Global Star Party 75

Transcript:

6:00 p.m..Scott Roberts - Introduction
we're hopeful that uh Geminids it'll clear up at some point we'll get to see a little bit that would be nice yeah me
6:05 p.m..David Levy – Intro and Poetry
too I'm not holding out too much hope but we're gonna try we're gonna
try hi Terry hi Scott how are you I'm
good hello Terry Hi how are you oh I'm fine you look like you're
6:20 p.m..Astronomical League Door Prizes – Terry Mann
outside yes we are we're at a very dark site or will be a very dark
6:30 p.m..Karim Jaffer - RASCMC
site coming up that sounds
6:50 p.m..Nathan Hellner Mestelman - Planetary Frisbee
nice har can you remind me when the next um astronomical League live event is
going to be it'll be Friday this this Friday this Friday December 3D yeah we're early this
7:00 p.m..Sybella Burlingame - Sybella’s Fascinating Space Toys
time
7:10 p.m..Adrian Bradley
I'm will we use the same information Scott that we used here yeah okay I'll
send it out then we need to set the dates for
7:20 p.m..Ten Minute Break
next year no problem yeah s by fast
7:30 p.m..Tyler Bowman - Tyler’s Imaging Journey
so this will one you done is that right uh right
Terry uh yeah we don't have anything scheduled after December
7:40 p.m..Jerry Hubbell - Live from the MSRO
3D
okay well Count Me In I plan to be there thank you David
7:55 p.m..Annie Scarborough - Assembling my First EQ GOTO Mount
I look forward to it we've got an excellent speaker Matt Penn will be there yeah that he is excellent
8:15 p.m..Nicolas Ariel Arias - Hammertime with Nico
yeah
8:45 p.m..Maxi Falieres - Live from Argentina
gosh it's a beautiful it's going to be a beautiful gorgeous night here yeah it's so nice here too Arkansas is like uh it
9:00 p.m..Steve Edberg- Perspectives on Scale & Perspective in the Universe
got like 71 or 72 degrees today you know really yeah it's really really
nice I haven't seen that for about a month I don't remember what reason for
9:15p.m..Ten Minute Break
you to move to Arkansas I can think of a lot of them but that's another one that's another
9:25 p.m..After Party/GSP Wrap-up
good one huh yeah just happy it's not 10 below right
now Russell that's this weekend yeah yeah just walked home just got home
little nice snow lots of ice yeah yesterday was like What minus 9 what is
that like 10 Fahrenheit or something getting a bit fresh
yeah Russell it's good to see you come back on the program well thanks thanks Scott yeah I've been really happy to be
back and I've just been on the phone with my dad my dad wants to see what I've been up to so he's gonna be uh
watching the show no pressure for me no that's right is he like really you have a dad
I'm glad you have a dad who can enjoy it exactly I think that's a wonderful thing it is it is yep he's uh yep so he's 81
and uh yep and there wife's having her birthday today and she's not going to be logging in because I don't think this
interests her at all so why would you do why do you spend all this money on like astronomy
stuff right you ask an amateur astronomer that question they look at you like perplex like why wouldn't you
spend more money on astronomy stuff that's great yeah that's why I have a job so I
can pay for this exactly exactly that's right you might need to hire me
Scott Scott were there were there any good values for Black Friday last week
some you know I mean we had we had a sale on on some items uh the problem is
is just for a long long time we didn't have inventory because of the Ripple of
somebody is asking me today what what has caused all this and I actually went
back and kind of researched the whole thing you know of course Co shut down manufactur ing uh pretty much everywhere
you know uh and then so that that was that's one start of the Ripple then you
have this perfect storm of uh the blockage in the Suez Canal okay soers
can't get anywhere all right and then that backs up um ports in China uh ports
in the United States um and uh you know and then and as far as the United States
is concerned I don't I don't know if this is true in Canada but in the United States uh the unions the uh that support
the long shoremen uh that operate the ports uh were really resistant to
automation you know they were they were protecting jobs so while you go to a port like in China which is almost
completely automated with very few people working there um you know us
ports are quite different and so uh but because of covid a lot of people the
whole culture of work from home change your career that kind of thing has played a role too and so they don't have
enough employees to run those ports okay and so that's that's exacerbated problem
plus this whole Crush of things so container prices went Skyhigh um uh it is created a really uh
strange Confluence of of problem s that have raised prices overall you know so
unfortunately the consumer no matter if you're buying what you know dog food
to screws and nuts and bolts you know it's going to be a situation where um
you know everything went up so that that that affects um you know uh
inflation now now in Canada we've got we've got the one M we've only got one major Pacific port and that's in
Vancouver and it's underwater and uh our national news reported last night that there are more
than 60 full container ships in the harbor waiting to unload and they can't do that's
right out there floating so that delay too you know lots of water
everything they' they got called in the Army it's everything's flooded they've got three atmospheric Rivers one after
another it's wow right I was watching that on the the news that's
right A Brave New World we live in yep we just don't know what it is yet so all
trying to figure it out gotta be brave yep our new normal yeah I asked my
students I asked my students they're in their 20s and 30s so what what do you think what do you think is it the world
like really scary or is it like just out of control they all look at me like what's my problem I'm an old guy world's
fine we'll figure it out get out of the way get out of the way that's true I mean well they're polite about it
they're polite yeah yeah yeah like we were polite you know to our our elders you know so that's right
you could say it's either a Brave New World or 1984 all over again
yeah that's true I do remember time brilliant young
people some of them are I think are on this program that uh will definitely be
U part of the solution for the future you know so great that's great well
they'll be challenged and maybe that'll help uh secure our future
yep think so yes y I
mean I'm I'm not very pessimistic really you know I know that
we are we live in a uh uh challenging times but we've always lived in
challenging times you know agre and now we have the uh was it the dart mission
that push asteroid out of the way I mean my God you know so it's out of a Cheesy Hollywood movie
with Bruce Willis right doesn't NASA know this has
been done before that's right yeah they got the whole blue blueprint and film I
mean yeah is still making movies so just ask
him how to do it yeah exactly wasn't there another one Deep Impact around the same time yes I was at the movie
premiere with Deep Impact oh no way yeah uh with Paramount Studios Don yans uh
from JPL uh who's like the you know one of the uh impact gurus I guess out there
uh he was there I get to sit right next to him and and uh he told me what was
real and what was not real in that movie you know so but at least at least they
consulted with someone right I don't they absolutely did yeah an Armageddon they consulted with nobody it
was a Michael Bay film right so he said make it big blow it up and uh y right yeah this I don't know if you
noticed that two there's a lot of movies that came out in pairs like that over over the last couple of decades um if
you if you research it you'll find that there's two Studios that release the same movie uh and and within a few
months of each other you know Jungle Book was like that most recently oh okay
and there's other M like that they got the same pitch they say no to one and they hire another team to do
it anyway the cheap I don't I'm not sure how that works but it's interesting that
I ran across a YouTube video that talked about it that's why that's the only reason I know about it because I'm a YouTube
genius you're a YouTube genius we gotta get you I'm a Google
genius yeah isn't that one of the challenges that's making our world more complicated too many YouTube Geniuses
that's right right exactly it's like I stayed at a holiday in I watch YouTube
last night five minutes ago I just looked up what I was gonna say on Google so
[Laughter] it's got to be right isn't that how everyone does their classes how they all do it that's right
yeah if you don't know how to use Google you are you're in trouble well that's our Collective brain right so
everybody's got the same brain
now over the years the Hubble Space Telescope has taken hundreds of images
of different kinds of incredible nebuli in our universe a nebula is a giant cloud of
dust and gas in space there are different types of nebuli ranging from
sites where stars are being born under gravitational pressures to expanding
gaseous remnants thrown off by dying Stars the famous Orion Nebula is a star
forming region only 1500 light years away making it the closest large star
forming region to Earth because it is so bright and prominent located just below
Orion's Belt this nebula is one we can see with the uned eye it also offers an
excellent Peak at Stellar birth for those with telescopes this nebula is an enormous
cloud of gas and dust where vast numbers of new stars are forged it's bright
central region is the home of four massive young stars that shape the
nebula these four Hefty stars are called the trapezium because they are arranged
in a trapezoidal pattern ultraviolet light Unleashed by
these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller
Stars this stunning Hubble image offers the sharpest view of the Orion Nebula
ever obtained creat ated using 520 different Hubble exposures taken in
multiple wavelengths of light this Mosaic contains over 1 billion
pixels the image's orange color represents hydrogen green is oxygen and
red represents both sulfur and observations made in infrared
light while the Orion Nebula is in the midst of creating new stars other nebuli
result from aging and dying Stars s this image of the Cat's Eye Nebula
shows a bullseye pattern of 11 or even more concentric Rings each ring is
actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky that's why
it appears bright along its Outer Edge observations suggest cat's eye was
created when a mediumsized star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at
1500-year intervals these convulsions created dust shells that form a layered
concentric structure around the dying star the view from Hubble is like seeing
an onion cut in half where each skin layer appears as a ring each shell
contains as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined W then there are the Supernova
remnants like the Crab Nebula these nebula are made of debris
from exploded stars in the year 1054 ad Chinese
astronomers recorded a guest star that was visible even in the daytime sky for
nearly a month the guest star they observed was actually the Supernova
explosion that created the Crab Nebula today the Crab Nebula is still
visible as a six Lightyear wide remnant of that violent event
this large Mosaic of the Crab Nebula was assembled from 24 individual exposures
captured by Hubble over 3 months the orange filaments are the tattered
remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen green is sulfur and red
indicates doubly ionized oxygen these elements were expelled
during the Supernova explosion the leftover ultra dense core
of the exploded star remains as a rapidly spinning neutron star in the
center of the Crab Nebula electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around the Stars magnetic
field lines produce the Eerie blue light in the interior of the
nebula the neutron star like a lighthouse ejects twin beams of
radiation that make it appear to pulse 30 times per second as it rotates wow
nebuli are some of the most beautiful objects in our universe their incredible
shapes and colors will always Inspire Humanity to keep looking up at the stars
and with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope we will continue to be able to uncover the many Mysteries of
the
universe
[Applause]
hello everybody this is Scott Roberts from explore Alliance and the an explore scientific and this is the 75th Global
star party we have a great lineup of speakers um that we'll be introducing
you to uh but you know one of the things I want to say about the theme this week
of scale and perspective is this is something that a lot of us that are
involved in educational Outreach and astronomy uh try to give um first timers
a sense of we want them to understand that uh there's their size their place
in the universe uh and um you know to some it it's a little disconcerting to find out
just how tiny we are and and the small space that we
occupy uh you know on our planet um and uh you know the but to others uh they
find it liberating because they understand that they are just a that their problems are nowhere near as big
as what they make them out to be in their minds and uh that they really are part of something that's incredibly vast
and huge um but uh uh perhaps uh you
know this will be further explained and in fact I know it will be uh as we get
through our our speakers tonight but uh I do want to turn this over to uh doid
Le Levy uh great friend of mine uh great friend of everyone here on global star
party and a great friend to astronomers everywhere uh David it's it's great to have you on global star party
again well thank you Scotty and uh it's good to see you good to be here but I'm
not at our shac Observatory right now I am at the uh shawa astronomy complex and
I'd like to just show you a little bit around about where what we're doing the sun has just set as you can see a little
bit of red over there and Venus will be coming out very soon and I'm here with
David Roser and I hope he'll come back a little later and when he does I'll I'll
introduce him to everybody but uh he has brought his telescope uh on comedi is
here to give you a little bit of a show and uh he's going to be using that and
I'm hoping to use it myself a little later to look at Daffy Duck which is a
uh very strange uh grouping a little little
strange nebulosity and that is in the um in the
um in the Milky Way right near right in the middle the North American nebula we
all know where um the Gulf of Mexico is and we all know where um where uh baath
and island is not exactly portrayed not portrayed exactly but it's kind of in
between the Gulf of Mexico just a little bit north of that and I'm hoping to be able to see it tonight and I called it
Daffy Duck it's number 403 in my little catalog of of objects that have
brightened my nights since I began searching for comets so long ago 56
years ago and this is um here as you know is uh is
manura manura usually sits next to me when I'm at The Observatory at home but
tonight manura is actually going to be used and it's getting ready to be used
right now and uh anyway I'm going to do a little quotation for you it has to be
from memory tonight because I'm out I'm not at the observatory site at home and
so I'm GNA quote from Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet and uh this is a very
special quotation one of one of Shakespeare's best and it goes like this
come gentle night come loving black brown night give
me my Romeo and when he shall die take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make
the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay
no worship to the G son when David comes
back I will introduce him to everyone and I might interrupt someone else just
a little bit just so that I could introduce David if that's okay in the meantime you're you're allowed no
problem thank you the meantime back to you Scott thank all right all right well that's great um uh we uh uh I I promised
earlier in our our earlier broadcast today that uh you know since this is the 75th Global star party that we would
have a special uh door prize so uh door prizes are conducted by the astronomical
League um uh they have been doing it uh for I don't know how many Global star
parties now but quite a few and um they are uh they come up with uh uh questions
uh for the audience to answer uh uh and um and the winners uh are are picked by
the astronomical League um we we uh we we help support that through our you
know our own door prizes and we have prize partners that are involved in this as well uh which is which is great mark
the mark Slade remote Observatory for instance is one of them um and uh so uh
we'll I'm going to turn this over to Terry man who's the Secretary of the astronomical league and um Terry how how
are you doing today I'm doing pretty good how about you Scott pretty good
pretty good I'm feeling good it's the 75th uh anniversary uh our special door
prize is going to be a $300 gift certificate certificate uh that you use
um you know so that that should cover the cost of of uh a few accessories or
one very special accessory or put a down payment on a really nice accessory or telescope so yeah that sounds fantastic
yes all right well I will go ahead then share my screen and start with the door prizes everybody close their eyes this
was supposed to be on the beginning there we
[Music] go a I'm
sorry something to kill a little time there all right uh we're gonna start
with what we always start with uh never look at the sun without the proper filtration no matter what you're using
whether you cover up your finder to look at it through a telescope or anything
always have the proper solar filter before you ever use any Optical
equipment to look at the Sun and so what I would like to start with is the answers from November
23rd the first question was this long dark feature call a filament is actually
a and it is a prominence of the primary eight planets
in the solar system how many have Rings ring systems and that would be four h
we've got what Saturn Jupiter
Uranus and Neptune Neptune
much all right and speaking of looking back time gnz11 is the furthest Galaxy
ever observed we're seeing it as it looked 14 13.4 billion years ago but how far is it
from us now and that answer is 32 billion light years wow yeah some of
that you know some of these numbers just really kind of blow your mind a little bit you don't really you always know
you're looking back in history or back in time when you're looking up sometime
we're going to have to figure out a good number system so you can actually understand better what 32
billion each light year 5.9 trillion miles so yeah 3 billion that's that's
how far away it is so yes it it's a long way Terry would you mind explaining to
us uh how how this thing can be 32 billion years if the universe is only
13.8 billion years old I don't understand
that I don't have that answer either if I did I would tell you because SpaceTime
is stretched yeah the space is the universe is still expanding so while we looked at
it you know that much time ago the Galaxy is
still moving on right the balloon still inflating still inflating yes yeah there
we go all right thank you and the people that answered those correctly are listed
here from the November 23rd and what would usually do is we announce the door
prize winners at the first Global Star Party of the next month so like next
week next Global star party we will announce the November winners at that time and there will be three of them or
maybe Scott with your special prize there might be four then I don't know how you want to do that so uh whatever
it is yeah let's make it four let we won't take away one of the other door prizes we'll just add on to it okay so
so next month on the very first star party of December we will announce four winners and one of those will be the
grand prize winner for the 75th Anniversary that's funny the league had
their 75th anniversary and now it's kind of the 75th anniversary of the star
parties right that's right yeah nice yeah so it's but uh we didn't have to
work out as long as you guys did yeah yeah there's a little bit of time and a little bit of time that's
right history there all right so the questions for tonight and please send
your answer answers to secretary at astr league.org the first question is in 1610
Galileo discovered 36 stars in this cluster sometimes it is called the
manger cluster what is another name for this
cluster and again please send your answers to secretary at as league.org
next question what star is the fifth brightest star visible from
Earth makes you wonder doesn't it makes me wonder why a car is sitting
there yeah you never know you never know you never know
that's right that car come from that scar all right the pistol star is
invisible through optic gold telescopes if it were placed if the pistol star
were placed in the center of our solar system it would cover the Earth in
Flames is that true or false and again please send your answers
to secretary at astr league.org pistol star yes and uh as we were talking
earlier we'd like to invite you to this Friday's astronomical League live this
one will actually be 13 um our speaker will be Matt Penn
discussing the dynamic Eclipse broadcast initiative and that will be an amazing
talk we're looking forward to hearing from him we'll have all the regulars Carol Don NAB will be joining us and he
is the chair one of the chairs of the regions of the astronomical league and David Levy will be here and Scott and
myself and we never know who else might pop in that's right yes so please join
us December 3rd at 7 pm Eastern Standard Time right here and thank you very much
Scott be before I let you go Terry um uh I know that the astronomical league has
been growing in membership but H how do you become a member of the astronomical League you can do it two ways you can
join on our website we have different levels of U membership and just look at
the website and you will will see I think it says join and that is join the
astronomical League the preferred way I think is if you have a local club that
is a member of the astronomical league and you can also check that on our website it will be under clubs and it is
divided by States you can click on the state and it will tell what clubs are in
what cities and if they're a member um then you can join the club and then you
can become a member of the astrona iCal League that way too and that's how most
of our members uh seem to be joining but if you don't have a club locally you can
be a member at large um and there like I said there's three or four other other levels also and you will have the same
rights as a member of the clubs so either way excellent thank you Scott I appreciate
it thank you Terry thank you very much okay uh that's that's great can I
interrupt you for a bit yeah go ahead David okay um David is back now and I
would like to introduce you to David Roser who is right here at the uh at the
meeting and would like to say hello to everyone hello to everyone it's getting dark nice Sunset
we're looking forward to a great night yeah now now David and doid uh the chawa
site is isn't that owned by the uh Tucson Astronomical Society is that
right yes it's owned by the Tucson amateur astronomy Association okay astronomy Association and uh uh what
what is that club like I mean is that a um uh is it a great club for uh uh
experienced people or beginners or for everyone how do you think um it's great for everyone it's
um they it's about 500 members so it's a big Club they've got a great they've got
a great um uh group for beginners and they meet every single month so it's a
