Transcript:
6:00 p.m..Scott Roberts - Introduction
territory in Washington DC I've gotten to do to attend some seminars and things
6:05 p.m..David Levy – Intro and Poetry
and uh at the U.S Naval Observatory and uh
and they do Outreach the the enrichment or the charlottesville's astronomical uh
astronomy club does outreach at the uh Leander McCormick Observatory
6:20 p.m..Dena McLung - President of the Denver Astronomical Society
uh in Charlottesville which is also a Clark refractor
6:30 p.m..Astronomical League Door Prizes – Chuck Allen
it's actually the twin I'm sorry it's a twin it's the twin to the one in the you know Naval
6:35 p.m..Sybella Burlingame - "The Old Grand Observatory in Greenwich, England"
Observatory in Washington DC actually the one that Charlottesville is oh my goodness
6:45 p.m..Jason Guenzel - The Vast Reaches
Anna does your Club ever go up in into the mountains to observe no not as a club
um we really don't have any sites in the mountains although
um one of the things that we're working on is um we have a um
7:00 p.m..Molly Wakeling - Astronomolly’s Universe
kind of an official alliance with the Douglas County open space
7:10 p.m..Ten Minute Break
and we're working on we've had one telescope donated we're working on
getting a couple of others and we're helping them they want to build an observatory on one of their properties
7:20 p.m..John Briggs - “Maria Mitchell: Her Philosophy, and the Observatory Named for Her”
um that has really good Dark Skies and while it wouldn't truly be up in the
7:30 p.m..Jerry Hubbell - Live from the MSRO
mountains it would be um very shielded from the um the light
pollution of both Denver and Colorado Springs and
um and there's a lot of wildlife there and it's going to be a beautiful location so
7:45 p.m..Adrain Bradley - Nightscapes
but not terribly far away from Denver you know maybe 45 minutes so
that's that's a very good that's a very good sign sounds like a good set I'd like to see it sometime
8:00 p.m..Nicolas Ariel Arias - Hammertime with Nico!
I hope you can yes it's beautiful
I have to tell you that the Denver group means an awful lot to me
8:15 p.m..Maxi Falieres - Astrophotography to the Max!
um I I've been involved with them on and off since 1963.
and uh I'm really such a privilege to be involved with the Denver Astronomical
Society it's really a good group of people
8:30 p.m..César Brollo - Live from Buenes Aires
well thanks to Jack Eastman we got reconnected with you connected
for me for the first time yeah how is Jack doing do you know Dina
8:45 p.m..Conal Richards
well I spoke with him this morning and he sounds pretty good I mean he's in good spirits but
he's having a hard time putting a sentence together um
that's too bad well yeah he was there did Jack uh have a stroke or something
9:00 p.m..Steve Mallia - Live From Ontario Telescope
or he had a stroke last Thursday oh I did not know wow but it's not affecting
one side or the other of his body it's mostly affecting his Communication
9:15 p.m..Tyler Bowman - Arkansas Skies
Center so but fortunately his next door neighbor
and um one of his main contacts in the world is a registered nurse and
9:30 p.m..Rodrigo Zelada
that's who got him to the hospital and who's been keeping watch on him ever since so yeah he's in good hands how old
is Jack now 80. 80. oh wow my goodness he's 80 going on
in 15. he's the one that got me reconnected
9:45 p.m..Gary Palmer - Gary Palmer Astronomy
with the Denver group it's a number about almost a year ago now and I just love being a part of it it's
it's been really such a pleasure I could go on and on but I better not
if you uh have a chance to talk to Jack Dina said in my regards and well wishes
I sure will I sure will thank you
yeah he's as soon as they can find a bed for him in a rehab place they'll be
moving him to rehab so I plan to be in touch with him when that happens
and you know things will be a little chaotic until they get it moved and then then
he'll be there for at least a couple of weeks so yes
so are we expecting a flood of people to join right before the countdown clock
ends you won't see you won't see the people yeah yeah they join uh uh there's people
watching in chat right now and they aren't chatting with us uh Dina if you
want to watch um uh like uh our Channel on YouTube or
on Facebook um you need to watch it on a separate computer with the with all the audio
turned off your microphone and and speakers because you can get this kind of runaway
um audio problem you know Echoes and stuff like that but uh yeah you can you
can watch the chats come in and chat with them live if you'd like I don't have another computer so
I'll just have to enjoy it okay well I will if they have questions for
you I will definitely let you know okay good thank you and you will also watch the internal chat here in Zoom because I
often post uh comments and stuff like that okay I've got that open so yeah
it'll work wonderful thank you
yeah and for those of you in the audience who don't know who Jack Eastman is uh he is an amazing
astronomer and uh uh Optics Designer maker it's not all
manner of of optical design I think for the military and
he has uh he would often show up with a beautiful Alvin Clark refractor uh you
could often see him at uh the Oaky Tech star party for example but uh I'm sure
he showed up at Colorado star parties a lot just where he's from
he is unmistakable in his looks he is uh he uh he has a very distinctive
but one of the friendliest guys around you know I think
Jack is a wonderful person
it's a group called astronomy Romania and invite them to watch
booster
ooze yeah Chopin's stomping ground yes
oh yeah yeah if Wendy is correcting I believe she is
Wendy is always correct because she's not she is
I'll remember that I'll remember that
oh my goodness uh next Tuesday is Sir Arthur
eddington's birthday he's the guy that led
the expedition to prove once and for all that Einstein's theory of relativity was
correct by looking at stars displaced around this uh the eclipse of the Sun
so um I knew the lady by Dr Viber Douglas
who wrote his biography and we were actually very good friends
founder of the Kingston center of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada very active in the Montreal Center
and a first-rate astronomer and she wrote the biography of Arthur
Stanley Eddington highly recommend
okay
p.m.04:00 End
now as we get ready to begin uh you see more and more people joining on this
channel we have a lot of people on the other channels hope that I cannot see but uh we're going to
be starting in about four minutes and after I do my little thing and I
will hand it back to Scotty who will then introduce you Dina
uh and and David if you could help me introduce Dina a little bit more uh or
Adina of course help us out I know that you're the president of the Denver Astronomical Society so
but um sure okay I'd be happy to
I love this quote from Mariah Mitchell yeah and uh
later on in our program tonight uh John Briggs will be giving a presentation about her
that's just what what a phenomenal person Mariah Mitchell was
speaking of comments she discovered a comment in fact she did yes he did
Miss Miss Mitchell's comment yeah
I think we're very proud of Mr let Mr Leonard who whose
comment is now quite right at about third magnitude and um
sporting a nice faint Tale going off to the Northeast
and a beautiful fan-shaped coma right now I got to see it last night just
gorgeous little comment that's awesome
you know [Music]
um [Music]
2021 was another year Gravely impacted by covid but at the European Space
Agency work has continued and Esa can look back on a year in which the agency once more showed its excellence and
outstanding ambition in science issa's year ends on a high note with the
long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in partnership with NASA and CSA
this cutting-edge Space Telescope will be launched on top of an Ariane 5 from
Europe's Spaceport Webb is designed to answer questions about our universe and to make
breakthrough discoveries in all fields of astronomy 2021 also saw the double Venus flyby of
solar Orbiter and Betty Colombo whereby both spacecraft on route to their
destinations did a flyby of our hottest planet only 33 hours apart a first but
on the ground New Missions are being prepared as well this summer esa's new space probe juice which stands for
Jupiter icy moons Explorer successfully completed rigorous thermal tests at
esa's s-tec facility the mission will launch to Jupiter in 2023 and it will study the planet and
its icy moons Europa Callisto and Ganymede for esa's exciting exomars Mission high
altitude drop tests were successfully executed in karuna Sweden and later in
Oregon in the U.S testing the parachutes needed to ensure a gentle TouchDown for Xmas on the
surface of the red planet for human spaceflight Issa astronauts
Tomah pesque and matthiasmara both made the journey to the International Space Station ISS in 2021 Thomas departed in
April for his second long duration Mission named Alpha and he was the first Issa astronaut to fly in the SpaceX crew
Dragon capsule during his stay another Marvel of European technology came to
the International Space Station the European robotic arm ERA this robotic
arm can move hand over hand on the outside of the Russian laboratory module naoka and can be used for inspections
bringing scientific instruments outside of the airlock and Aid astronauts during
space walks on board the ISS tommer was involved in the setup of era and in
October he became the fourth European commander of the space station he returned to Earth in November a few days
before German astronaut matthiasmara launched to the ISS for his six-month Mission named Cosmic kiss
ever looking forward to the future Issa opened applications for a new class of astronauts on the 31st of March and by
the time the vacancies closed in June over 22 000 aspiring astronauts had
applied it was also the first time Issa had a vacancy for an astronaut with a physical disability to which over 200 people
replied now the candidates will go through several screening stages and in
2022 a new class of astronauts will be revealed to the world the ambition of
Esa is to bring the first European to the surface of the Moon before the end of the decade
to achieve this Issa continues to work closely with NASA in the development of the Artemis program
in 2021 a second European service module esm2 arrived at Kennedy Space Center in
Florida while the esm-1 was integrated with the Orion capsule and stacked in
preparation for next year's Maiden flight it is also esa's responsibility to keep securing independent access to
space for Europe with two new upcoming launchers in November the last Vega was
launched from Europe's Spaceport to be replaced from 2022 onwards by the new
and improved Vegas sea launcher the development of the new Ariane 6 launcher is also well underway with more
tests across several sites in Europe and in Kuru in September the Ariane 6 Launchpad was
inaugurated bringing the maiden flight of this flexible heavyweight launcher ever closer
2021 was another important year for Galileo the most accurate and only publicly owned satellite navigation
system in the world in November a soyuz launched from Europe's Spaceport
carrying two more Galileo satellites into orbit these satellites were the first of 12
more first-generation Galileo satellites known as batch 3 and they fill in empty
spots in the constellation and offer replacements for satellites which are end of life
meanwhile Issa continues to work on a second generation of more powerful and versatile software-defined Galileo
satellites the way towards this Innovative software-defined satellite design was paved by utilsat Quantum
which was launched in July on board in Ariane 5. Quantum is the first of these
software-defined satellites which can be reprogrammed in orbit responding to
changing Market demands during their lifetimes in all these missions Issa is at the
Forefront of space technology it has the ambition to remain there and to excel even more this aspiration is shared by
issa's new director General Joseph aspaka who took the helm on the 1st of March he set out to Define new and
ambitious priorities and goals for Easter in the coming years with a gender 2025 outlining the challenges in
maintaining and growing Europe's role in the space economy to achieve this close collaboration with the EU is essential
and in June Issa and the EU signed the financial framework partnership
agreement defining the roles and responsibilities of all Partners the European commission the new EU Space
Program agency USPA and Esa which has a proven track record of excellence and
responsibility during the ministerial meeting a Visa member states in November it was agreed
that for Europe to thrive they must act now and accelerate the use of space and
three accelerators to bring Europe's space Ambitions to the next level were defined these three accelerators are
space for a green future rapid and resilient crisis response and protection
of space assets the space for a green future accelerator is closely linked to Earth observation
and climate change one of esa's focal points the measurements provided by The
Sentinel satellites of Europe's Copernicus program or by the Issa Earth explorers continue to give scientists
and policy makers the information they need to assess climate change and the
health of our planet the importance of climate change on the future of humanity was also stressed at
the climate conference in Glasgow in November where Issa was also present showcasing its space-based climate
action Issa can end another year of keeping Europe at the Forefront of space
technology using it to improve the lives of people on the ground to innovate and to learn about the
universe and our own planet [Music]
[Music]
foreign
well hello everybody this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and it's the 77th
Global Star Party um I'm so excited we have a great lineup for you uh this evening and as as is
tradition we always get started with David Levy you know I was thinking about
David uh as someone that I mean not only is a friend but uh as someone that is
truly like a um you know a living individual not unlike Charles Messier
you know Charles Mercier has a long list of uh of deep Sky objects that is to his
credit but he was also he found all those objects of course amateur astronomers know this because he was
looking for comets and uh um so you know I know that David has
also developed a list of objects called yes the the levy list which are some of
the most amazing deep Sky objects that extends what Charles mercier's own list
was but uh it's it's so cool to be uh living in the same space at the same
time with such an amazing individual who not only loves looking for comets but
loves um talking about it in through poetry
through his own thoughts uh through his lectures through his books and um and
through all of his initiatives that he's championed over all these years
his latest one is uh and we'll talk more about this later is getting more youth
involved in the astronomical league so I'm going to turn this over to you David thank you so much for coming on yet
again uh to the global Star Party well thank you so much Scott and uh
hello everyone good evening and welcome to the 77 Global star party we have a
lot of familiar people here tonight and some new faces that I hope will be joining us regularly after this
or maybe never come back again after they hear what I'm okay we'll we'll have to just see what happens
right there are two particular people that I'd like to welcome tonight the
first is Martha Fortis from the Ottawa center of the Royal Astronomical Society
of Canada and she is a regular at our Adirondack astronomy retreat
thanks and uh she has been really um really a
big help there bringing telescopes her son Matthew and just really enjoying
things very much and uh since Martha is here tonight I am going to offer us the poem a
parliament owner of comet Leonard I don't know how many of us have seen comment Leonard but I did get to see it
last night with the moon out of the early evening sky
the comet is uh appears to be just beautiful uh one person estimated as hydrogen is
2.5 but what I saw last night was more like a third magnitude Comet with a
faint tail going off to the north and east and a beautiful lovely fan-shaped
inner coma and uh
probably around the late 19th century wrote a poem that we can now dedicate to
comment Leonard across the night a crimson Comet lies it
ranges from the Zenith to the ground well maybe you want a Roman letter not quite from the Zenith to the ground but
it's trying they say its path is straight throughout the skies and never march through space
a circling round on where lights littering Legions flame and burn it runs
an endless race through ghosts unknown it cannot or it will not backward turn
and so it is ever hopeless and alone it's steadfat worship to the Moon is
sent that fickle ever circling satellite Majestic morner of the firmament uh
flaring grief I Praise You In the highest vests are a symbol of my soul's despair
our radiant brush that paints my destiny the utter loneliness as such as we
the other person that I'd like to introduce tonight is Dina McClung who is
from the Denver Astronomical Society I need to admit that I used to be
that I used to be a member of the Denver Junior estimated Society
they had a really strong Junior section start a section back then a hundred years ago when I was only 15 was
actually in 1963. we had not landed on the moon yet although we were starting
and we were really ramping up to that to that moon landing that would take place only six years later
anyway I've been become very active once again in the Denver Astronomical Society
and I proposed to Dina that we start a Juniors where we restart
the junior section and for some reason she agreed with that and we have started that
that is now spread to the astronomical League as what we hope to call the
junior astronomical lead it'll be a subset in in the astronomical League we'll meet
online every second Sunday and a little bit later tonight Dina will
be saying something about this herself you know I'm so glad you're here and now
back to you Scotty okay okay so I I uh
we have uh we have Dina on with us right now and Dina I am uh you know I've been
with you on a couple of the um uh junior astronomical League uh
meetings that we've held on Sundays and uh you know I'm still learning about you
but I know that you are the president of the Denver Astronomical Society
um I think that you've probably been involved in astronomy for quite a while and uh
um so what what brought you to uh Denver
and the Astronomical Society and what can you tell us about your organization and uh and and then what can you tell us
about the junior astronomical League
yeah my cat just decided to chime [Laughter]
I'll tell you a little bit about me first so when I was a kid I grew up in a small town in Oregon and my dad would
take me outside at night and we could see the constellations in the Milky Way
and satellites pass over I really I really enjoyed seeing the night sky
and I still have um an atlas from that time
um that I remember looking over and I I just ate up everything I could when I
was in school um but I fell in love with Aviation later on in my life I
at some point After High School I got my private pilot's license and I wound up becoming an air traffic controller I
retired from that in 2008 after my last 13 years in the tower at Denver
International and at that point in time though I I'd been to Chamberlain Observatory a few
times so I went and joined the Das and progressively became a little bit more
involved a little bit more a little bit more and and now here I am as the
president um I'm one of those people that I um I have pretty good communication skills
and organizational skills although I've never been to college but I love learning and
um I kept seeing ways that I felt the organization could better serve our
growing membership and back in 2008 to 2010 I think we might have had
around 250 members or so before they called the people who didn't Renew at
the end of every year and um now we just broke the 700 member Mark
wow but one of the what you have yes big wow for me one of the things that I've
struggled with is um finding ways to serve our members so I've been working on volunteer
