Transcript:
yeah john where are you i see light coming from the window behind you oh i am in magdalena new mexico which is the village uh real close to the vla radio tulsa i see excellent so my near socorro yeah we're about 30 miles west of socorro and my uh family and my wife and i got property here almost 20 years ago and now we're here for the duration well we're here for our duration if we if to tell us if the observatory won't keep on falling down yeah well they do that this happened to me yeah david i thought it would be already fixed at this point oh no they've they've started rebuilding it but uh they've run into some problems so i it's gonna be a while i think i hoping it'll be ready to go by the end of april that'll be very nice if it's ready to go by then we have some people logging on now we've got uh davies who was watching i think he was watching earlier today jeff wise is on and uh james the astrophotographer very uh you know these are all loyal followers of our program martin esper yeah are you looking at uh what would be if i'm going to follow the chat should it be twitch youtube or youtube is good because it gets all the the entire stream you know okay that's where i'm going youtube seems to be more reliable for some reason okay i'm looking on your live tab now let's see oh there's the youtube link okay right there boom john this looks like it sorry sorry bob george if i were if i were to give you the serial number of a dolan that i have would you be able to find a little bit about its provenance for me there's a chance but i would be depending entirely on the help of friends but the the because because i don't uh know those things but members of the readers of the antique telescope society discussion list are a vast source of arcane telescope knowledge man now i'm not i'm not um familiar with dolan's very often having serial numbers but they were in business so long maybe they started doing that like later in their career but if anybody knows it would be readers of the ats list so if you send an email now anybody can join that list and it's a nice list there's i should join i should join it then i will join it and i will send them some number and see if anyone knows you'll dig it there's some really wonderful people it's about five six hundred people you don't need to be a member of the ats um and um uh and i don't think their posts are overwhelming and we do not have things like flame wars or anything like that it's a real positive and upbeat and sharing group and uh so it would be wonderful if you joined and post the question directly i will i will do that john thank you excellent kind of an interesting story because we were on the cruise to see an eclipse in back in 2002 and wendy and i got off the ship and there was this little tent with selling stuff this guy had a few old telescopes and i picked up one and i kind of looked at it and i uh noticed on the brass tube near the eyepiece it said doland of london and uh with a serial number and i just about draw i almost dropped it well i asked a fellow how much would it cost and he said oh about a hundred dollars i said unfortunately i only have 50 with me and he said it's yours for fifty dollars i get back on the boat and uh the the uh owen gingrich was on that particular cruise and he met me as we got on he said did you just buy a dolan for 50 bucks i said yep oh that was something else good things happen once in a while yeah that was something and i have it set up and i use it a lot that's great david eicher i still remember very fondly spending hours with you at uh cellophane back like in the early 1980s you remember that you betcha of course i do we were hanging out sometimes with david sometimes with steve o'meara sometimes with some others we caused that we were sort of a little band of troublemakers there yeah we had some fun there oh we yeah we i have that five inch clark yeah there on the hill and i still have that instrument at sierra magdalena and uh we looked at a lot of things together and what you taught me about that night was the nice little galaxy right beside m13 yeah great yeah i didn't i didn't know about that and you taught me about that and i've i've never forgotten and ngc 6207 i'll be darned i've forgotten that story and i remember visiting you we had a really wonderful visit one time for a long while one day at mount wilson oh man that's the i i thank you for reminding me about that i've forgotten about that um um but you know how but things blend together don't they after a while it's been that we we've been hanging around for a lot of years i kind of like the troublemaking part of your skill i'm not sure if the cellophane organizers were happy to see us or not some of those years those guys again yeah well i i don't think it was the year we look we you taught me about the galaxy but there was a cloudy year and uh our canadian friend um oh goodness now now i've got a mental block doug uh doug welch yeah welch was there and he was where it might have been the year he was wearing his captain equinox t-shirt and he had an entourage with him including some some um pretty young women and handsome young men all from one of the centers up there in canada and doug was captain equinox and somebody else was captain this and and this and that and the next thing common theme but it was cloudy and i think it was doug who who naturally uh led a a loud and spontaneous conga line through the campground and i think that was probably among the most raucous things i ever participated in at stallophane but again that's a fond memory that's terrific generally you had to behave yourself at cellophane that that's covered away with a lot yeah yeah but doug doug doug knows how to liven up a party i think is i think that's is probably a trait intrinsic is nature well it's great to see you john i haven't seen you in quite some time now well my apologies i remember um smiling with you at uh at nif a few years back something like that yeah yeah yeah well it's great to see you look terrific well you're not you're not even seeing the half of it let's just put it that way [Laughter] i think we could all fall into that category yeah i had a weather related adventure like that at starfest in canada one time i went up there the entire time it poured rain and you know the campfiel the camp the whole field was soggy grass and tents and people playing cards in the tents and giving uh talks and i but i was um quite happy to have had the chance to sit with story musgrave astronaut story musgrave and talk with him i it's a long story i won't tell you how but i ended up as a young man and just about 21 at nasa for four days with astronaut um the guys that flew that were supposed to fly gemini 9 charlie bassett nelly at sea and they crashed their t-38 into the building that had their spacecraft in it in st louis and i had not that much before that found out how that actually happened maybe a year before this was many years after it happened and i was crushed as you can imagine i was like oh and i talked a story about it and he knew the story too and so it was kind of an interesting moment with him and i i don't know if i can find the picture of us too but anyway it was interesting to be in tents and i presented actually a thing on azp there and uh but it was pretty brutal what was that pouring rain did you actually did that with me over the internet that's correct that is sorry for the the overloading of my mic david that is absolutely correct we had a uh i i had you you were you came in by audio on that that's right oh i i had so much fun that night that was really crazy really crazy what do we have four more minutes my best time with you david was sitting with carolyn shoemaker and watching her manually guide your 16-inch schmidt camera and saying to herself i so love this i will never forget that yeah that that was for those are very special times remember that wendy when carolyn and when you and i and bob denny were out observing one night and he overheard carolyn saying i so love this and she's sitting there on that on the uh guider that's she was looking through the guide scope guiding while because it's oh um it's a uh it was a schmidt camera so it was film yes yeah where you put in the uh the 16 before we added right let me shut this down mail system off hold on it that's what just dinged that's annoying emails and 48 seconds to act like children and then we have to suddenly get michelle yeah that's right then the adult has to come out really [Laughter] none of our audience wants to see that but yeah there goes my presentation [Laughter] oh i'm looking forward to your presentation david i think i have you know i have show and tell tonight david it's awesome oh i think that's going to be fun to watch well that's cool i was reminding the audience that today's the anniversary of the uh first picture of the moon by john william draper in 1840 and james the astrophotographer is saying in my past life i was the one who showed draper how to do it i did not know that that draper's observatory is still i mean the building is still there and i was i was very curious to know if uh if there were any observatory domes or any astronomical equipment but uh someone was telling me that there's some beautiful photographs there draper draper's first image was not not so hot but it was monumental and but later on he got really quite good so when was that uh his first his first image was 1840 um the observatory itself i don't know when it was built um but uh it is um didn't louis daguerre do one a year before that trigger type i don't know this wasn't i think i think that what they they differentiate them by claiming that uh john draper's was was a sharper image okay the earlier ones but i was trying to review a little bit of the history just before we gathered together here and because i've actually visited the site at hastings on hastings on hudson new york and the uh the site is now the um uh the hastings historical society so they have quite a few wonderful uh astronomical artifacts on display indoors but i guess there's not much left there along the way of a dome or anything oh here we go yeah here we go um so okay hmm um [Music] ah [Music] well hello everybody uh welcome to the 38th global star party uh it's uh my pleasure to uh bring to you um david levy uh from the jar neck observatory david eicher from astronomy magazine chuck allen from the astronomical league bob denney from uh dc three dreams is that still true oh yeah that's still true and john briggs john briggs of the lyceum and of john briggs astronomer you know uh an amazing astronomer uh he was on with me earlier this afternoon uh and we got started into some stories and i didn't want it to end but uh um he's uh he's back with us again this afternoon uh and we'll hear more uh the uh our program uh is celebrating the 1840 uh photograph astrophotograph of the moon done by john william draper uh on a daguerreotype uh it's interesting as as our our group of guys here have been looking at the history and uh uh i guess like a lot of claims there's there's always earlier representation of things um you know dave eicher was talking about uh i think it was dave that you were saying that the um uh that uh daguerre uh had uh made an image of the moon earlier than john william draper and maybe some other people did too i'm not sure of that bob who brought it up was it bob maybe i i did i'm sorry chuck there we go one of us did he did six of us yeah but uh you know it is amazing uh one of the as you know i i started out my whole uh kind of career as a photographer and the thing is just really interesting is how um how astrophotography really pushed the limits of technology in in imaging and photography both chemically and digitally and you know many of you that are amateur astronomers amateur astrophotographers you know you find the way to make images that i mean today a lot of these images rival the best images made with big observatories and even space telescopes so but um we will get started as we always do with uh with david levy our friend uh someone that gives us uh comfort each week and uh you know as he captures the spirit and the wonder of astronomy and uh usually characterizes that in uh in a poem and so david i'll turn it over to you well thank you very much scotty and what an honor it is to be with this particular group of people tonight we had a lot of fun in the half hour before the 38th star party began before i give my quote of the week i would like to make some suggestions scotty it would be kind of interesting if i could persuade you to go into a store and see how telescope stores work david when i was a little kid my mom said that i didn't read enough and i can say the same about you i would recommend that you take up reading of magazines have you ever heard of a magazine that talks about the stars and the planets i think it's called uh astrology astrology or astronomical or something astronomy magazine bob danny bob denny um might be fun if we could talk you into into learning how to use a computer yes and uh maybe [Music] setting up a computer that would run a telescope but i don't know that's some far in the future and kind of john w briggs um i'd like to try to persuade you to talk to look at some telescopes i don't know if you've heard of telescopes but they are there are a lot of them around there are a lot of junky ones and some of them are pretty old in fact there's a club around that deals with them and uh it's it's what is it the old trashy trail telescope society or maybe someone came up with a better name of it than that and chuck i just would like to see you get interested in the nice fellas clearly nobody but odd fellows would participate something like that david well thank you more a little more seriously since it's time to be adults um i would like to welcome you all to this 38th global star party i really love being here and tonight i'm going to bring you to shakespeare my favorite writer and one of the things that is true that happened in my life is that uh when i was not too old my um father tried to get me interested in shakespeare and i he tried so hard that i honestly thought that if i did not inherit dad's love of shakespeare he'd take me out of his will and um so i tried reading a little bit of it and uh i remember when i was even younger having an egg argument with my brother and you know with my older brother he and i now are very close and very good friends but back in those days we argued a lot and i emphasized my argument by picking up the first thing i could see which was a blue book and throwing it at him and at that very moment dad walked in and i thought this isn't gonna go very well he picked up the book very calmly and he brought it over to me and he said david i don't mind if you argue with your brother i don't mind if you throw something at your brother but don't you ever ever throw a book it at anybody again and so i thought we were having a conversation