great place to learn wonderful Aster Imaging group uh involved in it too so if you want to learn that uh they're
some really skilled people so kind of all over the map they've got everything for you including the Tucson Junior
Amateur astronomy Association which is part of the junior astronomical League
we will be meeting again in two Sundays from last Sunday and let Scotty know if
you'd like to join and he can send you the link for next meeting right that's right so if you're
a young you're a young person or someone that uh is in support of young uh people
in astronomy you know this is something he should be paying attention to the league has taking this very seriously
and uh I think you're G to see a big push towards membership and we're all protein here
because we're in favor of teenage astronomers that's right that's
right okay and when I was here before I introduced you all to Archimedes which is right here a
telescope we'll be using and again of course to um to uh to manura that is
here out getting ready to look at the sky and uh I don't know if you can see
Venus but Venus is shining very brightly right now and so is Jupiter out there
coming out into the night so back to you Scotty thanks okay so we're going to go
back uh we were in Ohio with Terry uh bouncing down to Arizona with da David
Levy and uh and now we're going to Canada up to the Montreal center of the
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada with uh Professor Kareem Jaffer also of
John Abbott College uh Kareem it's uh it's great to have you on yet again um
uh you always give great presentation and you always invite very very interesting people thanks Scott we're
going to have fun tonight we've got a couple of people lined up uh we've got Russell Fric our Outreach coordinator
here at the Montreal Center we've got uh Nathan heler Melman from the Victoria
Center who we met a couple of weeks ago and who fascinated us all with h not
just his journey in astronomy but also his incredible wit the puns that he brought in and the comics that he shared
with us so we're looking forward to that but I always like talking a little bit about the theme and the theme that Scott
went with today he mentioned a little bit about this scale and perspective so what I decided to do is I'm going to share with you in a few minutes a simple
activity that I use with kids when we do Outreach but I've started actually using
it for my class as well and I'll talk to you a little bit about why but I want to start by just mentioning something that
Terry said she said that if you have a local astronomy club you could join them and then join the astronomical League
that way I actually joined a not local Club in order to also join the astronomical
league and that's the lowbrows in Michigan because a lot of the clubs because of covid have come online just
as our Montreal Center has done and so it's possible to be an active part of a
club even if you don't live in the area and I know in the US there are a lot of clubs now the astronomical League
stretches far and wide through the continental US and even offc continent a bit but it's important to recognize that
there are ways even online to get your astronomical fixed so I highly suggest
if you have a chance join the astronomical League join a local Club you'll get a lot out of it speaking of
the local clubs and what you can get out of it I want to do a quick check-in with the RC and last time around I talked to
you a bit about some of the YouTube programs that we have we also have a speaker series that's co-hosted by Sky
News Magazine up here in Canada and I've spoken previously to the global Star
Party audience about the MCM Moon's project which is one of the ones that started at the RC seven years ago now
where we've been trying to store and and share the heritage of some of our first Nations so the mcmah moons project is
actually our featured speaker this week so on Thursday evening 7M Eastern Standard Time you can listen to the
individuals who started the mcmoon project and hear a little bit about where the project has gone in these past
seven years locally in our Montreal Center I've talked to you a bit about the event that we have coming up this
Saturday but it actually had to shift our speaker had to cancel luckily we
have a local exec who is our space exploration expert David Schuman and so he's going to be talking about the
scientific missions of the Apollo the 15 16 and 17 where they had the lunar Rovers where they had Extended stays on
the moon surface extended being you know a couple of nights but still that was pretty hefty for us in the you know
early 70s and the moon so 50 years ago the science we did on the moon we are still learning from so join us on
Saturday if you want to learn a little bit about that bit. LE Apollo rocks in order for you to register in advance and
then lastly since doid is here I wanted to mention next Wednesday we are hosting a special Clubhouse for members and
guests and it's on dovid's Journey Through the RC Montreal Center in his
early days when he was a bit of a rebellious teen and he's going to talk a little bit about some of the trials tribulations and the friendships that
have formed and he is our honorary president he's very close relationship with our society so I would love to see
some of the GSP audience and some of the GSP VIPs out with us on Wednesday night
of next week 800 PM start time Eastern Standard Time what I wanted to talk to
you about today though was this idea of scale but within our solar system so we
love doing Outreach and one of the activities that we've been doing for the past few years is this thing called buildup planet where we show kids that
come to our tables or kids that come for one of our solar system talks some of the images of the planets and the moons
and then we provide them with styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners for rings and even Sometimes some beads and things for
them to put moons around these planets and we have them just Express their creativity and a few years back with one
of the Girl Guides groups I decided to do an activity that I've now since then been doing even with my postsecondary
students and it's just to get a feel for the scale of our solar system so what I
do is very easy I just pick one wall somewhere in the room where we are the largest wall I can find and I put at one
end the Sun and at the other end I put Pluto and then I tell them here's the sun here's Pluto those are kind of the
extent of the solar system I want to look at and here are Post-it notes or pictures of the other planets and the
asteroid belt and I tell them to just go and put them where they think they are and so the kids get up and they move
around and they place them where they think they are they argue with each other a little bit sometimes I'll give
different kids different planets and I'll have them do it in whatever order they randomly
choose and most of the time it ends up a little bit something like this where all
of the planets and the asteroid belt are equally spaced through the solar system
and that's the way they normally see it and when I saw and I apologize Scott if I'm picking on you here but when I saw
the logo that you did for today that's exactly why this happen I had to squeeze
it all in right exactly and we see this in the textbooks all the time and one of my pet peeves one of the things that I
worked on for years with the Ministry of Education here in Quebec was trying to tackle misconceptions that come up in
science not because the kids don't pay attention but because the way we presented them information actually
gives them the wrong idea and this is one of those Crystal Clear examples because when we're trying to show the
scale of the size of the planets we lose the scale of the distance so then I wipe clean the board
we have the sun we have Pluto and I start and this is where it's so simple because the planet the dwarf planet
Pluto is about 40 astronomical units away from the Sun and if you go exactly halfway you have Uranus Uranus is right
around the 20 astronomical units Mark halfway between Uranus and Pluto you can place Neptune and halfway between Uranus
and the sun you can play Saturn and then halfway between the Sun and Saturn at
around five astronomical units you would Place Jupiter and if you don't have a
big enough wall you run out of space in which case you have to kind of stretch it out again and start again for the
inner planets inside of that space between the Sun and Jupiter and right around the middle you place the asteroid
belt but it extends it extends from about two 2.2 astronomical units all the
way out to about 3.3 to 3.5 astronomical units so right around in the center you can place the asteroid belt and I placed
the dart Mission there because Scott was talking about the darkart mission so I wanted to make sure it was given a showcase and then between the asteroid
belt and the sun you can place Mars between Mars and the sun you can place
Venus between Venus and Mars the Earth and between Venus and the Sun Mercury
and so now you've actually placed B all of the solar system planets very roughly
but in about the position where they would be at within the entire solar system if you don't have space to do
this linearly you can actually do a curved fit where you can actually start at the Sun at the center at 0 and then
work your way up and what you're expressing there then is also the rotation or the revolution of the planet
sorry around the Sun but what's neat here then is to ask the kids
and this you can ask to any age how far have we gotten as humans from the Sun
and if you shrink down the scale again a little bit you can bring Pioneer 11 in
and Pioneer 11 is right past the 100 astronomical unit Mark at the moment and
you can talk a little bit about the Pioneer Mission and then you can talk about the two voyagers the two voyagers
have actually reach much much further they're out past the heliopause so they're far far away from our sun and
then you can ask the question how far do we have to go to get to the nearest star
other than our sun and it's 270,000 astronomical units to the nearest star
Proxima centor so if Pluto is 40 astronomical units away you're looking at
280,000 70,000 plut to get there or 7,000 Pluto to get there and so that's
kind of giving them an idea of just the simplest part of scale and perspective
just from our solar system from our home so with that I'm G to end my part with a nice happy 75th to the global star
parties it has been a blast to be part of them and I'm really happy today to be joined by a couple of friends so I want
to start off by introducing Russell Russell is our Outreach coordinator you might remember him from the 45 degree
star party which was his brainchild to be able to link up with New Zealand with the Duneden group down there and that
was a blast back on September 25th I believe that was and Russell also joined me all the way back on May 15th for the
international astronomy day where we stayed up I made it the eight hours Russell made it a good seven before he
gave up and so he's back with us tonight to talk a little bit about his journey into astronomy and astrophotography
during covid lockdown Russell we're all yours great thanks thanks GRE that's
wonderful um can you see my myh slide let's put the spotlight on you here we
go is it the right is it the right slide not yet we can see you but no sharing
yet oh no no sharing I gota push the sharing we see the greenery that's good
okay but that's that's not what I want okay where's my little button uh where's my little Zoom unit
Zoom share oh there we go yeah there we go share screen I will do that
one and another try how's that we see it awesome yay all right good stuff and
it's the slide not my little out my little view thing with all the extra slides right we see your slide Yay good
stuff all right well thanks very much Kareem well I must say that one of the best things about me joining the RC is
as meeting you and you've been really helpful I've learning a lot and as my presentation talks about I got back into
the astronomy game and specifically astrophotography during lockdown and I want to talk about it and uh after see
seeing Scott's a wonderful theme I'm going to I'm going to push the right
button there we go and talk about scale and perspective and my five challenges so far so for those of you who aren't
familiar uh Kem and I well we're from Montreal there we are in the North American spot we're a onh hour flight
due north from New York City it's a and you can see there's a little bit difference between the weather here in
Montreal Canada and in Arkansas you can see Scott with his golf shirt and I've got a very big wool sweater
and there's a few differences for those of you who want to know we're at 45 degrees north so that's the same as like
U southern France and Northern Italy uh Minnesota Washington State Oregon Maine
that kind of stuff so we're about there and uh like you uh we uh our our
lockdown for covid-19 started on March 13th and I know because I was doing a big public event on the evening of March
12th and people were starting to get nervous in the next morning everything closed and we were surrounded by signs
like this to stay home so what are you supposed to do well my first scale and
perspective challenge where do I start I haven't done astronomy like since I was a teenager I live in a bright city of
more than two to three million people I look up in the sky and my limiting magnitude is like 2.8 to maybe three if
I'm lucky there we are from the satellite view Montreal is a nice little island and it's lots of light you can't
see much and of course my goal was I want to see the good stuff although I
didn't know what the good stuff was I just heard that yeah it's going to be small faint and really far
away and I'm stuck in my backyard we had police robing uh our neighborhood to
make sure people didn't go out of their house unless uh they were going for Approved purposes like food shopping and
medical stuff so you couldn't just like walk around so I'm stuck and uh thinking like a sign
scientists I guess I'm trying to how do I get the most photons and I'm doing a little bit of research oh maybe I've got
two two pass if I take the visual one I get the biggest scope possible but other
people are doing this photography stuff where they're talking about exposure and that kind of stuff I don't know so my
starting point is here I think I'm going to get uh a really big uh like a
Celestron SCT or maybe one of Scott's 10 or 12 inch dobsonians get a got them all
encoded I just point and take a look and be great then I start doing a lot of
reading I do start a lot of reading so I went to Amazon like most people would I
couldn't go to my local bookstore and I bought a whole bunch of books like these ones so the Dickinson Dyer the the Bible
the backyard astronomers guide uh astrophotography someone told me oh you should get this pix Insight thing it's
like oh what is what is P's Insight so I started reading that that sounds pretty interesting and uh so I kept on that I
kept on doing that but that wasn't enough oh there's and there's Spotify so I listen to a whole bunch of Spotify
broadcasts when I'm allowed to go walking it's pretty good American Canadian European and of course I
consult all the gurus on YouTube what should I be doing and the
best thing I did was join the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada because then I can me people like like Kem
that's just it's really great so after about three months I come up with my selection criteria I'm a good engineer
by training so uh Best Optical quality I'm looking for something maybe I need to track the Sky Keeps moving all the
time I want something like hasslefree easy to assemble not too complicated and
I've got a very narrow stairs and uh my wife made it clear that whatever I get has to be in the basement and uh it's a
very narrow staircase and I need to bring it upside upstairs and outside every time I'm not getting any younger
so I can't have it too big and I can't have it too heavy and unfortunately I'm I'm I live and I'm paid in Canadian
dollars which are only worth 75 to 80 American cents and I can't see Polaris
to do a polar aligner those are my limitations so I just dig out my old
camera this is my 12-year-old Canon XSI camera which I hadn't touched in like 10 years and a 22-year old tripod in the
basement and I aim it up and I wonder if I could take a picture and there it is that's my first Astro photo ever hey
it's not bad not bad I just a up push the button see what happens it's pretty
good well welcome to my backyard in the spring it's uh very muddy uh it's a bit
small and it's surrounded by by neighbors especially if you can see the mouse this one they have these bright
hallogen Arc lamps in their kitchen no curtains and they're on till like at least midnight I don't know why they do
this just because they know I'm out here I guess right so I talked to a lot of
people and this is my this is the recommendation I get so I buy it I get it for my birthday well it's very
exciting my birthday is in June so I got it in June and you will recognize a lot of this equipment so it's a evil star 80
I've got my camera I've got guided camera I've got a flattener a nice tripod a nice Mount uh filter mini
computer and there's one item you probably don't recognize that's my anti- raccoon stick because in my neighborhood we're
surrounded by lots of animals and raccoon are are are afraid of nothing and I had one of my first evenings out
very very late in the summer raccoon comes up and jumps onto my shoulder looking for food and W starts chewing
cables and a whole bunch of stuff so every time I'm out when it's warm out I bring my anti raccoon stick mandatory
equipment better raccoons than skunks well the skunks came too but they don't
bother you they just walk straight through because they know you're going to leave and it's true but they are very cute yes and
stinky yeah well I don't want to hear I don't want to try that part and uh I did
my 30-day trials on nebulosity and astrop pixel processor and pix insight
and eventually I picked pix Insight I figured it's going to be I I'll try it out hopefully it'll work and so far it
has so it took me about uh three weeks of trial and error we don't we don't get
a lot of good Skies oops sorry that's the wrong a lot of good Skies unlike doid over in and Tucson um and uh
eventually got it working and this is not a great picture but I'm always going to treasure it because it's the first one that ever worked so it's a 25 minute
exposure on a on a non-modified camera with my new equipment and hey I can
recognize it and so good my wife actually had it framed it's downstairs cool I was very happy yes scale and
perspective Challenge number two Winter's coming I'm talking in July and
a good montrealer always thinks about winter coming in July because it's going to come faster than we can get ready for
it so this is one of my neighborhood streets little side streets and and it's a typical winter day and if you're
commuting to work like I used to do for more than a decade and a half you have to shovel your car out every morning and
the minute you leave someone else is going to mooch that parking spot and you've got to mooch one later on in the evening when you come home that's part
of the deal and here here's my backyard in early April and the challenge is what
am I going to do when it's like minus 20 out so again I go and consult the gurus
and the solution is this I get I buy a little mini PC and I put Nina and I tried all this different software Nina
seemed to work and I use Microsoft remot de remote desktop and uh it works and
it's it's been battle tested to two below Fahrenheit or minus 19 up to a
distance of 10 meters or 30 feet and it's reliable it's pretty good it slows
down a bit but it really works so Challenge number three for scale and perspective uh quest for Dark
Skies well I'm in the city there's no Dark Skies here and the neighbors have their lights on all the time and in the
summer one of the neighbors has a party all the time every weekend with all of his buddies and it's all uh 70s rock
music so I think he's about the same age as me I recognize all the tbes so normally I I think the best
place to go is actually just below the Border in the US in the Adera there's like nothing there it's very we used to
go hiking there a lot like Lake plaid area Elizabeth Town or Northern Vermont Northern New Hampshire but of course
it's co and the border is closed so we have a couple of provincial parks here
one called MK which is used by one of the local universities where they have a big uh Observatory there one 1.2 meter
uh Observatory and then we have monan park over here so they're bort three as
opposed to bort 9 or 10 or eight or nine where I am so this is a here's a 30-
second snap with my camera just on a little tripod I what the skies are really nice so
relaxing and when I look at my pictures that I take with my camera I count the number of stars with my little pic
insight and it's an it's an order of magnitude bet it's more than 10 times stars with like the same exposure same
equipment and even with a full moon out in the in the dark sky it's like wow it's it's really really good so I found
my dark sky it takes about two hours two two to three hours to get there though so it's not for
free uh and I of course especially in the winter I don't want to hassle of setting up so I I go to uh omon in in
Germany and I get this little windup Mount and it works and I buy a nifty50 a
50 millimeter uh fixed lens and I put it on my camera and uh I can do this it's
like oh my go this is not bad I was impressed so
that's like a 10 11 minute exposure on this little windup Mount 30 second exposure stack them up push the lens to
F4 so the the Stars aren't deformed and yeah it's pretty nice and of course this is mid this is early January so for sure
the temperature is no higher than like minus 20 outside so I don't want to be out there very long Russell how how long
could that wind up Mount track for uh well in the W in the winter it was
officially it would try should be able to track for about an hour I've never used it more than 20
minutes but it still kept on going really cool no no electricity required
that's great no batteries wind up Mount and has it has like little uh it has these little hooks where you you connect
to and that it changes the tension so depending on the on the weight of the of
the if you got a camera or a small scope it's rated to three kilos which is like a I guess s pounds but I tried my um
what did I try I tried my um red star 51 no too big but I I think an SLR with 135
millimeter lens it would work just fine very cool yeah it was really nice I
was impressed and was it was cheap until I had to pay the duty oh because it came
in from Germany so it was pretty cheap it was like I don't know 10 and something years
and it was about the same amount of money and Duty for Canada like you get it
yeah but you know you just put it in your bag and it's a piece of cake and that's it so I really liked it
yeah uh okay so going to dark sky I have my little windup mount my U my lx3 but
uh for more serious stuff to go beyond maybe 30 seconds at a time I bring my ABX mount my camera a little battery
remote shutter release and I bought a William Optics red cat very very nice
and uh I can just set that up um I can point it at wherever I want through the
uh the software that's included with the mount and I'm getting up to 90 seconds
unguided to give images like this this is m81 M82 nice so 70 stack 90 seconds
and yep I was like wow this is this is really nice and it's hasslefree well
sort of hasslefree the battery doesn't work uh so some observations where where I live in Montreal on it's not like