Recruitment and I know that people you know in their 20s 30s and 40s are trying
to you know make a living raise families that sort of thing so it struck me that the way to really
um serve the club and get families to come back is to engage the kids and boy the
kids in the club they have a lot going on there are some kids who are really bright and have
already done so much work on their own and so when David came to one of our
meetings via Zoom last spring I was so excited
um some of the kids were just so eager to make his acquaintance and learn what
he had done and I was just like they were you know I was
so thrilled to have this opportunity and we batted the idea around a little bit
and I had a few delays we had a website that was on the verge of completely crashing and
um I had to round up some help getting a new one created but we finally launched
the junior version of the club a couple of months ago and
um I'll tell you these kids are so lucky to have David as their mentor and
um the idea of having it spread to um other clubs and other countries is
really exciting I I think that the more these kids can interact with each other
and develop projects with one another and um make this work at their level before
they go off to college um you know the the ties that they create now are going to live with them
for life and it's going to bring them back to their home clubs and invigorate
those clubs one of the meetings we did have one in-person meeting outdoors in
September Dean regas from the Cincinnati Observatory was in Denver and my
lifelong friend who I've known since I was four was visiting me so these
childhood experiences are I think very important in forming who we are as
adults and where we go in our lives so I'm very grateful for David and his
participation in this effort well yes I I think it's uh
um you know special uh on you know on many points you know also having such as
yourself uh you know leading all of this is uh incredibly important I know that a
lot of our audience is also very uh concerned with
um having having Youth more involved in astronomy I think that um
this pandemic has gotten people of all ages more interested in astronomy in
general and what a great thing to do as a family you know to get out in your
backyard to stargaze with your with your kids uh and to wonder you know what's
what's out there and uh you know it has its own way of uh you know giving you
some peace of mind um and uh you know sitting there contemplating the vastness of the
universe and what it all means and we're we're we're all going to and
all of these things that you can contemplate uh in in the field of
astronomy is right there for you every clear night uh actually even under
Cloudy Skies it's still there right yes yes right so we had a conversation
uh earlier uh today I'm just talking about uh you know I mean some people
wish that they could travel to space you know and and to and to travel it you
know unbelievable speeds but we're already moving on this Earth
you know that's got its own force field and has all of its own it's got
breathable air and it's got all this stuff you know and we're already moving over a million miles per hour to a new
part of space that we've never been to before and so we're already on the Grand Adventure you just have to wake up to it
you know and whether you have a telescope or not uh looking Skyward uh
we'll show you some amazing things you just never know you may see the most amazing Fireball that will be a memory
that lasts you the rest of your life so may I interrupt for a second one of the other things there were two
things one of one of the things was that you know what we're trying to get this junior astronomical League going
and there's some obviously some growing pains and one of the things that Dina wrote to me was that I think was very
very wise was that she said I see that we have a few little issues
getting things together but what worries me even more is if we do not do anything
because if we don't if we don't Inspire future Generations we're not going to
have an astronomical League we're not going to have a Denver Astronomical Society we're not going to have a Royal
Astronomical Society in Canada and speaking of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada I was wondering if
Martha Clark has who is present here tonight could say hi
to us for a minute or so you're you are you must want to
um unmute yourself hey thank you David I think you and I are the only members here
possibly [Music] well I hope Martha that you will be also
active and I've never interview about this yet but uh there's nothing like getting secret asking you in front of
100 000 people but I hope that you will also become active in this junior effort
that we're doing and I use the word Junior as a mark of eloquence as a mark of privilege as a
mark of success and as a mark of the future one of the things that I remember
in 1963 when I was with the Denver Junior group was that I got to hear
Clyde Tombaugh at the Denver Hilton talking about
what he had been doing for the last 30 years and he said he's been looking at Mars for the last 30 years and I looked
at the person I was with and I said now I know what Clyde has been doing since he discovered Pluto 30 years ago and now
it's been almost a century and uh and what Clyde has contributed and over his
lifetime has been wonderful anyway it's been an honor to meet these
people and I think it's been the privilege of my life to enjoy the night sky I'm back to you
Scotty okay all right great okay so let's um
Let's uh uh bring on Chuck Allen uh and the uh with
the astronomical League um I am uh you know you know we're
privileged to have the astronomical league on uh you know every Global star
party it's it's uh uh you know when I think about it um you know here's an organization they
just celebrated their 75th uh uh you know year and um uh they have uh
continuously uh you know push push the envelope to develop uh skills amongst uh
amateur astronomers to inspire uh uh average people to go on and to uh
understand to become scientifically more literate uh and uh they do it through
their their uh observing program comes to their Awards programs that they have
through their you know steadfast development of uh astronomy clubs they
they're the largest Federation in the world of astronomy clubs with over 300 clubs you know uh over I think over 20
000 members now and um it's it is nothing short of astounding you have
like this continuous line of uh of uh inspiration and Heritage uh that is the
astronomical League Chuck Allen's been with the league for quite a while and it's uh been a privilege to meet him
know him and it's been a privilege to have him on global Star Party thanks John thank you very much Scott and good
evening everyone um since we're talking about young people I'd like to share a screen and
show you a picture of the first astronomical League convention that I attended it's a little scary in a way
this is it and one thing that you might notice in this picture
um is that 30 percent of the people in this picture that was taken at the hotel
Schroeder in Milwaukee in 1965 um is that over 30 percent of the people
in this picture are high school students um I'm here right here with Richard God
of Princeton right here I went out there with several friends and uh it was an
exciting place to be just for all the young people that were there and that's something that we started not seeing very soon after the
1960s and we're trying to get back to that point uh all of our youth awards
are starting to bring young people uh to our convention again and that's helping
and so this junior astronomical League idea certainly one uh that we're very
interested in pursuing and we will do so very soon so let me uh move on to share
screen again I can there we go I had a comment Chuck
about that photograph it looked like there are quite a few women there and and yes yes
that's good to see I'll let me let me go back
um there you can take a look at it again tremendous number of women there
and uh you know it was I can't tell you how stimulating the environment was when
you're when you're there as a high school student and you're around the professional speakers you're around
older amateur astronomers of note um and then you're around a lot of other
really accomplished uh young amateur astronomers uh people who are winning
Westinghouse science Talent searches and international science fairs and that sort of thing just an incredibly
incredibly stimulating environment and a very memorable experience
okay so let's get on to the door prize questions and I will
start with the warning that we always like to give regardless of the fact that we're not
talking about solar observing necessarily but your vision is very important to you and uh when you engage
in astronomy with the public or even for just yourself there's always the risk of
not doing something quite right when you're observing the Sun and that can have devastating effects before you ever
realize there's a problem in fact you can permanently damage the retina of your eye almost 500 times faster than
your body can react to the fact that you're seeing something that's too bright so never observe the sun without
professionally made solar filters that include energy rejection filters at the front end of the telescope
um never leave a telescope or binoculars unattended where children can get to them and try to aim them at the sun I've
seen this actually almost happen never use non-certified eclipse glasses and
certainly never use eclipse glasses with any other Optical instrument they're intended to look straight up into the
sky at the sun with the eclipse glasses on not for use with binoculars or a
telescope they will melt if you try that with obvious effect on your eyes eyesight so consult with amateur
astronomers in your local astronomy societies almost every Club in America engages in safe solar observing with
professional equipment and they can show you the ropes and prevent a lot of Heartache
so let's go over the answers from December 14th uh question one was what constellation contains to the Stars
caster and Pollux that of course is Gemini question two which astronaut is famous
for having written his daughter's initials on the moon's surface and the answer was Eugene cernan
and question three which star is Alpha urson minorus it's known as Polaris
okay and the correct answers from December 14th we had eight uh Cameron
Gillis Israel monteroso Marvin Huddleston Andrew corkel Rich kraling Josh Kovach Mike Napper and Rich Eubank
and they will be added to the door prize list at the end of the month okay these are the questions for tonight
please note it note at the bottom that your answer should be emailed to secretary at astraleague.org as quickly
as possible secretary at astraleague.org that email address will appear under each question
these are a little harder tonight this one is a star with the following designation is famous for being what the
designation is the Greek symbol Sigma followed by OCT
this star has a more popular name
question number two Fred Hoyle was famous for naming something that he opposed
what was it
he's also famous for other things too but this is something that he's particularly famous
for and finally the largest storm ever observed in the solar system occurred or
is occurring where is it on the Earth on Jupiter on Saturn or on Neptune I
used a picture of a hurricane here that's not necessarily the storm that I'm referring to here
okay the next astronomical League live event will be on January 21st at 7 pm and more
information about our main speaker for that event will be forthcoming and Scott that's it for tonight and thank you very
much for the time I appreciate it
we can't hear you Scott here we go sorry about that I do want to
add uh that um uh you know if you have not yet joined the astronomical League
you can do so uh probably through your own local astronomy club as many astronomy clubs uh in the United States
uh are already League clubs you join that club and you're automatically a
league member um but uh in the Denver Astronomical Society is one of them for example uh
but you can also join from anywhere in the world as a member at large so you can you can go to uh
astroleague.org and sign up as a member at large which I I've you'll find many
benefits to being a member of the uh of the astronomical League
um up next is uh sybella Burlingame uh Sabella has a has been on global Star
Party several times she is a great speaker and uh usually has
um uh some uh media that she shares as well and I'm going to let her uh talk
about her um her uh uh presentation about the old
Grand observatory in Greenwich England
Village we said we said a year around Christmas time obviously it tapes up it takes up the
whole living room and we only had one little thing about space it was just a father and son looking through a
telescope and we thought well there might be like an observatory that we could possibly fit in or that would fit
in that would fit in and we found um the Observatory that I'm going to
talk to you about today let's see let me share my screen
okay let me minimize that
no it's going okay there okay can you guys see that okay
yes okay good so it's it's in um Greenwich England
and the Royal Observatory in London England was founded in 1676 by King Charles II
and played a major role in the history of astronomy and navigation because astronomy and time are so closely linked
the Royal Observatory was also used to develop accurate clocks The Observatory
is noted as the home of the Prime Meridian in Greenwich in Greenwich Mean
Time which was the term used before today's coordinated universal time
UTC although no longer needed for navigation this red ball is dropped
every day for tourists to enjoy this red ball is still dropped every day for tourists to enjoy
why it was built in 16 in 1675 King Charles II of England
commissioned The Observatory to be built in London to help map the skies so ships
at Sea could find out their long their longitude and navigate better the ruined
Greenwich Castle was chosen as a site for the new Observatory because of its solid foundation as well as being
located on high ground on in a Royal Park the land was already owned by the
government so it was free a very useful invention
during the next 40 years the Royal astronomer who appointed Who was appointed by the king made over 50 000
observations of the moon and stars with a refractory telescope and the window of a nearby building
the astronomer and his assistants plotted plotted all the visible stars in the northern and southern hemispheres
1833 a red ball time was installed to drop every day at 1 pm as a signal of
the time for boats on the on the Thames River T this River T this
allows sea captains about this allows sea captains about to set sail to check the rate of their Marine
chronometers sorry chronometers this five foot diameter
ball was made of wood and leather 1838. it was its first for
permanent sorry it's first permanently mounted telescope was installed it was
this it was a sheep's it was a sheep's Shanks equate
equate how do you say that equatorial a 6.7
inch equatorial yeah thank you 6.7 inch aperture refracting telescope
whose tube was made of wood the future of it 1948 due to increasing
light pollution from London the Royal Observatory was moved to a village of
and was given a new name the Royal Greenwich Observatory the Old Greenwich
the Old Greenwich building was renamed the Royal Observatory and became a museum
2018. the Annie maunder astrograph astrographic telescope
system was installed uh was installed and was this was installed at the site
and the site went back to being a working Observatory again this system consists of four telescopes and is named
after Annie mondor one of the first women scientists to work at the Royal Observatory Greenwich
more fun facts 1934-36 wait 1934 36 inch reflecting
telescope called the Yap telescope was installed it was overall a Cassie grain
reflect it was overall a category reflecting design and an equatorial
mounting on an equatorial mounting and had a six inch guide telescope it was
the largest telescope in use at the observatory in Greenwich until the late 1950s
I think that's it yep
um so Noah that was really something I visited the Greenwich Observatory and I
actually started on the little line of paint that separates the Eastern Hemisphere from the Western atmosphere
imagine getting into an argument with a friend and saying you stay on your hemisphere I'll stay on my hemisphere
the interesting thing about first one so is that after the observatory left the
castle at her swung so it was uh donated to Queen's University
in Canada where it runs as a conference and a Educational Center in England
and diversity is the place that I got my master's degree from wow I just wanted to say that I have a
little bit of a personal connection with that wonderful Observatory thanks for
bringing us back to this wonderful period of British history
yeah you were welcome but you know I had a chance to go there too and one of the
more interesting things for me is that um you know you're right there they were focused on on um
mostly on on the computation of time and accurate time keeping for navigation and that's
um the interesting thing about several of the telescopes they have there and we're used to seeing
telescopes you know going anywhere in the sky and look but they have several telescopes that their
only functional is to point straight out at the meridian and just watch Stars past the Meridian and demarcate the time
so they don't the a lot of the telescopes there can't even look over the sky they can only look straight up
yeah hmm
wonderful okay so uh Sabella you had also a little video can I share that
video with the audience sure that okay all right you can maybe
you can tell us a little bit about it um let's see uh
here we go [Music]
[Music]
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[Music] thank you
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foreign [Music] [Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
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thank you [Music]
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[Applause] [Music] [Applause]
[Music]
[Applause] that's amazing
yeah it's a little bit off topic but um as you saw there was a scene with the observatory and it's kind of a little
escape to Christmas time which is only four days away um you can imagine it's
you can imagine maybe like a small to medium-sized living room
um The Christmas Village it takes up the whole floor except for like
um maybe the switch in walking space to go across in front of the couch
um but we set it up every winter and it started out with that little train that
the Polar Express train that you saw the round tracks but The Observatory is our latest
edition we just got it a couple months ago you know uh it just seems just watching
it it seems so magical you know and it's something you could just uh look at and
uh think about for the whole evening easily so uh this is the second time for
me to watch that video yeah um I realized that I had tears in my eyes
and absolutely not enough money to spend this holiday season after watching that
video it was uh well put together and I was waiting for anything at all related
to astronomy and you delivered because then the observatory with the stars of
the Moon showed up and it brought the entire thing together so thank you for
Reinventing Christmas Bella yeah in fact started it in 2017 with with the Polar
Express train and our uncle my uncle gave us some
little buildings and then we added on to it a little bit every year and I used to be able to sit inside of the tracks when
the roller coaster wasn't there but um we put it there and now I can't sit
inside of it anymore but it's okay because it looks so magical and so beautiful
right yeah that's wonderful sorry Bella thank you so much uh for coming on again
and um I look forward to your next presentation so uh and if I don't see
you again um uh you know I wish you and your family a very merry Christmas so
thank you you too thank you thanks Scott
yes if I can interrupt us a moment absolutely I'm reading the due to adverse weather conditions that Europe's
spaceported French Guyana the flight to launch the James Webb Telescope is being postponed
