i we're looking
at it again with my eight inch schmidt cast of grain from celestron my zwo asi
1600 monochrome camera and a chroma 3 nanometer h alpha filter hydrogen
alpha so we're looking at this in h alpha light which allows you allows me to reject a
lot of that light pollution that i get here in the bay area and be able to pull a lot of really awesome detail
out of uh out of this here and this is this is a live stack uh in um
in sharp cap this is a total of a little over of an hour's worth of exposure um
a mix of of three minute and five minute frames since i switched over to five minute frames later on
um and uh the the crab nebula it's uh the reason you can still see it
today unlike the uh the 1987 one that um bob has in his background that you can only really see with uh
really awesome space telescopes because there is uh the the actual
supernova progenitor star uh became a neutron star after after the core
collapse and that uh due to the dynamics of of this particular neutron star it's actually
what referred to as a pulsar it's spinning extremely fast and emitting all
kinds of radiation and has a really strong magnetic field so that all that radiation is lighting up the
gases that that's that the original star expelled and are still expanding to this
day at some hundreds of miles per second or something insane um
and with the i you can't you can't quite see it the neutron star in in like a telescope like
mine but uh some of the the bigger fancier professional telescopes uh can
see it especially in x-ray wavelengths uh where it's easier to spot um
yeah so if you look at this in the eyepiece it's kind of a fuzzy thing but if you can take pictures of it in wide
band color you can start to see some of the detail but a narrow band is where it really shines to be able to see a lot of
that detail in the filaments and and whatnot beautiful
and i actually have a view ready to go on another supernova remnant if you want to look at that real quick as well
please all right um let me actually just real quick
change the target name here so that it displays correctly
[Music] all right so um what we're seeing here
this is the the jellyfish nebula um and let me switch out the image of
which telescope is taking this image um uh so this is with that lx stream filter
that i mentioned earlier with my on zwo294 color camera
and uh it's on my on my lovely wonderful amazing takahashi refractor
um and i really have to you know i'm since i'm just live stacking this and it's uh
uh it's a bright target in narrowband but but not very bright in in wideband and this this duo narrowband filter is
seven nanometers wide in each of the channels so and this being a color camera it's not nearly as sensitive as the
monochrome camera but you can see it there it's it's stretched a pretty good amount when my screen saver doesn't come
on um which is why the star is kind of flaring here because i'm i'm stretching it a lot
but you can you can see part of uh the jellyfish nebula here and actually
the night velocity in this area goes on for a lot further you can kind of see some of it over here as well
um and i did not go pull up any details on this on how it was formed or when it was
formed and stuff like that um but uh this is not the star responsible for it probably
uh stars that are post supernova tend to become either white dwarfs or neutron
stars which are a lot dimmer than this hd star that's here um but yeah there's if you go look on
astrobin or even just do a google search there's some incredible images of this jellyfish
nebula and definitely worth going and taking a look at because uh it's it's really a
beautiful nebula and now that i have this filter here um i might go ahead and actually make this one of my imaging
targets once i wrap up one of my other targets that's currently filling its time slot the rosette nebula
very cool very cool um i uh i've shown this image on the show
before but uh uh this particular image by deadlift hartman which is a one
decade uh uh time lapse movie of the crab nebula i
still is is i love i love those yeah
yeah i'm actually i'm extremely impressed that you know given how camera technology has changed that he got the
image every single frame in this image to look the same like that's a feat unto
itself right yeah it's pretty incredible i'm hoping to be
able to create one of these in the future yeah i'm sure you will
yeah you can see the um because as that pulsar spins it's actually sending it like like it's sending out the material
so fast that there's shock waves going through the concealer and um
yeah it's an incredibly interesting object and i think i think it's one of the first
things that we recognized to be a pulsar back when we didn't know what those things were
to me it's like this object that's got a heartbeat you know so it's just uh it's incredible it's
incredible it spins at like like it completes one revolution every 33 milliseconds or
something like that um it's spinning multiple times a second but this this object a new neutron stars are like 20
miles across so first of all it is a star and but it's 20 miles across which is small
compared to the sun but imagine like you have this this heavy is basically a giant atomic
nucleus it's densely packed neutrons and it's the size of a major city
and it's spinning multiple times per second making a complete revolution these are just extreme objects that uh astrophysicists
who tend to be the lovers of extreme things absolutely adore right
yeah you can see the jet coming out from the bottom of it it's just incredible anyways
you know just just to treat yourself for you know anybody that's made uh and
this is an extreme astrophoto too a decade time lapse i mean my god you know
that's off to the dude um so richard how is uh how's how's things
going over there at mission control things are going good
see we were talking a little bit about smartphone astrophotography and
this was from the first night wow not bad very first night
i love it ringing nebula the ring nebula and you can almost tell that there's a
little white spot in the middle of it the central star that's a magnitude 14 star that'd be
pretty impressive yeah this was taken with a note 9 um and uh you mentioned
you had a note phone as well molly uh i love the fact you can use the shutter snap on the pen so you don't have to
touch the scope oh yeah you're right oh yeah yeah that's a good one right now you keep forgetting about these daunting
narratives i'm hoping there's going to be a smartphone category in one of the the
future astrophotographers oh we should we should contest that would be cool i do want to mess around we will we will
do it you know i haven't done there you can use a 24-inch plane wave but it
still has to be taken with a smartphone so yeah that was with a 130 sky watcher dab
on a cg4 uh in the middle of the woods in west virginia so uh currently uh as of now now uh we
got mark herrion's chain up here and unfortunately between the moon and the led street lamp if i stretch it anymore
we're gonna lose the blackness in the background here but we're gonna do it anyway see those galaxies anyways
yeah that was great richard last week i thought i didn't get a chance to comment on it but that was wonderful oh there
they are yeah they're wonderful yeah there are lots and lots of galaxies
there really blown out shot but i mean we've got galaxies galaxy
galaxy galaxy galaxy galaxy galaxy oh hold on let's make this uh
make this thing go away here there we go now we got uh they're everywhere i think that's m87
down in the corner i could be wrong about that but i mean the the chain starts here and
comes across through here and i um put a one millimeter spacer on