Tucson we get if we're lucky on average over the 12 months I counted one night in six that was actually clear enough to
do anything up to at least an hour and imaging in my backyard before clouds or
something else came along so it wasn't so good that's because you started during a good year yeah that's right I have no
empirical evidence that it's gotten any worse or better yeah you're right maybe I jinxed
it so kareim was it better before the year before you joined it was
so much worse it really okay it's like God yeah and this month is crappy too a
couple weeks ago was pretty good yeah um other things that I've learned that everyone else learns eventually um do
you move up from a DSLR to an asro dedicated camera and I decide didn't know because again it was the hassle
factor I got to plug in something it's got a remot control I wanted as little hassle as possible so I sent my camera
uh to this guy in Bas in Vancouver night sky camera and uh it works so here's a
comparison on the left is the California nebula and it's two two and a half hour
exposure and that's the best I could get I was like what and then this is like an hour so I was like oh this really
works uh other little challenges guiding and precision so my my Mount is you know
it's a it's a good Mount but uh I'm getting between one and one and a half Arc seconds after learning how to use
phd2 this free software if you're interested you can get it uh at openg guiding
toorgle scale with uh with my uh 0ed U my doublet refractor is about 1.6 so
it's pretty close um and if I want to go any more I've got to learn better so I'm learning how to get to one AR second now
and and trying to get it below that but it's pretty tough with this Mount I think I need a better Mount but that's
that's another that's another problem and uh my Mount is is small enough and light enough I don't have to worry about
carrying it and uh but it has a limited capacity about 15 pounds for equipment so my fourth challenge for
scale and perspectives was a quest for Di different image scales so the magnification power and uh I started off
with this one around almost 500 millimet focal length um for wide field is with
my red cat at 250 and for like big Landscapes I use my 50 millimeter it's
pretty nice and then two weeks ago or three weeks ago I got my my use Celestron 6s which will give me a focal
length of 1500 and if I use a bar Barlo lens I can get the
3,000 so my final challenge for a scale and perspective is my quest for Imaging
objects different distances I've always been fascinated by our human ability to
look at the ground and see a very small Leaf which is the size of few centimeters or a few inches or even look
very tiny at a piece of dust then look up at the sky and I'm instantly looking at something that's two million light
years away like the Andromeda galaxy and I just thought wow that is so cool and here so like I like what Kareem just put
together so I had a similar challenge here how do I put all these distances on so I used a log scale
based in kilometers and on the left it's a th000 kilometers here in the middle around around here 10 to the 13th is one
lightyear and I'm going up the 10 to the 22 so this is 19 orders of magnitude of
distance that I could I have been able to image with my little backyard outfit
so I I'm pretty impressed and if I start so the distance will be shown by this bar as it goes from left to right uh I
was on vacation in September and I got my little cell phone and uh I saw there's this big thing in the sky I
wonder if that's the ISS so I put the phone on a Little Rock leaned it back and maximum exposure was 10 seconds and
there it is so ISS distance is 400
kilometers very and you don't need any equipment except your phone pretty
cool then at a little bit further is the moon about 380,000 K and uh I took some
pictures of those and um pretty happy so I'm learning how to take good pictures as opposed to just any pictures um and I
can see different scales of course there's the moon at 93,000 no 93 million miles or 150
million kilometers and again I got a free solar filter with my Celestron C6
so I've been trying that out too although there's not too many opportunities recently it's always crappy
out uh Jupiter so Kareem you mentioned Jupiter so yeah I guess the scales seem
to be a bit squishy on this log but uh on the log scale but uh so I took the mean
distance um and my first picture ever of a planet with my new or my old my new
Celestron so I was pretty happy with a planetary camera we see the Great Red Spot yeah I was like oh it's really
there it's not a conspiracy and uh then I tried to push
it so I got Uranus and it's like yep it's not a star it's got the nice color so it's it's pretty
cool that's a uh 10 to the 9.5 or two 26
or 2.6 billion kilometers away and here we are at the one lightyear point and we
got this I've got this big void so I didn't I didn't put any like individual stars but I guess I could do that but
the next one I have is our our closest many of you know I guess our closest open cluster is a ples at 440 Lighty
years and uh so this again is from the backyard with all the backyard equipment
and um yeah so it's it's pretty good uh then we have m42 in gang so at 1300
Lighty years roughly and this is taken by one of the dark sites with the uh
guiding free hasslefree simple setup I just put it up and it's pretty good
they're 30 second exposures No Mess no fuss I just put a whole bunch of them and it was really working then we have a further a field
at 35 million light years we had like uh well I did a lot of galaxies with my evil star 80 and around 35 million light
years we have a Leo triplet um and my big Target was what's
the furthest thing I can do can I really image this quazar so I did my best and I
uh took an image it took about I think about 50 like five zero minutes just to
be sure I capture because I knew the it was quite faint at magnitude 13 and uh then I went to uh one of the
uh Nassau sites where they had a list of all the quazars and they had an this image in a finder View and so I compared
and I went yeah yeah I did get it oh pretty cool even though it looks like a
star and I wish if I if I had I don't know Kareem if your uh spectroscopy uh
outfit can detect that red shift it can and we can also do uh very like we can
actually keep it on for a while and measure the photometry of it oh okay yeah I have to pass it to you yeah yeah
I would be really Keen uh to see that red shift because it because otherwise it just looks like a
star it's like okay yeah I guess it's all right but it's 25 it's 2.5 billion
light years away it's wow and all from the backyard so for for me and scale and
perspective I'm I'm pretty impressed so I've got a setup that I can see uh 19 orders of magnitude and maybe
more in terms of distance and and just getting started
thanks very much that's incredible wow it's all from the home
it's all from the home all from the house so y yep yep the cosmos starts in
your backyard so that's that's uh no matter where you are maybe it just
starts right in front of your nose you know so it may be somewhere closer than
that yeah they're just waiting out there they are just waiting out there well that's right so very very interesting
I'm glad you uh put the uh distance you know the scale and perspective uh
aspects to that and uh people loved your scale uh that that you created there so
it's very cool oh great thanks and I think for your cloudy days and nights we can get you a microscope with your
camera so that you can just go the other direction that's right that's right one of these days I'm gonna get someone that
has access to an electron microscope and see if they can take us on a real deep voyage that would be very cool so
definitely it would be like that old movie from the 70s powers of 10 you could do yeah actually I wanted to download that
movie and show it but you know it's very much copyrighted and for sure can't do
that so we all saw it in high school at one point we own we own a copy at my college and I showed the students at the
start of the term the powers of 10 it's great now do you show the 1974 version
or or the I show them the original even even the cosmos one when we do the when we do the cosmic calendar even though
some of the time some of the timings are off still I should still show the Carl San one yeah yeah I like a lot of the
original ones right very cool but you can certainly find those on YouTube and
uh I recommend that you go watch them so very cool uh so is H is Nathan with us at
this point Nathan is with us yeah and so uh I was very happy when Nathan reached out and said that he's interested in
coming back to give another presentation and that he already has an idea and I said okay great well when you have a
chance to work out the idea let me and we'll plan A Tuesday he's like oh it's ready I was like great so we talked to
Scott and it was a perfect timing for the 75th Global star party I'm happy to bring back Nathan Helder Messin Nathan
we are all yours we're captive waiting to see hello everyone uh just by the way
the powers of 10 uh movie I really hope that wasn't live action and if it was I
feel really bad for the cinematographer there like getting launched out of the Galaxy and then back again like geez
that's effort man as long as he came back again right yeah well then he kind of like it kind of just ended inside the
atom I don't know what happened to him then that's that's this that's theh setup for the next Ant-Man oh right yeah
yeah all right so um here is this is the idea that I had it and just on topic
with the scale of the solar system I mentioned in my last present that I'm kind of like the type of person
who thinks about parabolic trajectories and the lift drag ratio when I'm playing frisbee and this is exactly what happen
so basically um yeah I was playing frisbee one day thinking about how the
Frisbee was um skipping off of the air in the Earth's atmosphere and then I was
like does it have to be Earth's atmosphere um so yeah so as Humanity
expands outwards in our exploration across the solar system uh it seems
natural that frisbees will come with us obviously um so an interesting fact you
may not know is that NASA is planning to bring frisbees to the moon during its
Artemis lunar missions and the reason you may not have heard of that is because they're not actually doing that
just to be [Laughter] clear but what if they did um so playing
a game of frisbee on other planets would no doubt be a totally different experience than any frisbee game ever
played on Earth uh so in fact like even the way that people would play Frisbee would change so in short what would
happen if we took some average frisbee players and put them on another planet with space suits um so yeah how
would the Frisbee fly and would a proper game of frisbee even be possible um so
yeah I'm just going to make some assumptions about the frisbee beforehand so it's thrown at a 10° inclination uh
and the players consistently throw it at 30 m a second um and the frisbee is also
30 cmers across and has a mass of 200 grams and of course it also has some
Jazzy NASA logos on the front because that's just awesome um so all the laws
of aerodynamics for this frisbee would be about the same from planet to planet except for the air density which would
have big consequences is as you're about to see so on Earth which is the only planet
in the universe that we know of that has had Frisbee games on it uh the Frisbee
would fly pretty well if I threw it at 30 meters a second it would fly for 115
meters um and if someone was there to catch it it would arrive at them at a little bit slower 25 meters a second uh
it wouldn't have lost that much speed to drag all right that's it for Earth with Earth out of the way um suppose you now
get aboard an imaginary spacecraft filled with frisbees or you know what you could just
get award an actual spacecraft filled with frisbees if you wanted to but you know I don't know where you're going to find that um so yeah if I were in a
spacecraft filled with frisbees uh firstly I'd probably be wondering like why I was there and second I'd want to
try them out so although it's not really Another World um I think that the
International Space Station would be an interesting place to play Frisbee even though it may not be the best idea to
play Frisbee in a pressurized module um so on the
ISS um you have only three of the four fundamental forces of stable flight uh
you don't have uh weight and so without weight it would turn out pretty
different so uh on the ISS the pressure is or I mean it really ought to be equal
to that on Earth so um if I threw a frisbee on the ISS it would immediately
begin accelerating upward with no gravity to contract lift um so it would
accelerate Upward at about 2.6 meters a second but that doesn't actually matter because the largest single module on the
ISS is 11.2 meters long and 4.4 meters wide so if I threw the Frisbee at the
speed of 30 m a second in less than a second it would hit the wall and you know at that point one of two things
would happen either it would kind of annoy whoever I was throwing it to or it would annoy a lot of people and a lot of
people on the ground too would get extremely angry um so yeah I don't think
that playing frisbee on the SS is the best idea so on word so playing frisbee
on the moon uh the Moon is the easiest world to get to beyond Earth and people
have already been there so it would certainly be the most convenient place to have an off World game of frisbee uh
so on the moon there isn't any air meaning that you have also three missing
forces uh needed for staple flight so you have no thrust as you'd expect for a
frisbee uh but also no drag or lift the Frisbee still has weight um it has one
sixth of the Earth's gravity so it's like hardly flying anymore it's just basically traveling and just just
falling due to gravity so if I was on the moon with the Frisbee after standing for about 10 minutes wondering how I was
there I would give the Frisbee a good throw um on the moon if I threw it with
the stated parameters it would fly for 195 meters actually it wouldn't really
be flying it would just be like coasting but still 195 meters in the lower gravity uh and if I was throwing it to
someone it would arrive at the exact same speed that I had thrown it at which was 30 m a second um yeah although the
Frisbee wouldn't really be flying it I think it would be really fun um now like I mentioned there would be no air
resistance so if I threw the Frisbee Upward at 45 degrees instead of 10 degrees the Frisbee could actually fly
upward of 600 meters before landing wow um now there's some problems with that
uh given how far a frisbee could go in the lower gravity uh you might have to throw it a little slower than on Earth
if you wanted to have a proper game um you'd also need to have a pretty good catching arm because you know the
frisbees wouldn't slow down at all and the only thing keeping you alive would be a thin layer of glass in front of
your head so yeah you better be careful um so now that the Earth system is out of the way I'll start at the center of
the solar system and work my way out so uh this next one turned out kind of
interesting so uh since the sun isn't solid uh there wouldn't be any surface
to play on so you'd have to imagine an artificial surface being built on the surface of the
Sun so yeah what would happen if you played frisbee on the surface of the Sun uh any guesses anyway so the sun's
atmosphere is actually extremely thin only 0.2 grams per cubic meter um that's
basically a vacuum so the Frisbee wouldn't really fly in the atmosphere of the Sun for other reasons too but you
know as the air um yeah the air would be too thin to fly so after running some
calculations I noticed something really cool actually uh the immense power of
the solar wind and the radiation just coming off of the sun would actually be able to counteract the gravity of the
sun on the Frisbee and it could actually allow the Frisbee to fly for quite a long distance um so if someone threw the
Frisbee in the middle of a prominence or a solar flare the force of the radiation
and the solar wind would actually be able to allow the Frisbee to fly for hundreds if not thousands of kilometers
just uh supported by the sun's solar winds so this sounds amazing so it kind of makes you wonder if there's any
negative effects of throwing a frisbe on the surface of the Sun well I mean everything would be
turned to plasma and be destroyed immediately so you know there's that well someone in chat is calling it a
fries bee a fries bee
that's only a small detail to work out you the hot plasma and the corona being
actually hotter than the surface that's you can work that out I'm trying to
figure out if it would end up being a cannibal Frisbee and just eat up all the other frisbees that were sent out earlier at slower
speeds the gravity of the sun um so yeah as you can probably tell
the sun is not the best place to play for be so uh how about Mercury so it Mercury
does have its Mysteries that would make it an exciting place to explore but when it comes to playing frisbee there uh
it's actually kind of boring so Mercury is a lot like the moon in terms of its
frisbee games but higher gravity on Mercury so it wouldn't even fly as far
uh only 88 meters and then it would just fall to the ground and once it fell to the ground of course another unfortunate
aspect of playing frisbee on Mercury is that the daytime side of mercury can reach 430 degrees
C uh so frisbee are made of high density polyethylene which begins to melt at 130
degrees C so yeah as the Frisbee traveled it would begin to heat up and melt but it actually wouldn't do that
immediately because there would be no air to transmit the heat but you know after a few minutes the the direct
sunlight would begin to melt the Frisbee but if someone one failed to
catch it and it fell on the ground then it would be in contact with a 430° hot
surface um and so once it touched the ground the part of the Frisbee in contact with the surface would just
immediately melt and eventually the whole frisbee would just be a puddle of plastic so yeah Mercury is also a bad
place to play Frisbee the next place is significantly worse though so Venus has the densest
atmosphere of any object in the solar system um yeah I've drawn a swimming pool here
for another reason too but mostly just because the actual scene would be kind
of grotesque so um but the Frisbee could fly well for a moment the amount of lift
a frisbee could achieve on Venus is really remarkable because you know Venus's atmosphere is 90 times as dense
as Earth's so a frisbe moving on Venus could achieve flight moving at only 3
meters a second which is actually jogging speed um but you know the
friction would also be much higher too so it would kind of just tumble and come to a stop almost
immediately um so throwing a frisbee on Venus is kind of like trying to throw something through water at a pool which
is why I've shown the pool um you know except the pool is on fire and it's also
inside a pressure cooker and it's a pool of acid so uh Venus is always 47 5° C
this is only a little hotter than Mercury but it hardly makes a difference uh the difference is that the Frisbee
wouldn't be so okay when flying so now it's not the direct sunlight heating the Frisbee but all the air around it and as
I mentioned the air is almost as dense as being in a pool so it's a little bit worse than a hot tub should I say uh
immediately after being thrown the Frisbee would just begin to melt so first it would just stop producing lift
and then it would stop Flying and then it would you know stop being a Frisbee and then it would actually evaporate
because the boiling temperature for high density polyethylene is a frigid 360
Degrees Cel which is 115 degrees colder than Venus so before any of that
actually happened the sulfuric acid in the air would have begun to just dissolve the plastic um I'm really not
promoting this well am I I just realized so you know with the effect of the acid in the temperature the Frisbee would be
totally destroyed well we haven't even dis discussed the uh effect on the human
body let alone that throwing the Frisbee so I think we can imagine that just by
looking at what happens to the Frisbee no no you missed the part where they're wearing space suits they're going to be really Hightech space suits
right ah well I should expect a high-tech frisbee then too yeah we might
need to redesign the frisbee presentation yeah you know I want to see a high-tech frisbee how to survive in
every planet as a high-tech frisbee all right I need someone to work
on that book that's
project Mike overaker says this is cool I've been a member of the international frisbee Association the professional
Disc Golf Association and the fris the freestyle frisbee Players Association
for decades I've also been a member of the ultimate frisbee Players Association for decades and I'm a master frisbee
player and played on the dis golf pro tour
uh I recommended that he asked you to give lectures to all of those groups
so could be sponsors yeah absolutely well I hope to see those guys
playing frisbee on the moon maybe some of their some of them will go there one day right
all right so you might be wondering why this person is not in like the best condition ever that I've shown here um
so you'll see that in a moment Mars is most likely where humans are going to go
next after the moon so it's also going to be where they play Frisbee next um
not that it's actually likely that humans will play Frisbee there but you know I just decided to imagine how a
frisbee game would work on Mars so Mars does have an atmosphere but it's not that thick so something as heavy as a
frisbee would really not be subject to many aerodynamic effects at the stated
speed of 30 meters a second um if it was thrown at 30 meters a second on Mars it would only
experience a minuscule 0.015 Newtons of lift um that's nowhere near the 0.65
Newtons needed to lift a frisbee on Mars um so you know if you throw it faster it
can produce more lift um and this is where this picture comes in because to
achieve the necessary 0.65 Newtons of lift needed for the Frisbee to fly properly on Mars the Frisbee would have
to be thrown at 702 kilometers an hour about as fast as some passenger
airliners fly on Earth such a speed would not only be impossible for the human to throw um if
a human arm moved that fast it would most likely fly off so this isn't work well and if you
think about what would be needed to catch that frisbee um yeah a game like
this would not end well at all for both the players
um but if you did throw it at 30 meters a second it would probably be okay it just would be kind of
boring um so yeah Mars isn't that great either deos one of mars' smaller moons
may not work so well either but at least no one gets killed um now now deos is
the smaller one of Mars's two tiny moons uh deos really is Tiny only slightly larger than Mount Everest which is
relative of course scale in perspective you know 12.4 kilometers across um
although Mars is most likely going to be like the main destination uh the two moons are objects of Interest so they
might require their own human missions and if that is the case there's a chance a frisbee game could happen there so I
decided to see how it would work so Deon has no atmosphere which means there's no
lift or drag and there's no thrust so already three forces of aerodynamic
flight are missing um but deos also has nearly no gravity
3,266 times weaker than Earth's gravity that means there's hardly any weight which is the fourth aerodynamic force
acting on the Frisbee so it basically has nearly nothing acting on it so if a