new targeted launch date is December 25th uh at 7 20 a.m Eastern Time 5 20 a.m
Mountain Time um and 12 20 p.m universal time
a rocket launch Christmas star yes
yeah that's great for everybody except for the scientists that are yeah
and if the weather's not forecast to be good delay I noticed the delays are only by a
day not a month not you know five more weeks so they are it looks
like they are wanting this to get up there and they only get one shot at it so I understand them wanting to be
successful so yeah I more patience I guess for all of us
yeah well great I I can wait one more day no
problem so yeah I'm I'm just I think I'm as nervous as well maybe not as nervous as they are
but uh uh but I definitely you know
uh I mean know that uh there's a lot at stake here so as far as them having a
successful launch a successful deployment you know uh there are careers
writing on this I think at this point so okay so I think that I think the
anticipation adds to the excitement and the adventural success of the mission will be sweeter because the anticipation
I think yes well put
well put so um yeah is there anybody here that doesn't want James Webb to go up
I think so okay I think even if you love you you'll want James Webb to go up oh
absolutely absolutely I I'm all for people don't worry don't worry
that's true so [Laughter]
I have both of them two Gyros but that's all you need you know
you know Molly you've got some instruments that rival the Hubble with
your uh your backyard
you guys are doing just fine so hopefully the uh Hubble stays up for a very very long time either way
yes I think couple of May uh out surpassed Jay West Jay West is supposed to talk it
only has 10 years of fuel on it so so we'll see we'll see what happens well
up next is Jason gonzel the vast reaches uh he has been on a global star party uh
several times um and he never fails to inspire with
his amazing images um he every time I see a new image from
Jason I'm just I'm utterly blown away and his work uh definitely uh is of
professional quality and um you know the uh the images that I mean you would
almost think it's almost impossible to get what he gets but Jason's just
another prime example of an amateur astronomer that breaks the boundaries you know uh and uh pulls out details and
information out of his images that are just mind-blowing so Jason I'm going to turn it over to you man thank you for
coming on yeah thanks for having me and thanks for the introduction amount I uh
again had good intentions to do a you know a nice presentation for you guys but then I ran out of time so now you
get a slideshow but um I did you know I have a topic that um was kind of dear to me and and probably
a lot of people in the uh the panel here in the in the audience uh it was one
year ago today that we were treated to a once in a lifetime event astronomical
event and that was the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky
and uh you know one year ago uh actually it was yesterday evening one year ago
yesterday that I was uh frantically running around my backyard trying to get a picture of this because
I had clouds most of my December um I only had two windows available to
shoot it and I wanted to um to just uh you know run through some of
those images and and kind of show my experience there but you know just to
reiterate we get an alignment of Jupiter and Saturn in our Sky once every couple decades but
this one that happened last year was quite special um the the planets came Within
six arc minutes of each other which may be a nonsensical number to a lot of
people except for an astrophotographer but that's about 20 percent of the
diameter of the the apparent diameter of the full moon in the sky so these the
planets as they approached each other and you remember this if you saw it almost collapsed to a single point of
light it was pretty amazing to see and I was able to get some some pretty nice
close-up images so we'll share those with you now
let me know if my screen's coming through yes okay so
um you know beginning in early December these the the the planets started to to
close in on each other in the night sky and Jupiter was kind of sliding in from
the right hand side or the western side and at the same time Saturn was was
sinking you know slowly into the West so they ended up crossing paths this shot
was taken at sunset on the 10th of uh December so we're still you know 10 days
from the event but like I said I kind of took every opportunity I could but uh you know this set of images ended up
pretty nice because of the nice uh Sunset hues of the planets so this was taken with a
camera lens um so I had not started taking telescopic images yet so
this is with the Canon 6D and a 600 millimeter zoom lens but even at that if you start zooming in
you can begin to see some planetary detail here as long as well as the moon's Jupiters here to the lower right
uh with a string of at least three of its moons visible here and up up to the upper left is is Saturn
with its brightest Moon uh Titan they're visible off to the side
and just to demonstrate you know what you can see with a camera lens
um you know planets are extraordinarily tiny in our sky so this is taking a crop
of those images I took multiple exposures here and these
were shorter exposures to get some details on the planet or as much details as I could but you can see here
that even with the 600 millimeter camera lens you can see the you know the ring make out the rings of Saturn and a
little bit of banding on the surface of Jupiter
really yeah so like uh like the uh nerdy astrophotographer I am you know I just I
wanted to get a close view of this this are as close as possible so I set up this telescope this is a 12 inch
Newtonian telescope uh with a Barlow to magnify the image and so the
ultimate um focal length of this system comes in at about 7 000 millimeters
and obviously you need some some sturdy mounting and and counter waiting here to
support this this beast but this is what I shoot most of my planets my planetary
images with hmm um and you know the one of the challenges at least for this event was
it was only visible um you know we're talking about solicitis
here where from the Northern Hemisphere where I shoot um at about 42 degrees north
planets end up being extraordinarily low in the sky and
um I think at the time I shot these two there were no more than 20 degrees above
the Horizon maybe maybe closer to 15. um this is not an image from that night
it's just showing the setup but with this setup I was able to get
um this shot of the conjunction event itself so this was taken on the night of December 20th
uh at right after sunset and this is the true apparent
field of view of these two planets in the sky so isn't that beautiful yeah it's quite
remarkable um you know to see Saturn within within
the band of moons of Jupiter you know about about the width of that away um you know we can see the four Galilean
moons here actually you know I was a bit confused editing this image because there's
another dot here within the the uh the moons and that was
actually a interloping star that was just uh just happened to be there aligned with the moons of furniture
yeah we were going to call it the fifth moon of Jupiter I remember trying to get images that night also and that I forget
what the Stars license plate was but it was uh it was a kind of a coincidental
alignment it looks like it fell right in line with the uh with the rest of the
moons [Music] so you know it went through the telescope you get obviously a lot more
details into the planet so you can see the banding on Jupiter at the time and looking up in the center and you can
see it um you know wow it's a nice view and then
several of the moons I don't know if that's coming through it
is now it starts to break down as you get super close but um
I think that's tightened off to the side and then I I don't remember definitely have cassini's Division and a hint of Yankees
division you know and uh
lots of planetary detail it's beautiful so again you know our
audience thinks In Our Lifetime we're never going to see anything like this again so it was important for me to run around and take
as many pictures as I could so I had this planetary setup running and I was able to grab this set
of images right before the planets fell behind the trees and I
I noticed from home if I walked around I could still see those planets
uh you know through the trees or over top of some of them so what I was able
to do I actually so I this is one more this is
through the telescope this just shows my telescopic field of view which is right
here um this box you can see that it just barely barely fit within the field of
view of my cameras uh so much so that you know it was getting too close to the edge for some
of these so I ended up shooting you know separate frames for each of the planets
which you see off here to the right and then boosting the exposure I was able to get the uh
the moons of Jupiter which you can see here the more distant ones and this is Jupiter in the center with a couple of
other moons and then this was the overexposure of Saturn to get the set of
lows for that planet let's just kind of a little behind the
scenes of what it takes to get that shot
Mary Cole so like I said I kind of walked around and I was able to position myself right
um you know I walked around to get this alignment but I was able to get the the
planets stacked right on top of the top of one one of my pine trees in my yard that's like the perfect Christmas card
right there yeah all right that is awesome so again this is through
the the camera lens so I don't get all that detail that I had in the telescope shot
I couldn't haul that big rig around but I took multiple exposures here to get
um you know because the tree is so much closer to me I had to focus it differently so this is a stack of of two
separate shots one focused for the tree and one focused for the planets
very cool yeah and I still wasn't done I lost both
planets behind the trees and I thought I still had more time so I went to a park near my house and I shot this
which is the planets off in the distance
gorgeous shot as they were setting this is um well maybe only Adrian knows this is at
Kensington Metro Park but um this is the frozen lake and what I
really loved about this shot was the reflection on the ice of the of the planets there
yeah really beautiful yeah this again was shot through a camera
lens and um you know pretty short focal length I think around 50 millimeters
yeah so I almost gave up nightscapes after seeing this shot but I said now
and I was just happy for uh you Jason that Kensington stayed open because I
know they tend to go down after Sunset they tend to try and run people out of Metro Parks if they let you in
closing a number of times don't tell anyone but oh I won't tell them
that's you know all right um yeah so that that's kind of a walk through of
you know what I did that night of the conjunction all the nights after that all the nights before that were clouded out for me so I
was gifted this um you know a lot of people called it the Christmas star but uh and there's
some thinking that you know the the story in the Bible about the Christmas
star was uh actually a planetary in conjunction very similar to this so it's
kind of cool to think about all right I had heard that it would that it was traced to be Jupiter and Venus being
that close but uh either way um supposedly it was a similar event
also I had a couple of people that asked if I was going to go shoot the conjunction this year it was it wasn't going to get
you know this close again in so many hundreds of years and I had to tell there were only a
couple of people but I had to tell them I don't know who's sharing this with you but that was lasting right so I don't
know if any of you have friends that are like are you gonna go get it but uh
someone someone out there started spreading some rumors that this was happening the night
and I was a little dismayed because uh like how are they getting well I think
people were cold enough to believe it yeah I think we might be partially for
people like me might be partially to blame you know because of the one year anniversary I I shared my images today
and people are probably thinking that's up there in the sky right now um yeah and I know there's much we can
do about it um my presentation later one of the images
on one of my slides is actually my version of that uh conjunction
um that I tried to take through a telescope so similar
um I think it's appropriate I mean it happened last year and all I did was
just let people know it happened last year if I dug up an image of it I just shared it and I said don't worry about
it this sort of thing happens all the time and uh it's still a beautiful image it's
still a beautiful uh you know regardless of your belief it was still uh once in a for most of us
once in a lifetime thing to see for all of us once in a lifetime they're never going to be this close that uh we'll win
this but well you know if we can hang around to the year 2080 I I hear it's going to be good again
so you're gonna be there Molly if you're
gonna hang out I'm going to I'll be like 90 but I'll probably still be doing that photography because it's you know me
um so I had another one here this is um just uh my best two uh shots of those
two planets from 2020. just to show what you can do when it gets higher up in the sky at the same
equipment it looks like you have the hexagon up there on the uh
maybe maybe all of Saturn it's beautiful really detailed it's really animated in
front of uh of Jupiter here these were both taken separate on on separate dates
but um my two best from 2020 and um nearer conjunction for both or sorry
opposition for both the planets so that's kind of when uh their largest in the sky and uh closest to us so you got
a better opportunity to get a good shot and compared to
how they looked at the conjunction they're about 50 percent larger so you
get more detail that way too because they're closer to us
very nicely done and so um I every time I come on here I
like to show just a few of my more recent images so this is a
that is wow look at that air glow that is gorgeous from uh
Mackinac Island Michigan so this is looking over like Huron but sometimes
you get these nights where the sky just becomes a glow and this isn't the
Northern Lights this is what's called air glow where the uh the upper atmosphere glows emits energy
that it's absorbed throughout the day when the sun was hammering on it so uh you get this
almost uh neon sign effect where um you know the you get the teals and
the magentas that glow cool thing about this shot is you know it's against the
backdrop in the Milky Way which adds different color casts and yeah you
traditionally see see it all reflected in the water is really cool yeah right all the colors
and the and the brighter Stars reflected in the in the water
and then uh this is NGC 891 which is an edge on spiral galaxy
but I was really happy with the way this image turned out a lot of nice details in the
Dust Plains of the Galaxy this was shot with the eight inch SCT telescope
it's spectacular usually you see you know someone zooming in on something like that and everything kind of blows
apart when Jason does it it just gets more and more detailed and you start to see background galaxies
you know that is uh really truly amazing I'm kicking myself here because looking
down in this corner I don't know if you can see this like yeah clipped it off the edge of the frame but look at this
beautiful I know wow that's a really cool one yeah that's
like a Target in itself yeah chopped it in half it reminds me of that famous Hubble
um image the r273 oh yeah just that I
was thinking of yeah I thought that was cool but yeah I was
really happy with this you know I I've been waiting to shoot this galaxy again for a long time because this has
got so many neat little dust uh tendrils uh over you know backlit against the
core of the Galaxy um what's the field of view on that image
Jason um this is pretty much the full field of view on my Edge HD so that it's about
uh 30 arc minutes tall so basically frames the full moon height wise
so there's some questions uh what was the uh your rig like and the camera
combination yeah this is with the edge HD 8 inch Celestron scope and then uh
got an ASI 1600 monochrome camera and this was shot in lrgb
I think I got about 20 hours of exposure into this wow
really amazing thanks yeah I was really happy with that one
um and Switching gears one more time this is two days ago on the surface of
our star this is a massive collection of active regions that's um making its way
across the sun right now we've got three named after active reasons and if you go count the number
of sun actual sunspots here it probably probably can count more than 20. but
this is shot through a hydrogen Alpha filter which looks at the chromosphere and uh part of those hydrogen
structures are backlit by the Photosphere behind so all this dark
arching and tendrils these are all the hydrogen spicules which are columns of
plasma some as tall as the Earth off the surface of
the Sun and yeah pretty much every one of these sunspots could swallow the Earth hole
yeah that looks really that looks really cool now I'll tell you what's even cooler is looking at those live I had a
chance to look through a uh a Coronado PST earlier today and I was able to see
those features uh one of those somewhere on the the lower the southern part of the Sun and I
was able to visually see those and that that to me was really
interesting the kind of what happened you cannot subtle features I mean you could go out and um
you know I'll repeat the disclaimer um I think that Chuck Allen said that
you know you got to be careful Anytime You observe the Sun make sure that you're properly filtered and you understand how to
manage the energy that's collected by a telescope or your eyes but with the
right equipment you can easily see these sunspots with a white light solar filter
which is a film you can put over the front of Optics or even
um they make specialty glasses that um that can be used to observe these
sunspots so they're pretty remarkable especially to see that many and the Sun is definitely waking up after a while
yeah with hydrogen Alpha I even saw those I don't know if it was the same features but I saw those the um
kind of the plumes in front as well the uh
that that you've got imaged here I saw those live as well with the H Alpha
scope I was using so made made it even cooler to observe yeah
it's with a like a cork or with a solar telescope yeah so I got that image here
this is this was taken during that session this this picture here so this is the solar setup so I've got the
explore scientific AR 152 telescope and um
yeah this is a day star Quark here and then the ASI 174 mm is the camera
[Music] okay thanks cool yeah but this gives you an idea of
what we kind of struggle with this season um you know shooting the sun because
we're so close to the solstice I never get the sun more than 25 degrees off the Horizon so I'm almost shooting you know
skimming these trees and um I only have a limited window before it goes behind these trees
but you'll recognize this tree this was the one that had the planets over it oh that's right it looks fuller now for
some reason oh it's taking so much further wood
all right so uh just one more picture I got the opportunity this month to do something really cool
which if never had a chance to do and um
if anybody's looking for a gift for me this holiday season I think I finished
my wish list I was able to go to plane wave they've got to move their manufacturing facility
to Michigan in the last few years and that's pretty close to me and I was able
to go to their open house and check out some of their telescopes this is a one
meter uh one of their one meter telescopes set up that your next scope there Jason
is that that is my next scope yeah yeah I could somehow get uh six hundred
thousand dollars it'll be in the backyard you're going to have to put off that
Tesla in order to get it right but just can do it just amazing hardware and
Technology there you know I'm happy to see it locally now but sure
it's pretty pretty amazing uh equipment you'll have to for anybody else doesn't know the other telescope looks compared
yeah probably like uh like a 20 inch or
something that little that's either 17 or a 20.