my camera so i could uh twist it a little bit because i don't have a rotator or anything yet uh gonna have to work on that but i
definitely got uh either the moon or the street light got me at the beginning of the stack so
we'll see it next week one way or another yeah it's a lot of those a lot of the contrast between the the uh
between the elliptical and the edge on on the bottom right that that
was really nice yeah yeah the first time i ever took a picture of mark carrion's chain i was so
blown away and then i was also like the two birdest galaxies they're just bright there's no definition they're just
booth they're like just uh kind of overexposed and everything and uh
i need to get this from a dark site honestly um because i mean i can do better than this
after editing but i don't think i can do what i can do from a darker site at all but uh to me this this um this image um
is just like kind of one of those ultimate living room wall images just yeah lots and lots of galaxies you play
where where's waldo with the galaxies you know what i mean just like how many can you find in there like
it's kind of fun but uh it's excellent it's great
yeah there's a certain threshold with signals noise basically where you where you get the
well you know you can get it up and the juice you can cut off the the background right the the
the darks and take that as the noise floor and then if you take that out then you have
the contrast you want yeah i'm not subtracting darks or any or or flats or anything uh live and with
the 2600 i don't think darks is going to do a whole lot for me live it might do a
little bit but uh it doesn't really have amp glow or anything to really take care of too much
it's a pretty impressive or at least as far as i've pushed it so far um and managed to keep around stars
but it would be it would be good if you could take a segment of that and do it with an image processing uh tool and say
okay this is the magnitude of the uh the sky goal right which is your noise
and then you you could just you can mask that off and just do a one shot one step filter right just say okay take out the
take out the style right whether it's literally shooting right over top of a of a led street land
yep i mean it's 100 feet away i'm shooting right over top of it it's impressive i mean
it is the worst smart part of the sky that i could be shooting at
somebody's going to figure it out you know richard they're gonna they're gonna have a tool
like gary or somebody is gonna say okay you know just take this segment you don't even need to take lights or darks
you just take out this is the this is the this is the magnitude uh brightness magnitude
density of the of the sky glow whatever it is moon whatever and you just take that out bang
yeah yeah it's possible you could use a 12-gauge shotgun
that's the end of the that's true is getting right into the uh the amount of data you're actually getting so
yes some cases was the sticking with the noise right with the other yeah yep
looking forward to uh processing that uh throughout the week and uh yeah that's one i'm gonna put some more
time on um this spring i'm definitely gonna shoot that one for a few days in a row
at least that's cool so jason it started raining out there
yeah i got an alert on my phone that it was gonna start raining in like seven minutes or something so i took all
my stuff inside don't worry i know i for us so they asked us when it stopped raining here in
seattle and sometimes i'm like in the middle of the night and i think i hear rain and i
have a panic attack because my scopes are out imaging uh but then it's it's not it's just like
a breeze or something actually do i check multiple forecasts every night and
fortunately the forecasts tend to be pretty reliable uh here on the coast so
we're in the bay area right yeah yeah in the bay area so um i
yeah i i so far have only gotten a little bit of rain on my stuff yeah i mean that's so when you when you
were talking with bob about you know confidence in your automated setup and everything like that i was thinking well
the one piece that's the wild card is always the weather yeah thinking about a usb
umbrella with that usb umbrella that's an interesting idea
or you know you know what i was thinking was um you know those awnings that are on the side of rvs
oh yeah mount one of those on on some posts and then have it extend it very
nicely right i think there is like a ruler it might be
yeah except uh i can set it to whatever height i want and not hit my telescope
yeah i can just you know rain detected cover the scopes and then you know deal with
parking them and whatever else well like i said earlier if you have a rain detector of any kind even an
agricultural one just set off a really loud horn
get it i thought about configuring uh like if this than that or something to
uh to send me and like a setting alarm off in the middle of the night on my phone
if there's uh rain or something but i haven't gotten around to it because the forecast is pretty good around here so i
haven't had to worry oh simple relay i i know a little bit about trailer life
and rving uh yes and uh one of the things about uh our awnings
on rvs and rain and wind is that they have detectors that retract
them okay when rain heavy rain and wind comes you know so it's not going to help you okay they're
trying to protect the awning you know which might cost you know four grand or whatever you know for for your for your
rv so i think you're going to be a system like that but with uh something
more robust like uh more robust and ugly like a tarp or something you know
i don't know it's just it's floating past my head someday i'll have a a nice like roll-off shed all right cause i
have i have three rings and hopefully a fourth one if i can never fix my mouth uh and so those those little pod dome
things are not going to work unless i get a lot of them so yeah right
i have coltans in my balcony from terpentins
i have made but next summer i like to have them with
electricity so they just yeah i like to have it between the
remote control um remote control um
like like for freak for curtains and blinds on windows yes exist you could modify that to close
uh a black screen instead yeah yeah exactly
but i have turpentines over my my mouth and it's totally dry
yeah and now with the time i have a heating blanket so i can control and i have a this one
so i can see three different uh you can see this yeah yeah
it's it's
it shows uh lower uh part of the mouth and then
uh upper the upper level because it's only because of the
humidity yeah it's not for the temperature because the humidity
rise up to 95 yeah and i i tried to hold it in 30 percent
all the time it's a good idea and you use a heater to yeah i have a heating blanket okay
for when i live somewhere that's that's got more humidity you need air condition
can you imagine portable air conditioning units underneath yes
yes becca can you can imagine i can't yes what's the temperature right now at 4 30
in the morning or 5 o'clock i guess uh in stockholm uh we have let's see i have to
make it show fahrenheits
are you wearing a t-shirt yeah
outside it's uh let's see upper level of my mount
is right now 50. oh wow i'm 51
of humidity and outside it's 35 degrees fahrenheit
yeah that's t-shirt while they're for canadians isn't it you bet oh yeah no problem and probably no problem for the
swedish as well right yes here in springdale we got in fahrenheit
we got down to about minus 20 with windshield factor that was
you had a terrible a little over a week ago tonight it is 60 degrees fahrenheit okay
so i mean it is i i went outside with my short sleeves on it was just like wow this is incredible we will get warm now
to until friday plus plus 10 degrees celsius
right in february it should be minus 35.