there so i said why not dad he said and i'll never forget the words he said because books are friends when you open a book it's like the author is inviting you into her or his living room and saying this is what life was like when i was writing when i was living and when i was writing and i didn't think too too much of it then but that particular book was called hamlet and i still have that copy of it here and i treasure it forever it really is something today i'm not going to quote from hamlet i'm going to quote from macbeth there are two quotes that mean quite a bit to me one of them i found out while i was doing my doctor's thesis on the night sky in the works of shakespeare and here's a quotation that doesn't even mention the sky or eclipses but i know he's talking about the eclipse of 1605 that was almost total in london and he writes by the clock to his day and yet dark knight strangles the traveling lamp is it the night's predominance for the day's shame the darkness does the face of earth and tomb when living light should kiss it and that's just after uh king duncan is murdered obviously by macbeth although nobody knows it then and uh the old man is just talking about he talks about eclipses later on there's something that is even less to do about astronomy unless as i'm sure david would agree with this that astronomy deals not just with the infinity of space but with time as well and with enormous enormous quantities of time and it's like shakespeare is writing his play and uh he's writing this and he's writing that and then suddenly god comes in and says excuse me i'm gonna write these lines these are absolutely divinely inspired takes place right after you know it's the end of the play macbeth is just miserable he wants to die and ease and says i have lived long enough and then someone comes in and says the queen my lord is dead and that just kills him and he looks up and he says she should have died hereafter there would have been a time for such a word tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time and then is heard no more out out brief candle life's but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour across the stage and then is heard no more it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing and if i could go on a little bit i'll add another four words signifying everything because in those lines we learn about the universe of space and the universe of time that is going on all around us all the time let's enjoy the night let's enjoy the night sky and back to you scotty thank you david thank you thank you well um you know what has also become uh really wonderful is uh the week after week presentations by astronomy magazine's david eiker uh what's been really wonderful for me i've known david for many years but actually being able to sit down with them with you guys in a live audience and listen to david go over the universe go over meteorites the history of of uh astronomical adventures and you know just his own experiences at astronomy magazine and even before that it what inspired him to uh go on and to make this his life's effort you know his life's uh mission and uh so you know i i for one i can definitely say that i know david eicher better and uh he's a he's a wonderful guy and it's it's uh magical that uh uh that he's uh here with us tonight to share his to share even more um as as we go on in in this adventure of the global star party so david it's all to you thank you very much scott you're very very kind as always and david that was a fantastic start as as always thank you for that tonight i'd like to talk a little bit about some planetary science uh for a change with a little bit of show-and-tell and i'd like to talk about minerals which is uh which are an interest of mine one of a number that my dad got me into he grew up being he was an organic chemist and he got interested in mineralogy in the early days when he could go out west and actually explore mines and collect things and fascinated by samples of things that you could find before uh defunct companies were worried about people falling down mine shaft and that day and age was over but nonetheless minerals you can go to for example the tucson gem and mineral show or many dealers and in rocks and minerals and yet going in collecting what's really planetary science studying earth remember that old saying richard berry used to say it is astronomy all the time earth is a planet too so and in fact it's the closest one we have so minerals give us a look at the way the universe puts together planets and it it's not magic there are this is not the no longer the middle ages i am afraid to say so there's no magic and no crystal power here but there is reality and and that is that minerals are assembled in a very particular way by electrochemical attraction uh with atoms coming together and forming in what are called crystal lattices to produce minerals and so they teach us a lot about how planets go together now when kids are young and they get interested in rocks and minerals generally they start out by getting interested in rocks and i'm going to try to show you i hope these are going to be in focus can you see that okay more or less yes okay um yeah you can see the structure yeah that that is a rock and and that actually is one of the oldest rocks uh that we have on the surface of earth it's called the casta tunnel light and it's from near yellowknife uh the northwest territories canada and it's 3.962 billion years old so that's old now there are some meteorites of course that are older than earth um but that's all carbonaceous chondrites various ones but that's old for an earth rock but rocks are jumbled up imagine putting the very very carefully constructed by by careful attraction of atoms in a specific way um these substances that the universe likes to do then you just throw them all into a blender and grind them up and that's what rocks are basically so the purists the chemists the mineralogists like to the planetary scientists by and large like to study minerals which are the pure substances if you will so um i'd like to just do a little bit of a show and tell and talk about some of the forms of minerals now what's interesting with mineralogy and astronomy thinking about this is a little bit different than astronomy well for one thing astronomers need to do something during the day so collecting rocks and minerals is not a bad thing to do when it's not dark out and you can observe the sun too but it's also a way that we can understand other planets because as we understand other worlds around us discovering exoplanets we know that temperatures and pressures and other local conditions change a lot but chemistry is uniform throughout the universe and we know that through spectroscopy so many of these very kinds of minerals could well exist on other worlds throughout the universe so in a way kind of studying these things is maybe getting a little bit of a glimpse of other worlds that are throughout our galaxy and beyond so i'll start with a few and talk a little bit i hope the brightness is okay on these and the focus there you go okay this is this is quartz from arkansas here down down not terribly hard down here um and and if anyone ever tells you uh that they have a rare quartz for you you know that you can never believe them because is essentially the most common mineral we have it's silicon dioxide and a large part of earth's crust is made up of quartz but it's nice and it's pretty and it comes in all sorts of forms of course and colors well i told you that minerals form in specific kinds of crystal lattices so the atoms line up in a particular way because they're attracted to each other in that way and they fill up a crystal in a particular pattern this is a piece of pyrite which is can you see that okay that's iron sulfide and this has not been sawn into a block that is formed cubically because pyrite iron sulfide has a cubic crystal lattice so that's a naturally formed cube of pyrite which is of course a common mineral and sometimes called fool's gold it has a golden color um and it is not gold so i'll just talk a little bit about some of the different basic kinds of minerals there are native elements of course that are just elemental uh made up of specific elements here's here's native copper i hope you can see that okay and this is you see it's kind of round a little bit here um and the kawina peninsula of michigan is the world headquarters for native copper that's where a huge amount of it comes from and this formed around a a rock it's a sort of an unusual formation that is called a copper skull and you can see why here i think and that's essentially pure copper then of course we have slightly more exotic native elements here from fryeburg germany is a native wire silver and you can see there are little wire-like tendrils of silver there that's natural silver that crystallizes as a pure element in in rock and was extracted there and then we get to something that would be very very common and worthless if we could extract all of it that's dissolved in the oceans but we can't so it's valuable and everyone loves it because it's pretty and it doesn't oxidize gold of course and this is gold leaf gold from the round mountain mine in nevada so just to step back for a minute those are sort of the bases some of the basic elements now minerals form in many different ways and as far as we know in the early solar system there were 12 mineral species 12 kinds of minerals when the solar system was forming probably the first one was diamonds diamonds exist of course in meteorites as well and of course they're extremely high pressure compressed particles so they're very uh rare to find on earth but there they exist throughout space well at the time planetesimals were forming in our early solar system colliding and assembling a lot of matter there were maybe something on the order of about 250 mineral species that existed and then an event happened on earth as our lovely little planet got going about 2.6 billion years ago does anyone know what that big event was that changed our world big asteroid strike the that's a good guess and there were big many big asteroid strikes throughout history of course um but this one was the great so-called great oxygen oxidation event that is when microbes uh that were the early life for a long long time on earth produced enough oxygen finally that there was an excess and there was free oxygen in the atmosphere and that tripled the number of mineral species because oxygen likes to combine and react with things and so it created an enormous number of oxygen rich minerals are you talking about the uh cambrian explosion are you david no no that that's that's different yeah um but but this was about 2.6 billion years ago uh and it it produced a huge variety of minerals about 4 000 species existed at that time and of course scientists have continued to discover more unusual kinds of minerals over time we now know about 5400 kinds of minerals that exist on earth and we don't have time to get into it tonight of course but david you raised a very uh interesting point in that there is in some ways throughout the history of earth a co-evolution of life and minerals life producing the oxygen to to make mineral species explode and minerals of course influencing uh and adapting life as well so that that could be a whole nother night to talk about and we'll end with one specimen that will hint at that now but a very good comment david so just to step through a few um interesting minerals uh chlorite is a very this is a sort of a sea green cube of fluoride you can see it has a cubic crystal structure as well this is from china and fluoride exists in an enormous number range of colors so this and and most minerals uh uh get their colors beautiful colors lots of them of course are cut and fashioned in the jewelry of course but minerals usually get their differentiated colors from little tiny impurities so for every 14 000 atoms of a particular type there's a contaminant atom maybe of iron or maybe of another element and that rare element in in this puzzle colors the mineral in a certain way so that again is a very complicated offshoot that we we can talk about as well what colors minerals it's known for many minerals maybe even most minerals but what colors some minerals is still not known precisely okay well how do you get crystals here's a hunk of of what mineralogists would call just country rock just basic you know sort of ordinary uh gang rock but you can see i hope you can see sort of raspberry colored crystals in here that's the mineral grass and these crystals you can see they're nicely shaped this is one of the minerals in the so-called garnet family so these are all garnets that that grew in this host country rock and what enables minerals to form most of them now they form in different ways but for the most part a short simple answer is that there are hot hydrothermal fluids that are rich in certain elements or combinations of elements and those fluids continue to flow and things cool and the pressure changes and they crystallize at a certain point and as long as the the fluids continue to be fed you get a continued crystallization of the mineral when the fluid runs out when the temperature when the pressure changes in a certain way that's it and the mineralization stops so it's a tricky random pattern of what causes minerals to form of course in earth now there's a mineral that's a beryllium aluminum silicate that's called a burl and there are various colors and forms of it but here again is a piece of country rock and this is a green type of burl that that's an emerald but you don't often see emeralds that are in the host country rock still because most people want to um run off with these and make jewelry out of them so here's an emerald that is in its host rock uh that's from columbia it's beautiful there are minerals of many different types many different colors this is barium titanium silicate now i'm not talking about the white stuff which is a a natural light it's a common ordinary stuff but these sort of sky blue crystals here are called bonitoite after uh san benito county california it's a popular rare mineral from california and and that's so again we have all kinds of crystal structures and colors in various uh popular minerals with collectors now john you mentioned that you were near socorro did you not my friend yes yes okay well this is uh smithsonite now this next specimen that is named after the english fellow who was well off who was an amateur scientist who died and donated his money to start a national museum of all places in the united states of america became the smithsonian institution but the most famous and sort of beautiful kind of robin's egg blue green smithsonite uh comes from the kelly mine in socorro there near where you are john it's it's incredibly near it's um uh kelly is now a ghost town just south of the village of magdalena and it's