you know you can get an idea of the scale by looking at the you know the door behind it and you know some of that
equipment it's just uh yeah when you get a scope like this that 600 000 is just the start of
the expense yeah you got to find the observatory you'll need the cameras you'll need
a need and need yeah yeah plane wave for anybody that doesn't know they make uh
premium telescopes you know oh yeah focused on the the professional semi-professional
um institutional type type telescopes you know I'm sure there's a rich person
Market too but um let's go definitely for aspirational for
any for any uh absolutely track watching from the UAE said I wish I had four
kidneys you said I would sell two of them and keep two
we could anyway I got a lot of you know I don't know if you can get that much
for a kidney honestly we're too kidneys it would probably cost
a million dollars to build a facility and the telescope and everything to equip the system but if you got a
hundred friends got 100 friends with ten thousand dollars there you go we could
build a remote Observatory for and schedule the time sure
that's right and there's insurance yes
oh yeah the insurance that's right well beautiful yeah that's great
that's great I'm glad to know that they're in your backyard Jason yep
they should turn you loose on some of their equipments yeah someday yeah believe me I was asking questions I'm
sure I'm sure wonderful thank you so much thanks thank
you so much that's great well up next is uh Molly Wakeling and
astronomally's uh Universe Molly has been on um
she's been on global Star Party many times and uh she has she is a uh you
know busy uh working towards her degree but uh she does take time out for us
um and to share her passions for astrophotography and um and to teach us
a little bit more about the universe that we live in hello you've got the uh you've got the
stage Molly thank you thank you yeah thanks for having me back it's uh it's been a while since I was last on here
I've been very busy with school um let me scoot over and had my recycling bin here
I saw a posting from you um where you were inside of this huge
organ oh yes um I I well I so I teach cello lessons to a uh
to a seventh grader and we were preparing for a performance on Sunday at church and this is not at my home church
but at the church that he goes to now and they have this incredible pipe organ there at this church in downtown Dayton
and um uh his mom was the choir director so uh she was there and took us around
inside of the pipe organ and we got to crawl around in there and sell the pipes
and then she let me play it and uh it was incredible so yeah yeah very cool
very cool now it's a lot of fun um but yes the quarter is finally done so I'm taking a breather for a second
and finally actually had time to put together a presentation today which I realized when I looked at my past
presentations that I haven't done in a shot I'm always Universe segment in the last 10
Global star parties so it's been that long really yeah the last one was number
67 when I did uh uh the whirlpool Galaxy I've been on a few times we have some
some live imagery and stuff but I haven't had time to put together a presentation in a while but I didn't have time today because I am on vacation
so um I'll go ahead and start sharing my screen here
all right so I decided to highlight a Galaxy that I just finished Imaging uh
that's what the last images for it on um on Saturday and I finished processing it today
yesterday today today I finished processing it um it all flows together and I want to
talk about this cool little Galaxy here which is uh IC 342. so even though it's quite a large and
bright galaxy has an IC number but I'll explain why in a bit
uh so it's known as the hidden Galaxy because it's just it's just above the
plane above or below depending on how you look at it of the Milky Way so it's behind a lot of gas and dust which makes
it really hard to see and much dimmer than it would be if it was
further away up out of the plane in fact it would rival the Andromeda galaxy
you'd be able to see it naked eye uh if not for all of the gas and dust in
between us and it as we're kind of looking out over the top of the Milky Way galaxy
it is a spiral galaxy and this picture in the background is a Hubble image of
the core which is really cool because that's the dust and then a lot of these newborn stars have blasted out the dust
to make little hole there so really cool looking now uh even though it is obscured by a
lot of our own Galactic gas and dust it is visible even in binoculars so if you
want to go hunting for it it's it's up north it's pretty pretty far north it's circumpolar for uh I didn't check
exactly what latitude is but I'm going to guess pretty much the entirety of the northern hemisphere
um and it's in the vicinity of Cassiopeia it's in the constellation camel apartilus
I finally said I think right because this time it's uh which is not an easy
to spot constellation it's made of several dimmer stars but um uh it means giraffe it's just sort of this this
couple star long thing that somebody decided was the neck of a giraffe or something
um but yeah see if you go to Cassiopeia and kind of look across uh I I don't
know a great way to find it but um there's some for there's this star here I think is fourth magnitude so you can
kind of jump down from uh gamma down to Gemma cam down to the Galaxy
there uh I couldn't find a good graphic showing where it's at in relation to the
plane of the Galaxy so I pulled a screenshot from Sky Safari which is my preferred planetarium app
uh where so this is the wintertime Milky Way so uh actually yeah this is the
screen I want to be pointing out um this is the the wintertime Milky Way so
uh we're looking outward from the core of the Galaxy we're looking looking out
the opposite direction of the core into our wintertime Milky Way here and
um uh the screen's kind of block from another screen oh the the blue dot is where ic342 is and you can see it's not
very far above the plane of the wintertime Milky Way so that's a lot of the gas and dust that we're looking through
so some fast facts I mentioned is in the constellation camel apartilus which I think I think I talked about like a
variable star or something in camel apartilus uh not too long ago and I had a lot of trouble pronouncing it but I
practiced in my head a lot today so I finally got it um it's pretty close it's only about
seven to eleven million light years away which is uh which almost puts it in the
local group I think it's no it's not in the local group but it's pretty close to it it's in its own group called The the
mafe group it was discovered by William Frederick Denning in 1892. he's a
British he was a British amateur astronomer who discovered it and several
comets and I think several asteroids and stuff like that um so yeah another Discovery by amateur
pretty cool even though it's a little bit of a older discovery apparent magnitude of 9.1 so pretty
extincted by which is the astronomical term um uh by the gas and dust of our own Galaxy
this is about 75 000 light years across it's a little smaller than our own Galaxy which is 100 000 light years
across that's still pretty good good size I like to show these objects in other
wavelengths because there's oftentimes something to learn from looking at it in different wavelengths of light so this
is ic342 in in radio I didn't get the exact wavelength but um this is an
intensity map so it's got a very bright hydrogen core here
um uh so I'm guessing this is potentially 21 centimeter light which is a strong radio radio wavelength from
hydrogen gas uh then over here we have the infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope
and one thing that's interesting about looking at infrared views of galaxies is there's often a lot more arm structure
in infrared than there is invisible so invisibly kind of see a couple of
primary arms but here there's a lot more intricate structure connecting the arms
together and I think that's really interesting this is three different wavelengths of infrared light mapped to
red green and blue uh I I couldn't find some ultraviolet or
x-ray images out on the internet so I've pulled up the software Aladdin which has a huge database of imagery that you can
overlay from uh radio all the way up to gamma ray so this is an UltraViolet image you can
see it's got some kind of hot glowing um well these are probably not stars that are probably
um uh hydrogen regions of uh what where a lot of new stars are being born
probably a lot of Stellar nurseries here which tend to Glow in ultraviolet but you can kind of see some of the Ring
structure there and then over in the X-ray image I was I
was reading up on um on some imagery taken from New Star which is a different x-ray telescope than the xmm Newton
image that I've got here but I think if the orientation is right this this Dot and this one down here are actually two
they think it's two black holes that are in that Galaxy that are emitting a lot
of X-ray lights that's really interesting and it's being investigated so if you're going to observe ic342 you
can do it without too much difficulty visually I've I've never actually I don't I don't think I have seen it
myself but I'll have to make a note to check it out next time uh it since it is
circumpolar you can see it all year round but it's it's highest during August to April in uh like the in like
the first half of the night so you don't have to stay up real late to wait for it to get very high it's it is visible with binoculars under
Dark Skies although all you'll see is a smudge from what I was reading and if
you look at it with um with a reflector of six inches or greater this website I was looking at
suggested six to eight inches because if you go too long a focal length it's it's just going to
um uh you're gonna have too much magnification it'll be hard to see the details but around the six to eight inch
um uh size with a low power eyepiece apparently you can make it out some
clumpy spiral arms under Dark Skies so um perhaps when I'm at my next star
party I'll have to go take a look through somebody's scope at it uh photographically it's a bit of a
challenge to image because it is rather large but also relatively dim
um compared to other galaxies fortunately it doesn't have a like a large variance and brightness is kind of
evenly bright throughout so um you don't have to deal with taking different exposure times and whatnot to
deal with the bright core versus dim arms you can get pretty much all of it with a single exposure time definitely a
wide field of view is going to be best so I am interested with my with my 106
millimeter refractor and it is like all galaxies it's best
done in wide band we can get some of those those H2 star farming regions really nicely using a hydrogen Alpha
filter like in this background image which is um from a NASA website
um by uh our tourists Medford Davis yeah really nice shot
there so here is the shot that I took over the
last uh two months I say 342 thank you um and unlike a lot of galaxies that
have a lot more blue in them you can see how this one is a lot more yellow and
that's due to a lot of that that uh because a lot of most main sequence Stars glow in kind of this yellow color
so oh that's a lot of the gas and dust in the Milky Way is eliminated by these main sequence Stars so it kind of casts
a yellow cast Over the Galaxy uh so kind of it drops out a lot of the blue
and you can see a lot of a lot of the Stars here are are foreground Stars I'm
not sure which ones belong to the Galaxy it's close enough that you should be able to resolve some but pretty much all
these stars are in the foreground because we are looking just above the plane of of the Milky Way it's very
thick with stars it's almost like Imaging in the cygnus region but we're looking at a Galaxy instead so it's kind
of wild so a huge number of stars there really cool
and that's all I got that's quite a bit
very nice I'm Imaging right now it's uh clear out tonight here in Dayton or at
least it will be for a while so I'm on to I've been Imaging sharpless 2 115 uh
struggles 2-115 which is a um an emission nebula
and um I'm also just started Imaging sharpless 2 200 which is a large
planetary nebula and I've been focusing much more on the northern sky because I have more Northern view now than I did
back in my California house and bonus points there's no the Moon is much farther away from the north so I can
imagine wideband for more of the month hey Molly um uh Richard lighthills
watching on YouTube and he his question is how do you keep the stars from overwhelming the Galaxy
yes that's a that's a great question and it's some star reduction techniques in pics
and site that kind of help reduce the the size and intensity of the stars for
one thing I am using a Takahashi telescope which um uh the stars are really tight the
Optics are really good on that telescope the other thing is I do use some star reduction techniques in pics Insight out
on block recently put out a video talking about somebody has made a script out of one out of his star reduction
process that you can go download into pixon site and I use a technique that
I think I learned it from one of Adam Block's videos I can't actually remember where I learned this I might have actually even been from somebody on the
Astro Imaging Channel I can't remember now um but there's quite a few star reduction techniques out there and I
found one that I really like right that's awesome now do you know mostly use pixinsight or I do yeah I use
pics insight for pretty much the entire processing chain from pre-processing
like so calibrating and registering and whatnot all the way through to the end pretty much the only time I use
Photoshop nowadays is for when my flats don't work well enough because I know a decent synthetic Flats procedure in
Photoshop that's just a lot I mean you could probably replicate it in in picks and site but it's a lot easier to do in
Photoshop um but yeah you just say for pretty much my entire processing chain
great Josh Kovac comments he says star reduction is quite difficult the scripts
are okay but I feel like I might need to start doing it manually yeah it's really
easy to get really funky looking stars or um to to really kind of mess with the
star profile so they look unnatural um I now that I think about I think I did
learn about this technique in one of the Astro Imaging Channel videos um where he was talking about
kind of making making images pop making images a little more 3D looking so I'll have to see if I can find the video and
who who gave that talk um to put the procedure up there but I I you the way that that I that I do it now
the Stars maintain in fact it improves my star profile I think because uh from
whatever step in my pre-processing my stars end up being kind of uh if you look at the star profile kind of being
flat topped and dropping off quickly on the edges which I don't like this procedure makes it more of a gaussian
profile which looks a lot more natural because it is more natural star should be gassy sure that's right
that's right well Molly thank you so much for coming on and um you know again uh have a happy
holiday that's coming up this weekend and uh you know if we see Jay West go up
he'll make it all the happier I'm sure so yeah I've been eagerly awaiting James Webb since uh I don't even remember when
I first heard it for 25 years probably at least all of my adult life if not so in my childhood
um and it's got some incredible incredible missions that I'm really excited about probably two of my
favorites are of course being able to look back at when the first galaxies were forming so we'll be able to see uh
look back in time look far enough away and deep enough into the infrared to see
the first galaxies form after the so-called Dark Ages when um there weren't any really any stars or galaxies
yet probably the most ex one of the missions I'm most excited about for it is exoplanet spectroscopy it's going to
be able to look at the atmospheres of exoplanets and determine what elements
and are in those atmospheres and what elements and compounds so we could look for for signatures of of Life
potentially of uh compounds only appear in atmospheres where there's biology
happening so um I'm very excited for that mission yes absolutely I see Dina's really
excited about it too you're making me feel Molly because I'm
50. so yeah James Webb has been something that
I recall you know just the last few years of anticipating it going up I can
remember the uh Hubble being such a bust because everything was Fuzzy when it came up and
um then they found a way to correct it and those are the images it's been producing have been spectacular ever
since only to be outdone by your work so it lasted as long as it could you Jason
and a lot of the other I think astrophotography the equipment
got better the techniques got spread out more and we learned that it only takes a
matter of time and enough light to be able to get the type of detail which is the same thing the Hubble does but it
can do it on a an even grander scale yeah it's got a little less atmosphere to deal with yeah and jwst can do it in
these other wavelengths I like you I'm looking forward to seeing if it can get a direct uh image basically of a planet
I know they want to point at the Trappist system they want to point um they want to point four light years
away at uh the Alpha Centauri system and see what's going on there so yeah
homicides of James Webb is um it's it's primarily focused on infrared observing
so um I has a whole lot whole lot of capability in the visible spectrum so we're not
going to get those jaw dropping visible spectrum images that we got from from
the Hubble but uh we'll we'll get some pretty awesome infrared images and I
think what will happen much like that black hole of m87 I think it'll get there will be a way to somehow represent
what they're seeing pictorially yeah are they had their color palettes and
stuff like that I never liked the Spitzer images as much as I like the Hubble images
well I'm sure they'll do a Fusion you can fuse the Hubble images with the web images too and create a whole you know
wide dynamic range image that you'll be able to see a lot that's true those are those will be cool to look at
yeah I grew up with Hubble bubble Hub when I was old enough to start
when I you know wasn't a baby and could actually be aware of things and yes again I'm dating I know that's
okay sorry you're fine that's the age is supposed to become experienced but I
haven't figured that out yet that Pillars of Creation image came out when I was a kid and I just it's just always
been a part of my life and I got through my Physics degree in undergrad looking
at those Hubble Deep Field images those Ultra Deep Field ones where every dot of light is a Galaxy that's that's the kind
of stuff that got me through college when I was not wanting to finish my physics assignment you know I'd go look
at one of those images and go like I want to go to space and then finish my assignment uh it's it that how
voluminous I think is what really got me here got me into astronomy got me into
physics and I think it did that for a lot of people and I hope uh it continues
to do so in that James Webb inspires the next round of folks as well
yeah I'm sure it will spoken I think it's going to inspire all of us in in this you know in all the
generations alive so it's going to be very cool okay so we're gonna take a 10 minute
break and we're gonna come back with uh John Briggs uh should be joining us by that time uh for his special
presentation on Mariah Mitchell so hang in there
so I figure uh James Webb is only gonna Inspire Gary Palmer to build something
to beat it over there in the UK I know you're working on it right now Gary yeah
but we're um we're pretty busy here at the moment a lot of online stuff
um lots of people buying online stuff for uh Christmas presents so the office
is meant one processing all of that at the moment and we've got stuff like this
yeah which is just programming up all the computers checking everything and just leaving it running
yeah yeah it's actually getting quite warm in here now because I turned the heating up it's going out to a hot
climate so um it so will it be up and running and um sort of working from
there a little bit but yeah and the other thing is just waiting for parts at the moment so yeah the delivery driver's
getting a bit hacked at the moment yeah a lot of heavy stuff coming in every five minutes and uh
gotta let it process it can only do about a hundred instructions at a time you gotta let it
go yeah that's it now you you keeping out your side right
are you keeping out your side okay I am um I actually did some solar visual
observing first time in a while I actually put I to the eyepiece and a lot
of the stuff Jason you were showing in your presentation I was seeing it firsthand through a uh
through that Coronado and uh it took me a while to figure out how to get it in Focus I'm thinking this thing's a bust
and then I go oh pull it out a little bit and then suddenly the sun snaps into place and so then we do the fine focus
look for prominences we saw a couple on the Eastern limb and I could but I could
also see the activity going on on the face of the sun
um there were like three or four different spots on there that I was observing and I figured well if those
things are going on there's a chance for a little bit of Aurora coming our way probably in the next uh couple of days
and of course like it always is where you are I'm sure it will be cloudy when that happens yep yeah it went off the
other night I saw a report in Ireland must have been the day before yesterday
okay yeah um they they said it was going off out there but it was just Cloud here so yeah
I mean you can see stars out there but there's like that High Cloud just sitting there knocking everything back
um but getting really weird temperature changes it's like tonight it's probably about minus two out there but before the
morning it'll warmed right up you know yeah up to seven eight degrees so again
it's a real fluctuations in the temperatures at the moment yeah the Falcon last week we just had a week
of fog literally so but I did see the Sunspot group
um Cutler goes back that looked quite nice yeah there's one on the I guess if I try
to describe it I should have just written it down or trying to draw it but there was one in the upper Western limb
I think that was coming into view there was a group that was leaving View and then there was that big group that I
think uh Jason you might have imaged or Gary you may have an image of it there's a big group in the southern hemisphere
of it yeah yeah that thing has been moving across over the last week or so
but it's
it's more or less a full disc of activity now when I image the couple of
days back there was another um active area rotating on with the Sunspot
um but I must have been too busy the last couple of those equipment throw the uh