so it's like it's like uh heatway
for us there is something if you have time to tell you about my first deep sky
experience and then we have to go back 40 years and
i don't think many you can remember slides scott remembers bob i remember slides
yeah bob remember slides as a pictures and molly maybe don't know what slide
she is i know so my parents actually have uh several about about 10 carousels
of slides okay okay from when my my mom was growing up and we actually have a
slide projector and a screen and we have looked at a lot of the pictures because
those those shows 3d pictures
if you look for a very good slide it is almost 3d okay i i i saw a
magazine for 40 years ago that they offer a set of deep sky objects
and i and i just ordered a a test so they sent me three
pieces one is was uh andrew meda one was i think it was some nebula and then it
was uh uh some galaxy was it but i didn't have any
projector okay so how did i look to look at them so
my mom has a shoebox so i took her shoebox
a torch and a magnifying glass and went into her closing closet
and made self-made projector so thereby us was sitting in looking for
those slides three slides and
then i realized that the it was a deep sky
because from 9 to 14 it was moon
sun and so on but not deep sky i was looking for the stars but i didn't realize that it's uh
more than stars you just reminded me pekka i think i had some slides
when i was a teenager i took some uh photos uh of orion or something in in hawaii or
something and uh but i think my mom's through them oh
yeah yeah i don't i don't i don't know i don't have them anymore but yeah i tried i tried that astrophotography when i was
yeah so i know i know but the nice part is the resolution of the slides that they they were much better than photos
right yeah oh yeah oh yeah basically direct film uh yeah yes that was incredible good quality
and then after a couple of years i have collected
finnish astronomy books i have a very good collection and then we moved from finland to sweden
and the moving guys they forgot my boxes
to finland and i lost all my stuff i have my note
notes and my first telescope that i now found on online
and now i have looked for old books from finnish
what do you call these stores that sells
use it books yeah use bookstores yeah so i have found
almost everyone so now i have my library is it from your
original collection yeah maybe maybe yes i can show you my
library from another camera maybe if you can see it
caesar are you uh still imaging or there is my library
oh yeah look at that am i all cheesy as uh g-gem
yeah so what time is it in argentina right now
i don't know caesar can you hear us
i don't think so cesar hi okay what time is it what time is it um
1 37 oh okay i i took a picture of it
um okay let's see it if you like i can share the screen
i'm jealous you know i wanted damage only only i i don't have a
fixing set in fix inside in this notebook
but i have only only here let me check
i just hear a rooster here yeah i'm just thinking it's uh it must
be getting bright out again yeah yeah the sun is going up
can you can you see yes oh it never gets old yeah love it
yeah we can see that uh 45 big power that's a wide field
what yeah what what did you use for that i'm sorry let me
[Music] like a dslr type yes we got with a zoom
only yeah um you know here this is middle of the city let me show you
it's impossible because wow yeah the high rise is blocking your view yeah this is my
my
it's incredible i i think that well i i am in the middle of
practicing with this program that is really basic that i need to
put this in business style but i work maybe tomorrow
with this but i i took a picture while we are he was talking of eta
carinae that is in the top of this building
well one of me and we have a very very
um i i forget the name
narrow narrow place
of my balcony and another and another
stop building in front of me but we could i could uh take a picture
uh you were writing the needle 45 45
snapshots of uh 15 seconds
and but i have i took darks and i took
diaz um i don't have actually i don't have flats yet
and i can show you the the orion
i i process it a little with this program because i don't have brands
and let me check if i can change the screen
so caesar the direction when we look behind you you have the corner of the upper balcony and you have a building
what what direction is that south east southwest okay okay sorry
that i i sorry camera that i i couldn't understand understood uh
this is right south directly so okay so yes so
here do you have uh the style [Music] let me
sow east the west south west because it's flipped on the
image the west here oh that's the west okay yeah
yes because it is let me show you
more easy sound is
west story east this is gonna work for this yeah my
balconies is to south west and southwest
so you can see said you can see everything set basically so you can see yeah
planets and stuff yeah but the problem is that uh normally i
for for the songs i'm here because i have internet you know but sometimes i go
uh normally if you took the pictures i go to the rooftop of this building that this
is 37th floor and it's very nice place at the house
the wind when you have wind you know in 37th floor because it's around
126 meters over sea level and you have
in any any wind is strong in the roof
and but it's nice place for force and
just to take photography as a photography middle of the
of the city i can show you
let me check
i can show you
this is the the last picture that i show you the only one before
yes and let me check how is this
same camera as you used for the ada karna karina right no it's a it's an old camera
eos 600 only okay yes you your work with um
your your work with [Music] with a
cell phone was amazing it's amazing oh hexes okay here here oh wow that's
really nice that's awesome i love it and what's amazing is that the
focus how could you get the building and focus at the orion afterlife yeah yeah this
is in this direction this welding i don't know if it's possible to see
the line yes they have here through two uh buildings and you have a
narrow place and yes i i and
it's nice because it's you know i think i think caesar you redefined the term extreme imaging
after imaging yeah yeah people remember when caesar was out and
the wind was blowing so hard that you could you could hardly hear him from the buffeting of the wind and stuff on his
microphone his nickname is called 100 mile per hour caesar
normally yeah well in the last eclipses god i was in the i have another from
california that he found a picture of a guy
catching off of a tree and he put my name
we actually got a broadcast of the one it eclipse like yeah yes but more
fortunately we have much better videos from mars that yeah the mars audio
exactly the most window audio is nothing compared to what caesar
i think that i have a good material to process much better than
than the the picture that just i have from from
uh in the skystacker but this sky stacker is too hard to move the lines or
move the cure processing and i think i could
like to use them in pixel size i really i don't i don't
know all about the style because i am but my son i would think
that here is a specialist and he normally the the bad thing
when you have your son that work in computing and processing
and i say okay i give you the likes and bye bye no it's bad because i don't have
i never practice i with the processing in pixel side and i know that
i need to to learn a lot of this and
because it's the problem is that lessons from molly yes
this is the problem when you have a molly in your family or come on
[Laughter] yes yes but but i promise to
learn a new speaking site in life in this computer
next time not this time maybe maybe one month more
like my friends here in global safari
that's awesome well gentlemen uh uh
we've been on we're almost to the 11 o'clock hour about 10 50 here does anybody else have
anything else they'd like to share tonight with our audience well scott i am gonna have to duck out
here soon but i wanted to ask you about those binoculars behind you oh
these these guys yes ah yes we we like to to watch this
come on yes these are beautiful 120 millimeter binoculars i was using
them today with a white light solar filter that we made for it you can see the uh
the uh uh interpupillary adjustment is just you just grab the
this one's kind of stiff here but but yeah you can just adjust it
uh for your you know the inner pupillary adjustment and then it's got um