frisbee were thrown at 30 m of second on deos it would fly for over an
hour and travel for 102 kilom before landing but that isn't exactly true
because 102 kilometers is pretty far away when you consider that deos is only
12 kilometers across um 102 kilm is actually well beyond deo's sphere of
gravitational influence um deo's escape velocity is
5.6 m a second so if you throw a frisbee at 30 meters a second it's going to leave forever and
never come back oh so here's the question does it then does the Frisbee
then go in orbit around Mars it depends which way you throw it uh either way it does um if you throw it
at just the right angle you can do a Homan transfer to Phobos so that would
make for just about the coolest game of frisbee ever if one was on fos and one was on deos could be secret messages
between the two satellites yeah well it beats carrier pigeon you can't send one of those between the two moons so send
to frisbee instead I like it if you get a par pass a carrier pigeon space suit
there you go then they can there you go that's a whole another discussion about whether or not a carrier pigeon could
actually fly and direct itself uh interesting well I mean you could just
like throw the carrier but then it's not like there's not much point in having a
bird if you're throwing it so yeah I know I'd like to see NASA try
that that would be cool actually um so then on the other hand on deos um if you
want to have a proper game and it not leave forever um you could throw it much
slower uh below escape velocity but at that point um a single pass would take about 16
minutes and you know the game would kind of just get a little boring at that point so yeah probably not deos
either um now Jupiter um you need a artificial surface again and it's also
hard to Define where you're going to be playing on Jupiter because its atmosphere is so complex and the density
is so much different um it's so different at different altitudes so if
you construct an artificial platform and you set it up in the area of Jupiter's atmosphere where the pressures and
temperatures are kind of similar to Earth well then you'd be immediately
blasted by the Jovian jet stream which is a powerful wind moving at 1,400
kilometers an hour you know it kind of seems like wherever you play Frisbee you're just going to die somehow um I'm noticing this recurring
theme yeah that's a little uh faster than the breeze you might encounter during a game
of frisbee um so to compensate for this you could just assume that the platform
itself is moving along with the wind but I feel like having uh frisbee players
playing frisbee on a platform moving at 1,400 kilometers an hour May kind of
distract them from the game of frisbee so we could just like pretend that they
are unaware of the fact that they're moving at supersonic speeds um so yeah the lift and drag on
the frisbee would be about the same as Earth but you know the gravity is so much higher it would just immediately
fall to the ground it might break if it's made of lower quality plastic but remember this is a NASA Frisbee and they
are good quality so if you went uh deeper into Jupiter's atmosphere uh you
could go to the uh super critical I think it's called the super critical fluid layer which is 90 kilometers below
um where the we would have just had frisbee so um
that's around the layer where hydrogen becomes a super critical fluid um and that means it's a liquid with no defined
surface um so at that point the pressure would be about 10 times Earth's atmosphere and about 67 degrees
cus that's still not as bad as Venus at least but it's not great either um the
Frisbee would still just immediately fall to the ground but this time it would kind of tumble too because the
atmosphere would be so much denser so probably not Jupiter either so I think
I've saved the best for last Titan Saturn's largest moon um yeah
it's the largest moon of Saturn and given that fact it seems obvious that we should put a flying ring on
it thank you um sadly Titan is not going to be a place that humans visit for a while but
while um while we're not there we can always speculate so uh if humans did go
to Titan to play Frisbee it would be a Wonder to behold I think uh I mean the
place is amazing and strangely like Earth um there's rain and there's lakes
oceans rivers clouds and weather too which is something you really don't find
anywhere that's earthlike at least other than Earth um of course it's it's
different than Earth because it's made of methane and below zero temperatures all the time so uh it but it would
appear eerily similar to Earth um another similarity to Earth is of course that it would make a fantastic location
to play Frisbee um so Titan's atmosphere is one and a half times thicker than
Earth's atmosphere um and the gravity is 17th the gravity of Earth even less than
the moon and those both add up to an amazing game of frisbee so if you threw
it at 30 meters a second the Frisbee it would fly for 406 meters
um if that distance is too far for a game of frisbee you could always use a lighter throw and as a matter of fact
you could throw a frisbee on Titan and have it Fly fine at two meters a second
uh that's below jogging speed so you could literally throw a frisbee and then catch it having overtaken it uh and
that's really interesting thing that also I figured out so um so Titan you
know other than the toxic atmosphere um and the fact that it's methane and not water and the freezing temperatures um
and the overall distance from Earth and the cost of getting there uh and the dangerous outbound Journey uh and the
technology to get back and the decade long travel time it might be an even better place to play Frisbee than
Earth um so sadly the human frisbee Adventure across the solar system has
not begun yet and yeah no one has played frisbee beyond Earth but this this
generation will be the ones who go to Mars so who knows maybe someone will bring a
frisbee um given that Titan is still a long ways off for human
exploration uh it just goes to show how special the Earth is like not only are
we the Oasis of life in the universe our planet is also the only known planet we
know of that um has an excellent frisbee environment and I think that that is
something worth protecting absolutely so just one thing before I
finish up given that the theme of this star party was scale and perspective I thought I'd just make a joke about how
large the observable universe is and how people often use humans to scale to show
the true size of things and how that obviously helps to add context with the observable
universe this is also a sneak peek of one of the cartoons because this isn't coming out for a while
so um yeah that's all so uh thank you so much um wonderful if you really like if
you really like these uh oops if you really like these thought experiments like playing frisbee on
other planets um I'm currently posting these on my website nerd
anomaly.com as well so uh if you want you can check that out and if not that's also fine so uh thank you so much thank
you again very well done oh that's really I'd love to see I'd love to see the follow on to this uh going out to
the ice giants Pluto and then some of the Kyper Bel objects see some Carnage
there um that would be fun to that would be fun to watch and to read as well very
well done it was really impressive the amount of research you put into this and clearly like the research and
calculations were phenomenal like I I I was I I'm just stunned by by how much
you put in into this it it's great and I do have to say I W I read your blog
after your last visit to the GSP and it was fantastic to read you're a very good
writer and the comics are fantastic if if you haven't visited nerle
atomy.com and I just kept going back and back and back and I think I still have to do some
more well thank you so much um you know one of the things um about me is that I
really like math but I I wouldn't say that I like math just for the sake of
doing math and calculations on a piece of paper like I like to think of like ways to apply it even if they're
ridiculous like frisbee on other planets but you know I really like to think like that actually I think that's pretty
important because uh that makes the math make sense something like a game of
frisbee there was an astronomer I think Jean cernon did did take a golf ball in
a golf club to the moon and took a swipe at it I haven't read the story of if they ever what they saw when it took off
or how far it flew but experiments like that do take place um so I think
wonderful idea Frisbee's a safer experiment because if you sit there with a ball in a bat and everybody's watching
on Earth and you throw the ball and you swing and you miss it's awful but throwing a frisbee you can't miss
throwing a frisbee right well what's worse is lining the ball into your fellow astronomer and
shattering the uh shattering the helmet and everyone's watching that's kind of
like some of these other frisbee uh examples so yeah you have to be more careful with some of these
experiments to try to avoid the loss of human life yeah in Ultimate Frisbee that
might count as a foul just a foul just it might uh two
two-minute Penalty Box for for shattering someone's uh helmet
absolutely sounds fair to me there were several comments on YouTube about how wonderful your drawings and the way
you're you're sketching out your ideas it's just really nice the visuals that you put in with it it was really
capturing oh yeah the one about the person on Mars getting like their helmet shattered that one the ISS with you
could clearly see the capsule falling apart I I I initially thought you were going to say something about Russians
throwing it but I'm glad you didn't go there it's it's been said already
somewhere no the uh the Venus the uh I'll show you a picture of the swimming
pool instead I thought that was really clever uh especially the way you tied it together to the real the real discussion
about Venus I still would wanted would have wanted to see the whole Venus thing but it would have been like most of the
other planets someone's getting crushed or picture Raiders the Lost arc when
they opened the ark that's what he was trying to avoid oh yeah that guy's face melted yeah everybody's face melts yeah
I'll leave that to the fan artists right yep so very very good job I relating
that to people I think that that's really gonna help down the line uh keep doing what you're
doing right yeah we look forward to having you back Nathan that's great man so up next is uh cbella Berling game
cella's been on our program a few times and this time she's going to share some
of her out of this world astronomical toys and so
Sabella yeah so um did my dad send you the video yes uhuh you want me to play
that now yeah because I don't have it on my computer okay but it's basically about all these um cool space toys and
Christmas gifts for any children or even adults um yeah they're from some of them are
from some old classic space movies or series and then there's a bunch of Lego
ones too so they were really fun great uh do you want
to well afterwards after they watch this I'm going to ask you a couple of questions um but um but let's get this
let's get this rolling here so here we go
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
oh H do you read me do you read me H affirmative day I read
[Music] you
[Music] open the P bay doors H I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do
[Music]
that now step off the L now
that's one small step for man
one [Music]
for [Music]
for [Music]
10 9 ignition sequence start 6 5 4 3 2 1
0 all engine running lift off we have a lift
off I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't
oh I thought we were in Loop here this is great um sobella um the um
get the spotlight back on you um uh these a lot of these were Lego um uh
models and stuff what can you tell us about these yeah so um the launch Tower
isn't actually an official Lego set um I we don't really know why Lego hasn't
made an official launch Tower so we bought an off-brand one to be honest I would not recommend it it took us a long
time the pieces were falling apart and it like we had finished it about a year
ago and then when we were moving it it tipped over and it completely fell so we ended up um gluing um the important
parts but the lunch tower has about 3,000 plus pieces it took us about a
month to rebuild it it has um we attached LEDs to
light we attached LED lights to it and um it has two misters at the bottom of
the launch Tower to look like there's smoke coming out and then the ISS took me about two to six hours to build I
forget it it probably ranges um depending on what type of person you are
and it has 864 pieces but in my opinion it was the hardest one
because so many pieces looked alike and it was I messed up a lot but it was really fun and it looks exactly like the
real ISS um that one was um around
$70 um and then it comes with a stand and a mini space shuttle and then the Saturn 5 um 3 to
seven hours average build time and then it has 1,969 pieces it's kind of um it's a
really cool fact because the first moon landing was in 1969 and there are 1,969 pieces very
cool uh this one is hundred around $120 these are not these prices are not
including tax obviously but um it comes with a little tiny Lim and a little tiny
Command Module um the LM has like a little moon base and the Command Module looks like
it just returned from Earth because it's on like this ocean base and then the space shuttle probably 3 to 6 hours
build time it has 2354 pieces um this one is the most
expensive but it looks really cool and it has the most pieces besides the launch Tower um it's about
$200 and it was it's the most recent one out of these it released on um April
fools actually 2021 April 1 and then the last one the LM the part of
the um Saturn 5 that lands on the moon probably takes about two to five hours
to build it has 1,087 pieces um and it's around
$100 what I find so cool about what you've done with all these things you know building them and stuff of course
is uh not only fun but I think it's pretty educational um and um you know I
think that um I think that it's cool that you make kind of these uh environments uh for them uh it's sort of
reminds me of when I made plaster of Paris diaramas during the 60s I used I
would do that paint them gray and then put uh various markings on them and then
back in those days uh we had tele we had tubes for the electronics of televisions
and so it look they to me they look like miniature um you know high-tech cities
and I would plant these things on the moon and stuff imagine them filled with oxygen and people living in them and
stuff like that but uh I think that the the um the lights the the movement and
all the rest of the stuff that you put into your um environments there are very
very cool so that that's that is uh it's awesome that you could share those with
us when did you start uh doing stuff like this um it was about I think I
started in like 2019 um okay that was when I really got into space and um all my science fair
projects were about space and stuff after that so and I would recommend the
Saturn five the most it looks the most realistic and it comes you can display
it horizontally or vertically it comes with STS that way you you can place it horizontally and it looks amazing I have
a friend that put theirs in like a glass display case and it looks absolutely
absolutely incredible so yeah awesome Sabella thank you so much thank you
thanks you mentioned that you were putting together these spacecraft models in a matter of hours um like you put
together the ISS in six hours I don't think you realize how jealous or envious
NASA must be because they've been working on the ISS since the 1980s yeah I don't think it's finished
yet so uh also did you have any any like
behind the scenes I mean how did you make the video yeah sure um let me pulled them
up let's see here my dad sent me them but they were
flipped so here we go let me share my screen here
um here we go so here's me um just
um standing behind the rocket and our whole living room was a green screen so
it was a process oh and then this was um
most of the film film making we had to put a green screen on top of it um
because we were shoot shooting scenes from many different
angles and then we have some more here um this is
the table that we displayed the all the other Lego sets on right um and then
this is what it looks like inside of the launch Tower where all the mist and steam is coming out of I see yeah and we
put two misters under there because one wasn't enough um and then we actually put a
turkey pan underneath the launch Tower because there was water everywhere um
but you can just go to the dollar store and there's um turkey
pans very cool very creative and then yeah these are the big
boxes um but all these sets are definitely worth it except for I don't
think they sell the launch Tower anymore the brand that we got it from but yeah
all these Lego sets here I would definitely recommend this definitely not the Lego
that I remember as a child so yeah um the smaller ones I would recommend oh I
would recommend for like kids um I don't know if you can see my mouse but back
here they're on a little turntable like yeah we can see it yeah maybe kids from
like eight to 8 to n and under probably those sets back there they come in a
little kit it um they um they have many different ones
this one was like famous women astronauts they came with like a display stand and stuff
um and then the shuttle and the ISS were
probably the most complicated um but the Hubble actually
came with the space shuttle and the space shuttle it's really cool because it opens up and you can
fit the Hubble inside I don't think we have picture of it but it's absolutely incredible that's great that's great
yeah very tactful very educational thank you Sabella thank you so much you are
most welcome thank you well um we're goingon to bring on Adrien Bradley with
his nightscape uh uh images uh he he
promised to add some uh distance or some scale and perspective to his talk uh so
over to you J Adrian to Noti that these days Yankees fans need some scale and
perspective so well we've got the scale we got the biggest guys in the league
but we definitely need a new perspective on everything hitting uh playing small
ball doing something but enough about that um I'm going to go ahead and make
the announcement that I purchased the mount today and I think Scott it's the one that's behind
you um the uh I yeah the iOS uh PMC 8 to
and Jerry you'll and Jerry you'll be happy to know that I watched a few YouTube videos with you and someone else
demonstrating that mount from it may have been from a few years ago um I was
like I know that guy that's Jerry to use the mount so it comes I'll
be asking you Tyler and all of you questions but um I think it's possible
to change the tracking rate which would be great because I'm going to change the tracking rate to half uh cederal or
whatever that number is and see if I get a similar effect to what I've got with you can adjust yeah so then the ascom
driver you can adjust or offset the tracking rate what to whatever value you
want basically that allows you to do that yeah that would give me that half cederal type of tracking where I can and
let me go and share my screen um so that pulling off
images like this where scale and perspective you
have trees on Earth I'll blow this up you have trees on Earth and you have the
Orion Nebula barely fitting in between these blurred out trees shooting this
through trees and then Starlight coming through this was an example of an
experiment that I tried using a similar setup to what I'm holding just a uh
camera and a big 600 millimeter lens on top of that star
Adventurer and it's an interesting shot because it's one it's one you'll almost never see something from Earth in
framing something from space inside two branches like that there's more that can
be done in that space it's just something I have to consider and figure out how am I going to do it but um I
remember seeing an Andromeda galaxy rise and it was framed the Galaxy was framed
over a building or like a house in the country somewhere and it inspired me to try out some sort of shot like that and
so and so another thing that I learned with the camera um
it's possible to handhold a shot of planets and actually get rings this is a
handheld shot of uh Saturn just aiming it at Saturn and taking a picture using
similar settings that I would use to take the picture of the Moon I tried it
with Jupiter and uh I did my best I you can barely see some of the moons
and you maybe some other inherent noise I this is a moon here this is a handheld
shot it's just aim at Jupiter fire and
uh and I was able to pull that off that to me that was one of those where well
the planets are so big you can handheld shoot them with a camera and it may not
be the best picture of Jupiter or Saturn that you'll see but it's one that I took
with just the equipment holding in my hand and and walking out of a bowling alley so it's uh it can kind of blow
your mind when you think about that this is a 280 millimeter shot and here you
have the moon and you have Jupiter now it's it looks it's interesting it's an
ordinary shot but if you move into the moon this is the X the the X and the
V that I happened to catch and I didn't realize that they were uh I was at a
point where they'd be visible and with the right camera I'd Zoom all the way in and I still have some detail here oh
yeah look at that so that's yeah that's uh that's impressive in and of itself that something
280,000 miles away you can get this much detail and yet here are some Landing
zones and people always say well where are the flags well they're too small
they're too small to see we uh lunar orbiters finally found those flags and
they're orbiting much closer to the Moon um my understanding is that even Hubble if it images and tries to zoom in it
can't resolve the flags are less than a pixel all of the human activity that's
happened on the moon is not visible from typical instruments on Earth but you can
still get detail and well here's Jupiter
again there's an equatorial band you can kind of see it it's faint but you've got some detail that
the planet's so big yet so far away that you can still pick up
data from such a far away and that that to me is just something you think about
how big something is and it may you may see it as a little Dot from here but
it's um it's a lot bigger than that earlier this is prior to the lunar
eclipse um I've got a crescent moon here and I tried to expose for Venus
because I barely it's bit of a blur but I tried to get a phase I think I would
have done a little bit better job I would have had a nice little crescent for Venus here but it was close it kind
of looks like it if I zoom out this way you kind of see the little bitty Cresent here um it breaks down after a while but
that's uh Venus it does have phases it looks like a bright little star from
this far away but as you zoom in you begin to see it take a crescent form
which I think is really cool it's uh it shows the facei that it's that far away
but visible and of course here's the moon um and I framed it so that you'd
have both of those in one shot and just finally seeing the moon
itself this is the the 97% lunar eclipse that I always Bragg to Kareem about that
I was able to get because the clouds ruin their view over in uh Montreal you
just had to take the Dig didn't you I had to take the Dig there's three stars
below it that are so far away but due to how much darker the moon has gotten it's
basically like a very thin as if it were
very thin Crescent and you normally don't see a very thin Crescent unless
it's near the Sun so you normally don't get to see how the sky would look well in this case you do and there's three