all in socorro county but the city of socorro is about 30 miles away but um i can practically see kelly mine for my house believe it or not and that's one of the most famous of all smithsonite localities in in the entire world and produces this beautiful sort of seafoam green smithsonite this is zinc zinc carbonate this stuff named after our endower of the smithsonian institution another favorite mineral of collectors is lead molybdate lead and molybdenum uh say that you can't that's hard for me to say 10 times fast that this is one that comes from the famous red cloud mine in arizona with this sort of deep orange tabular crystals this is called wolfinite lead molybdate and it's again a popular especially western u.s collected mineral and then there's a very famous colorado mineral there was a sort of a i you can't make this stuff up when my father was out in the 1930s in colorado there was a a defunct abandoned silver mine that was no good at all and it was called the home sweet home mine that people went past it um and then in the 1950s there was discovered not silver not gold in it but these rhombohedral crystals of a reddish mineral called rhodochrosite and it became the most famous rooted crew site mine in the whole world and you can see i don't know if you can see that these are little rhombohedrons they dropped the first home and it's simply called the sweet home mine now and it produced the best specimens of this stuff which is the the color here comes from manganese atoms the pinkish red this is manganese carbonate that's another popular mineral and then just very quickly to go through a few crystals we think of minerals and jewelry and so on and of course many of them are used for that another form of burl is aquamarine that's and here's an aquamarine crystal and what's neat is this is a well-formed crystal from an old collection and you can see i hope that it is hexagonal so again that has a hexagonal crystal lattice uh that forms it in in these nice crystals that you can pure mineral collectors would keep and never get and never breathe on this too much jewelers would cut this to pieces of course they would also do that with another aluminum silicate topaz this is a little blue topaz from russia and these silicates of course are very hard minerals the hardness so they're they're good for cutting and jewelry there's a tourmaline here tourmaline group this is called elba height the uh the style the the species here but there's a family called tourmaline of a bunch of minerals and they're used a lot for jewelry and you can see that the flow here with this one of the chemical solution changed as this crystal formed and you can see that i hope that the lower part is reddish pink yellow a little bit and the green is the top is green and so the there was more iron this um the last part of this crystal form which colored it green the solution there's there's also another popular one in in this way in terms of jewelry that's actually a very recent discovery from central africa this is a calcium aluminum silicate hydroxide and it's a was a sort of a dull colorless mineral most of the places it was discovered called zoecite but in tanzania a family and of some mines them graphite mines there found crystals like this one and as you can see it's trichroic so as i rotate this the color of this actually changes of the crystal and they they came to call this tanzanite in the 1960s from tanzania and so that's another nice jewelry one now we talked scott a lot about how we we've come from the stars what carl used to say you know we're star stuff and so on and and which is true of course the atoms in our bodies formed either in big bang nuclear synthesis the lightest ones but mostly in uh supernovae and colliding neutron stars the heavier atoms but here's an example of a living thing going back to a mineral which is unusual somewhat here this is a rhodochrosite here and it's it's cut so you can see inside there this is from the kirch peninsula in the ukraine um but what this is i don't know if you can can you see that that's a shell yes okay so this is a by this this is a a a bivalve shell it's 5.2 to 3.4 million years old that's the date range and after its death in a pit in the ukraine it recrystallized with rhodochrosite the mineral so here's the opposite of what we always talk about of a living thing recrystallizing after its death as a mineral so we can talk more about that some other time too there's much more to talk about but that that's sort of a quick overview of some of the different types of minerals which could very well exist nearly identically on many many many worlds throughout the galaxy and other galaxies because of the uh uniformity of chemistry throughout the universe that we know spectroscopically so you know what we can look at earth and marvel over how our planet formed with these and also wonder if if uh you know an an emerald like this exists on one of those exoplanets that we like to talk about as well right hey scott may i say just a couple things of course you can more than a couple david did you say wolframite was that one of the very colorful minerals you showed was that was called wolframite there is a wolf ramite that is it that's what i thought you said and i think it's right down i i have about uh 1800 aesthetic specimens i could bring a wolframite down but i didn't bring that's a tungsten mineral that's metallic but this is wolf fanite w okay i misunderstood you yeah the reason i said that this one yeah that's cool that's nice but wolframite is a ver is a very important well-known and industrially important source of titanium the reason it raised a flag is my my father and i hope you don't mind me telling this story was um a flying tiger in china in world war ii got shot down and once he got shot down and took three weeks to get back to his base they took pity on him and had him instead manage a series of dirt landing fields on the hump between china and burma and several of them were places where the old c-47 would go to pick up loads of wilframite and they were mining that tungsten was very important for all sorts of things in world war ii so they were taking that tungsten down to burma and then shipping it to the us and uh they would put 5000 pounds of wolframite in the dc-3 or actually the c-47 and fly it back to burma it was just and he was a he managed those fields and he was he'd go from one place to another and make sure they had good you know maintenance and everything so that was his baby after he got shot down and then that was that so that's one of the things he did that's incredible and had i known that i would have brought a a wolframite specimen down um but yeah one other thing to i'm going to give a shout out to a uh instructor professor at central washington university named nick zentner and if i could as long as we're on i'm not going to take up much time scott so but i think this guy deserves some bandwidth so i'm going to share my screen which i will pick this thing right here okay you should be seeing a web browser with his youtube channel part of what he has made is his geology 101 but these early videos this is if you want to start somewhere the flood basalts of the pacific northwest i got stuck on i got interested in this maybe two months ago i knew nothing about any of this when you started talking today i'm like this is so cool because i'm just learning about it these three are wonderful basic uh lectures and he is an old-school electric type teacher not you know showing videos or whatever he gets right into your guts and really does a wonderful job and here's his current um like there's one of his he starts early and he talks and he uses chalkboards and and but he has you know samples like you did so i'm not going to bore you with any more of it let me see how i can get rid of this stop share boom anyway nick zentner dot uh let's see you go on youtube and search for nick zentner z-e-n-t-n-e-r and um if you're at all interested in geology which i wasn't and i am now due to him and your presentation was fantastic i just was like oh yeah i've started to learn about this and how minerals form and all of this it's very basic but you get it and he loves volcanoes so he gets into the different types of you know volcanic subsurface and above service rocks and all of that and it's just great so if you're interested in taking a detour somewhere besides astronomy i highly recommend nick zentner at central washington university and that's what i will shut up now okay fantastic thank you bob that's great one thing that bob mentions about yours your story about uh your dad and the dc3 certainly inspired you i think in the company you have is called dc3 dreams and i imagine that that was a big inspiration for you then you're muted bomb you're muted here we go still muted yeah i unmute my mic um i will thank you david that's that is it travels through the dna there and um i will look for a picture that says it all and i'll show it later but um i won't hurt anybody while i hunt for it right now anyway thank you david that was fascinating thank you very much and thanks for the story bob that's great that was very interesting david thank you a connection that i have is one of my very first bosses that led me to get into the telescope industry was donald c penning and he was a flying tiger and uh so he was with the 118th squadron and uh he was he was not in the volunteer group but in the second group that went in so yeah my dad was not in the volunteer group either the 118th was down in burma they were down in the southern part he would my dad was in the 75th fighter squadron part of the 23rd group they he was in kunming and quail in china yeah right but they were not flying he wasn't original avg flying tiger he was the first group of military flying tigers in china right very cool very cool well that's great um uh well next up is it's my pleasure to introduce john briggs john is uh someone that many of us know that are amateur astronomers and if many professional astronomers know of him uh i had the pleasure of meeting john finally in person about two years ago at the mel wilson observatory uh we were able to uh have a uh a dinner together with other notable astronomers uh from the alliance of historic observatorical observatories this is a new group that's including many of the major uh old maidens of astronomy including like palomar mount wilson lowell lick observatory the vatican this is just the start but you know sam hale grandson of george ellery hale who is leading the meeting had told me about john briggs coming to this he said scott you got to meet this guy he said he's so full of energy he's so inspiring we can't do this meeting without him and uh so uh he was there i i mentioned the uh the encounter uh earlier this afternoon but he had this beautiful jewel-like amazing uh spectrograph i guess is what it was with all these beautiful prisms like in a in a merry-go-round uh that was about this device and and john was showing me how it worked and uh it just it looked brand new i mean he must have restored it or something or it had been so well preserved um but uh anyhow um i will uh without further ado uh mr john briggs hey hey thanks a lot scott thank you thank you everybody um yeah it's it's true that um just as geology is is a natural um enthusiasm for those of us interested in astronomy i mean it's really true i and i have to agree how much uh we all enjoyed uh uh david's presentation on minerals i had no idea you were such a wonderful authoritarian authority authority on bob in relatively recently i started trying to read a few geology books to educate myself a little bit on the subject and the way planetary geology has matured astronomy my goodness hasn't hasn't hasn't the world changed and turned over the course of our lifetimes but but uh another potential interest for those of us who enjoy astronomy is is its history and um i'll tell you ab an anecdote how it i helped uh i happened to be uh inspired to get into history of astronomy it was way back in 1971 and it was the very first time as a young teenager i was lucky enough to be dragged to the stellophane convention up in vermont i'm a native of massachusetts you know and vermont is not so far away but i grew up in the swamps of coastal massachusetts so to see vermont for the first time and the rolling hills and we referred to them as mountains and they sure seemed like mountains to me uh there in vermont where where stella thing happens up on breezy hill but anyway in 1971 um at cellophane everybody seemed to be talking about history and i got the impression that cellophane and astronomy and the respect for history just all went naturally together um i didn't realize until some years later maybe it was even many years later that 1971 was a very special year at cellophane it was the first time that scotty houston presented an evening talk that was that was uh nicknamed the shadowgram and very often scotty houston would spontaneously erupt with his history-related anecdotes he was powerful at this and an inspiration um and uh the the the uh patron saint of cellophane was russell porter and scotty was always good to tell stories about russell porter and to see the deal wasn't in 71 it was some kind of centennial there was some excuse for talking about russell porter and the history that year and so it was a grand theme that year and it made a big impression upon me um and i liked it and it evolved that i i've i've enjoyed history of astronomy now reason i'm dwelling on this scott brought up the alliance of his historic observatories the crazy thing is the the way uh the world has turned many of the older uh beloved facilities that we've read about over the course of our lives a lot of them are um getting repurposed and shut down their no like yerkes observatory where i came to work for a while um as an instrumentation engineer it was eventually shut down by university of chicago as a research facility fortunately a new organization has uh taken charge and and and it's now yorkie's future foundation is going to redefine yerke's observatory maybe in a similar way to mount wilson institute chaired by the grandson of george hillary hale will preserve activity at mount wilson but you know the thing is it's not just the grand american observatories that need the attention and enthusiasm of amateur astronomers there are opportunities for historical preservation all around us and it it really can be something uh particularly important at a grassroots level and so i encourage people to think about this another factor in my life it happened that as a young person i was lucky enough like how i got dragged to stallopine i was lucky enough to become aware of the skyscrapers incorporated the astronomy club of rhode island they maintain sea grave memorial observatory in north scituate rhode island another place with a fabulous history it happens to have an eight-inch alvin clark refractor from the 1870s how beautiful