you know individual focus control here but there's a twist lock that's holding the eyepieces so they're not going to
slide out on you you know so um and uh yeah this is some of the new
stuff that we're starting to carry um retractable due shield
and uh and that's what you want in a dark sky yeah it's fun it is fun i've already had
the pleasure of seeing the orion nebula through them uh you know watching the sun through it
over the last couple of days you know just seeing as an orb and and just being able to you know use both
eyes both parts of your brain you know to both sides of your brain to examine an image you know it just it's
uh somehow some so much more gratifying i you know so i'm i'm uh
i'm sure that i'll uh uh be including this in all of my uh
you know star party experiences and even when i do sidewalk astronomy i'm going to take this thing out because it's
going to be fun you know what was the max field of view on that again scott what's the matter
well because the eye pieces are interchangeable and it uses more scientific eye pieces
27 millimeter eye pieces work on it so it's going to change quite a bit
yeah beautiful for for the 82 degrees so to give you
you would just work out the field of view because it's a it's a 120 millimeter uh
660 millimeter focal length 160 millimeter okay got it yeah yeah so can
you use parallels on those that's what can you use barlows yes
i've never tried you know i haven't tried yet but uh i'll give it a whirl tomorrow i'll let
you know okay because my 20 80s
are traveling binoculars they're those
those those are nice they're just a lot of fun to use and uh
um so that's uh that's that's new from us we've got several different models i'll
be uh posting them all on our website so i think the maximum field of view is
four and a half degrees or 4.4 degrees that sounds about right just using a 27 millimeter uh field stop
on 120 right is that the calculation let's see 120 divided by 27
i have
24 millimeter 68 degree eyepieces so
660 24 27 and a half power
68
two and a half degrees with those eyepieces but uh i'd have to really run through the whole gambit to
to uh to cover it all you know cruising cruising the galaxy cluster
virgo or crudely using the milky way or lmc long drive galaxy stretched out in front of
you you know oh my gosh that'll be awesome yeah so
awesome to make your videos two classic cameras
shoot stereo yes vr yes
it actually could hold camera adapters you know so because it's just a standard 1.25 inch
exactly two there are enough backs focus for two filter wheels
you're already thinking i had a feeling jason was thinking something like that yeah the first thing
i thought was i want one of those for solar one for like uh calcium and one for
oh yeah to look at it in both oh that would be cool cool and that that's
probably doable so i don't know i don't know how much back focus we'd
have to have for like uh you know uh daystar type filters or
something so but uh interesting idea
or a straight through blocking filter you could use a lunt uh
probably uh you know front front loaded deadline and uh
and then blocking filter on the back that's straight through so
i'm modifying a uh alum system for uh that ed80 and ed102 behind me so
and i've got that would be nice yeah i've got
all my toys here
was that father film you had what's that what what was that
borders solar film filter you had a front of that solar filter you had already yeah that
was uh that was actually a thousand oaks uh film that i used okay
yeah and i just made a box we made a box and just cut it out so there's a big
oval but it's almost the same as potter's sort of idea that's a white light
this one right here this is uh this is a lunt uh
so i've got this and then i've got inside here
i've got adapters that attach this to the front of the 102 and
then i got another adapter you know we 3d printed this but we have a very nice 3d printer
and uh um so this was the package i was supposed to take it to uh
was supposed to take it to argentina uh for the eclipse but uh
you know due to the pandemic you know oh my god yeah yeah yeah
yeah so so scott the uh
friday uh star party european star party what's the uh hours for that one again
gary will set it up but i it's going to start a little bit earlier probably starting at about
i'm thinking like four or five o'clock in the afternoon now tomorrow uh do you guys know who
damien peaches planetary um makes high-resolution planetary images
he's pretty famous he's in the uk he's going to be on our daily show tomorrow uh so they'll be at
uh 3 p.m central he'll be on for half an hour to an hour
uh showing some of his uh you know wonderful planetary images um
you know but jason i i have to admit the uh that mars image that i saw there is
uh pretty stunning mind-blowing
fantastic it is and i love i love you know what all the astrophotographers
are doing you know so going all the way from these smartphone images to you know the best images that
uh amateurs can make and the best images that amateur astronomers can make
really are amazing you know because they're they'll you know their creativity and
the work they're doing to show the universe and all of its splendors just uh
you know there's no limits you know i there's astrophotographers that use different telescopes and blend images
from a six-inch refractor to a you know 24-inch rc you know and and uh
and make these uh super detailed uh um you know wide expanse images but as
you're looking down into you know pockets of nebula and stuff where they've
you know made high-resolution images they've just sort of nested inside of there it's just a great way to look at
the universe and only the way that so many telescopes can put together so
it's massive yeah today man he's he's one of those guys that
you know really busted it open for amateurs yes especially in the planetary
realm um you know the images he was pulling down with like a celestron 14
inch telescope just amazing amazing amazing amazing and
uh you know i don't know how much clear sky the guy gets really i mean he's in he's in the southern part of the united
states i know yeah i know he from what i can tell he shoots a lot in
like a barbados or something is that what he does i don't know if he's got a toast up there
perfectly but yeah he told me he's still working on last year's images you know so he
got a ton of work done and uh a lot of data to capture and
you know the image processing is as well i mean jason well knows is uh can take a lot of
time so i think you're still working on images that uh data sets that you know you're
still getting through yeah that's never gonna
present myself to be in in the background permanently yeah
that's cool well thank you set up at any clear sky time i get and it it just starts adding
up faster than i can get to it right right
well you never know what you might get you know uh uh you know whether it's uh
it's possible to capture a supernova in in process there was a guy
um the name will come to me but uh he
he put a movie camera this is going way back okay and this guy was not at first
was not a very serious amateur astronomer uh kind of was dabbling into it and uh
he put a movie camera on that would take an image every few seconds
and he uh he started a
program called probablycom which i'm not sure exactly what that meant um but
he his claim to fame was that he was able to capture uh images of a galaxy just as a supernova
was happening and so he's got this he had this whole light curve and everything and was one of the very few
one of the very few guys that made that happen let me see if i can
remember his name
for those of you that might be uh from argentina or brazil
no ben mayer ben mayer was the guy's name
and so he he did uh yeah he was uh he became world famous
actually yeah he's like my friends thinker
but is another another
guy that that founder neverland in 20 2017
or 18. this was amazing because he was he was
only trying with a ccd that he buy it
and he uses the living room
and he was only trying his new ctd that he received from
f wbo and he
appointed his galaxy and
in the first time of different image he started to see
that something was changing when
and victor busso is special to you i i like to know if
this is a very very very kind
victory here i'll share my screen
just so you can have the historical aspect of some of the
amazing amateur astronomers that have been out there but this guy this is ben mayer right here with his celestron 14
his observatory building and uh these are i mean it's cool to see this because