stars well four if you count this fuzzy of course there's more stars but I in this particular shot we exposed for
three of them um that are so far away but they show up because they're that
bright so a simple image but yet if you think about what you're seeing in the
image you get an idea of well perspective um and we can see the light
from these stars but in order to see the light from these Stars they have to be
very large you know much at least I I would have to see what stars they are
and what class they are most of the time they're larger than the sun if we're able to pick them up in the night
sky so um here's the last space face shot that I
have here's that Moon again um oh that's nice yep and it's situated next to the
plees which is where it was this is a this is a composite that was done true
to life as far as where the uh moon was in relation to the plees and I basically
tried it in two shots so this was just the shot to expose the plees and this
was a bright this was a bright Circle CC and then I shot the moon and and put it
to tried to put it to what it would be as far as proper scale if uh put in this
image and that's what you end up with of course the Moon is 280,000 Miles um I
forget the number of light years I think it was said in the uh Russ yeah 440
Russell your presentation 440 light years as opposed
to what one light second I believe so you have something that in our
perspective looks like it would be the same size but just one of these Stars
would dwarf not only the moon but most of our solar system so it's uh the same
thing when we were looking at Mars and anares a few years back where the two were close by and anares was named as
basically the arch rival to Mars but if the two were to ever meet
anares would make not only short work of Mars but the rest of us and I think out
to I would guess out to Saturn um as far as if it ended up in the center of our
solar system so what you see out in space looks like
things are at a at a similar uh size but what is
actually there and its actual sizes uh vary they're different they're
far um more different than than we may think and to drive this home as always I
know Scott your uh burder this was a zoomed in shot of a
bald eagle that I saw yeah and but if you zoom in I took another shot and I
zoomed in and this is what I saw the bald eagle looking right at me oh that's
cool it would fly away and I wouldn't be prepared to shoot it in Flight um because I looked down and wanted to see
if I could zoom in and see some eyes but uh Zoom all the way in
and they're nesting now in Arkansas so yeah they're they're nesting up here too
in Michigan so we're yeah they're starting to get together so um as always
I end a photo with bird pictures um not sure if I can tie them
into scale and perspective um these are zoomed in so they look a lot larger than they
actually are if you see the birds in Flight mother bald eagle that I took um
a little closer uh so once I because I was closer to this bald eagle I got more detail of
the bald eagle the closer you are the more detail you get that's the challenge with astrophotography is that these
things are so far away and yet they are
um so large you can still get some detail but imagine if you could fly
closer and get even more detail um of those uh images in space
you know imagine what you might see that we just simply can't see on Earth Adrian
if you do head out there don't forget to take a Frisbee and I'll take a fris and I'll let Nathan know what happens if
you throw a frisbee through the horse head nebula right uh yeah size and
perspective a seagull bullying a ju a juvenile bald eagle the Eagle's looking back like what do you want with me and
uh and with that irreverent picture I will end my presentation
um back to this image when we say we're connected with the universe these are
the sort of images I try and take to show that connection this is in the sky
but it's visible from Earth this is all these trees represent where we are at
Earth and this is something that's visible to us so it's interesting that
even with the the branches obscuring the sky that you still see stars through
them yeah there you can see that it the Starlight you expose for it long enough
Starlight just pushes through it just like it pushes through clouds and part of it is the branches are blurred so the
focus is actually on the sky and yeah the Starlight comes through it as well
so it's uh it is interesting so excellent thank you
that's my presentation and I'm looking forward to that uh exos uh PC and mate
Mount to see what I can do with that all right well uh we'll we'll help you get
it uh all dialed in as you start start U setting that up Adrien thank you so much
man okay so we are going to take a 10-minute break uh so it's time to get
that sandwich cup of coffee stretch your legs and uh we're going to come back uh
with more uh Global star party thank thanks
SC I'm going fun y it is I'm gonna get a full debrief from my father now he's
waiting on the phone so oh excellent find out find out if he well actually
the question is going to be if he talks to you about your presentation or everything but so
yeah thanks thanks K see you later Russell yeah take it easy see you Saturday yeah see you
Saturday thanks Adrian that was a great show too and
thanks
uh Norm wants us to talk now I I think I think we need Norm to come one of these After parties and talk to us that's
right we'll have them give the presentations well Norm did ask for a quiz so I think Nathan might be able to
give us a quiz but I think Annie has one first uh maybe they should let us uh
maybe they should come up with a subject for us to talk
about that's good well frisbees would be a pretty good subject whether the
Rangers overpaid whether the Yankees locked out on not getting the contracts or whether the Jays are doing a good job
with their pitching staff I'm gonna go get coffee now while yall discuss that I I had to tease Adrien because the
last time he was because I mean he's a Michigan boy he's a Michigan boy and he's for New York I fell into the
Yankees due to a good friend of mine uh named Alfred I talked to him today
um and uh I've been to Yankee Stadium a couple times and I would follow them when they'd come to Detroit so you can
blame Don madingley for hustling after every single ball he didn't catch his single one but I go that's how baseball
ought to be played then came the 97 team which just pummeled the Tigers Bernie
hit one under the [Music] old oh yes I I have to be very careful
here because uh I mean in Canada we talk hockey and Nathan's Vancouver team
that's closest to him just beat the Canadians so you know I have to I have to keep steering the conversation away
from you know anything that might remotely come to hockey I I was sure his next presentation was going to be hockey
on all the planets and you know pointing out how the Canadians would lose every time would the planets be the hot the
puck or the sticks like what would be whaton talk I honestly think that the
Canadians would probably win on the icy planets because they're so used to that condition
anyway and at the moment you're used to flooding how's it going over there Nathan are you are you okay uh the
island or how's it going I mean as you can tell my surroundings consist only of o2 and
nitrogen not water so I'm I'm not swimming so it's okay um today was
actually pretty nice only a bit of rainfall which I've been appreciating more and
more after looking at how conditions on the different planets affect it yes water is a good water is a very
good thing yeah you kind of you need a you need a good atmosphere too you want
to you want to be able to breathe and you you want to be able to fall normally
not abnormally or not at all Fant Mars would have a bad restaurant
because they you know there's no atmosphere there so you don't want to go
there very very cheesy wait that would be the moon never
mind Norm is gonna be joining us in the Afterparty next week hopefully yeah that's gonna be F
that I tried I Harold came to one of our Montreal Center events a while back and
uh turned on the video and chatted with us for a little bit which was a lot of fun it's always great to have people
join in and getting getting a chance to chat with them and get to meet them I agree that's the nice thing about the
league right now and and the gsps is we get to see an audience that we're starting to get to know which is a lot
of fun yeah that's right that's right
yeah Adrian so Adrian I want to know are you gonna try to put your I exos one uh
exos uh no your exos 2 together by yourself or are you going like from
start to finish or are you going do you think you'll stop and call us I'm gonna try and put it together myself and
knowing me I'm probably going to look at the instructions and go yeah most of it's already together anyway and start
tinkering that's what I do so yeah I'll put together and I know I've got the
video of uh Jerry throwing it together um although the two I don't know if
there's going to be much difference between that and the original but the plan is to put it together play
around with it get frustrated and before I snap something in two I'll give you
all a call I'll make sure not to break it I put together ANS 100 last night and
um I got to there was something I had to ask Tyler about and so I I messaged him
and he facetimed me and and I said okay he said wait you've got to learn how to
you've got to learn how to um uh I can't remember what he called
it where you balance it you got to learn how to balance it and I said I don't want your help goodbye
click because I wanted to learn how to do it myself
so I think we just all need Jerry on speed dial that's what we need no I'll
just have them on live programs all the time and people can ask questions at any time
that's right he'll set up cameras all over his
house The Truman Show will become the Jerry Show yeah
right hey Jerry what's the thread pitch on that screw yeah yeah it's uh it's
14 okay plus or minus five I will I will try not to bother you
Jerry even since I have your phone phone number uh quite a few people have my
phone number but I also I do answer my emails that's one thing when I when I look at
them yeah when you look at
them that when you look at the notification coming through or when you actually open them to look at them no I
I glance at the notification and I see how important it is then I'll then I'll look at the mail never not just how
important it is yeah I get a B I get a lot of junk
mail my unfortunately I've got like five different or six different accounts and
a couple of them have been compromised so I got a I get a ton of junk mail on a couple of my emails now
nor now nor Hughes you you can actually uhh Scott's phone number is somewhere on
social media so if you you want to everywh call Scott it's everywhere I've
given my personal many times he sees who calls and then he blocks them so that's
how he gets out of that is that why he never answers my calls no everybody gets
blocked unless they're in my phone book so the the way to do it is to text me first so I don't know that you're trying
to sell me Insurance uh extended warranties or trying to give me a loan
okay so well that's good to know oh he says he has your phone number already yeah
it's all right it's okay yeah yeah so yeah sorry I dropped uh
Annie while you were talking I the last thing I got before my internet crapped
out was um that you said you you told Tyler I'm not talking to you anymore
goodbye and you hung up get the rest of story he was trying to help me and I
didn't want his help because I wanted learn how to do it all on my own and he's like he's like well okay then like
goodbye yeah it's more fun to uh it's more fun to try it out but once you
realize you're about to mess something up that's when you you make the phone
call or you take another look at the instructions yeah and you uh you try to avoid you try to avoid making your Mount
unusable yeah well I really well my deal is is I really want to put my myself and the customers you know shoes as as well
too so I want to be able to answer questions and and and I'm a Hands-On learner
so just easier actually you're seeing right now is from
the James web Space Telescope and how the mirrors are mounted it's now confirmed for the 22nd for launch oh
great yep it looks like everything's a go [Music]
again
okay well we're back uh I don't think we actually ever left but um we are um
hopefully you had a couple of minutes to to uh take a break and um uh we are
missing a couple of people from Global star party tonight Tyler Bowman uh was not able to make it and Nico was uh not
feeling very well so we we let him uh get some rest there so up next is Jerry
Hubble live from the marks Lade remote Observatory Jerry oh I didn't realize I
was coming on so soon yeah you forget it's 247 Jerry right that's right that's
right and we are running a little bit behind here too so we got some gained a couple gained some time so um so yeah
I'm on the observatory right now I'm doing some asteroid work right now let me let me go ahead and share my uh share
the observatory desktop
here so basically what I typically do I don't
have um sometimes I'll get some near Earth asteroids that I want to observe but but sometimes I'll just go
randomly go to the chart and I'll I'll just uh look up some
some of the asteroids that are out there I'll turn the uh link on so this one that I
just I imaged it yet I just moved the mount to this asteroid
um it's 200 ao2 203 and I just look at I just flew to
the position in the sky to the east to start out the evening and I just I just go anywhere along the ecliptic and look
and see what's available there and then I just start Imaging Imaging moving from one to the next next
and I typically like I've got nine asteroids that I started out and then I'll go through this image these
different asteroids and uh and then cycle through them three times to get three
measurements and I'm doing this the astrometric measurements of these of the positions of the asteroids and I can
show you for example this last one I just took an image of
um it was which one was it
well we'll find out let me zoom up on here and I'll show you oh it's uh 957
chamelia so the way I do that I I basically I cheat that's how you can do the
measurements fast you kind of cheat you got a catalog of of asteroids that you look and it'll identify where they're at
in your image as long as you've taken an accurate time stamp and everything else
it'll it'll find them so the first thing I'll do let me uh let me go ahead and um
I'll load this image again I'm going to close this and I'll show you the process and I'll get to some another
image here I'll talk about scale since that's the theme for tonight but
um uh let's see so the first thing I'll do is I'll load the image and then I'll
go to the and then I'll do uh the astrometric plate solve this is this is
a program I'm using called astrometric and so it comes up pretty
quickly it's got the data down here at the bottom I don't know if you can see that very well but the uh Precision is
007 arcs on the position measurement on the uh on the uh plate solve I should
say so that means a residual error from the catalog position and the image B and
the image is basically 7 70 mli Arc seconds which is pretty darn good uh so
at that point I I'll use this tool called known object overlay and it'll go out and so it knows
exactly where I'm pointed in the sky and it'll say okay there's some objects these are all this look how many asteroids are out there see all the
red but unfortunately since I'm using a a backyard telescope and not a 100 inch
telescope I can't see pretty much all these except for a
couple so all these are in 20 23rd 21st 22nd magnitude so that's how that's the
catalog I've got is the complete minor planet center catalog of objects that are out
there there's over a million uh asteroids out there that have been
that have had orbits calculated for them so that this is just a smattering of them you can see but the one that I
targeted was this one right here let me zoom up again see this box it's drawn around
this dot here and it's not the green circles around these uh stars are
basically Stars they're reference Stars okay where the plate solve was done and then now I've got an object that's been
identified as uh asteroid or minor planet 957 chamelia
and it's a 14.5 magnitude uh object that's my measured
value so that's that's pretty good I mean 14 and a half magnitude is pretty
dim U this is with just a 60-second exposure and so I've got this little
button here that says okay I've selected that object identify
it and it comes up and says Yep this is it this is the one you picked
chamelia uh you see the error in the position is basically zero on the calculated
position and so I say okay good so then I'll accept that and it'll it'll draw it and
identified that as a Target that I stored in the uh
uh in the report that I'm creating as I collect this data it start it keeps it
in a file so that's really nice to have uh let me show you that file real
quick so can you see that I don't know if I
can zoom up on yeah we can see we can see it it looks a little small yeah it's a n not small for me just looks like a
lot of numbers yeah it is it's a bunch of numbers so let me go to this asteroid that I just measured so it's this this
one right here 967 okay and and um it's got the right
Ascension declination coordinate position and the estimated magnitude uh so that's the report and
once I collect all this data then I'll be I'll ship it off to the minor planet
center so that was just uh that's what I'm doing tonight at The Observatory so I'm
observing objects that are um let me think if I can say this right
it's they're probably about 60 million miles away I could I could figure that
out I could look up this object on Google and and find out actually I can do this on the chart the chart will tell
me so I think I think that's chamia that's a different one so for example
this other one I was Imaging it was see how far away it is
here 1.3 uh astronomical units so a lot of
these are around 100 million miles away okay
and this one let's see how how big is it
I think this tells me if this I think I've got to go to uh
Google to find out how big this asteroid is they're not very big I can tell you
that they're they're 10 to 20 kilometers in diameter all right so think about you
can see an object that's 10 kilometers in diameter 100 million miles away yeah
so that gives you a sense of scale yes that's right so that's kind of cool that you
can detect the light uh that's how dim it you know how how small it is out
there out in the middle of nowhere let me ask you another question is it possible for an amateur to
measure the diameter or any feature you know width or Dimension to um or to
determine Mass well there's yeah so the asteroids a lot of them you have to first you have to determine what type of
asteroid it is okay to determine the albo so the albo is basically what
percentage of light gets reflected off the asteroid or the minor planet uh the moon has an albo I believe
it's around 5% so as bright as the Moon looks it's it still only reflects 5% of
the light that gets hit on it back to us uh so the albo on the on the uh minor
planet would would give you an idea okay if it's this distance you know where the
orbit is if it's this distance um then it should be this bright okay or alternatively if it's
this bright and you assume it's uh a certain material then you can say oh it
calculates out to be this distance so there's a relationship there between the albo the brightness of the object and
the distance and that's that's one thing you can determine okay uh you can determine the as if you do a light curve
if you do a um a Time series of of
measurements you can determine the rotation rate of the of the minor planet
also which is kind of cool uh there's a
um the minor planet bulletin is a great resource for that let me see if I can
bring up one real quick to show you what a light curve looks like
um oops it's unfor forunate that the highlights are showing
up as we're waiting on the there we go what the heck not
good server
404 this is this is an example one probably here see if it load loads
it takes it a while yeah this these reports are pretty big this comes
out every month it's a great resource if you're interested in asteroids this is the one report that you're going to be
digging into a lot so these are all the observations that people do of of minor
planets um and these are example light curves
let me zoom up some more
so this is this is a pretty large asteroid here 13
anderia uh so
basically this is a repeating pattern think about think about asteroids it's like their bricks okay they're shaped
kind of like and in general terms are shaped like bricks okay so let's say
you're rotating around the um short axis is up and the brick is in your hand and
you're rotating it around so you'll see in one rotation you'll see two uh short sides and two and two long
sides right and the long side will reflect more light than the short side
okay so you'll have a you you'll basically have two peaks for each rotation and two valleys and that's what
you see here okay you have one Peak here one Peak here and one Valley here and
one Valley here so that's like a that's kind of the way I look at like a brick rotating around they're they're more
rounder than that but they're but you get the general idea uh about what the rotation is so
typically you have two peaks and two valleys uh to determine what the rotation is and so for example this one
was taken in 2009 and you can see it's got a rotation period of seven
hours so from Peak from the large Peak to the large Peak is 7h hour period okay
and uh you can see how many magnitude it's changing it's going from um it's from the bottom is two to
minus two so it's like 04 magnitude and that's quite a bit I me think about how large that how large
that asteroid is You' think it would be pretty round okay but apparently it's not as round as you think even if it's
200 some kilometers in diameter or 400 kmers in diameter I'm not sure how big big it is but that gives you an
idea now here's here's another one that doesn't show quite as
much it's 14 Irene okay which is a low number that means it's a very large
asteroid okay it's one of the largest and so it doesn't have as much
uh um it's more round I should say and that gives you an idea of that um so
that's the minor plan Bolton oh here's another one that's kind of cool you get an idea but so these
measurements are very very uh amateur astronomers can take these measurements
pretty easily especially on the brighter asteroids uh so that gives you an idea
about that I'm gonna U so one of the last thing to talk about scale I want to
show you just want to check something here on the observatory so I'm going to stop my share on this and I'm going to I'm going
to talk about scale on a photograph that I was talking about earlier today with
Scott of the Moon that I took this past this two three days ago when it was
a third quarter moon I got up at three o'clock in the morning or four this picture was taken at four o'clock in the
morning so you you want to look at the third quarter moon you got to get up
early in the morning that's right so let me uh share
again that's
true so this to do high resolution moon
or four days away yeah that's right so if you want to take uh high resolution
lunar Imaging you would not do it the way I'm doing it you can you need a long focal length High focal ratio uh system
with uh very uh High oversampled pixel scale of around 02 arcs per pixel or
something like that and and it's good to get a focal ratio of around F20 to f30
depending on how good your seeing is but I I did the opposite I just used the standard deep Sky camera on the uh 6 and