these historic instruments are scott was remembering this john browning uh spectroscope that i happen to have on display at that mount wilson institute in fact i never had to restore that scott it actually just survived exactly as you saw it showed up on ebay and it's a long story i tried to bid on it from right here in new mexico i lost the bid so this was this was 12 years ago somebody man blew me right out of the water trying to get that john browning solar spectroscope fabulous thing maybe i'll come back and show it here someday but it turned out the fellow who got it on long island eventually i met him by dumb luck where did i meet him back at cellophane we became friends and he i visited his home in long island and my goodness did he have a lot of amazing things when he passed away his widow realized what good friends we had become and she made it possible for me to acquire that john browning solar spectroscope so i've had a lot of fun collecting stuff but uh it's an opportunity for anybody interested in astronomy in the same way we can enjoy geology to also enjoy history of astronomy we learn i think about fascinating human elements um the blood sweat and tears that have gone into uh all astronomical progress it's the humanity in astronomy that you learn by uh appreciating its history the beauty of the instruments the artistry of the instrument makers and i just can't help but be enthusiastic about this i knew a wonderful um senior astronomer he's passed away you all will have heard his name he was such a prolific author of history i'm talking about don osterbrock who uh got his uh phd at university of chicago at yerkes observatory his thesis advisor was none other than chandra but osterbrock was an engineer as an undergraduate and he became an observational astronomer but with a strong theoretical background and he ended up becoming director of lick observatory and i'm sure as many people listening uh know don osterbrock's name from the many books he wrote later on in his life late late in the script relating to history of astronomy don osterbrock believed that the history of astronomy was too important for mere historians to tell it he wanted astronomers to report authoritatively on their own history and i i knew him at yerkes observatory because he came back and was hanging out there for a while in the archives when i was an engineer in the staff and we became friends he understood that i was seriously interested in this stuff and one time as we had we're only still barely beginning to get to know each other but he understood that i i really appreciated this stuff i was interested in it but he knew i was not like a chandra seikar i was not destined to become a theoretical astrophysicist but he wanted to encourage me and he said to me once just in passing quietly on a stairwell he said you know john history of astronomy is astronomy too and that might just sound trite but what he was trying to say is history astronomy is very important and if if if the interest in history of astronomy comes natural to you pursue it it's very important so anyway um finally maybe i should try to connect this uh this uh uh all this talking a little bit our celebration today with uh john draper um people confuse i know a little bit about john draper and his son henry because they were both they're both remembered in history of astronomy it's sad because both father and son died in the year 1882 and so what we've mentioned tonight is that john john draper was it was is recognized for having taken an early and important and clear route for the era uh a image of the moon in 1840 you know according to what i read the exposure time for that photograph daguerreotype was 20 minutes he had a guy 20 minutes to record that what a pain okay that's what i read well um that was john's contribution but his son henry died the same year but henry also was a very pioneering um astrophotographer and he was an an early uh stellar spectroscopist and he um was very keen on using uh photographic techniques to record stellar spectra he was very pioneering in this but when he passed away his widow was determined that this enterprise continued and she made it possible for harvard college observatory to continue the stellar spectroscopy studies and that's why we have a vast star catalog at least vast for that era of uh of star designations that begin with the letters hd hd this and hd that and it's usually what like up to about a five digit uh numbers five or six digit number and those were the designations of photographable stars many of which had their spectral type determined by uh people at harvard college observatory like andy cannon so it's great to know something about john draper and his son henry i remember hearing in some circles a standard question for young astronomers like maybe physics majors who are whipper snappers who know a lot about physics but not necessarily much about astronomy and one of the trick questions the all-time astronomers would ask maybe the young and all too arrogant uh whippersnapper what does hd mean in the in when we're talking about an hd this or that star very few modern astronomers actually know that hd is referring to henry draber so knowing these kinds of things we have to teach them to ourselves i'm afraid these kind this type of trivia this type of knowledge is um there's too much to learn uh in in school it's like learning the constellations not many astrophysics majors get to go over constellations and astrophysics class do they in the same way not that many get to learn some of this history we have to cherish it on our own and spend some time learning about it i love the subject there are many specific projects near needing attention projects of historical preservation the same way um um the skyscrapers preserves sea grave memorial observatory in rhode island and if you don't uh understand how many opportunities there there are along these lines just from listening to my little monologue right now someday google the museum that i've created here museum is kind of a grandiose term i'm afraid for the informality of what it is but we call it the astronomical lyseum here in magdalena new mexico astronomical lyceum i bought an old high school gym building for hardly anything here in rural new mexico and it was an inexpensive way to get a big space of six or seven years ago since then orphan telescopes have fallen upon me i mean i had collected some of my own but i'm afraid so many more have come out of the woodwork very interesting things historically it just goes to show how many orphan instruments there are out there that need to be loved and appreciated and preserved so anyway that's what i'm into among other things but thank you for letting me ramble on a little bit about it and if anybody has uh some comments or questions i should stifle myself now for a minute and allow a further digression but thank you yeah i do thank you so much john it was so good hearing thank you voice again after a long time i um i think that the central point of what you were trying to make tonight is the relationship of astronomy and history it is so important to all of us and particularly to me in that i had a very very lethal example of it happened just about a month ago two months ago and it was january the 6th 2021 i was getting ready with wendy to have a a civics lesson we were going to see how the um we were going to see how the excuse me how the united states government works and ratifying the results of an election it turned out to be a lot more than that and we're watching the television set and suddenly it says that the madison building of the library of congress has been evacuated and at first i wasn't sure what that meant found out very quickly what that meant but it was very personal to me because they had started that whole day that whole incident with the evacuation of the madison building of the library of congress the library of congress contains 170 million books and it is the second largest library in the world beat out only by the british library which has a little over 200 million books anyway i was just thinking of the treasure of a library and the fact that a library itself a library building would be put under such danger as that one was that day but when i was a kid i was i i was i asked a question how many books does it take to make a library and the teacher looked at me and said two if you have two books you've got a library when i'm in a library any library it's the wisdom of the ages is there with me the wisdom of the universe of earth and of our history and it is just so wonderful to hear you talk in your sense about how the history of astronomy relates to the history of virtually everything else and john thank you so much it was such a pleasure to hear you talk to me i have a question for john oh yeah go ahead go ahead bob i do um i have to show my screen because i want to ask you something um ready set share you can see this is this guy right here you no that guy's way too fat oh come on wait you're way too fat for me just cause it sure looks like you i don't think that's me no okay well this is the bowler and chibins talking about old telescopes the bowlers i thought it might be you but that's you know if you saw me you would see the same thing all right so i thought that might be you and this is alan slicky yes um no we are involved in this i had quite a bit to do with that project and uh that's a whole that's a long story and it's an ongoing story and uh very exciting but it's a thank you bob for bringing it up because it's a powerful testimony for what i was trying to allude to i i'd i'd hoped to share some pictures of my own but this was my first time on here like this and i actually i had a more complicated day today than i anticipated so it wasn't possible for me to prepare much uh show and tell the way i'd aspire to but that's a powerful example sometimes in the antique telescope society and i've been very active with that group it's almost 30 but about 30 years old now some 250 members it's a great great group but let's see sometimes we have conversations or somebody in the discussion group of the antique telescope societal bring up a question well what defines an antique telescope well you know to me i'm sort of like david levy and his enthusiasm for books it doesn't have to be a 100 year old telescope like to be cool okay um it doesn't have to be an alvin clark to be uh fabulously interesting though clark telescopes are nice um i've in recent years i've become especially interested and enthusiastic about relatively recently made amateur telescopes they're one of a kind um we have two shoopman refractors um in the in the lyceum uh collection both of them were made by mike maddie um uh and so relatively modern instruments you might say but they're all interesting and that bowler and chibins um it's nominal that in the picture you showed that had been at princeton university um that was nominally a 36 inch it actually has a 95 uh centimeter as built and it was actually i who recognized this telescope was up for grabs at princeton university can you believe it that they were on the verge of scrapping it now see in my opinion boulder and shivens telescopes were equal to the finest in the world at the height of the space race like west germany zeiss telescopes were also out there and they were incredibly good i'd had a chance to use a few at different places i mean really cool telescopes but american-made bowler and shipman's telescopes were right out there as superlative machines fabulous things at the height of the space race which was also saying something so it's absolutely mind-boggling that that a university would be inclined to scrap and instrument like that but you know these big telescopes they can be challenging in terms of their maintenance you basically gotta hire a technician to be responsible nearly full time for some of these uh meter class telescopes a lot of institutions even places like princeton well when they're trying to build something or be have a spot on a team at some big new operation down in chile or something they have to count their pennies and they have to decide to shut down campus facilities even though such facilities are powerfully educational and inspirational for local undergraduates things like that happen and it's a little insane but if it weren't for the fact that i had some friends including the late david middlemen in a position to deal with an opportunity like that orphan telescope um that's what it's all about and that's what i'm trying to allude to uh as opportunities for in amateur astronomy in general for historical preservation sometimes it is not just the instruments for example scott roberts you've been very key right in the salvage of the 24 inch refractor from swarthmore of of course safely in stored in arkansas now well not so long after swarthmore resolved the wise fate of that brashear a refractor that weighs about 50 000 pounds it came up on a history of astronomy discussion list that swarthmore was now finally going to dispose of the observatory library and now of course i'm alluding to to david's enthusiasm for books which i sure share i saw that the college um announced that well to dispose of the observatory library they were going to have a book sale and they announced this on the history of astronomy discussion group i read it with complete horror um they meant well but they announced with a date and everything was going to be about a month in the future and you come to swarthmore and you could buy whatever you wanted for what was left of the observatory library for a dollar a volume a dollar wow what i realized why was this horrifying to me it was horrifying to me because i knew that most of that library would be journal runs like complete bound sets of sky and telescope magazine popular astronomy astrophysical journal and you know the old issues of astrophysical journal man you could actually read them um a lot of interesting things but when you're selling things a dollar a volume journal runs get destroyed so i wrote to the college quite frantically and i said they'd already announced the sale but i said and i of course they don't know me for any more than you guys might have heard of me but these guys at swarthmore they didn't know me i was just some desert rat in new mexico i mean look at me um but i wrote to him passionately and i said please don't do this because you'll destroy your journal runs if you let me i'll take the whole thing and and and i are i said i got the space to take it and put it and i presented the facts and i included references in that letter because i knew people that i knew they would know so because otherwise they would probably dismiss the inquiry but lo and behold they said well as a matter of fact we'll cancel the book sale and if you will come and take them all you could have them all and that's how i got the swarthmore uh squirrel observatory library and that's why i have quite a collection