these are early astrophotographs uh in the 1980s this would have been
some of the better astrophotography by amateur astronomers done you know so
um yeah this is impressive work back then i
mean but that's uh all right it's no small task no small task
i guess the entire um uh you know mercier catalog right here too
which would also have been a pretty big achievement to have a full set of personal photographs of the
uh you know of all these um wow beautiful objects that's neat
yeah now now scott everyone can do this but
with the smartphone i mean that's what's amazing i mean it's it's awesome
yeah it's really cool that's right yeah like i said the barrier of entry is is the key
is is getting it to the point where and that's what i love what you're doing scott with explorer scientific and just
your whole i think philosophy is just making sure that people can can take steps right at their own
rate and and then everyone has their different levels and i i think that's fantastic and that's how you
bring everyone on board right right it's wonderful well i just wish that i
could go back through the whole process myself you know for knowing absolutely nothing you know you're doing it every
day scott you're doing it every day you're by inviting us all you're you're reliving it's like having children
maybe that's that's probably true that's really true i i just i love the
interaction of our community and uh um i still marvel at the technology that
we have because you know here we are we're sitting down talking to you know caesar and uh
blinnissary's and uh you know pack is in stockholm and uh you know the rest of us
are here in different uh parts of the united states um but uh it's uh
in canada they're in canada yep that's right that's right so
yeah north america school can i share one picture one more
picture yeah absolutely you can see this is the big talk today in sweden
can you see it not yet okay not sharing yet
no no nothing okay i have to learn this sharing
at the bottom share screen button at the bottom of zoom
yes it's just the moment i have to then pick the screen yes
yes ah i have to yes share i have to boost the button share there
you go now you're sharing now this is okay you can see that
i see the moon okay a little icon on top of it okay then i have to move this
over there yeah that's a few uh 14 kilograms of 30
pounds meteorite that came down on november
and almost one-third of sweden saw it
it was a light flash and they found it in november and today they
relieve it for the whole sweden and it's from uh
literature it's from a telemeteral uh belt you know from between mars and
jupiter yeah and that's for 4.5 billion years old
so they have tested it and so on oh my god you know meteorites are i mean i've often
described them as being rarer than diamonds you know yeah it is it is and
14 kilograms 30 pounds yeah that's a quite big
boom and it it went down in the middle of
the uh forest and
that area there is only how they say sank mark mark you know
this wet mark yeah trees and and very wet
there is only what we call them mooses
living there most
yes hey can can you uh uh let me share for a
second i just wanted to share this so you this is interesting um let me share my screen here
i got this video here canada sky lit up by meteor and this is a big one this is a fireball uh can you
see my screen yeah yes yes okay here to watch this
oh my gosh it's going to go again just uh one more time look at this
oh that's that's lighting it up yeah isn't that major right so that's just a crane alberta and you could
see did they find it did they find it i don't know i just got this yesterday actually
so because here they didn't release it first
today on news every new channel we're talking about
that today yeah i saw when one night a couple what
a month ago or something i i saw not a big one like that but i saw a pretty bright um
fireball yes uh leaving a smoke trail behind that was that was good oh that's nice yeah
yeah yeah but the the those pieces are expensive because i have uh looking for
to buy one and one gram is about
100 to meteorite to buy
a piece of yeah all right well while we're doing that i have one to share with you as well that all right happened here in
arizona a while ago okay can you see this it it's just a video that stopped right
now right so here we go i don't think you're sharing your screen bob
oh really the blue button it has a uh all right oh i have to push
the share button hold on here we go all right i'll back this up how's that
yeah we saw you rewind yeah all right here we go
oh yeah oh i think i i think that's right
went right over our place that was really crazy what's really neat
is the color change there's different colors right depending on the material like that was a blue one the one i showed you is blue those green ones i've
seen red ones yeah it's green this one was uh
red yellow wow so one time i was in uh northern
california near uh you remember that you heard about the paradise fire you know that that was all
in the news and everything actually i was in paradise this is many years ago and uh i had my coulter
13-inch dobsonian so this is this is the scope i used that i really
right and um so i decided that i needed to go out to where it was really dark you know i was
like really anxious to get to dark skies and um so i went out
out onto a logging road and uh i drove out and found this place it was
really kind of lonely i am by myself okay by myself and i um
i i park and and i take my dobsonian off of the surf racks i have
this old 96 swab okay which looks like a stretched out vw bug and i used surf
racks to put this thing on it looked like a jet you know a jado uh on my you know justice
device on people would just look at me on the highway and stuff and honk their horns and stuff and want to
know what that was white sounds uh once that's rocket uh exactly
anyway i get set up out there and uh you know i just uh it's it's a beautiful
night and i find this clearing in the in the forest and um
and i set up and i i had been thinking about these guys that i'd seen driving
around like with big monster trucks and stuff and i was going i sure hope that none of these guys show up in the middle
of the night because i it's peaceful i don't want to you know i really just kind of wanted to have this sort of uh
you know tranquil experience out there by myself and so i get the telescope set up and it's
amazing i mean it's just super super super dark skies and really transparent
and i see some lights and i go oh my god you know and i turn
around and i look and uh the lights get brighter and the lights get brighter and i'm thinking and
i'm imagining in my my mind this monster truck with the big lights the bank of lights up on top and everything
you know driving through the woods or whatever and
as i'm turning around i see the shadows boom boom boom boom boom like that and i look up guys and this is an absolutely
true story i see i don't know i see a ball lied that wide in the sky
going straight over here jesus
no one is going to believe this story nobody
but it was absolutely true and there's a there's a meteorologist that lives here but he was
in lake tahoe roughly at the same time that i was out in northern california we
didn't know each other at this time but we figured out that we had both seen the same meteor uh
freaking across the sky because he saw it he saw this same thing too so uh i would like to learn more about it
um and uh maybe one day we'll track down exactly the time and date and all that
so i should have written it down but i was just i was first and and after that i was just like
oh okay i'm going home now it was just yeah that's you can't top that overload
you know at that time so uh about about that you say the scott
that they was looking for you for in the the rodent tweeting to you
i was setting up my scope one day for the evening and i took my
eight inch cell strand and it pointed up and the older woman
walked downstairs on my balcony and she stopped and looked
at me for 15 seconds very angry and looking to me and asked me what are you
doing she thought that it was like a gun or
something i'm going to shoot somebody
okay she was very very confused she was looking what are you
doing yes because it's very it's very rare here in in stockholm we
are not so many oh sure yeah we are only couple
andre as me and then other are outside of stockholm but it's
only me and andreas is saying that's it now with all our technology and and and