a half inch refractor that we have in MSR in the mark Slade remote Reser station one and uh it's got focal Ratio
or focal length of 850 millimeter so to give you an idea of how nice this scope
does and the camera and stuff this is a this is the image uh zoomed out now this
is CR so with that 851 millimeter focal length I've got a
qhy 163 camera and it has a field of view of about 1.3 by9
deges which is about 4 full moons okay now I've zoomed up uh to around one a
little over one full moon diameter um so it's
cropped but my pixel scale when I did this was
point8 arccs per pixel okay so that's that's a 16
megapixel camera so I was able to get very high sampling on it not as good as what you
want when you went super high resolution but with a deep with a deep Sky camera 850 mm focal length it's pretty good so
I'm going to so as a sense of scale I'm going to start zooming in okay to show you uh what kind
of what kind of uh resolution you can get now this isn't the highest resolution one picture of the moon the
third quarter moon I've taken I've got another one that I took last year which is a little better but so I start zooming in and you
start to see smaller creators around here and I'll tell you and so you can zoom in
a little bit more so that's cernus I just zoomed in on all
right and um so think about your neighborhood and
your town and your city that you live around and how big it is and how far it is between places that you
live and uh so the highest the resolution on this image is this crater
for example this crater is 5 kilometers
okay um you can see the dark shading right
there in the crater floor and then where the and the sun's coming from the left
all right and shining on the rim you can see it on these larger craters you can see here the
uh the sun is coming from the left and shining and then you can see the dark and the other part of the crater so this
crater what did I say it was um five um this one here five kilometers five
kilometers right there okay yeah so which is uh three miles
okay so that's three miles so think about how far in so would your would
your city fit inside this little crater there probably so if it's a little town maybe three miles across or maybe you
have a lake like I live in a lake community and our lake is seven miles long so you
could actually photograph the the lake I live on if it was on the moon that's kind of
cool to think about um so this crater
here is 5 kilometers I mean five miles or eight kilometers this this crater
right here um so that gives you a sense of scale on the moon so I'm going to zoom
out so the res so the resolution on this picture is
around three um three to five kilometers depending on
what the object is there's so there's other there's other features on here they kind of look like like here I don't
know if you can see this that's actually a crater but it's
kind of a smudgy smudgy thing that's about the limit you can tell it's there's a crater there and if I brought
up a chart we could find it pretty easily uh but that gives you an idea so
I'm going to zoom out so the resolution on this so if I sent you
my yeah I there may be a delay with my internet if I sent you a 61 megapixel
camera would you resolve it or would it just would it still
be a little F based on
the the aperture your scope well so there's half of it part of it is
um your scope okay what's your what's your limiting what's your uh what's it
called your defraction limit on your scope right but to to do to do this to
do this Imaging you have to do uh some tricks and some neat techniques you have
to do uh sampling you have to have a huge number of images to take because you're going to take a video basically
of thousands of images like this is this was made up of a thousand images on a video and you're GNA uh take that you're
going to compress it down with a program called regist stacks and Astros stacker
is another one that you use to process the video into a single image and what
it does is it statistically gathers the best data off all the images and compil it down into
one image um which is a high resolution image but you can't when the raw imagees
doesn't look that way when you first uh stack it oh okay you have to do some
other thing it's called wavelet filtering which is kind of cool technique and that that's what brings
out all the detail in that data so it's a statistical measurement is what you're
doing you're you're Gathering it's like when you take an average of so you have a noise a noisy signal right let's say
it's bouncing around from a value of 50 to 60 that's for example let's say but
it's around 55 is the average okay so you're doing a measurement of this noisy
signal and you're doing you're gring Rand random samples you might get one 157
51 53 55 if you grab one or two pictures or one or two values it's not close to
the true value it's it's to get closer to the True Value you basically take an
average now I'm simplifying this what the reg STX actually does I'm just giving this as an example of how you get
a more higher Precision value through statistics right and you take a bunch of
samples and then you can you you know what the variation or what the sounds
like standard deviation is of the values right and you get a value that's that's
you get accurate value 55 plus or - one um where you think that's that's
what the true value is it's within that so that's kind of what what the wavelet
what the uh as what the regist ax is doing it's stacking all this data and
say okay what's the true value of that pixel um I'm simplifying it I don't know
exactly how that stuff works but this is in my mind this is how I think about it so you you look at each pixel and you're
moving around but you're getting a good average of what that pixel is right and
and so then you you you get that value then you start to bring out start to stretch it so that you can bring out all
the detail and that's what you're doing here so I just wanted to point out a
couple things for the details so look look this is crater Tao right
here um that's the peak inside the crater and you can see the shadow of the
peak right there and you can actually do measurements uh to calculate uh the
heights of different mountain peaks and things like that and I demonstrated that on previous episodes it looks really
dramatic you know when you look at it is it's pretty cool so you think about all the math and all the programs that go
together to help you just to to take you that next step to get this to get this
level of detail at this scale right so this is a very close scale and this isn't even the
best photograph I've I've taken um um oh let me let me show you real quick I can
show you I can't zoom in up on it I I'll I'll show it the maybe I'll show it a
little bit later but but this just gives you an idea of the scale of the Imaging
you can take uh if you get your system set up correctly you can see a wide a wide view
one and a half degree field of view down to um yeah AR few AR right it's crazy so
and the software to to analyze all this stuff I mean you're you're talking about you know multi-million dollar
development years and years and years of of uh of engineer you know software
development and Engineering to get to this point so that an amateur astronomer can download the software for free for
free that's right no exactly and take advantage of it yeah it's amazing taken
you also sense the scale I've taken uh one video might be like two or three
gigabytes of data okay think about how much data that is three gigabytes okay and it gets compressed
down into this one image which is six megabytes all
right fact 500 that's a factor of 500 times it's been
compressed but it's been brought to life right so you compress all this data this
video data which looks blurry and it's moving around and it gets down into this real solid still image that's gives you
a huge amount of detail which is it's really cool I just
like wavelet filtering is the most awesome thing if you haven't done it take a you got to try it out with a
video and and it just it just blows you away difference between an unprocessed
and a processed image right
great thank you thank you uh Jerry and for those of you uh it's msro science
right is the right msci yeah so.org
NSR science.org so if you really want to get involved
with some more of the science of uh astronomy This Is The Place To Go a
great a great training ground uh you know especially if you aspire to do um
proam type projects uh in the future you know right wonderful all right thank you
very much thanks ma'am thanks Scott all right so we are going to bring on Annie Scarboro Annie Works in customer service
at explore scientific she also manages our explore Alliance membership program
and she is learn she has been learning about astronomy since she got here so uh
and telescopes so Annie I'm going to turn this over to you thanks Scott um so yeah my journey
has been a little bit of a whirlwind of a ride um I had
never touched a telescope in my life when I started or when I started working
at explore scientific I just started off as a data entry Clerk and um I got offered a CSR job and it
literally sounded like I was listening to Charlie Brown's mother speak when
I yes yeah whenever whenever I was told to sit at a desk and answer phone so I
was like oh gosh right but um I had I've had great
and I still have great people to teach me and and to stretch me and grow me and so it's been really good but um
uh one of the things I've done is I've started you know last week I talked about incorporating that with my kid and
so um I you know we had now have a new pmca
system and so I it's I've never dealt with a tracking system it's it's very
interesting to to even think about that you can slew something to an object in the sky and it knows that the Earth is
moving and that's you know and track that it just it's amazing to me so um
and I and I'm a Hands-On learner so I wanted to learn from the ground up
astrophotography that is my goal is to learn it from the very big you know from Old School to eventually attaching
it to a telescope using a sing Mount and all that stuff so um I've done I've done a little bit of astrophotography on a
just a manf mount um I have a I have a little um uh Canon Rebel uh T T5i is
what I have um is my good camera and then I have a Rebel XS which is from
like 2007 I think it's really it's really really really old um and so um I
started putting that on a mount and just playing around with it outside and learning about you know you need to put your equipment outside let it let it
cool down especially with getting winter and things like that and so um I finally
have upgraded to a go-to system so yeah so um so I I put it
together last last night um I had you know being in customer service you would
have think that I had put one together from unboxing it to setting it up and I
had never done that and so um Tyler was telling me to take one home from the showroom and I said nope I want to take
it out of a box and I want to put it together and so that um I want to know I
want to know in in In-N-Outs of it and so that's what I did so I'm going to show that I'm I just got my computer
back so bear with me while I try to while I try to share my screen because it's um I'm still act I actually
accidentally turned it off earlier when when I had logged on and then I was like I hit the button I was like oh gosh so
I'm still learning um it was in the shop for a little bit
and so that's working now I think this is right okay all right so this my plan my
plan is is to uh start blogging um what
I'm doing um just because you know as a single mom and a mom with a little kid
it's you know I just I want to be able to leave this leave this behind but give other people tips and tricks um with
children and what it's like to be able to start from at the age I'm at I'm 43
at 43 never touched a telescope and touch one you know you you can learn you
can learn how to do this stuff and so pick up new hobbies and and it's great so um my goal is is to eventually be
able to blog everything and just kind of talk about um all the things I've been through so um and then I don't know how
to I don't know how to oh there we go okay so this is me unboxing it this is these are all the boxes that come in a
PMC they're on all on the left um and yes this is an empty box which I
thought was absolutely hilarious but it so stuff doesn't move around I didn't even know we had that in a in our I
didn't know I didn't know they were label that way when they came out either no I
did yeah the the lettering so crisp and clear better than the boxes themselves
yes and obviously I have a TV remote there because any girl needs to watch Christmas movies while putting together
pmca just saying okay so um then on the right you can see I have the I I tried
to layer everything out as it came out of the box so so we so I could see that um and then so I put everything
together then I put the tripod together and then I put the mountain on this is
when I had to finally call Tyler because one of the things that's kind of drilled in our head
um is don't unlock amount and turn it
because you'll you could cause backlash so I'm still learning about that and so
I don't know if you can tell in the picture on the right but my mount's upside
down and so I was like can I unlock it and I was following the instructions
and nothing in the instructions said anything about unlocking it and spinning it so you could put the rod on um for
the counterweights and so um I actually put it on upside down and called Tyler
and then asked him can I turn it because I don't know if I can um and so um he
said yeah it's fine it doesn't do anything to the deck monor I was like okay well good I don't I'm well now I know what
not to do when I try to put my Mount together so um once I got everything on
there um that's when Tyler was said that he said that's whenever I had that conversation with him about um hey you
got to balance it and I was and I wanted to do learn how to do it by myself and I was like nope goodbye and got off the
phone with him so um I everything's put together flipped around the way it's supposed to be um and then I put the
counter weights on and I realized that my camera was at the
office so I couldn't balance it with my camera so I wanted to learn how to balance it
correctly so I decided I guess I'm going to use a telescope which is not what I really wanted to do but it it it's the
idea of learning how to do it and so um I grabbed my ed80 you can see it in the
background over there on my mao1 and I put it on my Mount and um started
balancing it and obviously it was too heavy because of my guy because of my uh
uh Red Dot my polar
my my finder scope my finder scope I ended up having to take it off I didn't have enough counter weights so um that's
one of the things that I that I learned through this process was um sometimes you need a little extra counterweight
even even the smallest thing can make it a little heavier and so um so anyway so
I followed the instructions balanced it out got my telescope all all on there and it's ready to go for me to start um
hooking it up to a computer and um or my iPad and so um and I left it at that
point because I'm not I'm I know a lot of people want to like throw one
together and then make sure it's work you know start playing with it right then and there but um I'm a little
different in the fact that I want to try to take it a slow pace and try to figure out every intricate thing about it and
so um and my goal is to actually have a camera on there right now instead the
telescope so um I just left it and so it's still sitting there in my living in
my living room so that's uh that's that's the beginning of my journey um
that's the beginning of my journey with um with my telescope and what's going on
with it and um so yeah okay well I appreciate that we'll
we'll see where where you get to next yeah I'm EXC I'm excited to start doing the software side of it um because we
get a lot of questions about the software side of it in fact there's a there's a common question that we have
and um I finally was like I just want to learn how to do this and so I went and
grabbed our um our uh uh our exos 2 and
drag it over to my desk but then we found out that I don't have Wi-Fi capabilities on my computer so ah
okay so I got nowhere fast really quick well very soon very soon when we have the the new um explore Stars you'll be
able to run it from your phone so yes yeah that's coming so but it's it's nice
to learn how how you know because we because well we had a customer the other day that that reached out to us and said
I bought a pmca in 2019 and I just now opened it so to have to go all the way
back and have to figure out okay what was the software then what do you need to do what you know is it's nice to have
convers you know it's nice to have that knowledge of from the you know ground up so in fact we Tyler figured out I'm
gonna have to drift a line I'm gonna have to learn how to drift a line my my Mount I'm not going to be able to I
can't see the Northstar from my house so right okay all right we'll have to well
there there are tricks uh to to uh to doing that and a drift alignment is
definitely one of them and it's something you should definitely learn how to do so it's not not as difficult as you might think so well it's it it
it's fun learning it's fun learning the process doing all that so it's been really good it's been really good so I'm
glad you're coming on I mean it's incredible you're you're taking the initiative to create a blog and all of
that stuff you know uh most beginners don't start blogging about their
astronomy experience right off the top you know they wait until they're quite
good at what they're doing so yeah I I think it's important so thank you well
you know and and I think it's important for you know even even when we even when people call in for us to say I don't
know the answer to that question let me play around with it let me figure it out I'm I'm I'm in the same boat you're in
let me you know and try to try to recreate what's going on with them and so and that's kind of that's what
started my whole process with everything with you know we have a lot of people that are in astrophotography that ask
questions I can tell you how to set up an image train never done it and so I
thought well that's ridiculous I need to actually I actually need to do it and so
um that was the beginning spark of me trying to figure out what I needed to what was the next move and so I I taught
myself regular photography and I thought well I kind of want to learn learn from
the ground photography yeah that's awesome so great Annie thank you so much
thanks for taking your time tonight yep thank you all right okay so up next is
uh we're gonna jump from Arkansas and we're going down to Brazil uh to uh Dr
marchelo Souza uh who's going to give us an update of what's going on down there
uh marchello it's great to have you back on again for Global Star Party um uh
your group uh young stars are tomorrow is still progressing quite well and uh
we are getting close to uh publishing the next Skies Up Magazine so I'll turn
it over to you marchello thank you for the invitation
every it's is a great pleasure to be here uh I have something that is
wonderful that we participate in the Global Science oper every year and this
year the them was the light pollution how to mitigate the effect of light
pollution animals and the students from two different seats near us here
produced a video with a new music about
this I will share my screen first to show what we are doing now and then at
the end I'll show the the music they produce let me share the screen
this is a project that we have the support of the United States Consulate in h Jan we
already visited 15 schools since the beginning of
October we two schools per week develop AI during two days let me change here
this okay here is one uh thank you for support of the
mentor that it is one of the international support that you have
thank you SC and here was one of the biggest event uh activity in school that
organize even with the problems we have in Brazil with we are yet in a pandemic
period we are we believe that you are at the end of the pandemic period and the schools open at here in
Brazil Public Schools only open in October then we be we begin with the
project when the schools open it and we have the particip until now we have we
had the participation of 24 six students in the project
wow this is in this picture we have 30 four
students from one school that you visited most of them are located far
from the center of the seats then it's something that is amazing they don't have internet they
don't the mobile phone didn't work you don't have mobile phone there then we
are talking about astronomy new technologies for them and try to
motivate them to develop project as you were talking about the scales I will
show four of the we make presentations about astronomy for them we make
presentation about programming for them and this is one that you have something
that is uh I didn't believe that this was possible but when I show this
picture of the Sun for the students we talk about the sun we make I show you
this SC that you use for them they are students from the last years of the
fundamental schools I don't know equivalence in United States I believe that is
K9 K7 to K9 if I am not wrong that you call United States is before the high
school and the when show this most of the students think that the
sun is a fireball this something that yes this is a result that was
surpris for me because they they stud about the sun in schools we have also
every way advice stand to not look to the Sun Direct to the Sun and here this is
the scale that you show to the students and this is ever is a big
success in schools when they see the size of the Earth when you compare the
size of the Earth with the Sun look at those eruptions though it's just
crazy yeser and Saturn to them yeah this is
the reason that it shows the this picture of the Sun and when we say that
and something that is also unbelievable most of them don't know
that the sun is like the other stars that you have in the sky then we try to
show them to compare the size of the sun with some of the stars that have names
and that are easy to to find this guy this is we used H
image of that make this because we can compare that it is available everywhere
but we make it on this this is the most they begin to we ask them if they
think that that's possible to have bigger Stars than this that we show then
we show B and Anar because Scorpios and the or here
are very famous yeah because for us or they see or during the
summer then you have here in Brazil we call the three stars that is the best of
the the or is the three three Mar in
Portuguese maras everybody knows as th maras here in Brazil that's I think
that's in English three Mar the three sisters these one this three here and I
will show this picture of B this is what we
use this part there small part of the presentation that we show to the
students in school in schools H during the activities of the
project and we have a hope to motivate students
to start the and this is the global science Opera that you had this year the
time the time I strive and we were responsible here in
Brazil I coordinated the Opera here in Brazil and
the we shows the ter the light pollution how to mitigate the effects of light
pollution animals and today today early we have a
a ceremony in a theater to give priz for
the students that participated in the Opera here is the city of son one of the
city that participated in project here you see the students this
uh the uh during the Global Science oper students that write the
lyrics and and also perform the the music during the the