of duplicate papers and things and swirl observatory publications that i look forward to giving to scott um when the time comes because of course when i got there i had to load about 240 50 pound boxes of myself it took me several days i sweat quite a bit but i can move surprisingly fast even now when the circumstances are right so in order to afford this move i had to pack the books in person i had to travel there and they had agreed to give them to me which was fabulous um but i had to pay for the move but i knew about moving pods you rent a great big box they drop it right there it it was nearly ten thousand pounds of books uh but that's how i got them and if you visit astronomical i see them someday um i will show off uh this library could you also talk you've referred to the lyceum uh you and i've talked a little bit about the lyceum but but tell our audience what the what is the lyceum well the the uh it's a it's a very pompous name is what it is but it's supposed to be humorous because when you see it and the full informality of it is revealed unto you the balloon is deflated and somehow you look at me and you look at the relative sloth of the collection the informality of it in most museums you know everything good is behind a piece of glass at the astrotropical i see him i mean you could really still touch stuff um it's it's the headquarters of magdalena astronomical society it is uh 1936 um wpa project magdalena village gymnasium and theater for the old school um they built new schools some 25 years ago the buildings have been used only marginally i was able to acquire this this big old high school gym building right on south main street um with a bronze plaque on it and everything that says built by the wpa it would let's just say here in rural new mexico surprising things are still possible um it was so inexpensive for me to acquire this building i merely needed space i'm not a wealthy person but people think i am because after all he's got the lyceum um it was nearly a gift guys everybody it was nearly a gift and um and it was it's needed a little bit of repair but but but the roof is still good so it's a big space and it allowed me to unpack my lifetime collection of books and telescopes and begin to have fun with them and have some lab space i got a machine shop and one one room and a corner i got another corner room which is an electronics lab i've got a stage theater and we've had lectures in there for as many as 45 people and now it's also a library with with many thousands of pounds of books on ikea bookcases and you just have to see it to believe it right now it looks it's a little embarrassing it looks more like a warehouse than a museum because uh we've acquired a lot of things over the course of the last year i have not been able to buy more ikea bookcases which i desperately need because of the supply chains are so goofed up i can't buy matching ikea bookcases right now i kind of want to match the bookcases i started with but it's uh it's an informal facility lab workshop and most of the things in there have actually been given to me um in recent years because i bragged i bragged to my antique telescope friends say guys gals i've got a lot of space now i got this building let me show you i've got all this space some of my friends retaliated against me afterwards they said briggs you got all that space okay therefore i am going to give you all my stuff so it's honest to goodness that is how i've had an influx of some truly amazing things because we all care a lot about this stuff we can't take it with us people know that i'm not flipping this stuff on ebay or something i'm too nuts about it so therefore it's that what is the lyceum it's a black hole of this type of stuff and on that i guess i've said enough but i do hope that you come visit and uh poke around the collection i will make a point of it that's great that's great if we're ever in the area i will definitely stop by i'd like to say a little bit about david middlemen if i might david and i met seven or eight years ago at nif and he laid out to me what he wanted to do um he had a couple of scopes running our software and another some other visions and not that long after he passed away from cancer he set up a foundation which to this day is running two telescopes for public outreach they're cited at new mexico skies a third telescope there that is running an all sky ir imaging h alpha imaging survey that is the mdw h alpha sky survey and i will give you guys a quick look at the webpage for that not long i won't waste i you can see i didn't get my um browser i got the chat for the anyway this is the um the mdw sky survey thing i'll put that in the chat uh for for that but there's dennis dico and there's david and sean walker is one of the other team members on that and uh that is an amazing thing that you should look at sometime and then he funded the rehabilitation of the princeton bowler and chivens and we were up there a year and a half ago i think and visited the facility at that time and they had the roof on it was moving they had the telescope there it was actually operating i don't know if it had made first light yet but we met there with um alan slickey and i'm surprised we didn't see you there um john i anyway i'm not able to have him and get back there for uh every visit but the commissioning is very much still ongoing there with the instrument okay well it looked pretty yeah covet has uh slowed everything down i can imagine but uh things in fact there's there's quite a bit of talk about next steps with the telescope and i uh there's a possibility some of them will be truly surprising good anyway i wanted to give a shout out to david middlemen for providing is his legacy through his um foundation for public outreach to younger people for the mdw sky survey and for the princeton spoiler and chibins that's a wonderful gift of his to the astronomy community and i just wanted to give him a shout out right on well deserved well i think we're going to take a 10 minute break right now uh we'll come back with chuck allen from the astronomical league and cesar brollo who has some new images he's made of the moon to share with us so we have also opened up the waiting room if you're interested in joining us with the after party it is now open so you can log on to the zoom link that i just put in chat and we'll see you in about 10. you you it you you you well we're back and hope you had a nice break to get your sandwich or uh hot drink or something we are up next here is uh chuck allen from the astronomical league he's the vice president but chuck you were i know you were president one time did you do more than one president uh i was president for two terms back from 98 to 2002. yeah wow wow and almost made a clean getaway too they got you back can't get away but anyhow you know i i want to thank the astronomical league for all the amazing support that they've given the uh uh you know the global star party uh it's been a privilege to help broadcast uh their programs they do astronomical league live programs i think they're on they're going on their fifth program uh coming up here very soon and uh you can see it on on the calendar that we have at explore scientific forward slash live uh their their uh their schedules listed out through the rest of this year um and um i know that uh we are doing things a little bit differently as far as the way door prizes uh will be uh conducted uh but the league will still be on each week um and i'm not certain if they're making any changes right at this time or not chuck and tell us i will okay all right and um but it's great and uh chuck i don't know if you have uh if later on as we get down this program if you have one of your great talks i really loved uh the uh lectures that you've given on uh you know the uh the tallest of things and the uh you know the different perspectives that uh you that you take us on these journeys through your your lectures uh i just i love the way you look at the universe so it's really cool um but i'll give the uh i'll give the stage to you chuck thank you and scott i think uh it's we should be thanking you you've been the host for us for the live events you've invited us on to the gsps multiple times each month you're helping us with our virtual convention in august helping host that and the league will not be holding a live convention this year for obvious reasons it's unfortunate uh the second time since world war ii we've had to cancel a live meeting for the safety of our members and so we are going to postpone the albuquerque convention again this time to 2022 and scott will help us host our virtual convention from august 19th to august 21st it'll be held in uh afternoon and evening sessions on three consecutive days we're going to have a lot of interesting programs some great speakers robust door prizes and there will be more information posted on the league website soon about all of that but scott thank you so much for your help with that and with our awards programs which i'm going to talk about here in just a minute before i begin i'd like consistent with john's talk uh i'd like to show him something that i picked up just to show you what can be found in odd places i went to a star party one time and somebody had a book sitting there for ten dollars and i bought it uh and it was this uh norton star atlas oh wow and the date on this star atlas is 1921. that's a 100 years old pardon but not a nice early one yeah early very and it's this early let me share a screen here if i may and maybe it's signed by somebody interesting i wish it were but i can't detect that it is but this is uh why it's particularly interesting about i think 1931 or so the international astronomical union of course established formal borders for the constellations and at the time they did it they were all consistent with lines of right ascension and declination that of course is precessing a little bit uh now but nonetheless the borders are all drawn very particularly like this like state lines uh but before the iu did this and this is what's evident in this old norton star atlas before the iu did this the borders were just drawn rather curvy and haphazardly around the stars so that's what you see yeah loosey-goosey yeah that's why i really like having this volume uh this is taken actually from this book that i have and uh so it's kind of interesting a lot of great history out there i would like to say something before we begin about the astronomical leagues youth awards because we have a deadline coming up on march 31st which is very soon and several of these awards are open to young people who are not league members and one of them uh is an award the national young astronomer award and we have a first and second place winner from 19 2019 seen here receiving their plaques on the cruise at the convention out of titusville florida and these awards have been sponsored for a very very long time by scott roberts and explore scientific he helped us from very early on with major telescope prizes for our national young astronomer award winner and league membership is not required if you are a us citizen or if you're enrolled in a us secondary school or even homeschooled here and you're between 14 and 19 years of age and not enrolled full-time in college an occasional course is no problem uh i would hope that you would submit your research paper and a photo in an application those can be found on the league website uh just look for the word awards in the menu and continue on and scott again thank you so much for your decades of support for this program it is this is our winner from last year she built this radio telescope and was the first person in high school she became the first person to actually determine the source of a 21 centimeter neutral hydrogen source that had not been previously determined we also have youth service awards for this you would need to be a league member which maybe you are we have very substantial cash prizes for young people who engage in service so if you're out there doing outreach and sharing your telescope with others as this young man is about to please consider applying for one of our horkheimer service awards we also have very nice cash prizes for youth imaging awards and the horkheimer horkheimer omira journalism award is open to young people 8 to 14 years of age regardless of league membership uh upon the writing of a 500 word essay on science it does not have to be on astronomy so if you're close to being in a situation where you could apply for one of these please let us know and you can contact me at my email which is vice president at astroleague.com uh before we begin we always give a solar warning those of you who are new to observing or new to telescopes or who may win optical equipment as door prizes please understand that you never observe the sun without professionally made solar filters that include energy rejection filters at the front end of the telescope the top end securely mounted there you never use a solar filter or welder's glass that attaches only to the eyepiece as heat can build up and shatter these never leave a telescope or binoculars unattended in a daytime especially if there are children nearby they will try to use them to observe the sun and that can have devastating consequences never use non-certified eclipse glasses for viewing cards unless they comply with iso standards that should be printed on the glasses and there are sites you can go to to determine whether even if they have that certification they are from a reputable source because there have been counterfeit glasses that have used the iso certification falsely never use eclipse glasses or viewing cars to observe the sun using binoculars or a telescope if you use eclipse glasses you just put them on your face and you look up you don't look through a telescope or binoculars if you try that they will melt and you will have permanent vision damage and never use off putting things like sunglasses exposed film cds polarizing or photographic filters or other makeshift filters to observe the sun get something professionally made there are knowledgeable solar observers and amateur astronomy societies near you you should always contact them before attempting to observe the sun for the first time especially with new equipment okay so we'll move on now i we are going to have a new process for door prizes from now on um starting on april 6th we're going to continue to ask and answer questions as we've always done at each of the gsps but we're not going to announce winners each week instead we're going to award prizes at the end of the month and then grand prizes twice a year so what we're going to do is accumulate the names of winners each at each gsp in an excel spreadsheet and at the end of the month and twice a year we will use a random number generator to choose the winners and those names will be included uh in the drawings uh twice a year uh accordingly and starting