more people imaging in in off of balconies there's probably going to be more
or was a balcony astronomer for a long time uh uh dr don parker who made
incredible planetary images uh had a 16 inch
i can't remember what the focal length was but it was a long focal length 60-inch onion and it was just on the
balcony of his of his uh home and and um i think uh
coral gables and uh uh just uh you know it's it's where you can be most
productive you know uh i encourage people to uh do their astronomy from where they
live you know because exactly a little bit more of it
you have to make the best of the posit of the situation
that's right because i can't take my mouth every day it possibly clear
so i just opened the door and there's my audience observed there it is
just look in the on-off pattern we're all prisoners of the time
dimension yeah yes and um
the problem is that we are living in a in a building and
here okay it's concrete but when i'm shooting when i'm photographing
on the balcony nobody can walk inside our apartment it's so
so sensitive oh yeah yeah yeah right so it it i can see there right directly if
somebody has walked inside yeah so night time okay that's that's good
right but even even i can't walk i have to sit down
and take a cup of coffee right so um
am i yeah uh cameron were you aware of this thing i just was looking at this american meteor
society uh and this was just like yesterday or
something oh yeah oh that's it that's the same one just a different view
perfect yep it was like i say it's fresh off the press yeah
that's awesome good good fine yeah ams meteors.org
i i found it because i was looking for one of my friends i'm
richard rodriguez and uh he's a meteor hunter he goes out on the
dry lakes and uh and around here in the west and they walk across the dry lakes and look for
me that's cool yeah that's quite a collection meteorites i should say
yes so do all of you have do do you all collect meteorites do you
have some and you're no no not me
i want to have one yes one thing i've done which was a
collateral gift from my time working for the local sheriff's office is a helicopter pilot i was a night guy
yeah i worked for four years at night flying helicopters rescue and law enforcement we had night vision goggles
so whenever there was a meteor shower i'd grab the nbg's go set
up my camp chair out back and just watch and you can see a hundred times more
meteors with those than you can me with the naked eye because we'd seen a lot of
them at night we'd be flying around at night and you could see him going and flip up your goggles and you couldn't
see anything so it was that was a cool tool so they're getting cheaper now
um by quite a bit and uh that would be the way to watch a meteor shower would be with some sort of
night vision enhancement thing would be great for sure for sure
i saw that that was nice it's good that's nice yeah this is a piece of shikota len
okay right now it looks like shrapnel okay and when shakota lynn uh when this
meteor it's a nickel iron meteorite uh came over russia
the that area of russia uh it exploded and shrapnel went everywhere but the
explosion uh was thought of uh to be possibly
an atomic bomb attack and so this is one start the big one for five
six years ago no no no no shakota lynn happened during the height of the cold war um
uh let's see if i can find you some memphis it was not the 1911. no no that's uh
uh you're thinking of the
1911 i think it was but it was uh exploding
above the atmosphere or not atmospheric
around 500 meters yeah this is um
thank goodness for wikipedia [Laughter]
it's a mountain range shakota lin and the
meteorite oh they don't have the meteorite in here but
there we go there it is
the coarse octahe octahedroid structure so it does have if you cut it and
polished it and etched it it does have that vitamin statin structure and that can only occur in space
um and it's a you know it's when two asteroids collide
and then they they take a long long long time to cool
down and uh um makes that beautiful structure in there
maybe that's a good way scott to manufacture edelar
that's a perfect epistle 10 30 in the morning on february 12th 1947
okay and the eyewitnesses uh in the shakota lynn mountains
in the soviet union observed a large bullet brighter than the sun okay
brighter than the sun jesus um
they came out of the north and descended at an angle of 41 degrees the bright flash and deafening sound of the fall
were observed for 300 kilometers 190 miles around the point of impact not far
from i i'm sure i'm going to butcher the name of this uh lucha gorsk and approximately 270
miles northeast of uh
20 miles long remain in the sky for several hours and this is what year was it
this was 1947 1947 okay yeah so the they i mean you know people were afraid of
what the atomic bomb attack yeah
i saw some video now they have in russia they have all these uh
video cameras right in in their cars and all right they were they were recording some some
of these uh these events and uh some of them were pretty significant i forgot what show i was
watching but that was like whoa now everything's on video right
remember the one guy he just kept on driving he just put his sun visor down
exactly that's the one yeah i was going down interstate five one
time i'd come back from uh taiwan on one of my business trips and i'm driving down the in i-5 in
california and the and the highway the freeway lights up more than just the street
lights okay and i realized that it's it's a you know it's a meteorite event
and uh a meteor event and uh this thing went straight down parallel uh with the
with the highway and i'm looking around the other drivers going you know i'm like pointing up at the sky and
everybody else is still just driving as if nothing had happened
so wow yep yep probably not the safest thing to do
though to watch the sky while you're driving but it's like highway driving i can't help myself okay
yeah there's one thing i want to show what i found on auction here in in sweden i
don't know if it's authentical but
it's an apple um
that's neat let's see if i can maybe
maybe it's i'm not an expert at such things for sure but it's a pin
i have seen just once in my lifetime like this i i collect uh
rare nasa things well that's very cool so uh
when i found out that one i i i don't think they are copies because
they if they were they were many of them right
if somebody sells just one copy um that's unlikely
there should be thousands of them right i think i don't know
destroyed or thrown away you know so yeah but i i have to come to two states
to take a two-week strip to florida and california and nevada
and houston and and every
of the museums there the shuttle is there are if there are five five of them
yes i think there's yeah it's it's getting late isn't it
no it's morning yeah it's it's early for peck yeah it's early i was just waking up
i had my morning having me i had my morning coffee four hours ago [Laughter]
so no problem i'm used to for this yeah that's so it's really cool and this is this is great i just think
this is the best thing happened after internet yeah i think
this community is the best thing happened off the internet
yeah that's awesome thank you very much this is the only place we can talk and see because
there is nothing else in sweden there is nada
in whole europe there is nada it meets the nightclubs out there eh uh
nightclubs no the door those are closed yeah yeah
everything is closed i remember going to helsinki and that that's i mean up north that's what it is
about right i mean drinking and and nightclubs yeah in finland it's just you living in
finland yeah ice iceber beer ice bears
on the streets that's uh something everybody thinks that in finland there is ice bears
northern lights oh man yeah there are no ice bears in finland
becca do you see northern lights no no no i have see i have seen once in my
lifetime and that was on south in finland and
the there was minus over minus 30 degrees celsius
and they even uh there was sound even it was like a thunder wow wow
i would love to see that i've never seen aurora
if you have lucky you can hear them this sparkling and they are like
there's like a small thunder and the colors and this
it's something mind-blowing yeah i have seen yeah
i'm from finland now i live in sweden but i have seen once in a lifetime
i was wondering what the name like i thought you might be finished yet
yeah i'm from finland yes yes and my english is very bad right now