Opera here celebration that you have and this is the the them that the the city
of son they produce Opera about the effects of the artificial lights in the
sea turtles because they have a big a big beach in the city and they have many
turtles there and because of the artificial lights the turtles uh
go directly to the roads then they changed the the lights
near the the coast to protect the and I show now your I will
try if it work I I not to use my my phone now can
you hear me yes we can we can hear you I put the sound here high in my
computer let me wow some fing is not to work
moment I don't know how that I manage this here okay and then I'll show the the video
now I have two let me first show The both videos the of both only a moment I did
something here that H this is my
presentation yes no what is only a moment squat I did something wrong here
I cannot done to to
let me find you I okay okay I think that is
here [Music] more all of this online stuff is a big
experiment marello yes I'm I I did something wrong here because I cannot
see turn to to zoom to share the other screen
let's me see what I did wrong so so what what you're sharing right now okay I I
and this was image for from the presentation about the SE Turles I will
show the video and the other or the light pollutions how that light
pollution affect the animals and it was produced by students from the city of Santa Maria madal that is where you have
the headquarter of H Park State Park that soon will be
the first dark sky Park in Latin America that I believe that is near the
announcement make by the international Dark Star Association they are fantastic
yeah and they produce this video here I'll show the video now let let me try
here I stop sharing okay I'll share here only a
moment um I'm trying one a moment let me see if
you work I'm not find
okay okay can you see the video yes okay let let me
[Music]
put this is why it's transmitted live
[Music] [Applause]
[Music]
[Music] from
tell [Music]
you [Music]
wow [Music]
[Music] br [Music]
[Music] you can see the
[Music]
stars is a seral
[Music]
now is a another music about the SE Turtles the effects of like potion
in who that the Stars ising Darkness
naturey aners man
man I [Music]
don't Str be more
[Music] the [Music]
makes me take the [Music]
direction I'm and I just born
inside I love you have to fall
alive but I don't know
anymore I fall the
glor oh the callor light of the big [Music]
Beauty even put
[Music]
during the [Music]
migration the made his light shines
just about and think about
[Music]
better well that's great this was presentation bra yeah
Bravo that's great you know because I I was wondering what the science Opera was
going to be like and this is it so let me put here the the credits let
me return let me see if I can return here this is the
link if someone wants to to see the full
Global Science this link andan
you were saying marchelo sorry I was listening a music here because I didn't close the Opera
sorry only a moment I'm not hear you no sorry
sorry today and this is the link for if someone want to see the full Opera it's
about the science opera.com that's very cool and the from one hour and 30
minutes begin presentation from Brazil then the and this is what we
did the premier happened in November TW is
near days this has a great experience and the most important because the
students now from two cities are studying about the effects of light
pollution in schools during the class this something that they are protecting
their future now due to the participation the Opera there is a way to show that it's possible to have
projects associate Arts and Science marello how how much influence
are these kids uh having upon um uh
communities in Brazil to change lighting is it is it starting to have a strong
effect in schools well not only in schools but uh
just getting the word out you know the these these kids to their parents uh
maybe to their parents um uh to the communities you know H have the kids had
uh some influence also with this uh with the park the dark sky park that is is um
coming about yes yes in the city of Santa Maria madalina where they
are they have the this state park that you will be at Sky
Park students are participating directly oh that's great they they are inviting
the students to visit the park they are talking about the and Al the city is a
small City they have 10,000 people living there m small seats in the
mountain in the mountain and all the seats now they they are waiting the
final answer for the international dark sky Association to organize a big celebration the city then they they have
a calendar here they are say is near is near then they are following then some
think that they are thinking now about the tourist in the city they are
thinking in many things now because you be the first dark sky part in Latin America then some think that they are
very motivated and in the the other city that s they have
they began this project I think that's three or four years ago that is change
lights near the coast to protect the sea turtles and now because of the
participation the Global Science oper they are including this in as a to
during the classes and then I think that these two seats will be the first
experience in Brazil to talk about light light pollution the effect in classes it
would be the first experience in Brazil yes I don't I don't think in the United
States you have much discussion going on in schools about light pollution you know uh it is um uh although the
international dark sky Association uh was started in the United States um
you know there's still so much work to do in the world uh to protect our Dark Skies you know for the health of
wildlife as you're pointing out with the science Opera um for human health you know uh we definitely need darkness and
um you know for Science and astronomy of course we need Dark Skies so so many reasons so many reasons and
to save money um for Dark Skies is as well uh there there have been complaints
by uh people saying you know why are we sending uh spacecraft to uh other
planets to spending billions of dollars going to the Moon um uh you know uh in
the last Global star party I think it was Kareem Jaffer that was um no no no
it was Mike weasner who uh determine that if we just spent less on lighting
and use that money to feed the Homeless to feed all the rest of it that we could
feed the world just by proper lighting yeah you know and and we can
have science too so and what also happened because the city of Santa Maria
madal is changing the public lights now
they to change in all the city now because of the park they are changing all the
lights in this in the city and another thing because many people from the two
seats now one is almost 10,000 people that live there and the
other one is 40,000 people there are small cities there many people uh is
asking about information about how to buy telescopes there
great something fantastic because they are looking for telescopes many people
saying that you visit the park to see the the sky then because inside the park they
don't have electric electric electricity inside right they not have poers and a
big Park the size of of a a big seat then they don't have lights inside and
you don't have ways to to use artificial
lights inside only flashlights because they don't have
power inside the park and they signed a document that they will keep this they
the inside the park they will not have artificial lights and don't have power for the
future some that's that's wonderful that's wonderful our our national parks
here in the United St should probably adopt uh some of the practices of what's going on in Brazil that's great I hope
so me too marello thank you so much for coming on and uh I'll be contacting you
very soon take care okay all right so um up next is uh
we go from Brazil down to Argentina where we have Caesar brolo uh set up on
uh I think his patio again so that's great yeah tonight I am without
wind iide an observatory a prate Observatory oh you
are in Observatory yeah yes yes it's a a customer Observatory that we we install
uh in in uh 90 sorry in
2012 and we are uh going in works again
um I'm working now um tonight we are H
starting to to make again the polar alignment uh installing more software
and well we are uh working to have uh this
telescope um so fast as possible in functions and uh really is is a it it's
a 14 inches Schmid Crain uh you know with um off uh uh of
comma um um image and um really uh we
are putting in works again um uh two weeks ago I disassembled
the the foca the corrector plate smid
reor plate uh to clean uh because this telescope
received uh a little amount of rain water and uh but it's clean now and work
really very good and we are um making some uh some uh uh Corrections for for
uh the polar alignment because uh we found uh a a huge error in the
installment of of of the
the the vas and uh actually we need to
disassemble all to put in the in the right in the right um uh
position um it's very interesting because we are we are putting this uh
in in only only eight uh eight years that this uh telescope uh is not working
uh the difference between the softwares and the
possibilities are incredible incredibly different and the the technology in the
last eight years it's really it's really interesting how uh first of all we when
I meet again with my my uh customer and
friend Alberto and Jose and uh ruen and
they call it the group oron group because they they uh they meet together
for to work in this Observatory that this is Observatory inside a home um is
interesting because we thought that we uh we had this telescope working uh only
before the before the pandemic and when we opened the old computers from from uh
we started to to see the old old uh archi of image arches uh we uh founded
that we made the last pictures in
2012 not in 2018 come on a years
uh um it's incredible and the the quality of the of the the image in in
especially in planetarian uh cameras is so different and the software uh that uh
we are uh putting in inside the M or um
you know the for processing IM much uh well it is all that we are talking with
with good with good mechanics uh good electronics and especially good Optics
and mechanics in in the optical assembly uh do you have every every time you can
bring a telescope to the present is uh it's another scale about that we are we
are talking it's about time it is very short time but do you have this this
thing that is Magic that um the equipment was was
sleeping a years and now with some corrections some new software some
cleaning in the Optics This is er this is starting to this equipment is
starting to to work again it's completely different I I don't have in my
planes transmit from from here but it's really a a different kind you know of of
n in my week right that's great though that's
great so what's what are the what is the future of this Observatory at this point
well first of all um I I tell um to to
these guys that they have more possibilities that they really imagine
um uh just we are talking about uh um the problem is that the telescope is
it's not in the middle of the city but is in in the Suburban area of Buenos ciris and we have the maybe a little
less light pollution maybe we are in here I think that we are in
850 or maybe 7 75 sorry 7.5 Bal
scale but um with the proper filters and
you know um searching the the especially the filters especially the filters um we
can put this telescope in a program of searching or uh especially photo
photometric measures of asteroids this is the best the best way because we have
we are in the in the Suburban areas with a a high ble scale very bad but we have
40 inches you know we have opportunities to to work here H in a uh you know after
uh maybe one year in a program of of going ahead with a with a a a great
program of uh astrophotography um take a great
pictures in in the in the limit of the possibilities and starting when you have
your the equipment calibrate you you can have the possibilities to to to go to a
program like here in Argentina we uh I think that is the same Gora g r a it's a
here is is the name of the program of uh observation and photometric measurement
for asteroids I think that this telescope is yes I I am disembl I remove completely
the the corrector plate I put the game I calibrate the the with
an star you know the the a disc and I get a very very great
Precision cation and well you know
uh uh well possibilities it it's a it's a telescope that that was delivered for
our company um only we found the problem of of only less than two two degrees in
in the right position to calibrate much better the the the polar alignment
because never some we use or the customer used this telescope for to to
observation in the first time and now that we are going to to make a s
photography with the new cameras you know we need really a a a right
Precision to to have this Mount really with good
alignments excellent excellent that's wonderful yeah what's a surprise uh uh
tonight that I'm here yeah yeah but you look quite natural
being in an in an observatory with the telescope behind you so yeah yes is in my we are in yes I am in my in my in my
water or yes that's right you're in your natural environment yes in my
environment yes I I understand absolutely okay thank you Caesar thank
you for coming on to you uh it's it's a pleasure every
Tuesday H enjoy with the gr and in global Sur party with uh everything
everyone uh this these great things next week I'll show you the um the the image
that we took last week about the tarantula nebula okay wonderful
wonderful we look forward maybe maybe next time next Tuesday not now
in in a few weeks more few weeks more
ahead uh I can uh um I I can't but earlier in the in not now we can um we
can uh project some image from this telescope in a live image no problem oh that would be great that' be great yes
when I have calibrate in the future of of of course that we can do it so uh
Caesar how far away is this Observatory from your home no isn't it's on only we
are at only no half hour of from my from my home I live in the in in the city and
we are really yes only and half 40 for 40 minutes only it's it's City too but
it's not yes it's suburban area but not H at no more that maybe uh from the
cities this is yes 17 kilometers no nothing yes very very nice place yeah
excellent all right C thank you so much thank you it's a pleasure next time I'll
present you the the the grow that yes they are going out now but yes
next time I presented more more uh the the group that that uh enjoy this
Observatory wonderful all right all the best thank you so much yes thank you
bye-bye Scott bye-bye Caesar bye okay so uh up next is um is H Stephen J edberg
Steve uh and I have known each other since the early 1980s um I was introduced to him during
the uh also uh actually mid1 1980s when I was introduced to him during H's Comet
during that time uh Steve edberg uh put together a proamp pro project called the
international Halle watch of course we were all anticipating Hal's Comet return
uh and I had never heard of uh professional amateur collaboration
before but that's exactly what Steve did he helped uh many amateur astronomers uh
get involved in uh research uh as Hal's Comet was on its inbound uh and so we we
learned how to estimate magnitudes we learned how to record data and uh so I'm
proud to say that I was part of that uh you know my my few observations that I made but it was so
cool uh Steve is uh a professional astronomer uh he um uh he worked at the
jet propulsion laboratory as a planetary scientist he was on the Galileo mission
to Jupiter the Cassini mission to Saturn um and uh he also many other projects
and was at JPL for a long time he's recently retired uh but I think
he's probably working harder than he ever did in his life and just to prove that fact he's on
vacation right now in Seattle um but he's still doing a lecture for us uh
about his perspective on our scale and perspective of the universe so Steve I'm
going to turn it over to you thank you for hanging in there with us thank you Scott for the invitation you know it
always um your questions to me always prompt a lot thinking that I'm happy to
share great so uh and just talking about
this was one of those things that even as I was sitting and mulling some of the
pictures I'm going to be using showing you in a few minutes I realize there are things that that apply that I hadn't
even thought of in the course of pulling it together so uh I have I have my
daughter-in-law to thank for letting me use her home office to uh do this and I
we'll get right to the talk and and what I what I call this really perspectives
on perspective and scale in the universe and that's
because I I want to show you how at least some of my thinking goes
and and I don't think I unique that way I think that anybody who puts their mind
to it can can gain some of the the ideas
and insights that that just from thinking about questions like this so um let me get my screen up and
I'm going to also apologize in advance this is not as as um polished as I
usually have things uh simply because I didn't have everything at my immediate
disposal which I do at home I'm going to put this up as full screen as I can
make it and and start with talking about scale and a bit of
perspective uh this is I'm going to be showing you at least some photographs that I have taken myself so and this is
one of them uh this is the rising Crescent Moon uh we hours of the morning
back quite a couple of decades now and as you can see the moon has actually uh
ulted is now in front of one of the stars of the pleades that tiny little
dipper is right here with one star hidden one star in the tree and the
little handle pair out here now many of
us don't I think don't have a real good idea of what the sizes of these objects
are when we just look at them at the sky and if you don't have a mental image of
that or haven't made measurements or something how do you get get an idea well this is one of those
opportunities and uh you can see that the the plees are about one degree
across at least along their length um again not not something that's
especially useful and yet it's something that gives you some pause because you have to realize that the
that cluster of stars is 250 light years away and and the Moon is uh about
400,000 kilometers 20 40,000 miles away
and yet they're very similar in size the other uh little insight that I had was
pondering what's going on here with that star
because Starlight is definitely getting through the tree right
Horizon and yet not all of it is and how does that work and uh a little bit of
additional thinking in your realize well the aperture of the telescope here must
be big enough that individual leaves cannot be covering the full aperture and
so now we' just learned something about that tree knowing the aperture of the telescope and I'll admit to you I'm not
quite sure what which telescope I was using at the time I have recorded I just
don't remember it now so already we're comparing scales just of what we see in
the sky of familiar objects now suppose I go
to another and I skipped one I'm going to go back oh boy something's not not
going right for me let me try this again I apologize there we go that's number
two um I think that will be familiar I don't know why it is that these
occultations these disappearances of bright objects seem to occur much more frequently in the we hours before Dawn
than in the evening sky but and it's probably not true but it's certainly the case that I've had much more success and
for where I've been uh I've been able to see these things uh for that first plees
in the moon I was just at my my own Observatory about 150 kilometers from
Los Angeles 85 road miles and for this one I
actually had to drive out about 250 kilometers and uh that's like 150 miles
uh to the east of Los Angeles out into the desert near 29 Palms it's called
North Springs and uh catch the moon
actually I caught it a low when it was all lower before Jupiter and its moons
had gone behind the moon this is the aftershot and again perspective here um
one of the things that tells you is of course that the moon must be closer than Jupiter Jupiter at this time was rough
550 million miles away and the moon was still that and that translates into
order of N9 100 million kilometers and the moon again was that
same distance I quoted earlier around 400,000 kilometers and 240,000
miles but the other interesting um comparison you can make is of the sizes
of everything of course the distance makes up for part of that but if you compare those
four uh satellites of Jupiter the Galilean satellites iio Europa gany and
Kalisto it turns out that two of them are actually slightly larger than the
moon in physical size and two of them are a little smaller and so again we have to from
this perspective we have to realize that that some things can be actually fairly
similar in size but look very very different in the sky because the
distances the 3d effect of of the fact that the universe is 3D the sky is not a
a flat hemisphere which is a contradiction but a flat surface or a hemispherical
surface uh is
important here again is just another example that's a cool shot um this this
goes back uh again I had to travel even further not a lot further maybe 100 150
kilometers further in this case towards Northern California than 29 P Palms
about 100 miles further north and then I did getting up 29 palms and Saturn I was
along a very narrow just a few kilometers wide path where Saturn was
never completely covered by the moon and that's pretty cool and if
you're wondering and I'm not sure if you can actually see I hope you can you can see where I'm pointing that's not fake
it's not the shadow that's the actual part of the Moon that still hasn't seen Sunrise yet moon was creeping along I
have a series of about 30 images of this this was taken before we had easy access
to video and uh I I've got it steps along
there you can see the detail matching this the exposures and there's a whole different story in terms of
perspective um the moon appears
brighter Saturn not because it's it is brighter the moon reflects about as much
as as much light as fresh asphalt a fresh black tar Road surface 7% of the
light reaching it Saturn is reflecting probably on the order of uh 60 to 70% of the light
reaching it so intrinsically Saturn is fainter only because it's much farther
away not because it's reflecting light less and its rings are definitely darker
but they're still brighter than the moon probably reflecting on the order of 40% of the light again compared to 11% for
the moon again this is this is a scaling issue and the scale
has to do with both distances from the Sun and the materials that are
actually um reflecting sunlight to
us I like to also point out um
that when you want to ask well what what are the sizes of Saturn's rings well
there I have a nice picture which I didn't have access to so I'm not going to show it tonight but it turns out
Saturn in its main ring system a through d g in there uh actually will fit nicely
between the Earth Moon Earth and Moon's separation that quarter of a million
miles or so right 400,000 kilometers that gives you some real feeling of what how big Saturn really is it really does
yes and and I should have mentioned it with with the the Moon and Jupiter um
Jupiter was farther away than its maximum but still the moon was was about only 140th of Jupiter's real
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think about these things yes I um actually love this oh and I seem to
have jumped a bunch of I'm sorry about this is just just not going quite the way I was expecting them to go
okay I will mention this since I'm at it and and talk about Cosmic scales because