the website up and have a look around but just haven't got around to it yeah this was and I don't know if Jerry
or Scott are listening um actually Jason what I did was I rigged basically I put a vixen plate on
the uh Coronado PST and I was able to fasten it to the ixos mount
so I basically I I false aligned it and got tracking on and set it up so that
even though I was I wasn't fully about I would the scope itself was balanced with
the counterweights and everything I pointed it at the sun I get it working and then I slightly adjust the tracking
so that I could just sit there and observe and I was able to follow the sun along visually
and you know make Minor Adjustments with focus and yeah what I liked about it was the
adjustment to the tracking speed if I'm just a little bit off and I was it was
almost like I didn't know it wasn't tracking at all a little bit of adjustment to the tracking speed at
least helped visually keep the object near Center and I was able to sit there and observe so that was a nice little a
nice little touch using the tablet to uh to make sure the uh Sun stayed
and I just sat out outside the house and looked at the Sun for a while
so one thing you can do also if you ever Mark a place on your in your yard or
wherever you observed to make the alignment near perfect you can set the uh ixos 100 to track on boot which means
you don't have to connect the computer to it at all you could just plop it out there in the yard get it pretty close to a polar line
and then you can just move it manually across the sky to different objects like the Sun during the day and just observe
through it it'll track like an old-fashioned uh Drive yeah I'll talk with you about that later on
maybe the week because since the day Space Telescope arrived at Europe's
Spaceport and French Guiana in mid-october preparations for launch have been going on around the clock
Webb is one of the most complex and sophisticated scientific instruments ever built and has taken some 30 years
of development and while the space Observatory is being checked fueled and ready for launch in one building in
another facility a few kilometers away the Ariane 5 Launcher that will carry Webb into space is also being assembled
this is just the final stage of a process that began when Ariane 5 was first chosen for this prestigious
International Mission some 14 years ago and special adaptations have been made
to the launch vehicle and assembly process these include stringent clean room conditions and new procedures to
protect the telescope at the top of the launcher when the protective fairing is being lowered around it
due to the size of the telescope we needed to develop a specific
guiding system allows a guiding system to encapsulate the web telescope
interfering because we have really few margin inside the Fairing and during The
Descent it's really important to control the positioning of the Fairing and to
ensure a safe encapsulation for the telescope [Music]
because with its core stage and two solid rocket
boosters Ariane 5 is one of the most reliable launch vehicles in the world it's launched most of esa's largest
science missions including Rosetta and most recently the beppi Colombo
spacecraft to Mercury but launch is only the beginning of an
eventful Journey it'll take a web telescope to its final station 1.5 million kilometers from Earth known as
L2 this is a position in space where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the
Earth Balance out special flight control Maneuvers have been developed for the mission to ensure
web isn't exposed to damaging sunlight when the launcher's fairing is released
the launch itself will take 27 minutes from liftoff until uh until uh until a
web separation from the launcher and then the Drone toward the LaGrange Point
L2 will take about four weeks and during that period uh
web which was in folded configuration will deploy in a carefully planned
sequence the telescope will first deploy its solar array then the antennas sun
shield and finally the two mirrors even then it'll be several months before
web is ready for science The Observatory has to cool to its operating temperature of minus 233 degrees Celsius and the 18
individual segments of its mirror have to be aligned so there's a lot of work to happen after launch that's just the
first step and only after six months we will be ready with the telescope and the instruments
all fully commissioned ready to start doing science the science we've dreamed of for decades it's just around the
corner if we can wait 30 years we can wait just another six months
Webb promises to transform our view of the universe detecting light from the
very dawn of time and now there's not long to wait for the first science
[Music]
so I hope that you found that as fascinating as I did um I am I can certainly wait the extra
six months but I think that will probably be getting regular updates as they check all the systems as they come
online um up next is John Briggs John has been
an amazing individual in uh in the uh community of astronomy both the amateur
and professional he has been uh involved in some of the world's great observatories and he he describes
himself as uh you know an instrument uh uh expert uh uh well I
don't know that he calls himself an expert but he most certainly is and uh he has kept uh the history of uh some of
the most remarkable scientific instruments alive through his presentations uh his Restorations and uh
his activities in astronomy he's a great friend to many people and our astronomical Community I love hearing
his presentations and uh he's with us once again to talk about uh the first uh
female professional astronomer Mariah great to have you on John
hi there hi I'm um I'm gonna try sharing my screen okay
and hi do you see some pictures yes okay
uh you know Scott thank you so much for letting me uh participate again it's
always so much fun but when I saw in your
um in your promotion that you quoted Mariah Mitchell I thought oh man I I have to I
have to offer a quickie presentation about Mariah Mitchell uh and boy how did
I entitle it uh her her life uh her philosophy and the observatory named
after her something like that and so I've uh in some haste I've thrown together some pictures that I hope uh
folks will enjoy but um she was born on Nantucket Island
um off the coast of Massachusetts and Nantucket wasn't really so far away from
where I was born but I was born on the mainland uh but of Massachusetts and
maybe 30 or 40 miles is the Sea Gulf wise and it was actually the um uh
typical Nantucket house in the early 1800s on the right in this picture where
she was born Now The observed territory the little Observatory shown on the left
was built in the early 20th century after her death
in her honor because she and her father were astronomers out on Nantucket
islands in the early days Nantucket was a major whaling port in the in the
middle 1800s navigation of the whaling ships was a
key industry and the ship sailed by Celestial navigation and the uh the
clocks the chronometers on board those ships had to be raided by astronomical
observation well Mariah's father did that as a business but he was also a
keen amateur astronomer so she grew up with a lot of astronomy in the house and
this here was the um uh how she was born in now I'm a little awkward here let's
see I'm gonna here's um uh here's a more I got contemporary picture of what they
called the birth Place Cottage and the observatory that was eventually created
in Mariah's honor is uh uh one of the
domes to it is still is there on the left because you see Mariah had a lucky
break and it led to her becoming named as a professor at Vassar College and
um and it was the alumni of Vassar College or a number of them created this
observatory in her honor um uh and I'll I'll talk about that but
let me explain a little bit about Mariah's lucky break in the year 1847
she was sweeping for comets with this small refractor made by Doland in
England it was one of her father's tall Scopes and lo and behold she discovered
a comet and in those days well communication was tough but her
astronomer father was wise and he was friends with the astronomers of Harvard
College Observatory and he quickly wrote a letter
to the director of Harvard College observatories saying my daughter has discovered a comment and um here's a
picture of Mariah about that time and um so uh the the astronomers of Harvard
pointed out to William Mitchell the father that you know um there's a prize available right now
which has been offered by the king of Denmark a gold medal for the first
telescopic Comet uh discovered and um I didn't realize that Mariah discovered
the first telescopic Comet but uh from some of the things I've read it sort of
suggests that's what the award was made for but in any case there was a strip
Elation and that was that uh when the telescopic Comet was discovered the
astronomer responsible for it had to it immediately mail notice of the discovery
to other scientists and now some astronomers at Harvard had already
discovered comets and and tried to get this prize but they found that they
hadn't they hadn't noticed the rules carefully enough and they hadn't sent by
immediate posts to other astronomers internationally but they had made the discovery well the fact that Mariah's
father wrote to officials at Harvard but immediately that she made the discovery
to make a long story short ended up becoming acceptable uh for the nobility
in Denmark to award Mariah the prize and a gold medal and it was actually the
president of Harvard College who was a key in the negotiation with the the
Diplomat said other people in Europe to facilitate Mariah getting this prize now
Mariah was also very inclined to mathematics and all Fashions of
practical astronomy and there's it's the story there's more to the story than I
have time of course to relate in just another couple minutes here but there's a wonderful book written about her
sweeper in the Sky by Helen Wright Helen Wright is the same lady who wrote a
wonderful biography of George ulrey Hale called Explorer of the universe but
here's just for fun here's a picture of Mariah when she was the uh a professor
at Vassar College and her father was quite elderly when this picture was taken but that's her dad William but I
happen to have something um that I was given a book in my library
and I think I just have another minute or two to show you pictures of what what is this book it's a pretty tattered
volume it turns out it's volume three of the publications of uh Harvard College
Observatory let's see specifically well it's the annals of the astronomical
Observatory of Harvey College volume three and um why this book is very cool and I like
showing it off here's the title page it is an account of the Great
comets of 1858 so this would have been this was a comet 11 years after Mariah
got her gold medal for her Discovery helped by her father but also helped by
the astronomers at Harvard College Observatory William and George Bond bond
is one of the authors of this particular volume but uh let me just show you uh
the volume is full of these beautiful drawings of this Mammoth Comet of 1858
otherwise known as donati's Comet and I'm just going to flash a few of those
big full play page plates but what is cool about it is this volume which was
given to me is signed as you see here uh it's indicating it's two William
Mitchell from the Harvard or the observatory of Harvard College with the
respects of the author who would have been George Bond uh but then and the the
in different handwriting following below it says presented to James Edward Oliver
as a token of regard by his friend William Mitchell uh 1862. so in other
words the volume was given to William Mitchell um uh Mariah's father but he passed it
on uh evidently almost immediately to this fellow uh Edward James Edward
Oliver I sure would like to find out he who he was I don't know yet but uh just uh I'll show you a few more
pictures this is no longer directly about Mariah but it's just cool how this
was um uh the the beaut this beautifully illustrated book was once uh in the in
the hands of the Mitchell family and it just seems cool look at how these these
images of the blazingly bright donatis Comet that had that had Hood structure
in these highly magnified views near the nucleus like a comet hail Bop uh had a
beautiful uh structure like this in the head of the Comet and I'm just showing you quickly some of the illustrations
they're quite mind-blowing to me and I'm doing all this just to dramatize to folks I think it's wonderful uh to be
aware of the older literature and astronomy and in the back of the book as though it wasn't cool enough there are
all these fold a number of fold out there are big Pages
um this thing man measures about I don't know 18 by 24 inches and all these
little drawings um of the of the near nuclear activity and let's see
um there's a close-up of some of these drawings they're just incredible so the
old literature is wonderful to know about in a strong history of astronomy
we can really relate to it as observers today than amateur astronomers or any
kind of astronomers today but Mariah Mitchell was wonderful uh she had a
philosophy a very much learning by doing and obviously I don't have the time to
talk uh of any more I think I'm not watching the clock I'm just flashing these pictures this is a relatively rare
picture of Mariah behind the 12-inch refracting telescope that she had at
Vassar College Observatory you could see it says this picture is dated 1878 and
as I recall John are you able to bring that up full screen uh so
um uh well there's more out here here She is buried on Nantucket this is one
of the other domes of Mariah Mitchell observatory in the background but this gravestone says Mariah Mitchell and if
we could magnify in on it but uh born 1818 died
1889 I think it is she was a wonderful person with very cool philosophy very
practical uh Hands-On education sort of philosophy and I think I've run out of
time but uh thank you very much everyone as always for your attention letting me
share some of my favorite things thank you John that's great uh is this
uh is this book um that you're showing uh the pages from from your lyceum yes
so I have a a library and something of a museum here in um uh uh um uh Magdalena
New Mexico and so we have a lot of cool things here many of the things believe
it or not have been given to me I can't resist continuing to work to collect
cool things um uh but the most important thing is for folks to be aware of how interesting
and educational and inspirational some of these historical things are and uh so
it's a privilege of trying to call attention uh to them uh to folks uh in
in forums like this great John thank you so much thanks for
coming on to uh Global star party and uh you bet you bet they have a great
holiday holiday weekend thanks very much same to you all okay bye-bye Take Care
thank you John okay all right so up next um we will have
um uh we will have um uh Jerry Hubble on from The Mark
Slade remote Observatory the msro is uh
a research facility uh uh managed by
volunteer amateur astronomers that do professional level uh science
um they have uh you know discovered the dip and the brightness of exoplanets
um uh they are they work closely with the uh the tests uh team as a Pro-Am uh
you know uh project and uh they show amateur astronomers how to do science
through a Hands-On technique probably not unlike what Mariah Mitchell herself
would have loved to be involved with so uh Jerry I'm going to turn it over to
you thanks thank God I appreciate the opportunity uh as always uh and I'm
pretty fortunate to work in the astronomy industry also for Scott and
I've moved my career from uh nuclear instrumentation on into astronomy
instrumentation and uh so that's going to be the topic I I was digging around today our our skies
are cloudy tonight so I'm not going to be able to observe what the uh with the msro tonight and share that but I've got
uh something else that I worked on about 10 years ago
um and I've I've always been interested in recording stuff since I was a kid
recording things was always a an interest of mine you know like having a my dad bought a
my brother and I uh old-fashioned or it's old-fashioned now it's a small reel-to-reel tape recorder that we've
played with so we recorded sounds and I got into that and then also I started getting interested in electronics and
then moved into my career at the Nuclear Station into instrumentation and then into
and then as a wider uh thing into you know as a teenager I got into astronomy
and telescopes so anything to do with physics and electronics has always been
very interesting to me so I continue that to this day I've Scott
gave me the opportunity to develop the pmc8 mount control system and controller
and uh so that's again one of my main interests in life is the is control
systems and electronics and anything to do with astronomy thing where I can mix
all those things together computers you know Electronics astronomy all that
stuff comes together for me in my career uh today so I'm very uh pretty
pretty excited about that uh and very fortunate in that regard and of course I grew up during the
Apollo era so I got exposed to a lot of Technology just by
seeing what was going on not necessarily getting Hands-On or anything but just seeing the development of the Apollo
program and the technology and things that they developed during those times
so that that just kind of that's a long segue into what my topic tonight is and
it's going to be I'm going to be talking about an instrument I developed about 10 years ago called uh fiber said fiberfed
spectrometer um so let me share my screen and I'll I created a presentation for my club about
10 years ago on this uh and it's based on a product
um let me go to that first that I found uh online so you see this it's by a
company called science Surplus they were they were removing these spectrometers from from laboratory instruments and
selling them they're kind of like a standalone uh system that was integrated into a
chemical analysis system I think and then they were reselling them they refurbished them and then resold them
so and it was kind of cool because it was uh
at a linear CCD detector array is basically a a 10 24 by 1 pixel CCD
camera if you can imagine that it's a just a big line of pixels and uh and because the Spectrum spread
out on the line that's how it did the measurement and uh it's kind of cool to play with so
I found this and I decided Well I'm going to turn this into an astronomical instrument and see how it would work and
I wasn't sure if it was going to work or not but I I came up with some techniques to uh to do that and I'm going to share
the other presentation right now that I put together using this instrument
um some of you may have seen this before I
don't know that I presented this on the global star party before but here's my uh here's my presentation
so I developed this instrument and there's several components that I'll go over and I developed software to do the
analysis or at least to record the data I should say so
the objectives of this was to take this
fiberfed spectrometer and turn it into an astronomical system that I could use
to measure star Spectra or any other Specter that I wanted to try and uh I'm going to talk about the
interface I created on how to tie the fiber into the optical system and and also how to create a guiding
system because the fiber element
is about there's a there's two fibers that I use one was a 200 Micron fiber
and the other one was a 50 Micron fiber so that's a very small aperture to get
the Starlight into so I had to develop a way to guide the star on that once I got
it centered on the fiber and uh let me just I'll get past these text slides a little bit there's some
details some engineering details that I won't get into really but I just want to show the elements of
this of this uh system and show you how it worked
so this is what the inside of this fiber fed spectrometer look like there's
an optical bench here which is that big black box and I'll show you the inside of that in a minute being the
electronics and the CCD camera that's involved with it which is at
linear CCD and the alternative was this was a store
analyzer grading which is what we have in the MSR today we have a grading like this
that's mounted in our filter wheel but this is a totally different type of system uh and
it had had the op the uh potential to be a much higher resolution spectrometer
system than degrading so the way this thing works here's a here's a picture of
the inside the fiber feeds the light into the system it's got a mirror collimating mirror
and then uh it's got this grading it's another diffraction grading which spreads the
light out and then the light gets spread out and then reflected and focused onto
the CCD linear CCD chip right here and it's basically like I said it's a
it's a one by 1024 pixel array of pixels
that it spreads the light out on uh in this fashion but you can see how the light bounces
around inside of it and that's called it this thing this whole thing is called an optical bench
um there's another drawing of it and it uses a specific folded
uh pattern or folded uh configuration that's called a zerny
azerni tourney Turner design right here um
that's what it's called and then there's some specifics to the
light cone that has to come into the entrance slit and everything else that I won't really get into a whole lot but I
had to create this fiber optic head that mounted the fiber onto the uh onto the
um eyepiece end of the telescope to be able to focus it and to bring it in and
then to focus the light into the fiber and it needed to provide a solid connection so that it was really steady
and then didn't move around and was very uh predictable and and uh
very uh precise to be able to adjust it
so what I did is I took a flip mirror
all right which has a standard uh flip uh lever and you can move it in and out
of the optical train to reflect the light either let the light go straight through to the camera or to reflect it
up into the in this case into the fiber optic cable
and in order to provide a way to focus this
or to align it I should say to align the white I CR I use this thing called a
cold mirror all right and a cold mirror what a cold mirror does is it transmits infrared light straight through
on the main Optical axis and then it reflects 90 degrees the visible light up
into the fiber it's kind of a cool device and um there are companies out there today that use
this technique that you can buy for Auto guiders but I did this this is 10 years ago and
I bought this from I think I bought the cold mirror from Edmonds Optical
I've got a parts list at the end of this I think um so you can buy these cold mirrors and
this is this is what it looks like I guess Edmund Optical is what I bought so if you look at the curves the
transmission and the reflection curves it's just basically uh they cross over each other at certain
wavelengths so the visible light uh it's transmitted through