because i haven't talked english right like this for in 20 years
wow yeah well you're doing just fine pretty good okay thank you i was working
for the ericsson and for any ericsson it's a concern language
and it was daily but when i finished eric's on
i have read and i look every movie without text my only new
channel is cnn or or uh bbc
so i watch only english and read english but when you have to talk that's
the other is another history yeah it takes practice yes to find words
and and to be to have the guts
to open your mind you're doing great yeah thanks thanks thank you very much
thank you very much so i used to work for uh nokia for 15 years and
i had a lot of friends finished friends of course okay yeah so yeah you're you're doing
great with your english thank you thank you yeah very good yeah finnish people they are very scared to
use to talk english they are very conservative to
they understand not only finnish people but you know you go around the world
you know you can go into asia lots of places and many people are afraid
you know and you just have to be open and not mental
okay yeah yeah exactly exactly as an accent or something or is it
real i realize that the folks are accepting your language
and if they don't understand you have to make better explanations sit down and
just you know so yeah yeah and this people in this forum
it's can you find better people somewhere i would agree with that i would agree
with that this is so so not only this forum but the just the amateur astronomy community exactly exactly exactly
and you and they are so few in sweden there are more in finland maybe but
in finland they are more like like in-house by by themselves i
see isolated yeah and they doing their at home and
there is a forums and there are one big uh community called urusa
in in finland they have a observatory also there
and uh the funny funny thing in that observatory is that they have a
uh flax how do you say when are you drying up a flag
yeah like yeah it's uh it's not on the uh pole but very near
and in 1800 century they the astronomers
keep their to watch the clock and they they was
they was throwing up and a sack uh very with the stones and so on when that was
up then was at the time was exactly uh 12 at the day at day
and they looked they had a ordinary clock and they keep it
that accurate and then he one in the in the observatory was yellowing two one
that five seconds and now and he was pulling up and four uh
people around in helsinki who was watching at a clock and okay no
yes he's late what if he's late like one or two seconds late everybody's clock was
late so there was uh like uh it was your job you know
strong and watching okay no it's 12 o'clock
and the woman there was all women who could and have a good side
they was doing the maps star maps they was they was counting the cars the
stars in the photographies oh yeah um
there was a few photographers they took the photos and then they gave them to
the ladies and the ladies was looking and counting their stars
and 1800s in finland yeah amazing yeah amazing and thinking how
many discoveries they made you know yeah exactly and they was cloud class plates
there was not like plastics they were glass and we have a whole
observatory here in that's our club log club house right now
in middle of the stockholm there is a old observatory and nowadays it has moved
outside the town i'll show you something here yeah can you read the date
uh 21 1921 october 21 21st okay yeah this is this
is a glass plate wilson observatory from einstein's solar eclipse
relatively test was that oh this could be neat
oh be careful this is uh the moon
wow take him with a hundred inch telescope wow
awesome that is that's wow that's cool why don't you have frame
frame frame frame it's the original uh plate holder um have you
sorry have you tried to print that like no no it's just contact print you could
probably get a positive off that do some do something and share with us
that's beautiful though that's fantastic oh my god i have um what else do i have i have
i'll bring out a couple of things here do you have nuclear proof safe
for that no you have to have okay this is the physical journal from 19
15 16 45 16 16. now this is uh this is i think one year before
one year before the 100 inches finished at mel wilson oh my god uh
see the inside it says uh astrophysics library california institute of technology this is
this is from the palomar 200-inch dome oh my god okay up here in light pencil
it says second set and above that and it's very difficult to
read it okay it says george e hale okay
all right this is from george ellery hale's private library oh my god
furthermore it is signed by george ellery hale oh geez wow for the treasure
you have to have your safe yeah that's stuff like that this is priceless it's priceless inside is also
a um there's some sort of uh uh stamp you can see kind of raised
and i think it says caltech or something like that on there huh i have to show you hold something
that i know that george ellery hill actually held him red himself
this is so that's that's awesome you know wow i don't have very many things like
that but i have a couple of things that's good i i have to show scotty my oldest book and it's it it's in swedish
but and it's a how do you make a mirror telescope by
hand okay and it's from the funny one is that uh
i don't know when it's make but every page it's by
type machine you know and it's single pages oh my god yeah so
so this is uh as you can see it's a type all type machine light okay
yeah and it's single pages yeah it's single pages so this is it's empty angle folded yeah
yeah and this every page is uh like uh typed
it i make it a book and the title was it's a
speaker telescope it's a mirror telescope ah how to make it is it a play is that a
play because spiegel in german yeah spiel is like play yeah right and
there is like there is a telescope there is a picture how to make your telescope oh wow
first atms in in sweden yeah every every
i think i think it's from 1920s
something so there was a there was a drive already back then now we have the technology
yeah how to make this unknown like i saw an old magazine in new york they sold
instructions for one dollar 99 cent how to make your own telescope
and people didn't understand that when they buy this for one dollar
they don't never build a telescope because all the machines you need for uh
making the mirror run and so on
related thing here we got whoa look at that oh wow
that metal is that metal no it's a leather bound leather
oh that's pretty that's antique beautiful yes that's nice
that is nice i have an old a picture of something old
also which um next time maybe i'll share it with more people but you guys might get a
kick out of this um that's the original 1998 setup that i used to start my
astronomy software career yeah that has a special meaning to me too that's the old lx 200 riverside
telescope makers conference that's exactly right and then the [Music]
what yeah no it's an eight inch oh okay yeah and the the
weight is like an ink you know a daisy chain couple of ankle weights so that it would be the right balance and the
camera i never quite got working that was the mead i don't remember what camera that was scuzzy
uh those were the days wow
for the night it's so brilliant get ready for work so
yeah yeah i'm
make sure you get a good rest not today not tomorrow but on friday and saturday and i have to get some pictures
for on friday because i have a training session with molly on saturday awesome
okay we will first try to pull out as much as we
can from m42 that i have showed you
and i will try and catch something else because uh that the orion is the only
uh raw date i have because we have had there was the i have didn't have any
possibility possibilities because it's cloudy all the time every night
so i have to shoot now everything anything
and to get some raw data to process and learn to process in fixing site so
all i have to ask from somebody the good part becca over the years you're going to collect more and more and now with
today's technology you just can keep an archiving and stacking and pulling it on right i've heard of guys
images imaged stuff over years i mean look at that crab nebula animation right he just happened to have the same style
oh yeah yeah but it's just gonna get better and better you're gonna be able to go back to the archives and build
your yeah right but the problem is that i i need them today i need today today
yeah i need the date until saturday so