tonight uh to simplify the process of uh for terry mann a past president and current secretary of the league we're going to ask that the answers that you give tonight to these door prize questions go to a new email address it will be on each slide as i get to it and that address is secretary at astroleague.org so please send your email to secretary astroleague.org with your answers first of all here are the answers to gsp 37 questions asked by carol org i do not have the slides with the images on them but here are the questions question one was in what constellation do we find the star betelgeuse and the answer is the constellation orion question two what is the name of the path that the sun moon and planets take across the sky as seen from earth the answer is the ecliptic and question three what are the names of the two stars and the bowl of the big dipper that point to polaris the answer is dube and merak these uh the winners of these questions we do not have ken martz who has that information is not available tonight and so we will announce those at the next gsp here are the questions for tonight again look at the email at the bottom that's where you need to send your answers the first is how many planets in our solar system have no moons question two what is the name of this northern constellation that seems to wind around the bowl of the little dipper there's a minor scene here this is the bowl of the little diver here's the constellation we're talking about and finally question three these two prominent features seen here and here are visible from southern latitudes on earth what are they called good luck with your answers and thank you very much uh for joining us tonight thank you okay thank you thank you that's great okay uh joining us tonight uh from buenos aires argentina is um is uh cesar brollo and uh says i thank you for coming on uh he in the spirit of uh photographing the moon cesar has made his own photographs and has processed them uh we're going to give you the stage maybe you can tell us more about uh what you've uh yes yes thank you scott good night um [Music] yes uh we i early i took some pictures of the moon um you know that in south america we have a very in very low position on the moon in this time of the year and between the welding here is no no easy to to take pictures of uh only when when we have the the moon here uh in the in the in the top uh highest point in the sky this was at 7 80 9 9 9 o'clock in the night nine o'clock here and i took some pictures of of the moon to to make the experiment of [Music] mineral moon or luna lunar mineral that is a great experiment for for to make for everyone because it's easy to to make with a normal camera you know a planetary camera a telescope a camera only with that and we can saturate the colors of the moon we see the moon in normally white color or bright color and the pictures looks like gray color but [Music] we can x over we can saturate the color only and i can share screen and show you the pictures that i took you can see my screen yes nice image of the day we have first of all we have a raw image of the moon i took this with a a small telescope only from my balcony and the first one that you can see is is the the south hemifer in reverse moon like you can see yes here the mari seremina serenita serenities marine neckties here do you have marie in blue and [Music] i saturate the colors very slightly because this is something that i can i can show you again first of all i show you the the picture where do you have two different colors i think the more significant difference is between this one where do you have a blue blue color and here do you have a more orange color oh yeah yes the explanation for this is that where do you have blue uh blue tongs you have um a great quantity of a substance that a mineral that is called illuminite illuminate and it's a mix between iron titanium and oxygen and here is is totally different you have a poorly mix of titanium and iron oh wow of course that i am only making the image if i i prefer that any of the participants in this zoom talk more about about mirrors because like for example like today like maybe i can show us a lot of very interesting things in minerals but i'm not a specialist on this only only i i show how hope you can manipulate an image in a real way to make something of science and this is very interesting for schools education because it's something that next saturday we'll make a new safari with only 100 people that came from from institutes or or universities in beijing our our [Music] group astronomy group and we will make this and teach to the to the students how to make this and of course uh how to how to experiment changing the colors of of the of the moon to to take these results where you have examples where the the orange areas and blue ones have different type of of minerals here is it's a very over over over a saturate and maybe this is not the real colors i can i can take an idea of this is have some something real but i don't know this this one near to xiang colors or something green but here do you uh maintain the difference between between the orange and blue between the mares serenity and because it's a mix of you know english i i talking is in spanish this is english and uh the name of the moon i remember in latin it's a mixed one it's okay sorry and marietra glittatis is with blue tones uh about this this area is about iron detergent and oxygen and well i i opened a new a new picture that i took today first of all one thing that we need is is have the white balance correctly level okay well first of all here [Laughter] here is when we open only the the raw image we don't need to touch this because we have the opportunity to saturate the colors but in a in a raw image you can over saturate or see difference really really that you can say okay this is a different color just only we can change only a little the exposure [Music] many authors for example make something like uh image auto color it's okay because it's something that that for programs like photoshop make a level between the the chroma of of the image and we can make something like took the the instagram a little create a little of contrast okay and now we can go to saturation separation sorry you saturation sometimes no more than 35 percent oh it's okay a little more because it depends of the image but if you have a great white balance you can you can have over saturated colors we can make here okay and we have the we can see the difference between the two matters in my my my telescope i used to i used the camera over the mirror is not okay and i need to to change this because to show for example for me for for south hemisphere it's here and you have the colors to to understand and and and know the difference areas between between the the areas where you have iron italian oxygen and the areas where do you have less quantities like this let me see here where do you have a mix of titanium and iron but of course that exists a lot more of minerals and this type of image is something basic that every everybody can make in telescopes cameras you know it's very interesting is something to to to to make uh with the students um this is a great a great experiment for for everyone wonderful and beautiful i hope that you enjoyed the yes i think that uh uh it's it's a perfect fit for uh dave eicher's talk about uh crystals and minerals uh you know so it'd be uh so interesting to actually look at uh real uh lunar rocks and and soil uh you know through a microscope or something yeah yeah i hope to do that awesome time uh we have someone new joining us uh here cameron gillis cameron you were talking earlier this afternoon on on the program in chat that you captured some some interesting photos with your uh with your smartphone yeah yeah thanks uh thanks scott um actually uh i was just throwing it together um it's not in a very organized way i wanted to make a better presentation um so if you if if you wanted to uh can you give me another five ten minutes sure absolutely okay okay thanks no problem no problem well we're kind of like toward the towards the end of the uh our our program here but it's kind of free form at this point uh have you all up as like hollywood squares up on uh from zoom and uh okay i'm gonna just i'm gonna go for it scott then okay okay but it's gonna be a little bit messy but uh let's let's do this okay so okay so let me share my screen here by the way that background shot uh one of your smartphone pictures no no i want to make it one start when when i get my ed80 fcd-100 i'm gonna do it but yeah this is this is a this one you know i had this for many years uh i've had it for about 20 years it was it was it's actually a uh photograph um yes and um it was really nice one uh and i can't remember where i where i got it but i i've used it on my backgrounds and everything ever since it's even on my on my phone as a background anyhow let me share my screen um okay so i uh can you see my screen yes okay great so i have a couple pictures of the moon here uh this is from last week um this is with my mac 102 so let me just uh pull up uh i'll try to zoom in here sure wait a second yeah i'll just open this one here hello it goes okay yeah so what was interesting about this one whoops about this picture is um you know i like uh i love it when that when the uh when you when you have some of the peaks going on the terminator yeah um showing uh here and what's interesting is at the end this is a little bit fuzzy because i compressed it uh 10 but you can see on the right let me just move you guys here um what's really what you you visually you can't i was trying to capture this uh you know digitally i have a lot of rather than going through every photograph but this is just an example um where you could just see the uh the light coming over the terminator on the bottom part this is this is really nice to see and it's so beautiful to see when it's nice and crisp and uh and uh seeing that so that was the crescent moon last week and then and then i had my eight inch out yesterday and i got some clouds and i actually have a video here uh where is it did i open it all right let's open up this guy here yeah let's open up that and then yesterday we had some clouds coming through but uh i captured a video here and you can see the clouds and i zoomed in uh and just did a quick quick video here um so basically you can see the clouds running through but you can see the the eight inch gives a beautiful view right out of the moon um sorry for the uh quick video here but uh and then i have another one where i'm panning it i just uh go here so i just started here you can see all the detail and then i pan to the southern part where of the moon where you can see all the craters so that was kind of fun um but most interesting is uh i was uh after yesterday uh scott in the in the program you you reminded us that there was a supernova in cassiopeia and i actually said you know what what the heck let me see if i can find it so i i did so i did a search as i was out there taking the video of the moon and um on my smartphone and i found um or is it uh yeah so i found out i wanted to do a better presentation here but this is this is my sky safari and i found that basically the supernova is just uh north of this sao 20610 and so i was looking i i basically was able to i visually played solve these three stars here on these two stars and let me show you what uh where i found it uh let me just get it not here no no not about that one ah here it is okay one of these is a good one i think this one's yeah so here it is so if i zoom in okay so there it is that's that's the supernova right there and i'll show you how i know i see these three stars here that's the mirror image of um i go to here that's the mirror image of these three and then these two here are those two and this makes a right angle triangle with sao 2016 and this is a right angle triangle here so right right there that's where the supernova is nustar there you go yes so i wanted to you know have little pictures and whatever diagrams and then i i checked the science telescope uh smartphone yeah but i did this with a smartphone and i was like hey that's cool because it's bright enough it's only like nine it's a ninth magnitude right yeah um six was discovery um by yuji nakamura of japan and he's an amateur astronomer too and he took his with a 135 millimeter lens so it's you know leave it to amateur astronomers to be undaunted and being able to make discoveries you know so yeah this is so fun because you know like you've said before scott and a big part of astronomy and what i really love is is the rediscovering i mean there's yeah we're still only scratching the surface but just just discovering it's like you're you're having a self-discovery when people might have found it before ahead of you or whatever but learning it and finding it yourself and uh and being able to share that it's it's a blast it's it's really uh really a wonderful feeling there's so much depth uh in you know in the meaning of this you know of a new star and all that but um but just getting you know taking a journey to to find this object using today's technology um it's it's just it's really nice to be able to have that in the in the in the arms and the fingertips of uh of most people now right i mean yes every everyone can now do that discovery themselves and it's it's really really cool that's true that's true and and and you can just take the some of the most basic tools that we use every day uh to do that um it's uh you know i i often uh uh come back to uh to talk about uh you know the uh not only uh just general well-being uh benefits of doing astronomy but uh uh the ability for exploring uh the night sky with with what you have whether it's naked eye binoculars uh you know the small telescope and your smartphone whatever it is you know it it has it has an amazing power to uh bring you to a perspective to bring things back into perspective to keep your problems from mushrooming uh and and and seemingly taking over your life you know because uh you know you have to remember that you know we are on a as carl sagan uh put it you know we're on the pale blue dot and uh um you know traveling through space at unbelievable speeds and yet we're we're you know it's you know where uh you know chris empe wrote a book called humble before the void which i've ordered and very anxiously want to read because all of us have felt as we've been out under the night sky i think a tipping point to becoming an astronomer is that you you understand just how humble or modest or not just how small we are you know compared to the uh the size of of uh you know other stars the vastness of the local neighborhood of galaxies that we're in and and just the cosmos itself yet we're intrinsically connected to it all uh um and uh we are you know without being too tongue-in-cheek uh you know we are our our minds are are as vast uh or