and and reflected light or gets gets uh
it's blocked at the angle and then the reflected light gets transmitted through uh the infrared
and you can see this on this drawing how that works the visible light gets
reflected and the infrared light goes straight through now the infrared light is coming through
it's coming in at an angle it's at 45 degrees it's not straight through so there's a little bit of distortion there
and I'll show you what that looks like um
see there's there's some technical details here I'm not going to get into with the light cone and what I had to do
to set the focal ratio correctly for the light to enter the fiber optic
it's uh this is kind of showing what it is so
you have to you have to make the cone the light cone come in so that it will reflect without loss through the fiber
optic okay and that's called uh um what is that called
uh the focal the focal ratio degradation uh that's an effect that occurs for it's
not optimized for the um vocal ratios not optimized so you'll
get a lot of lice losses uh on that um
so the uh so to come in the light has to
come in at an angle to be reflected effectively through the fiber hold on a minute
foreign
looks like your telescope's barking at you with your yeah Vision background
but it's a loud telescope right so in order to in order to attach the focal
the fiber optic to the uh to the system I had to create it I had to buy a connector called an SMA connector
and uh let me get to that uh let's see if I got a picture of it here I'm gonna
go back to that other I want to add another picture it's not
let me go back so
this SMA connector sits on the top of the thing
all right right here on top of the spectrometer and you screw
the fiber into it and then the light can go into that so that's a piece that you need to buy or that I had to buy to do
that uh oh there it is so that's what it looks like right there
so that gets screwed in together with the focal reducer to create the correct cone angle going into the fiber and all
that assembly sits on top of that uh flip mirror device with the cold mirror
um and when you focus it this is the kind of distortion you get because it's
coming in at an angle all right this is the start capella
um so I knew I knew at one location the uh fiber was at in terms of the XY
position on this image on the camera and so all I had to do was position the
light of the star on that position and then I knew it was entering the fiber optic
uh so trial and error I I determined what the uh position was and it was
pretty pretty constant pretty stable position so I was able to put the star on that location and then
it would I knew it was like going into the fiber and then I could auto guide on it
okay to keep it in there when I was taking the data so this is a raw
Spectra with the program I wrote that that uh
what star is that I don't even know if I know it start oh that's Jupiter that's a specter of Jupiter
and now one of the features of the Spectra is it's not normalized to the response of the the CCD so the CCD
doesn't have equal response across the Spectrum that's why it's in the red and the ultraviolet side
it's low response but then it gets more sensitive as you get into the green
and then into the red it tapers off a little bit slower in the Red Band and then when it gets into the infrared it
starts to really uh taper off so that's the sensitivity of the CCD you have to normalize for
that that's part of the calibration and here's another example of a Spectra
and I created a way to record the data as a fits image file and that's what you
see here so each each row on this image is one uh
exposure on the CCD and then I accumulate them over time and time goes
on the y-axis going down and so there's a series of rows that I
collected so now you can see what the Spectra looks like over time okay on the y-axis X is wavelength and Y
is time so I was able to do that and then uh
to calibrate it I used a
an LCD panel basically a like a a tablet that just had white light and the LCD uh
the phosphorus lamp that was in that LCD panel emitted light at these wavelengths
okay where you see these Peaks and I knew exactly what those Peaks were so now I could calculate or calibrate the
wavelength of the light on the seats on the uh on the CCD uh uh Spectra
which is needed to understand what what the Starlight is doing so you got that calibration then you've
got the normalization of the response curve which is what this is showing so this shows you how the light uh based
on the wavelength the sensitivity goes down on the CCD so
um once you correct for that uh which is what I'm doing here
you've got the raw Spectra and then you got the normalization curve for the CCD response
you can correct for that and uh there's a Jupiter one uh Spectra
that's been calibrated and normalized and you can see the light shifts from
the blue to the red and of course these are the colors that Jupiter looks like here in the yellows and the Reds right
that's what it looks like so that's and then some green so this is what Jupiter looks like and
that's why it's uh peaked in that range and then a star
well Deborah I calibrated it and then when you normalize it oops
if I can get my mouse to pay so the red the red is my data that I took after I
normalized and calibrated it the red Trace is the Spectra of aldebarin
which is a pretty bright star the blue is a reference Vector that I got from a
program created by Tom field called rspec so you can see how my red Spectra pretty
closely matches what the reference Specter is on the catalog for that star and you can see these these dips and the
Peaks right here where the absorption lines are and other things so overall it was very
sensitive uh the the resolution was very high on it and this this instrument by
itself only cost me 200 where if you look at spec Spectros uh spectrometers
today for astronomy astronomy use their several thousand dollars so it's kind of
a do-it-yourself organ basement spectrometer that's got fairly high resolution
it's pretty cool it worked out as well as it did um so this is this is what I paid for all
these pieces so 200 for the spectrometer the flip mirror was 170 dollars
the cold mirror that I put in there was fifty dollars that SMA adapter was 80 bucks and that
that was pretty expensive I used my ATEC camera which was about thirteen hundred dollars at the time
you can use other cameras of course and then I invested probably close to 300
hours into this project to learn and I'm just I was just it was just cool to be able
to build an instrument uh uh like this and adapt it to astronomy
use and it works pretty well I haven't used it for several years I don't have it mounted on an instrument right now
but again it works it worked very well and I was pretty happy with it
so that's uh is there any questions about that instrument how big was the the instrument itself all right so I got
a picture here I can show you just let me do this real quick uh mounted on the telescope
um
so you see that this is my 127
and you can see the Box up here and you can see the fiberat that orange fiber optic cable comes down into the top of
the flip mirror okay right there yep and then the flip mirrors there and with the
cold mirror and it puts it lets uh infrared light through the optical axis into the camera and then it reflects up
into the fiber or the Fiber goes over here into the box and then I have my program that I run to
acquire the data and that's what it looks like all right I'm going to share the link to
admin optics for their cold mirrors yeah and let me uh let me share
I think I've got the link for this paper here hold on if I can share that to you also
um or is it
give me a minute oh here it is
I'll paste this into the chat and then you can paste it out into the world
uh see
chat all right what happened to the chat there it is
movie all right there's the paper or the presentation I just gave
I did it to Adrian I was selected to him
foreign yeah we've each sent each other a
message we meant to send it to send it to everybody yeah um yeah you
yeah I was uh telling you about that mount so you sent me uh the response I
which I appreciate there we go I can share that so that'll that'll give you
some ideas for do-it-yourself astronomy like Adrian said um it's kind of cool to build instruments I
know John knows all about that stuff Don Briggs
I had typed in our chat and I'll just say it over the over the air those that
joined astronomy later in life during this sort of digital Revolution that we're having where all of these pieces
are they're coming already made but as uh talking to those who are in astronomy
clubs and that have done amateur astronomy for years and years A lot of
it was do it yourself you wanted to figure out how to get at some response
and you've built you built and grinded your own mirrors and Jerry like you've
built your own traffic spectroscopy unit and figured out from
the paper what part she needed got them all put it together real experimentation
and it's something that I uh right I kind of missed that part we the
experimentation now is you know can I align a telescope so that
it tracks so that I can get an image and well but there's still there's still some opportunities for that I mean
there's still uh like for the exactly the exoplanet work that I'm doing I discovered a methodology
uh that used uh off the shelf component and I was able to integrate it into our
system to do high Precision photometry with the exoplanets based on work that was done in college
and that's pretty cool when you can bring the high-tech stuff down and reply it to your own
you know small telescope systems yeah my my uh foray into that was
figuring out how do I take uh Coronado that was not designed with a vixen
Mountain what screws can I use to mount it and attach it so that I could put it
on the mount I found something that works temporarily but I know there's a
better solution for that um so so that's been the extent of my uh
trying to engineer something to work it did real well because once I got it in the actual uh OTA and focus I was able
to observe using the uh using that uh ixls mount
so um figuring things the spirit of figuring things out I think is well
that's part of like that's a right that's that can be part of the hobby if you're into that if you're into
technology and you also like to observe you know you'll you'll figure stuff out and uh sometimes it takes a lot of a lot
of uh thinking and studying and thinking about how to how things work
to really get the best performance and Gary knows that you have to get the best performance out of anything you have to
know everything about it yeah and when you live in the UK you
need Imperial and Metric there's everything that comes from the US
is Imperial yeah yeah
thousands and thousands of bolts when you get to my stage yeah all different sorts of things yeah trying to what we
call get out of jail free card when something doesn't fit we'll find something to fit it and if not make it
yeah yeah right that's the beauty you're fine and a lot of people are making things now with 3D printers although
threads are not brilliant on them you can still get by you know um
and you know I've got laser now all sorts of other things yeah and if we
ain't got nothing to fit you make it right and then I think I think the atmers from the 50s and 60s that ground
their own mirrors and built their own mounts and everything that's kind of that's kind of warped into the system
integrator of you know of this Century you integrate components that you buy
off the shelf into your own personal system um so you become a system integrator and
uh uh and learn all about the different components and sub components that you
need to build your system and that's actually what my book my first book was about scientific astrophotography how to
do that if you're not sure where it works take it apart
yeah okay put it back together again you soon find out that's how you learn
yeah yeah it may not be such a lost start but it's definitely something that uh
you know you're faced with a problem you just uh you go okay I needed to do this so how
do I get it to do this and then you have to you methodically step through it well
that's that's kind of an interesting thing too to push the limits of whatever you buy off the shelf and you discover
that it can do more than what they even the designer may have thought it could do and I've I've found that myself with
some of the stuff that I've done for explore scientific that it actually does it performs better and it actually can
do more stuff than what you originally thought about it doing which is kind of cool to discover yeah that's the case
with uh Jason gonzale he's using uh one of our six-inch Acro mats not a not an
apple okay not our most expensive telescope but our largest least
expensive refractor uh and as um you know those the solar images that he does
so and he's done also some narrow band deep Sky stuff with it too which is
you know really quite stunning so I was uh you know I've been very impressed with um what what he can do you know he
he just he doesn't have a lot of money and doesn't have uh you know uh to spend
on equipment uh or he keeps his budget tight anyways for spending on equipment
and uh and he squeezes out every last ounce of performance he can
yeah I think um you know and I'm here with uh Jerry and Gary and you know with
a lot of respect for the work you've done over the years but I think if it's one thing that you all teach and uh and
now Jason does its work technique and process do matter as far as how you get
to the results that you want and it isn't a matter of just sometimes you can't just read it in a book you have to
kind of understand what it is you're trying to do and then right you're
working towards it it's a practical aspect so some people just don't get
along with reading stuff out of books and you know literature and paperwork
they're getting on better by actually working on something and understanding it at that point
um there's lots of different ways around it but yeah you know things are progress
massively if you look at like lens Coatings over the last decade and all of
those sorts of things things you know they're massively changed what you can do
um so what we class does maybe a lower down product or a more inferior product
a decade ago it's not that close anymore but you know that a lot of the the
products are still hanging with that label a little bit you know
um and everybody you know wants to know what glass is in a telescope you know what Coatings are on the glass but to be
honest if he's through four through up four pictures yeah from different telescopes with with no information
about the class none of them could tell the difference yeah you know but it's a thing where
they've got to know what it is and if it doesn't have the correct label as far as they're
concerned it's rubbish and that's not the case you know we have many a product that
comes in where the the glass is not specified on that some of it's absolutely stunning
you know it really is nice yeah that's the sort of problem that you're getting
this a lot of the old school will turn around and say oh well you don't want that it's rubbish
um you know I I see it with um you know branded telescope whoever they come from United or some of the
other places you know and everybody's commenting well that's not very good or this is not very good in actual fact it
is very good for the price that you're paying you have to remember that everybody's got a budget
yeah everybody's got the money to run around buying Takahashi you know all
those sorts of uh things and even when you do go and buy that then you're going to get caned on the adapters that go
with it that's when you learn that a lathe comes in really well and you start making your own adapters rather than
paying 50 or 100 you know for something stupid and then two of you do that
Nothing fits it's not the same thread size and you'll find that with lots of different things
you know if you get Mountain plates it's very very rare that the set goes together from two different manufacturers the whole spacing will
always be slightly different yeah I think that uh you really when you when you invest your time in into
playing with your telescope or learning it the systems you're investing in yourself and your skills and knowledge
going forward so it'll pay dividends going forward when you go to buy that next Mount or that next scope you'll
really understand how to get the best performance out of your equipment and you should always push the performance
of your equipment I'm I think before you buy the next level up if you want to get the best value
you want to get the most value out of your equipment learn everything about it and push it to the limits to where you
can recognize the limits and then you'll know well I'm I need to go more you'll
get that passion yeah you get more passion and you want to get better and better and that's just the way it goes
yeah that I know that this hobby like a lot of others will lend itself to kind
of the more is better and for instance this a7r4 camera that
I'm holding that you can't even see it's in photography it's a similar thing it
really takes understanding what the equipment has in it and how it can help
you before you really I think you get benefit of
tools that you know may have Superior buildmanship
um what I hear from the both of you is you kind of have to know what it is you're doing and what you what you want
your outcome you can't just rely on well this is rubbish or the you know this is
the best stuff you got to get this you got to get that with any hobby I feel like it's kind of a shortcut to
say well I'll just go get the best stuff and then all I have to do is press a button and it's going to get me what you
want yeah you can get you can do the worst work with the best equipment any you know anybody that doesn't know
anything about it can actually do terrible work with the best equipment if they try hard enough yeah right
it's one of those things you know it's about learning and one of the biggest things I stress when it goes right when
it's working make sure you write them some of the bits that you did
another month or something before you actually get around to redoing that again
steps are brilliant yeah any settings that we
do on Scopes Focus points other things yeah it's just taking a picture of it yeah we've got it there yeah and
literally when we're setting it back up again you can just literally throw it straight up you just have a quick look at the picture that's the focus point of
it that's roughly in range you're not sitting out messing around with it so documenting some of the stuff in the
early stages is really helpful really wise point and just uh to back that up
and I know Scott I think you're going to move us along but um yes how often yeah how often do we go if we're visual how
often do you have the guy with the 30 inch mirror reading a manual and cutting a light on to figure out why it won't
work with the uh it won't connect to the tablet it won't do this it won't do that
yeah um and then you're bringing over other astronomers to help you figure out and
troubleshoot what's going on and there's a beautiful sky out there one of the
lessons I learned early on I remember being at a site that was
reasonably dark and I went there with the goal of using some little rig I had
to image a Galaxy I couldn't find a Galaxy I couldn't figure out why it
wasn't working and I'm sitting there frustrated then I looked up at the sky and I go
this is a beautiful sky and I'm mad because I can't get my little whatever I
had to work and I said I'm gonna make a pact with myself if my instrumentation
doesn't work as I expect I'm gonna take note of it I'm gonna move on and I'm you
know I'm still going to enjoy being out there under the stars because this feels
ridiculous things that like making bullet points of your setup certainly
when you're doing this and making those points is if you followed that correctly
each time when something doesn't work when something goes wrong it's really easy to try to sit back yeah and nine
times out of ten it's one of those things you've missed you're in a bit of a rush to get it set up and get on the sky and it will be one of those things
and if you've got it bullet pointed you set the thing up the same way each time yeah yeah and that's why I say once it's
working and once you're happy with it make sure you write it all down you know jot it down take a few pictures of it
that makes it really easy for you to do a certain bullet point notes and I did my system portable it was over
200 times I set my system up Portable to do astrophotography and uh it you get to
know the systems that way and you do the same thing everything you choreograph setting it up and tearing it down the
same way every night you know that's what I did yeah yeah all right Scott
we're okay we give it back to you now okay all
right well that's great um let's uh let's move on to our next speaker
um but a very interesting conversation and I think one that uh everybody you should
consider uh when you're getting your gear there's nothing wrong with buying the world's best equipment and uh and
doing all the rest of it but I think that all the really experienced people would would advise you uh to try to get
every ounce of it out of it that you can you know um so a lot of that also has to do with
uh you know skill your skill levels that can improve and so not only I mean of
course all of us like to get new equipment and better equipment but uh investing back into your own education
is important and so programs like what Gary Palmer offers uh you know to really
take you up to you know top tier level image processing is is equally important
you know especially you know in the field of astrophotography you want to learn science you get with someone like
Jerry Hubble and he'll you'll you'll be getting your name on scientific papers
um uh you know in in record time so okay uh up next is uh we've got Hammer
Time with Nico so Nicholas Ariel Arias from Argentina is with us and uh Nico
I'm getting it all to you thanks God how are you guys
good night great to see you again we still got to get that sound for you
Nico the the drop from uh Whimsy Hammer Going Hammer Time
how are you okay late but sure I I'm
here and and what and this this night uh
this uh as you know I we was working
here in a in my home so a few nights only with the with my scope
or my binoculars but this night uh I I was
casing and capturing the the Leonard Comet so let me show some some pictures
that I get this week it's also the first day of summer for
you yes yes today and it was really hot this week
here okay so uh well this was my my first uh
comment at all I use my my equatorial mount with my six inch Newton and as you
know I I don't have a reflex camera or a big sensor camera so I always use my oh
y5 and so I have a lot of magnification
like a 91 magnification but anyway I get a really nice
pictures this was the the first attempt uh was a