so i have to borrow from somebody here in sweden ask if i can
borrow their date and process them so that's the only way a heck of a party
man yeah why don't we have a archive that we can
download to training for process
some picture series oh yeah for something there are some um
uh well damien peach for example uh he does do tutorials like
like gary palmer does but he also allows you to download some of his original data sets to yeah
i can ask carrie if i can yeah i'm sure or buys or something sure so
maybe somebody should share molly would would also do something yes molecules should
have a couple of sets right so but they would
funny if there was an archive you can buy some data set
and train on those because you need just one object it's it's not enough because the
next set is difficult it's different you have to process it differently
because the uh weather condition is different the light pollution is different the
temperature temperature is different and and so on so every shot this calibration frames
and exactly and it's kind of
i think it's better than just one object to process to learn process on one
object maybe 10 objects only stars galaxies nebulas
could be interesting it'd be like a collection
training and training here with uh with the community uh yeah exactly exactly it's processing skills very good
yeah that's a great idea and i i think gary has a good what he does is he he kind of skips a lot of the steps right
he takes snapshots of yeah stages in the process
and that that's that's a good uh if you could do that with a like a little a little uh tutorial
set of data that's that's a nice idea now i was meaning that if you if you
could borrow somebody's total set of lights darks
flats and babies yeah all catalogs and then process jeff wise is pointing
out something here in chat and uh he's saying that the hubble data is later is also free you know okay so
yeah i can download there from there and in fact many you know
many of the orbiting observatory uh probably have access you know because it was
built with um tax dollars okay okay good
packer i don't i don't know if you have uh access to twitch or discord
no but uh um i was gonna say the clear skies network on twitch they do uh some
processing and stuff and if you check them out you'll get an invite to the discord it'll be in their
chat over time and they have uh sharing of uh data files and stuff like that going on so um you might find your
way into that could you send me an email or um
i can i can share my email address to everybody just put it in the in the zoom
in the chat yeah just yeah one thing i reflect as you're saying these things and they're great ideas
becca is it is it shows also that we're kind of in the pioneering stages of big data and cloud computing yes and and and
my you know your head kind of quickly explodes there's so many things that need to be addressed but there's a
lot of people now that can put their heads together on this problem and uh and eventually as an engineer
myself i could see that you know these problems will start to get solved and it's going to get more and more again the barrier
of entry and a lot of people can come into the crowd crowdsourcing and stuff and it will just
get better and better so your ideas are fantastic and then you know and then hopefully this inspires more
people and developers and the community to start to come together and solve
these problems because this is going to get better and better but it's it's as advanced as we are we're still in the
early stages of this next evolution absolutely absolutely
so for me it's the weather that's the problem
and when i don't can get my data by myself i have to get it from
somewhere else because if i don't have data i cannot train
yeah that's the problem so if there was a cloud community that
i have a good picture that there is a very
little bit demanding processing i can upload it and
the categories from one to five and i i can say that this difficult level tree
and who wants a difficult level 3 data
take down from the cloud and processing and training and processing and training and next step it's the level four data
well it's gonna have to be like a google type of system where you know you're gonna have to you're gonna have to be able to have searching
indexing and categorization because people are looking for different things yeah right in different data some people
want a pretty picture some people want scientific data exactly different different instrumentation different levels
exposure different resolution there's a lot of exceptions yeah you can use ai and you can use a lot of the uh the
tools or you start to auto filter this and then you can do some indexing so it's
just that astronomy doesn't have that big base like other you know other communities uh to be able
to do that yet but it will get there it will get yeah if i type that i have a skywatcher ed80 and i am shooting with
canon dslr with optilongl extreme or
el pro it will check what kind of data sets there are available
for me to download yeah yeah that would be fantastic
yes somebody
beginner i can shoot kind of
uh but the processing that's the problem you have you can dedicate
a large portion of your time now at this point right yes 24
24 hours dive in this is great for right behind you
i i i am unfortunately not quite at that stage yet in my career
um i'm getting close but uh i can't wait to join it full time yeah thank you
because i am isolated so i have time and i i will use every minute uh wisely
so that's processing processing processing and looking for my stuff that they are ready
for shooting when it's time that's my days that's my days
actually i'm looking for a dog to my companion i need somebody to talk
right now watch my stuff what's my stuff [Laughter]
that's right i have sold a beagle do you know this
uh beagle yes david david levy loves beagles just if you see him next
time you should mention oh i want a beagle he'll start talking about beagles okay okay okay i have
chuck brussel or beagle
but let's see uh there is a gentleman on the chat his name is jeff wise and uh
uh he is uh he'd like to send you some data sets so oh
i think jeff weiss was let's see
i have so i just sent you pekka's email address so
i think i have an idea jeff is let me see
he he watches a lot of our programming yeah i i think that he's building a uh
he has fingers telescopes to use i think he has a fingers that on this uh
that molly is training me i know it's kind of i mean this is what's the other thing that's cool about
the technology we have is hey you can actually have parallel processing like you can have multiple telescopes now with the imaging
at the same time which is fantastic i mean yeah you could have the most you can literally stack up
you know even if you have the same telescope uh times whatever three or four
you can take all those and they can be in different objects or same objects and and basically stack up so in places like
seattle where you hardly have any knights free you know you can start to take advantage of
parallel processing right scott can you tell jeff weiss
greetings from me and thousand thank you for him he's watching you right now so
okay yeah yeah that's right who is stiff
from here no no no no jeff is in the chat he's in the live chat right now okay so he's in
nothing she's he's not in the picture he's not in he's not on this okay
okay man but he's waiting until he's ready to come on so okay because
he is the guy who speak with molly
that molly will train me yes that's right yeah
that's right yes so uh i would like to thank you yeah jeff also
but i have not met him you will see me we'll email you and uh
and then you guys can connect on something okay thank you thank you scott
okay okay this is better than what can you say yeah
it's really nice having you fantastic yeah fantastic great thank you everybody
thank you everybody thank you everyone have a good night good day good day
great party a cartoon behind me that describes the big bang yes this is the moment of the big bang fire up the
larger
seconds before the creation of our universe if you don't have this one
let's see oh yeah it's a photo of a black hole it took us 23 years and 74 million dollars we
finally got it
learn it for sure and share okay okay good night everybody good night
okay good night take care take care bye-bye minus no chase
[Music]
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good night everybody good night take care richard catch you later