as vast as the universe we can comprehend and so it's and as we learn more about it as amateurs as professionals collect the data that might prove or disprove certain theories uh you know we're on a constant quest to learn more about ourselves and uh um you know it is uh it's this to me it's medicine you know and to be under uh the stars is like being in a temple you know so um it's all very sacred to me and and to see this this image of this nova uh done uh you know uh by cameron is just uh it's it's a it's a thing of beauty and and and the images of the moon that we saw uh with uh with caesar and you know his uh pointing out how we can see various features just by taking the simple tools of image processing to see the different minerals and and to listen to david eicher's stories of um how we're all connected to the universe is uh you know that this is why we do the global star party you know so yeah absolutely scott i mean and if i could just say i i as you're talking and and everything you said and i kind of came to an epiphany of this because you know i i've just taken this image and there's so much more depth to everything about it right i mean uh and and and everyone comes at different levels right of of understanding and there's so many facts you can get about this new supernova how far is it you know what you know you're you're not even experiencing it you're just seeing this dot right and and there's just so much more background and knowledge and and breadth and depth to uh everything you see and uh it's you know it's it's just wonderful the the spectrum of everyone's level of contribution engagement and understanding and and as you get more and more tools and more capability that understanding becomes more harmonious if you can call it right um it's it's it's really uh it's it's it's really neat love it yeah uh the the astronomers studying at the national astronomical observatory in japan studying this uh this nova called v1405 cassiopeia they are measuring ejected material moving at 1600 kilometers a second away from this star and uh so that's 3.6 million miles per hour and uh they they make the point that at that speed you could reach the moon from earth in four minutes flat so that's warp speed that's very important speed that's right it's amazing it is amazing um you know go ahead oh yeah you said something earlier that uh caught my attention among the many eloquent things but you spoke of uh the importance of of using what you have i think and uh it reminded me of something i once read of george l ray hale about him uh and i was talking about him earlier tonight he was the founding director of yerke's observatory and and also of mount wilson but he had he had health problems occasionally and and there in in the book about him explorer of the universe as i recall there was an anecdote about how hale had had to take time away from mount wilson and time off to relax and he found himself down near the ocean near her beach and although he had done so many amazing things at mount wilson discovering the magnetic fields associated with sunspots he was down there near the beach and all he had at hand was of a four or five inch refractor but he took his his four or five inch refractor on a tripod and set it up in the beach with a white light filter to look at the sun down there in the beach and that was always a very moving little anecdote to me because here was this guy who just built some of the most important solar telescopes in the world right he needed to get away and relax but what did he choose to do but take out you know a relatively small about cherished telescope and still look at the sun with just a white light filter you know and um astronomy teaches a lot of humility and uh it's not how many telescopes you have i've got a lot of telescopes sort of ridiculous um it's not whether you have the biggest false scope but it's it's uh seizing the moment with whatever you have and uh maybe all an individual has a circumstance at any point in time is to go out and do sidewalk astronomy or go to an elementary school and share their enthusiasm for the subject um but that's that's really what it's all about some people are observational cosmologists you know they get to they get to use a monstrous apparatus down in chile or something hale had founded mount wilson observatory but when he was trying to relax he set up a telescope on the beach i think he had the right attitude and we can all learn from that oh absolutely absolutely i i i there's there's few things i think as therapeutic as uh stargazing and uh you know the casual kind of the astronomy that amateurs love to do you know we've all been to uh stargazing events or been out with friends stargazing we do global star party because i wanted to connect people from around the world uh to do this you know and the only way to do it is online you know the you can't you know unless we all jump on airplanes and and fly to some amazing spot which i'm not against but but uh uh you know a few of us could afford to do it every week and we we do that here which is really cool um you know i um i i also am reminded of uh amazing nights of seeing bolides and uh such things streak across the sky you know whether it was uh uh you know seeing a rocket launch or uh you know seeing a meteor shower or or in fact ebola you know a big rock breaking up uh in the sky and uh i all of us have uh great stories about that one of them that i'll share with you uh i was um asked to come down to uh canada mexico uh you might know where this observatory is john but uh it's it's a university of mexico's uh at the time was the largest telescope in in the in the country and uh they had a meade 16-inch telescope set up in a smaller observatory which they were sending me out to go repair the reason i was being repaired is because the guys after they made their observations left the dome open and then it snowed and filled up this three-story high silo okay full of snow and uh so they had to let all the snow melt out they left the door open let all the water drain out and then i went to go you know put in new electronics and new motors and stuff um but as we were driving out the observatory director i unfortunately cannot remember his name he was given the job by his i guess uncle or something that was in uh he was a politician and said okay we'll let you be the director of this observatory um so he was confessing this to me and he says you know i've never even seen uh what do you call it i said you mean like a falling star and he goes yeah yeah a falling star and as i raised my finger and we're in this super dark you know we're driving away he picked me up in tucson we're super dark skies i raised up my finger and i said all you got to do is keep your eyes on the sky and a green bow line comes down breaks apart okay into and goes on i said you've seen one now [Laughter] you'll probably never have such an experience again but um uh it always pays to keep your eye on the sky i think so but uh anyhow cameron thank you for sharing that um i know that uh uh chuck allen has a uh another program he'd like to share with us uh uh we could uh are you are you ready or do you i'm ready i was a little desperate there for a second but not anticipating it so let's see if we can get this going here all right meanwhile um i posted a link to an article about the nova and the picture in the article believe it or not was taken by david middleman's mbw sky survey guys dennis tachico and sean walker which is cool wonderful okay those guys this is just going to be now this is going to be just an easy listening thing for the audience uh looking a little bit about universe scale and the first thing we're going to talk about is the distance to the nearest star to the sun uh seen here are really two stars alpha centauri a and b they look they appear to be one here but they have a little companion called proxima seen here at the yellow era arrow it's visible only in a telescope and obviously in a very busy field you have to know exactly where to look but it is the nearest star to the sun at a distance of four and a quarter of light years that's a little more than six trillion miles to give you an idea of how far that is and consider for a moment that four light years is roughly the average distance between stars in the spiral arm of our galaxy so the distance to proxima centauri how far is that well our voyager spacecraft took two years to reach jupiter it took four years to reach saturn it took nine years to reach uranus and 12 years to reach neptune what if it were enroute toward proxima centauri or toward the alpha centauri system four light years away it's not headed that way by the way but what if it were how long would it take and the answer is 96 500 years that's how far it is to the nearest star to us if we look at our neighborhood if we look at the or roughly a range of 50 light years we see quite a few stars in our vicinity these are the bright stars many of them are the bright stars we see in the night sky seen here for example vega alpha centauri scene here the sun in the middle of this arcturus and so forth if we back away 10 times further out to about 500 light years we see a vastly more crowded field and a lot of gas and dust and if we back out even further to 5 000 light years we begin to see a spiral arm structure and if we back out far enough about out to see the entire galaxy which of course we can't do we see something like this galaxy this is not our galaxy of course we have no way of moving out of our galaxy to take a photograph like this it's simply too far but this is roughly the structure that we're looking at a spiral galaxy seen edge on it would appear rather thin and here is the predicted current predicted structure of our galaxy we believe our galaxy is barred it has an elongated central nucleus with several principal arms emanating from it and we find ourselves here on the orion spur which connects the centaurus arm with the perseus arm here if we zoom in on the area however in which we see most of the things that we observe with telescopes it would be in this little area right here this is a seemingly a very small part of the galaxy but consider for a moment that this galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across to give you some perspective on that if you held up a nickel and if that nickel the edge of that nickel represented the orbit of neptune that would make your nickel six billion miles in diameter if that were the size of the solar system the nickel this milky way galaxy that we live in would be approximately the size of north america and several hundred miles thick wow now within that little illuminated area there are all the bright stars that we see uh such as the stars that compose the constellation orion for example and most of the stars we see with binoculars or even telescopes and these stars come in many different sizes the sun is really larger than about 94 of all stars because most stars are little red dwarfs but we are a lot smaller than some of them and most of the bright stars you see in the night sky are conspicuous because they are extremely bright and luminous and big here we have the sun and this line represents the distance between the sun and the earth and here you see the sizes of some of the stars in our night sky sirius the brightest star we see other than the sun altair famalet procyon castor vega regulus spica pollux capella arcturus and ander rigel in orion here's betelgeuse in orion both of those stars on opposite corners of the constellation orion deneb pretty large star which is the reason we see it it lies really quite far away over 1500 light years away some of the stars are even larger still like stevenson 2 18 seen here compared to the orbit of earth around the sun wow that's crazy now within this little range that we hold here this just this little area of our milky way and the orion spur we find most of the emission nebulae the birthplaces of stars we find reflection nebulas that are not being excited by stars involved in the gas itself but are merely reflecting starlight here you have an example of a dark nebula which is simply gas that's occluding your view of broadly brightly illuminated gas behind and you have the pleiades an open star cluster that has formed brand spanking new hot blue white stars and the nebulosity out of which they formed is still visible and we also have the planetary nebulae which come in an incredible variety of sizes shapes and colors these are the results of stars that are no bigger than about eight times the sun's mass when they reach the end of their lifetimes and then of course we have the stars that are greater than eight times the sun's mass they reach a more cataclysmic end quite often and what we call a supernova here you see the crab nebula the result of a supernova and as those supernovae expand and pass out through space they carry with it the heavy metals that were created in the supernova explosion bear in mind that during the cataclysmic moment when the star's core collapses inside the superintendent of the star extreme fusion takes place and heavy elements are created that are then strewn through space into these gas clouds which later coalesce to form stars and because of the heavy metals they will also form planets we also have the globular clusters these enormous collections of stars that orbit the galaxies cores some of these are very prominent in the northern skies this particular one in the southern skies here's a distribution of the globular clusters around our galaxy seen from edge on now this is our local group of galaxies you notice we have three principal members the milky way here with two principal irregular galaxies called the magellanic clouds nearby we have the andromeda galaxy which is two and a half million light years away and we have a smaller spiral galaxy called m33 located right here and a whole slew of little dwarf galaxies that populate the area and this is our local group it's gravitationally bound so the expansion of space is not carrying the milky way and andromeda apart looking at those little magellanic clouds we see this image in the southern skies that's really quite impressive if you get a chance to go south it's quite a view and this is andromeda of course another spiral galaxy believed to be even larger than our own although that's up for some debate lately i hear and we're moving toward it because we're gravitationally bound in about 4 billion years andromeda and the milky way will collide and our night sky will become a lot more dramatic than just the milky way that we see today those two galaxies will merge pass through each other and do a gravitational dance that will last many hundreds of millions of years and eventually settle probably into an elliptical galaxy which i'll show you in a moment this is m33 that smaller spiral in our group it's quite large in our night sky but more easily seen in binoculars than telescopes really and this is