few nights ago but the first day that we can see that
and it was really really uh low altitude so it was really hard
just trying to escape from the world
and uh Night by Night the comment was rising up
this is a the capture of this was two nights ago
it was a a really nice really
better image than the the first night and this night before preparing my my
dinner and and go to eating I I left the scope and taking captures and I mean now
processing so let me show these night pictures with a maybe
20 82 degrees maybe and it's another
uh it looks like a different comment wow so this is the
the first stack look at the detail yes hey yes it's it's a little camera but
it's really powerful and I was this is the the stack and I
was trying to make two different Stacks to to bring the Stars one to another
and I get this this one this is I I was stuck in right now it's
great it's really very nicely done yeah thank you Adrian yeah this uh I
think that we have a a bigger expectation about this this comment
because it was writing in in magnitude but uh
we here in the in the southern hemisphere we always get the Comets
going down so yeah but it was a really nice really
nice one because I uh I could observe it with my binoculars with my Dobson and
even here in in the city so it was a a funny night with the with the with the
government um so well I I didn't have a much
material for tonight so I I was trading this this capture from
this week and that's all guys
that's right it's not only it's great unlike the last comment that uh
gray star Skies southern hemisphere you now it's now your turn to get as much as
you can of that comment yes I think it has come to you all to get our best
yep and well I I cannot get a color image because
as the comet moved so fast uh when you look at any stars in a few minutes and I
I get no time to to give the detention the the wheel filter and to get the
chance was and like an impossible work
yeah well still you've got something I I had a lot of clouds that uh clouds or
something else work wise anything that precluded my ability it's the one the
one time I wasn't able to capture um something that was on the minds of all astronomers but I figured I'll have
to sit this one out because I knew a lot of other uh astrophotographers like
yourself were going to take a shot at it and that's a beautiful one I even like the one where you've got to
start this is your composite but you've got the one where you've got the comet and you've got the star trails that kind
of shows yes how fast it's moving so yes it's amazing this is uh like maybe 20
minutes Nico um what time are you seeing are you able
to image the comments before is it after sunset or Before Sunrise no we have the
here in the sunset like when the when the sun I
the first days uh we was chasing with the binoculars the first stars and this
was even very late so it was really hard and
tonight we have more time because it is is going going up you know you do
so tonight I have like maybe half an hour of almost night uh Sky yeah
is it very is it to you is it looking very low on the horizon or or yes yes no
no it was really hard and uh maybe tonight that was the the
light with the High Altitude yet it was I like a 20 degrees altitude
and with the walls and the TD I cannot see any stars there so I I start
tracking in the in the area and waiting to to Lark
was really really funny this one yeah this one's
moving opposite of the way Comet neowise did I think you had the first shots of it but then it Rose higher in the
northern Skies just because of the way it was moving so this one's doing the
opposite for us and now it's going to go higher in your in the southern Skies
which is nice you'll be able to probably take some more shots before it finally just starts disappearing on us
so yes yes yes because it's losing magnitude it's it's going
down in my middle but it's it's higher in the sky so it's easily to to to watch
and with the contrast of the sky uh yeah so let's hope this night will have clouds
it's clouding out we'll see tomorrow
so when you are when you are taking these images is it just drifting through
the field of your dobsonian or are you somehow guiding on
the comet head no for this especially pictures I cannot use the the love song
because the the angle I I say what you will do to handle because I I need to
put the dub at the up up early because
the the weight so I use uh the things six inch Newton with my equatorial
amount the the old multi equipment
I see makes sense yeah yes I was to go to the to a farm or
something with a greater great skies and and no
City but it was I was no able because my work the
family and everything I I kind of travel these three days
okay guys I'm glad you're able to share uh your work with us on global star party so yeah it was a a very short
presentation but it was a really great to get this image from these days and
yes I love to to share this with you yes we love it too it's great all right so
that that's Hammer Time with Nico right there so that's okay guys thank you yeah
and maybe I'll I'll try to work on that t-shirt okay oh yes I need that
right so um Maxie um Maxi filari's is up next uh I've also
come up with a nice name for maxy's time it's this astrophotography to the max so
so it was a really good one
so uh I know that you're friends with uh Nico and and Cesar it's great to have
you guys on um every Global star party it's wonderful so
um so how how are things going are you also getting images of comet Leonard
yes well good night everyone I hope you're fine
we're we're having some lucky nights because even the the the the the
the Moonlight of the full moon uh we were able to watch
with binoculars and Telescope the the comet Leonard and also taking pictures
uh you know um like a well every
um astrophotographer does when you have to take pictures of a comet you have to
get maybe three or or two minutes per
picture and guiding and everything but in this case it's almost impossible
because you have to hey put your gear if you disarm it like
I do every it's something that you go outside and I want and then well trying to get
the most uh appreciate to the polar alignment and then we'll find to try to find the
comment but for example here my C in my home I
at the end of the last week um
I couldn't even watch it because it was really really low so I went to a place
outside of the town and uh well uh when were my binoculars
with my DC alright but I almost fighting with mosquitoes you
know I was feeling like it was some car race a
Crossing near by me but it was The Cloud of mosquitoes
and well let me show you my screen
[Music] okay do you see it
yes yes great so basically uh I started in the 15th of
December it was the most time that we calculated that we have to start to
see it but unfortunately it was a a really
it's a good very clear skies but
the comet I think it was almost up here you know this is uh almost uh
really really down I think the time that says the camera
was nine pm and 10 minutes
and you know it's it's really writing the the what the group that we call and
you can see here is Venus there was no stars there was no I don't know you know
I was I was trying to to get more explosion but try to not get a burn the
the images and I couldn't find anything so I grabbed my equipment say goodbye to
the mosquitoes and went to my home the next day uh we have some
almost bad weather but uh this time we had some kind of lucky
because the the commercials started to get it up and
it wasn't such a difference you know and let me show you some
picture here's the same place that I went the the Northern Lights
you know in this case we have some really this cloudy was almost 300
kilometers from where I am and you can see here this is not the comment
this is the reflection of Venus it really writing but the comment I think it was almost
right there I think a world by the clouds almost but I could only take care is a single
but some kind of stuck in emails manually and
then I I found the well this kind of stars
in Sagittarius and here it was this Lily little really
blur it's almost you can see anything this is a crop image of my dclr cam
camera and well you can say oh yeah that
there's the com the learner comment and now it was really really
I I don't want to say uh frustrating but you know I I was expecting uh much of
that and also I still fighting with the mosquito because I want to the same place
let's get them yeah
so the Friday I was invited by Armando sandal and remember that was
my teacher physics of physics and they
went to a place a in another place of the city uh that we have also a clear Horizon
and uh well this is some pictures uh when when we they're disarming we you
know we're in almost summer but you can see we are covered with sweaters and and
long pants or jeans because obviously they're mosquitoes
so uh well this is
a 150 refractor and kids I only went with my star
Adventure Mount and my dclr camera but in this case with a
um a 70 200 objective that I put over there
so I in this case I could take pictures of
you know of the government this I almost is 50 seconds of pictures you can start
to see here you know and I don't know if you are seeing oh yeah yeah you know it
was really exciting because in this in this case uh we have a more Darkness but
obviously we have the in our box the the almost the full moon but with binoculars
and Telescope it was amazing to watch this you know a almost at the afternoon
with The Shining Sun a you
was almost able to see it with
a telescope and you know we're watching it with a reflector of Armando
hola
hello I think you're you're yeah we're here can you hear us yes
the Gremlins took over your internet for a few seconds but I didn't have let it
go it was the mosquitoes Revenge yeah the mosquitoes are still haunting you to
even this is of course the comet and this you
know it wasn't an airplane it was it wasn't a satellite this was
the International Space Station crossing over the the field of view of the camera
you know and I my app says that it's going to risen up and when I see the the
where is going to pass cross over I saw it was almost near of the Comet so I was
you know I think I have to to take the picture so
it was there was the International Space Station so in this case I did a single video
I didn't stuck anything because it wasn't very good images but I did this
video this animation
oh yeah oh how is moving it
but let me repeat it and also is how it's going because of
the not the live pollution and this was almost at the Horizon and we have some
kind of um I don't want to say fog but almost you know when you see it the Horizon is
really great and also the moon stops you know uh well it's going to
decrease the the brightness so well I have to oh okay okay
so uh well I spent a couple of days I
have to to do some homeworks here because it was three days outside you
know my my fiance was not angry but you're you're a lazy man you know she
said to me that last Sunday and
I grabbed my equipment in my backyard I
I was really prepared it started really really early
and I put my equipment in another another place where I used to
put and also they put the mount more higher because
I have my my rooftop for my house and at
that time it was almost impossible to to capture it this is the
was the the preparation you know it would sometimes
in this place and put higher the amounts
so I could in this case my eight inches reflector and my camera everything I it
was impossible to to start to to do some pictures and to do some
guiding and of course a the sky was almost a afternoon
but I started to do pictures like this this was only three seconds you know but
this is out how to stretch it let me reset it so this is the the the the the
the the real picture and when you can see I did a lot of
pictures and I started to to practice with the game with the seconds and
trying to not get a start Trails for the the the the the time and everything
so almost I think there was some this
you can see it is really dark but when I get out the stretch
when I saw this I say oh man you know it was really a I was really
excited to yeah process it so well I
I get my equipment inside almost 11 pm and then I started to to
remember the the stacking and the processing of the of the comets and I
was almost at 3 00 am and well
and and in this case I was practicing again
here is the the first
a picture and I want to show you that the movement that I have
this is a little animation and you can see how it's moved the comet between the Stars
oh yeah
so I actually yeah this is a really cool
um a process to to get and see how it moves
of course if you haven't a with a with a star alignment you
you're able to see only the the the the comet moving
and then well I I started the processing first of all
stuck in the doing the star alignment then stacking the comments and get out in the
the stars and you can see this is the stacking you know but the the
it isn't only this uh if I stretch it
this is what I get let me yeah
you know in this case start to see it with more
details in details yeah yes and you can see almost the the Stars the island tail
pretty good and the dust tail and also uh the core
it was in this case is really bright in but if you reset the the strategy you we
have here the the the comet and of course this is a
almost well not sorry let me
so then I did the uh me
here I did the this the star alignment but in
this case try to get out the the comet
and this is what I get
well I it's you can see there is instant a comet but then I integrated all uh
this uh to uh Integrations different
Integrations and this is what I get
and then you got the comments and the stars without star trees right
and then you start to do the processing that you must know and then well a this
is a a new one that I did almost a half an hour but what I did uh that I uploaded my
Facebook page and Instagram page and I think it was yes you guys see three
almost four a.m that I finish
this is the the processing that I did
you can see here is the core
and also a coma and the tail well but I
want to do again the the pre-processing to to get in practice
so do you hear me yes oh okay we can still hear it
excellent so well this is my little presentation
I hope tomorrow well uh
this afternoon I only went up outside
with my 10 really old there's my father that he gave in a circle rush and you
know it works really fine and I was in my bag here watching try to to find
Saturn then some stars and then oh there's a comment I'm seeing the
comment in from my home with biteless you know and unfortunately they this the
major city is starting to put a left light in in the street but
uh I I hope they won't bother me
um well thank you to everyone and thanks again for inviting me and of course
I hope you have a a really good a Merry
Christmas to all of you that that wants to celebrate but also uh that ones who
know that there knows and they have a maybe a good concert with her family and
also um wish you to all of you a Happy New Year I hope the next year we get more uh
a a more freedom of these situation and
well I hope that we can still with good health that that's the almost important
of all things so thank you again and thank you Max I
hope to see you next week next week yes yes we'll have excellent
one more Global star party uh before the year is over so we have to do a
um a happy New Year let's start party you can bring your own champagne or
whatever you'd like you know so make it a toast make a toast okay
drunk party after
yeah we should probably be careful drunk stargazing or drunk online that's why
you're broadcasting from home then it's at least it's safer yep yeah but true
you know for some people the focusing might actually improve just sick
it helps me double Stars there's more double Stars than I
remember seeing I'll have to report them all I didn't know duve was a double star
it's not it might actually I have to be careful because I know a lot of stars really are
double Stars we just don't see them yeah I think maybe most are so that's it's just easier to
see them that way I think you can measure it
okay so let's move on to Connell Richards Connell has not been on to our
program for a while Connell how are you I'm doing very well Scott how are you
great great and thanks Maxi thanks again for coming on that's great thank you
yeah good to see everyone it has been some time yes it has it has uh tell us
uh catch us up what's been going on in your life I've been pretty busy so I'm an
aerospace major at Penn State now and I've been getting involved with some of the the university activities there
now they do have an astronomy club and unfortunately I haven't had the time to join but in the meantime I've joined the
uh caving club and they have access to uh some other organizations that led us
into some fun underground places so if I can't look up at the stars I'll just go the opposite direction and go
underground um so that's kind of what I've been doing lately I've been doing Air Force ROTC that's given me some additional
classes so I'm still keeping close enough to the space realm um if I can't have my telescopes and and
books and everything there with me well I have to do this uh
there's a there's a war cry Penn State I think you all it starts we are
happy birthday because when I go we are you get to go
Penn State I was waiting on you to say that I wondered if this was some kind of
Michigan rebuttal you know there's feelings are still heard after uh what happened a couple of weeks ago yeah
we're we're really quickly yeah we're we're more focused on Georgia now it's
the furthest the football team has gone in years but um I missed out on doing aerospace
engineering there uh with my love of the Stars I would have loved to have used the equipment the University of Michigan
has there and no doubt Penn State has some state-of-the-art astronomy
um infrastructure there as well so so gay for the football team we barely
got by you guys but uh you know now we now we have to move on
yeah that was indeed a Tense one yeah all right Connell all right so
um I we didn't get much of a chance to chat but I was really glad to see you um
uh uh come in and uh what will your presentation be on today
well when I saw your presentation title about breaking the boundaries in uh
space exploration and astronomy a lot of the focus this week is on James Webb and
when we think of breaking boundaries in astronomy we think of all these big colossal achievements that have been
made some of the large firsts that have impacted the entire astronomical Community but when I read that something
I thought of would be a lot of the firsts that I've had in astronomy and some personal I guess boundaries that
I've broken in developing my interest in the stars and kind of exploring the hobby as I got new equipment and got new
skills and gained some experience as I was going along right so to tell that story and share
some of my experiences I have a folder here of images that I'd like to share and I'd like to preface that by saying
in in the first year or two when I was working in amateur astronomy and kind of exploring the hobby one of the questions
I found myself asking a lot as I found new targets and looked for new things I
always wondered what it would look like I I didn't really know what to expect I wasn't sure with the Deep Sky objects be
big and bright with tons of detail would be would they be really small and fuzzy what would I be able to see on the
planets what could I see on the moon and it really took some exploring myself to figure out what my equipment could do
and how I could build my skills up to see even more with the equipment that I had
so I'll share my screen in just a moment but in summary what I'd like to share
with everyone today is is some of what you can see starting out with very moderate equipment
um some some modest Beginnings in amateur astronomy and kind of learning your way around so I'll share my screen
here and can you see that that folder there yes yes we can okay good
so I could start my story my presentation here with an image from my first night
observing this on the right here is my blue six inch reflector it was the first
day I could get that out or the first night I suppose about a week after I pulled it out of the box and I was just
thrilled I was talking to everyone about it including my neighbor who came by and set up a six inch DND refractor which
was just stunning to look through but of course I was focused on you know the equipment that I just gotten and kind of
exposing that to the stars and seeing what new things I could find in this new hobby so this is where the journey began
I have my telescope there still the original finder scope on that and a little cardboard box of the eyepieces
that came with it so they were some modest Beginnings but I was really excited to get out there and explore
what this guy had to offer now one of the first targets I came by would be the moon and this here is a
close-up of an image I took I think it was just with my phone early on of the moon right here is the crater Copernicus
I think it's about 120 kilometers in diameter so you're seeing these massive objects but still you can see these
ridges inside it's kind of a tiered crater you can see some peaks in the center up here you see those Peaks a
little better in eratosthenes in the mountain range we have here and then there's all this debris surrounding
Copernicus of uh things that have been blown out and didn't make it as far as some of the other particles in the race
system and all of this was being you know soaked into my eyeball through some very
simple eye pieces and the equipment I'd just taken out of the box this this had to be taken on one of my first nights of
observing and it was so rewarding that I wanted to take it all down and share it with everyone and I again like I said I wasn't really
sure what I could see but this was just a six inch telescope and here I was looking at six or seven ridges kind of
stepping down into the floor of Copernicus crater and then these peaks in massive craters and mountain ranges
all around it was really quite stunning and after that I had to move my gaze a
little bit farther out and again I share these images they're not stunning they're nothing you know
groundbreaking but for me at the time they were personal breakthroughs this is an image of Jupiter through a yellow
filter I can't remember exactly the ratin number I think it was a number 12 but if I zoom in here it's a little
tricky to see but you can see the North and South equatorial belts and maybe just some darkening at the poles there
but I was trying to take pictures just with my phone of the moons around Jupiter and what you could see on there
and it was really quite a milestone for me to see those first bands so to anyone out there who is exploring astronomy for
the first time or they're getting out there Jupiter is a wonderful first Target and I really had some some Joy
exploring that and I still do to this day there's always something to offer there