here I can bring up something else you see a US quarter dollar we call them a quarter here they're worth 25 cents
they're about just a shade more than 24 millimeters in diameter and if you were to compress the
whole solar system including Pluto onto the top of that quarter
dollar and then scale the Milky Way galaxy on this at the same size
rate um the picture on the right the one here is actually wrong I did the
calculation I think later or picked a more uh correct number for the size of the Milky Way which is 100,000 Lighty
years across and it would actually span all of North America from the Canadian
North down into just about Central America wow on this and this is one of
those things that I just found absolutely mindboggling uh it was something that I
could Gras I don't go in for comparisons like this very often but it just gave
gave me such a feeling maybe because I've had the opportunity to fly across the continent a few times to have some
feel for what that's about but but it it's still kind of an
amazing thing and and and I'll mention this now just because it's kind of kind
of interesting uh Star Wars didn't ever really talk about how far away one place
was from another place they just took the hyperdrive and away they went you watch Star Trek they would always talk
about going warp a and if you start trying to figure out okay what what did
did warp eight mean what does warp eight mean um it certainly doesn't mean eight
times the speed of light and if you look at some of the books that talk about it well maybe it means 64 times 8 squar 64
times the speed of light and yet when you talk about well they so they can get from one star to another in two days
nah it's many times a speed of light and that's the reason the whole question of
interstellar travel is interesting and looking very very
difficult but that's a tangent let me go on let me talk about these here you see
on the on these two are on the same scale uh this is slightly reduced scale
but if you compare um over here you can see this is uh roughly 13 the diameter of the sun uh
800 65,000 miles about 1.4 million kilometers and that the distance between
Earth and Moon is about that same onethird of that
distance and if you look at the scale of this one and compare it to the size of
this sun on this side you see that that also is about 130 these eruptions these
were uh eruptive prominences one a slow one and one much faster
were um actually sending out material beyond the distance between
Earth and Moon just in course of in this case it was about 20 minutes and in this
case it was about 45 minutes time and I was fortunate to CCH both of
these and uh I'm feel Steve when you see these things and
you start to put in perspective uh the size of the Earth and then you think
well okay the Earth is about three and a half million times bigger than a human
person in in diameter okay uh then you start to think you start to
think wow I'm I'm almost not even there I'm not you know in the scale of these
things we're so tiny yes yes it's almost get buried down
to almost insignificance right but but again you know we're the ones
that are exploring all this stuff so right that's absolutely right and so it
says something for the power of the human mind to be able to grasp things on
this level and you know in a way I can I can almost suggest that that's true with
with the even power of our physiology if you think what we can do with eyes which
all of us use as astronomers uh to to look in daylight at
a bright sunlit day and to think that within a couple of
hours after Sunset we can look at something many millions of times fainter
and see it right is mindboggling and our mind is able to grasp also these these
differences in scale as well and so it's it's it's
really precious what we can do yes all right so let me go on and give
you some more examples just um this this was put together when I was working on a
project called Sim the space interferometry mission and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on that but I
put this together because I wanted to show the scales of what we could do um and what our technology can do now
here is Jupiter much like that picture a little larger presented here uh that I
showed you earlier near the moon and its diameter across the its equator is about 40 to 45
seconds of arc Arc seconds um depending on the distance we're seeing it from
when on on Earth to Jupiter and here are its its moons Galilean satellites three
of them anyway and those moons Span in
angular size one to two Arc seconds with a good telescope you can make them out
as discs if you have a very stable atmosphere I've been happy to do that
seems like about once a year to get steady enough where I do most of my observing to actually see that and it's
very exciting when it does well
this large donut here or the circle with
it is the circle here is one
1,000th of the diameter of one of Jupiter's Galilean satellites wow one
and a half about one and a half millarc seconds and that that's the Hubble Space
telescope's positional error Circle how much it will allow itself to flop around
a little bit before it corrects its pointing so that tells you something
about what we can do I'm happy saying I can see one to two arccs hubbles um
keeps at one and a one and a half thousands of an
arcc now for positional measurements an earlier satellite that the European
Space Agency flew was able to actually get positions of stars to this inner
amount which is a fraction about one well oneir little less than that of the
Hub positional error 64 this is Milli arcc thousands of an
arcc wow that's great yeah do you realize
that we now have the technology because we proved it to build Sim but we didn't
fly it that we could make measurements down to four microarc seconds we have
technology that can do that which would allow us for example to
physically measure the distance to the to the center of the Milky Way
galaxy it would allow us from 33 parex
away and maybe even farther to measure the motion of the sun caused by Jupiter
and Saturn orbiting it what
yes wow that's that's the path of the sun's orbit around the center of mass of
the solar system for a couple of Revolutions of
Jupiter Saturn amazing and and one of the mindboggling
things to me is you a lot of you know that um that that the 2017 total solar
eclipse was the 100th anniversary of the measurement of or the observations that
led to measurements that proved the that the sun displaces stars in the sky by its
gravity they proved uh general relativity from Albert Stone Well turns
out even Jupiter does that and this technology would show the mo the offset
of a position with Jupiter going by a star in the background Sky mindboggling to
me so i' like to to show that just to show what's
possible and now I'm going to G to shift a little bit more and I I realize what
we've lost and I'll get to it at the end and out on the international Hy watch
effect um when we look out into the sky we see
Neighbors here's the small melenic clouds our friends in Brazil and
Argentina and South America and Australia can all see this and back in
199 uh7 it turned out that there was a guest
star a supernova in the large magic enic Cloud you see it in both of these
pictures this is it this is the tarantula nebula very nice large nebula
visible in the large Mulin cloud and the pair of them are over here at a slightly different angle um and slightly
different brightnesses but the mindboggling thing here is that
Supernova 19 1987 in said 97 19
87a was actually visible to the uned eye
170,000 light years away it was discovered
visually by about four different people over the span of a few hours in the
southern hemisphere from from South America over to New Zealand and then
with a confirming later but prior to announcement observations made I think
in South Africa so the southern hemisphere really got to see this my second view of it was from an
airplane on my way to New Zealand in May of 87 when actually it had gotten
brighter but and I had these pictures were taken in that same time frame in
May and the amazing thing was to think that I am seeing actual a single actual
star that kind of distance away right just mindboggling
again now the reason I'm showing you this and I know you can all read it in
advance and I'm GNA let you do that is that when we talk about finding
exoplanets planets that orbit other stars it's maybe not so easy to grasp
how hard it is I found this to be a very telling uh
set of cartoons that indicates just how tough it is because with with stars
being so much brighter than planets the comparison is like looking
at a lighthouse and trying to see a firefly that's right next to
it and to give you some idea of that I've got a couple of examples to follow
up and that difference of a billion really makes a difference this fahal B
here hiding and then shown in this shown in two places after a couple of years
motion is um a planet that is orbiting it will take a few hundred years to
actually get it so that they actually captured it luckily um quite far from
the star hidden behind an occulting distance hble space telescope
image and uh part of the hint that there would be something there was actually this
ring of dust planets actually move dust around
and get that get can set up rings like that in this case surrounding a
star I'd still like to see a third picture here sometime just to prove that
the it really is there because you see a lot of these SP you can see them they're
they're actually just part of the way the Optics work um and are very difficult to get rid of and you want to
make sure that these aren't fake for whatever reason I don't think they are because it matches the orbit nicely but
uh it's it is it would still be nice always to get a third we even do that in
the solar system here we actually have uh picture uh what this is one frame
from a video composed over several years of the motion of planets orbiting HR
8799 and again this is this is what's called speckle actually each of these
little dots is called speckle and this is mostly a culted star you can't really
see the star that's just kind of the remnants of the light coming from it but sure enough when you watch and you can
you can look this up I'm sure you can find it on on video somewhere um of
actually seeing the arc that these three planets and there's a fourth make over
the period of time that that the video was pulled together uh numerous pictures
these were taken from Mona with I think the mellin
telescope so again just just
mindboggling I want to step back and take you back oh about 150 years
show you the familiar view of a star like Sirius Alpha Canis
Majoris and it has the companion the puup it's sometimes called so Sirius a
is picture here series B follows and moves along this orbit I'm going the wrong way but there it
goes and we can we can actually follow it through uh pretty much it's it's
roughly a 50e orbit but to understand how difficult
something like this is we have to realize that that it's just not as
simple as as it looks doing this because Sirius a is in motion too and that's
presented here the line C to C or line C anyway is just the apparent
straight line motion across the sky it's called the proper motion motion of Sirius over time it has to be measured
against a background of much more distant stars and you can see it moves a
fair piece of change across and if you do this long enough and you see a
repetition and you certainly see that here we see a big um offset to its motion on this side and
a similar one on this side and in the on the other side we see the these
reflecting and that's or rather not reflecting but this is the apparent motion if we could
see it of the pup I beg your pardon this is the pup
here this D is the is this is the white dwarf a is the primary star it's like a
cork screw yes and it is and in fact if we lay out the two of these and you
might remember I just mentioned U watching the sun's orbital motion
uh caused by Jupiter and Saturn well the orbital emotion of b and a the primary
star and the secondary star match these so here's the orbit of B and that's
going to look just like this one what we don't see it usually is the orbital motion of a which it has to do um that's
Newton's third law in action so again this what we see and
what we can measure are very very different another example we talk about
the about measuring the red shift and everybody knows well it just means the
spectral lines here are the hydrogen lines that's hydrogen Alpha in the red hydrogen beta in the the medium blue
green and hydrogen gamma in the blue or deep blue and um we say okay so
they all move to the red with a red shift or they might move to the blue with a blue shift well it's not that
simple actually it's a stretch and the red one moves farther than the greenish
one than the bluish one okay and we don't look at Spectra anymore like this
that we might see through a telescope we actually use digitals uh uh detectors to figure out where they
are this is not the same set in here this is actually just this short
area in the red um but we see these spectral lines just like we see these
black big black ones here but these are for other elements and they're even
smaller ones but even that's hard to measure and so the real way that the
discoveries of the first exoplanets uh made with optically were
done first announced in 1995 was using a special filter that had
iodine in it and it created a spectrum now you can look at this part of the
this is wire spanning spanning the green to the red you see that all here and you
see it puts through in just regular light continuous light with a light bulb
for instance you would just see a bunch of these black lines going through there
but what what the astronomers searching for did was compare the Motions of
these lines to all of these down here which match those
they're steady they're they're moving with Earth and then we're able to see a
slow red and blue shift that could be translated into a planet orbiting a star
that we could not otherwise see so this again amazing gives you not
so much that you have to remember anything that I've said but I hope it helps you understand from the
perspective of what astronomers do spend lots of their time doing and it's
studying these data uh and not just thinking oh it all
pops out of of a machine doesn't it takes thought it
takes careful examination and interpretation of what's being
seen okay well there's my extra Cosmic scales and I apparently lost one slide
and I'm going to ask you to bear with me because I'm gonna go find it because you're gonna go find it it's not hard
it's not hard uh and I think I put the wrong one away
up here so Steve I really want to thank you again for coming on to our Global Star Party to talk about this because
it's so interesting to um you know get a
you know a real scientist's perspective on the scale of the universe
you know so well it's my pleasure um actually I'm
GNA bail on this I I did seem to have accidentally uh deleted that picture but
I'm going to describe it to you anyway okay couple of different things from
it goes first off back to the international hle watch this really has to do with
scale because I I asked myself one day what can we use as a big indicator of
you know what we're looking at when we talk about H's Comet so I said okay what happens if I make the size of comet H's
nucleus which is anywhere from 10 K mm or 6 miles to 17 or 18 kilm 10 miles and
make it the size of a pin head about one millimeter across okay SC I'm gonna put
put the pressure on you put you on the spot and say how big do you think the coma of the com would be if I said it
was between 100,000 and 200,000 miles um 150,000 kilometers to
uh 250,000 kilom I'll go for the bigger number well that's no I'm giving you the
big no how how on the scale of 1 millimeter for the for the comet nucleus
how big do you think that would be oh jeez I won't make you I won't make you
guess too hard I I I think I think that um maybe a couple of millimeters I think
very the coma of the Comet that's that's just the head of the Comet okay between
10 and 15 M across okay coming out of
that one little millimeter nucleus and the tail of the Comet which
going to be on the order of 15 to 30 million
K 10 to 10 to uh 20 million miles
measured out as between um 5 and 10
kilomet 3 to miles away for the end I can't wrap my
head around it Steve well that was the thing that my mind boggled at it yeah
and and another one of those things again scale-wise everybody should know Saturn's rings
span about 180,000 miles and we know from
Cassini I'm sorry 250,000 kilometers we know from Cassini
that they're between they're right around 10 to 30t about 3 to 10 m
thick if I take if I were to spread Saturn's rings
out on a football field and that's American football uh interational football or a
rugby um Pitch the thick of Saturn's rings on
that scale would be the thickness of a sheet of paper spread across that
whole wow so it's it's amazing the things we
can measure but it's also amazing of the sizes of things that we see right and
and one closing thought I had the picture with the comet picture and I I don't have it to show you and I
apologize for that um most people many
people at least will remember Comet hail Bop and a few of those will remember Comet
hakutake which came within about 15 million mil I'm sorry 15 million
kilometers of Earth about 9 million miles and one of those nights I was up
on the ridge line just north of Mount Wilson Observatory and I had one of
those uh nights of seeing that was arcc or sub arcc meaning it was really really
good still yeah and I'm guiding on the comet's head as it's moving through the
the field of view I've got to chase the comet continuously it was moving so fast
and I got a picture that looked very good with just bright the bright nuclear
region with uh you know material coming out later the Hubble Space Telescope
published a picture taken about the same time and even through my 5in guide
telescope with its and 5 in is 125 millimeter Hubble with its um what is
it 200 250 2500 millimeter uh diameter
did not show any more detail than my small telescope was show
but the pictures look the same wow and and it was I I felt good that I got a
decent picture and gee you know You' think we'd have seen something more with Hubble darn it so yeah you certainly
would think so it's one of those things this was after the Optics were corrected right oh yeah yeah no this was 1996 it
was it was well after yeah it was I mean the the fuzz
was there because it was the way the com was making itself look right but having
a larger scale telescope did not help show it any better than my small scale
telescope right I think that we see these kinds of things a lot in amateur astronomy where
people are able to make images that really rival what uh Hubble Space
Telescope has done you know through image processing techniques you know uh
patience time in you know where they're able to uh make like 100 hour exposures
and such you know so um we saw that kind of stuff happen a lot at the Riverside
telescope makers conference with Tony Howes who you know is now you know
almost mythical of legendary status amongst astrophotographers but uh there's been
many others you know Adam block uh Chuck IOU I you know I've got a long list of
of people that have been able to do that the other thing that's really interesting right now too is that the uh
technology uh in amateur astronomy especially when it's applied to imaging has really started to mature and that
has allowed people to go and from like not even rank beginner I'm talking
about no experience okay to making images that are really quite amazing in
a very short amount of time when I say short amount of time this used to take people you know 15 20 years to go
through this learning curve now now it's one year two years you know so uh and I
imagine that that that uh that learning curve will get shorter and shorter even
yet in the years to yeah yeah so proam uh proam
projects uh like like the one that you started with International hyat uh gosh I mean you know I just
remember the very fact that you know um that an amateur astronomer could work
together with real professional scientist was just an amazing idea to me
at the time um and I think that uh we're going to see we already see it now we've
got um uh did an interview with uh uh Nicole Ola she's an 8-year-old
astronomer out of Brazil and she's doing asteroid work you know so she's working
with a proam NASA Affiliated project right now it's just uh we're in the
Golden Age of astronomy we've been in it for a while and it's just getting better and better all the time so and and all
of those observations that the amateurs sent in are at the at the uh Comet node
comment minor minor object node of the uh planetary data system DDS and those
data are accessible um Steve do you remember how many people
participated in international hle
watch I think I think there were about 250 who actually sent in observations
that ended up in the archives okay and and and some were
published uh in a variety of places I got asked to pull out a few specifically
by the large scale phenomena Network which was looking studying the comet's tail and up in the big Atlas that they
published so um and and others as I say are in in that small B's node um so it
was 250 but but tens of thousands were were collecting information and looking
at the comet at that time I I'm am quite sure I just don't have a way of knowing
yeah yeah yeah sure well that's great well hopefully
some of you that are watching uh uh were inspired by uh not only learning you
know about the scale and perspective that we gain from from just thinking
about uh our place in the universe and uh you know the sizes of things and such
but uh I hope that uh having Steve on would U would help inspire you to uh get
involved in the proam project you're going to start to see a lot of this stuff come about from the American
Astronomical Society um in the last uh what five
months or something I was involved with a uh committee uh to um get get amateur
astronomers more involved with professional science uh and the whole
the whole Mantra There Was You Know H how do we combine professional and amateur astronomers together and um so
you know I know that it's coming about they have already accepted theas did accept a lot of our our suggestions and
they're going to start putting them into the action into action the next year so
it's uh it's it's time to get on board folks so excellent yeah Steve thanks so
much thanks for you know I don't what time is it there now 8 8:15 or something so thanks for taking your evening and a
piece of your vacation out for us and um uh you know safe drive or flight back
home right you're flying back yeah good better than driving right now
thanks very much Steve take care and I want to thank everybody in the audience
um uh for hanging in there with us and uh participating and watching our our
program so you guys keep uh like our old friend Jack hor climber used to always
say keep looking up and uh we'll see you uh we'll see you uh tomorrow on another
program okay and uh our next program will be with um uh with uh seped hushar
from Iran uh she was the subject of a documentary uh program uh called
sepay reaching for the Stars uh if you want to watch that or try to watch that
before we have our our program tomorrow you can download the movie I think on
iTunes and so uh that's about the only place I've been able to find it at this
time but a fascinating documentary about the passion and desire of a young
Iranian teenager uh uh Fe female teenager um you know wanting to learn
more about science and sharing that experience with her friends so until then uh we will see you um we'll see you
soon take care and we'll talk to you
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