basically our local super cluster i'd like to show you here the location of the milky way near the end of this cloud of galaxies down here the sculptor group of galaxies here's some taurus a m81 m101 m104 the sombrero galaxy the coma cloud clump coma one group rather in the huge virgo cluster and so i'd like to show you some of these this is a distance of about 50 million light years across this uh the end of this cloud that we're near the end of so when we look in one direction we don't see many galaxies that are bright in our night sky but when we look toward the constellation of virgo and coma berenices we see lots of bright galaxies because we're looking up the chain of this galaxy supercluster that we're in here are the m81 and m82 galaxies that are located about 12 million light years away as we look up that cloud and they're here roughly if we look further up the cloud to centaurus a that's just right up here it's about 12 million light years away this is m101 about 21 million light years up the road if we look a little further to m104 the sombrero galaxy 29 million light years beautiful spiral scene edge on with its dust ring very evident if we look even further toward this coma one cloud we see lots of galaxies populating our view at a distance of about 47 million light years and then beyond that the kingpin of it all in our local supercluster the virgo cluster at about 53 million light years with massive galaxies including the kingpin of all of it m87 seen here host to more than a trillion stars with its jet and it's yeah actually that's not the jet visible there oh that no okay those are two background galaxies isn't it yeah now here's that cloud again that local super cluster that we're in so this distance right here is now 50 million light years and we begin to see a large structure that's called laniakea our local galaxy a much larger super cluster structure that we're in we also see voids such as the sculptor void here and we're sort of projected out into this void which is why when you look in this direction towards sculpture we don't see a lot of galaxies you can see distant bright galaxies but they're not as easy to see as the bright ones that are closer in the direction of virgo leo coba baroneses and so forth we can for example look across the void at the perseus pisces supercluster and see many galaxies there like the famous exploding galaxy ngc 1275 seen here and we can look even deeper into space billions of light years deep we see other galaxy clusters with the hubble space telescope and the huge telescopes that we have on hawaii the canary islands and in chile we can see enormous clouds of galaxies and indeed we can see gravitational lensing of galaxies we see curved images of galaxies that are being refracted from behind by the superclusters in front in other words the light from galaxies in the distance is traveling toward us but there's an intervening cloud of galaxies and so the light gets bent around the cluster in the foreground and we see it as a stretched curved line like this it's very commonly found in some of these images looking even deeper into the hubble deep field we've detected enough galaxies within range of our ability to see uh that total about two trillion galaxies and they seem to form a cosmic web uh it's a sponge-like structure that was actually first proposed by a very close friend of mine richard god of princeton many years ago the idea that it's a sponge-like structure such that if you can imagine a piece of swiss cheese a bug could fly through the holes in the swiss cheese or could eat his way through the swiss cheese and so the voids are connected and the filaments of galaxies are connected as well as we look across even vaster distances we can see some amazing things such as quasar apm five 08279 five five not the sexiest name in the world but it's really rather remarkable that any amateur astronomer with the dab in a good chart can observe something whose light has taken 12 billion light years to regis it has a luminosity equal to 100 trillion suns it's the core of a very active young galaxy very far across the vastness of space and this gnz11 which i showed i think in a prior gsp is the furthest galaxy ever imaged lies at a light travel distance of 13.4 billion light years now the light that left this galaxy that we captured in this photograph left there when we were only about a billion miles away from it but because of the expansion of the universe the light took 13.4 billion years to reach us and by the time it did we now know that that galaxy today is actually 32 billion light years away the universe we see of course is limited because any distance you look even across your own room right now you're seeing the past the deeper you look into space the further in the past you're looking and that puts a limit on how far you can see the furthest things that we can possibly see in this universe are things whose light has taken the entire age of the universe to reach us about 13.8 billion years and by the time that light reaches us we know those objects lie at a distance of no more than 46 billion light years but there's a vast universe beyond that today and you see some of the estimates of how much larger the universe is than the part we can see so it's really quite an amazing place okay yes so if your mind isn't like uh as as warped as those galaxies are right now uh i don't know what it is i found you know one of the the uh the sponge-like uh network of galaxies that that image that you showed uh very much resembles uh the uh the the the neurons in the human brain it sure does the this uh this image was uh i guess made by the allen institute for brain science uh and this um this says it's the first data from human nerve cells uh to the allen cell types i guess which were discovered there anyhow you know it's it's uh it's remarkable uh how there's so many similarities um you know within us and and beyond us um so it's it's it's really cool it's really cool it's like fractals right as you as you look in or out you start seeing the same structures yes that's right it's very uh yeah it's really i i love the you know of course the deep the deep field of view is awesome but two of the images that you showed chuck earlier that kind of caught my eye is uh the globular cluster one yeah where the global cluster we know has hundreds of thousands of stars or even millions but even surrounding it it was loaded with stars you know even immediately outside it it's always like forget the global cluster that's that's just one thing but then the whole field was this loaded with stars you know that was that was interesting and then and then the other one i i love the my uh rediscovery of the horse head like the new images of the horse head uh having that dark nebula kind of curve towards you you can see the reflection yeah because before the earlier images you just see that it's like oh it's just a dark nebula blocking it and you just think it's that she but there's a three dimensionality to it now with the current images right that show the the the light on the front end of it just faintly reflecting and and you can see this this uh dark nebula move towards you it's it's awesome i love that they even created uh several images of the horse head now that give you a little bit of a 3d effect as you move the cursor have you seen those no oh no i haven't seen those oh they're incredible i mean it it's an impossible view of course but i mean what you're seeing is actually rounded a little bit as you move the cursor i i don't know how those are created before there's something for that yeah oh thanks chuck i'm gonna look for that that's cool that's great well uh gentlemen is there anything else that we would like to share before uh before we call it a night well i promised i would share um an image that will give you an idea of now that it's the end of this and it's kind of self-centered so sorry about that but i i said i'd tell you how dc3 dreams got its name oh good very good so let me see if i can do this the smart way and not share my entire screen here we go so you can see this picture okay there's a dc3 in the background yeah you probably can recognize that that's me in the crib that's my mom wow and that's a little um walker a baby walker with some stuff piled on it sure if you look carefully at the crib you'll see a line here do you see my cursor can you see that yes okay that's a ordinary to keep you locked in right that's an ordinary window screen door spring and that top would flip over onto the top of the crib and there's a little standard little metal hook so she could close that and there i'd be in that box they put me in the airplane on the floor no seat belt forget it i mean this was the old days right if i bounced around inside of there oh well and uh well if it got bad she'd take me out and hold on to me but mostly it was just bouncing around and me kind of floating sometimes i honestly can remember the smell and the sound of that dc3 and i flew back and forth to the east coast a couple of times and this is in wyoming on a dirt strip where my granddad had his ranch and um this was an airplane they built out of parts after world war ii they just put it together and then we you know they had a lot of fuel underground from um uh overhauling airplanes which they would defuel and they put that fuel into the ground so we had lots of fuel and anyway we'd fly up there and then she'd take me there and that's uh the sound and everything and as i got older and older of course i got more and more attached to the sound and the smell and the bounce and everything until i could sit in the jump seat and then that was it man i was up there i was part of the crew and then one day the co-pilot got up and went in the back and put me in the co-pilot's seat and that was the end of it that was it was permanently etched in my mind i want to point out one small really cool thing and if you look on the wing right here this is a control lock to keep it when the aircraft's parked you don't want the wind to blow and slam the controls around right so you put these control locks in and that holds the ailerons from flopping around and getting hurt by the wind and the rope that you see that runs goes to the control locks for the elevator and the rudder so it's really hard for you to get in the airplane and forget to take the control locks off think about it you got to see this rope to get into that door so oh yeah yeah we got to take the control locks off and they're all roped together like that which i've never seen that again but and the other thing once it was parked i i when i got older once they'd park it they'd put up some they pound some stakes into the ground and string snow fence around you know that old wooden wire and and lattice snow fence to keep the cows from coming in and licking the dope off the tail feathers you know that was the old fabric butyrate or whatever nitrate dope and the animals knew that that was sweet and they if you let them out the airplane they'd lick that dope off and then you couldn't fly it so it was some old days old-time aviation i thought you might enjoy that it's the end of the show it has nothing to do with astronomy but you did ask me where dc3 dreams came from this is it that's very cool that was very cool scott i've found that 3d image of the horse head yeah let's check it out yeah oh cool thank you bob that's a really cool story my dad was a pilot so thank you thank you so much for sharing that that's really cool can you see this thank you very much i i love that my sister said it to me and i just went uh oh my gosh look at this holy mackerel oh that is stunning wow and i thought i was figuring out the dimensions i don't know how this is done but it's it's it's pretty incredible yeah this is called opening your mind opening your mind wow uh that's awesome thank you chuck that's really good i would be happy to find a way to send this to you if i can find the source but uh wow well it's what on um it's on facebook so yeah you could share it with somebody that has a facebook account and they could get in there and see that oh man that's awesome sort of an algorithm that allows you to make it 3d or something so i see a lot of people posting pictures and then clicking that option and you can see the backgrounds kind of moving behind them and stuff but very cool you know visualizations whether it's done through image processing media or multimedia stuff it just helps us understand uh the universe even more you know and it gives us in some some way a more uh spatial perception of these things so i love that i love that i love looking at also 3d images uh we this book here by dave eicher this uh cosmic 3d cloud is all about that you know thank you and uh i mean it's just so fun there's there's these image sets in here let's see if i can run across one here here we go here's two of them right here just on this page and of course what you do is you look at both of these images simultaneously kind of cross your eyes but they have a little tool when you buy the book there's a little tool these glasses back here that help you do it even better so it is called cosmic 3d clouds done by dave eicher and brian may so very awesome very awesome that's really cool yep all right well god um you guys it's been uh it's been amazing another fantastic voyage through the cosmos here on the internet on the global star party so that's wonderful i want to thank the audience for uh spending their evening with us i want to thank you guys for uh coming on yet again uh cesar you've been on many many times you too chuck bob uh thank you and cameron you're starting to become a regular here too so uh you know anytime anytime you're you guys are always welcome and thank you for doing all that you do and uh i think that's it and um uh as my uh my friend and uh one of my inspirations jack horkheimer always used to say you know keep looking up and we will see you next tuesday um we are coming up on a global star party that will be co-hosted by molly wakeling and molly is going to have uh she says her the the star party she wants to run is going to be largely women and young young people so we'll uh that's very interesting and i'll let i'll let the group know more about that as it develops and certainly we'll be talking about it on on the our daily shows that we have on i will also let you know that chris empe from university of arizona will be on april 6th he's going to be on about 4 p.m central and really excited to have him on uh the program uh he will be apparently he made a journey to i believe he went to uh uh dharamsala or tibet and so very very interesting uh some of the parallels there um and until uh next time we will see you uh we'll see you out uh on our next program so take care nice good night good night everybody hi good night folks good night [Music] [Music] [Music] wow good night everybody take care good night thanks everyone good night cheers bye-bye goodnight everyone