this was an image taken the same night as uh the Jupiter picture I showed you earlier we have three of the moons kind
of wrapping themselves around the bulging equator of the pan of the planet because it's been so fast Jupiter is
just overwhelmingly bright and it's kind of flooding my little phone camera with
um all this bright exposure but not quite enough to to knock out those moons and that was that was something I was
really excited to see over my first couple observations of Jupiter I eventually saw all four moons and that's
one of the first really fun things that you can see if you're starting out in astronomy especially as a young person like myself who was just looking into
this hobby for the first time after being interested from reading some books
now again here we have the next gas giant in line number six this is Saturn
and I don't know how I managed to get this but I found that I could actually photograph some of the moons so I think
we have Titan here um memes and Dion I think they were some of the others and tethis I think was the
other one and I don't know exactly which ones they are here Titan of course would be the brighter one but that was
something really rewarding that I was able to see through not only just a phone camera but after straining my
eyeball after getting some newer eyepieces and practicing my skills a little bit better I was able to look
close to Saturn just behind that little exposed oval and see some of its smaller
and dimmer moons now that was something very rewarding and again it builds on these skills it was this is all done by
pretty much the same equipment but seeing Saturn and its rings like you see here and the moons these were some
of the first things that I saw and they were really exciting to share with everyone so again I would encourage anyone new to astronomy the planets make
great first targets they're bright easy to find and the closer ones like Jupiter and Saturn those gas giants they just
have so much to offer in terms of detail especially in terms of watching the moons go around
now this image was taken a little bit later on in my astronomical career in fact just this year
this was that partial solar eclipse that some of us in North America saw and I
managed to to get up and and get a spot right through the clouds here you can see just that little oval of the Moon
kind of budging in and taking a chunk out of the sun there and it brought back some memories of the 2017 Eclipse which
I did see in totality and I have an image of that a little bit later on here
but again this was something that I saw with those uh solar glasses which which you do have to be careful with you have
to make sure you have the right ones but they are essentially solar filters in the form of eyeglasses uh eclipse
glasses they're typically called and I put those on that morning and this was only five or ten degrees above the
Horizon as as the sun was coming up and this Eclipse was finishing out but it was really beautiful to see that chunk
taken out of the Sun and watch the moon grazing by bringing back some memories of my first solar eclipse
now next in line I have that Eclipse image like I said this was something really stunning that I I managed to see
in the six inch reflector my family traveled Down to Georgia to see this and we were right in totality a little over
two minutes and 30 seconds it was for this Eclipse yeah and this is a close-up image of the moon during totality and I
couldn't get all the details yet my my skill with the camera wasn't quite there but you can see if you look around the
limb of the Moon here it is quite bumpy you can see where the the craters and mountains and rails are kind of creating
this uneven but but very close to perfect disc but anyway you see through here there's
these little pink spots and in the telescope when I was looking at this they were these huge arches these huge
prominences branching off of the Sun and you can also see up here at the North and South Poles of the sun you have all
this energy all this energy coming out and coming from the magnetic field exciting these photons and creating
these huge bands it looked like maybe something you'd see in a movie or or a space documentary about a black hole
even though it was just our sun and a lot of people I know who've seen total solar eclipses say it's one of the
darkest things you can see just obscuring all the light from the sun and letting you see that really
beautiful Corona now again this was in 2017 a little more than a year after I got my my first telescope in April of
16. so this was a really new experience for me and it was quite exciting after I'd only spent about a year Under the
Stars kind of watching the seasons go around for one rotation now later on I started photographing
with the DSLR and I started sketching and my ability started to improve so I
was frustrated maybe at times when I was starting out in astronomy I didn't know how to do this or that or what I could
see but later on Mars became one of my favorite targets I remember I tried to see it at the the opposition in 16 and
18 and I couldn't really get much detail out of the planet but I upgraded some eyepieces and kept training my eye on
different planets and I don't know why this image is coming up blurry here but um this was a
nightscape that I took and Mars is very bright there this was in October or November of last year
and I had some time after taking some sketches at the telescope to bring out my DSLR and get a beautiful picture
showing how bright Mars was against the fall background Stars it was really something spectacular to look in my
telescope and see all this detail and lean back in my chair and see how incredible Mars was
here again is Mars next to the moon this was kind of a close-up shot I got the Moon is near full it looks like it's a I
want to say a waning give us here if yes North would be this way so this is probably just a day after the
full Moon Mars is not too far from the moon right there that's probably well maybe 90 Arc seconds or so
and one of the first things that I found surprised me in astronomy was the scale of everything if I'm looking through my
telescope say I'm looking at the Ring Nebula that is 2 000 light years away and meanwhile there are stars in the
Milky Way much closer to us that are only maybe tens or hundreds of light years away and so much closer but you
don't see that scale in the eyepiece unless you think about it and consider the objects you're looking at so the
moon here that averages about 250 000 miles from us and Mars during this opposition around the time this was
taken had to be I want to say 50 or 60 million miles away so there's there's orders of magnitude in terms of distance
between these two objects and yet there they are right in my camera focused together it was really quite spectacular
and it taught me one of the first lessons in astronomy that being the concept of scale and how crazy it was to
to look across the cosmos and see so many different things now something many astronomers are fond
of and and should be fond of is good note taking and sketching in fact right right here I have my notebook next to me
uh and my Sketchbook as well and here was what I was working on during that Martian opposition uh you can see here
and I'll show the sketch in a little bit there's sear this major and I have my red flashlights out and I was trying to
show people uh not just what comes out of the eyepiece but what I'm doing while I'm looking at that so this was a book I
was using kind of as a guide to to the moon and Mars When I was making some of these sketches and photographs I have my
eyepiece case right there and I found that it really impressed some people to to see you know what
really goes into an astronomical sketch it's not just something that's coming out it's something you get to sit down
and enjoy and that really encouraged a lot of people to explore astronomy for themselves and it also works as a great Outreach
tool to share not only what you're doing but how you're doing it and how accessible that is
again here's that sketch you saw after I scanned it there's cirdus major there
there's the South Pole which I was able to watch kind of shrink as as spring
came around in the southern hemisphere of Mars during that opposition it was really quite incredible
and up here in these deserts where a lot of the Dust has been Stripped Away you can see there's some clouds I drew or
some dust I couldn't really tell what it was but again that's part of the exploration involved in amateur
astronomy now after this I have some more DSLR
images to share as I played around with Mars and and uh capturing the Stars it
was my first time being able to do this so I experienced a similar learning curve here as with the telescope you can
see there's a little bit of noise in the image it wasn't quite focused as I was learning how to do this but this was
Mars as it was passing right by the pleiady star cluster and it looked absolutely stunning and binoculars and
it was something I wanted to capture and get in the books to share with family and friends and encourage people who were in a
similar position like I was in 2016 starting on us in astronomy and wondering what they could see now the
answer to that is so many stars like this this is my first astrophoto here and then if you think about the Mars and
Pleiades there are many close pass that you can see and kind of conjunctions or
perhaps like the Christmas conjunction last year now as I said these images are not
always the greatest because there are many of my first but I think it's really spectacular to know that you can capture and I'm living
in a suburban area capture things like the Orion Nebula here the color of Beetlejuice up here there's a number of
asterisms throughout Orion there's Orion's Belt there's that S curve right in the middle of his belt so there's so
much that you can see just through binoculars and I think a camera represents that pretty well especially if you're looking at some of the
beginner images like I have here now I'm going to skip ahead just a little bit this was one of the first
images of the Andromeda galaxy I was able to get this was during the fall I waited till
Andromeda came up high in fact from my specific location it passes directly overhead even though it is a massive
object it does that for a couple of places I'm sure but this I found closely represents what
it looked like in my first binocular view I remember it was I think it was the spring of 2016 and I was up I'd done
this huge observing run with my telescope and eventually some do was building up on the Optics so I brought
them inside and I do live in a humid area but still inside and completely clear I had a pair of binoculars I was
borrowing from a neighbor of mine there were some 11 by 70s and it had to be about 3 or 3 30 in the
morning I put my elbows down on the railing of the deck and sat down and stared straight at Andromeda for the
first time I had no idea what I would see if I would see it at all and there it was this little nucleus and I think
it's two or three degrees of nebulosity stretching out in some darker locations
people have said they can see spiral arms or some slight hints of that and larger telescopes but it was really
beautiful to see that through binoculars for the first time and I would suggest the Andromeda galaxy as a great Target
for first-time observers or people trying to find their way in the hobby it is such a spectacular Target that I
still come back to every now and then eventually coming to see the dwarf galaxies as well that was something really special
so next up I have uh some of my later progression in astronomy you can see my
Astro photos got a little bit better and I even had some luck with this on capturing a meteor I think this was
during the Pearson meteor shower this would have been in 2020. you can see it's coming straight up off of the
northern Horizon and you can see where it kind of comes in and then really Burns for a little bit as I was taking
that exposure so these meteor excuse me these meteor images
they always take a little bit of luck to capture but the stars are more focused in this image and I found in looking at
this that I was really proud of the progress I had made since starting out looking through a telescope and trying
to figure out what what was what on Jupiter or perhaps the moon and later moving on to take pictures of meteors
passing by and to close us out here
um hope this will play I have a little bit of a time lapse that I took this is looking due north you can see uh Polaris
is here and coachab is here in Ursa Minor our pole constellation in the North
and I took a little bit of a time lapse I like seeing the trees blow in the breeze and airplanes come by satellites
I looked into this in the past I think I got a meteor on one of the slides but I'm not sure it depends on how many
images I took but my message to to people new to astronomy especially younger astronomers
like myself when I was starting out I would say that there's so much to see if you put your mind to it and invest some
time into it to build your skills I heard you speaking earlier about how much there was how much you could say
for building up your skills even if you had the nicest telescope the most money that you could put into your gear uh
there really is something to be said for a good book now and then or a magazine or spending some time out with just a
pair of binoculars building up your skill set so that's something I would very much encourage for younger
astronomers and people starting out and to not be discouraged by uh what they may or may not see there there
really is quite a lot to see if you put your mind to it and keep Imaging and sharing and speaking with other
observers so thank you very much that's awesome yeah a great presentation Connell really uh you know I'm happy to
have you on every time um uh you know your presentation style is very professional uh you know and uh
um you know I love how you encourage beginners to get involved you know so showing your first efforts and and what
that feels like uh you know is you know it certainly reminds me of you know my
uh first experiences of seeing n13 flowed into the field of view by
accident and you know finding the Orion Nebula and all of these things and once
you start once you see a deep Sky object man you just want to go from okay what else can I find what else can I find you
know and so it's just uh it's thrilling and uh you know I certainly found myself
out every partly clear night and of course every
clear night you know if it wasn't raining and there sometimes I have a story of of course when it was raining
and I just had to get out to go see Holly's Comet and I got lucky so you know the those kinds of things can
happen but um if I may share a quick story something to be said for uh keeping your
mind and putting in that effort for astronomy even when you're later on in the hobby it's not always the best effort so yesterday I was out for a hike
with a friend of mine and we were coming back to our cars around Sunset and I could see Venus I knew Comet Leonard was
up and I hadn't seen it yet so he said here's a really good location with a good Western Horizon you can see the sun
setting and get some of comet Leonard now I put my binoculars in the back of the car I knew we had some clear skies
and I wasn't quite sure what I'd get but I ended up with this which is a napkin sketch of the Comet and some of
its coma bending away from the Sun yeah it's a napkin and a pen from the glove box where the equipment I used and still
it's one of my best experiences so far so really it doesn't matter what you're using it's all about the experience
that's right yeah and so your equipment cost was very low but the experience left
um you know payback was huge so that's that's great absolutely thanks Connell
thanks thanks for your inspiration and uh thank you very much again okay so we are going to move on uh we're
going back up to Canada uh with uh Steve Malia uh from Ontario telescope and and
Steve uh was kind enough to uh come back you know he's he's been on and off a
global star party uh but he was reminding me about the marathon event
that we held uh right a year ago right yeah a year ago today right
that was uh it was it was pretty awesome we got up very
early in the morning uh to capture uh astronomers in the Philippines and in
Asia and uh and then moved around the world uh as we followed the great
conjunction that was going on during that time yeah that was that was quite a quite an event I um
uh it would I got back to my shop I think at three o'clock in the morning
um so for you it was two o'clock in the morning and we had started off with uh
uh David uh Levy and and Christopher go um yeah uh and and that was our first
glimpse of the um conjunction Christopher go was uh live streaming as well so and then we went yeah 18 19
hours I think I go home that's right yeah that was a marathon Global star party yeah it was it was tiring but it
was really fun and thrilling so yeah I remember Scott I remember you telling me
what your plans were and I'm on the phone I'm talking with you and and I'm like well God if you're doing that I I
have to be part of it I'm gonna do the whole thing right and um yeah that was
uh that was an event um and uh you know uh it came up in my
Facebook um uh memories today that that it had had happened in the whole broadcasters there
so if anyone wants to go back and watch the 19 hours or so you can um and uh of course uh if if uh actually
some pretty great images coming across live so yeah there were some great images there were some really good
discussion there it really felt like a um uh
um a family coming together in around the holidays and and talking about their
experiences and what they do and how they um observe and and the Outreach that
they do and what uh everything means to them and it was just amazing to see this all happening in different parts of the
world and you know this is always something that I have um uh uh said you know when I was a
president of my um resc Center um and the message that I always like to
give out was you know the stars are the same no matter where you are in the world right and so you can travel around
you can have a conversation with someone look at the same same object and you might or start a constellation star
pattern whatever and um you know it's the the one one of the
few constants that don't change right that can easily bring people together and I think I think now
um well in any time period really that's something that's really important um to uh to keep in mind and to reflect
on um on how something as simple as astronomy I say simple there's nights I
know it's not well you know um but uh even looking up on how that can bring bring people together and and
uh share uh um a common Bond where you might not think that a common Bond uh
exists so that's one of the reasons why I love astronomy but you know this past year Scott I was saying um you know I
was trying to think what am I going to talk about today it's been it's been incredibly busy at Ontario telescope
which I'm extremely grateful for um and the year has turned out to be pretty good too I was honestly very concerned
um as a business owner all right um uh knowing the the uh the effects
that uh there have been on supply chain and Equipment manufacturers and
um uh it the economy itself right um uh people have have had a rough go uh
the past year year and a half um what that's going to mean for business so it means having to get creative and look for new ways of of
keeping things moving and and and and engaging with an audience
um and and engaging with your customers and and attracting new customers into into and not just you know customers
that are in the hobby or in the industry that are um you know necessarily buying
from someone else but uh also just getting more people into into the Hobby in general and and it's sort of like the
new the next generation of astronomers I think is really really important you know O'Connell watching your
presentation it was really exciting to see your progression in after photography and astronomy and then even
pulling out a napkin and a pen to get um the comment I think is absolutely amazing I think back at some of the
um early images I've seen were actually sketches and and this goes back to
um a few years ago I was fortunate to be in Dublin Ireland at the
um uh Leviathan telescope uh 70 72 inch reflector massive telescope it's
beautiful yes and and then I was able to um get into the museum and walk around
and for some reason I wasn't partially but I wasn't complaining um and to see some of the sketches of of
M51 right and this was the first view that people had of This Magnificent Galaxy that's out there right
um uh which for me has always been a personal favorite uh because it just looks so Majestic uh in these two
galaxies colliding um and to think that it's so far away I think 51 million light years away just
so so you know to be able to uh image a as a sketch and to share that
I think is amazing so you know to do the same thing with a comment I think comets are absolutely I haven't been able to
see comment Leonard yet because of my weather situation but I think to be able to
um for anyone to be able to see a comment no con no two comments are ever going to be the same and no experience is going
to be necessarily saying I remember the first comment I ever imaged from my back deck was actually
um uh it's just like a look like a green ball I don't remember which one it was uh but it was just a green ball but the
fact that I had a green ball in my camera what was exciting and then I think back last year
um with um uh that big one um someone help me out here
thank you very much um you know that was exciting to see because you know hopefully in our
lifetimes we'll be able to see a beautiful naked eye comment like that again um I remember waking up at four o'clock
in the morning and dragging my youngest son out he wanted to go so it wasn't really a punishment or anything but he
uh um we went we went hunting for this thing we found a clearing and we were able to find it with a pair of binoculars and it was really really cool
um the next day I decided I was going to go out again because the weather was going to be good and I literally walked
my front door and there it was in front of my house it's like it was perfectly positioned just for me and that
experience is unlike any other comment that I've been able to see as well so um uh the fact that we have a comment
now um which I would like to get to see sometime I think is absolutely amazing um and I think these are the type of
things that that help attract more people into the Hobby and to see the beauty of of astronomy and what it what
it is it's always Ever Changing um you know this past year has been been interesting uh I don't know uh many
people know know that are on the call Gary and I Gary Palmer I have been working together actually quite actively
for the past year um with uh uh courses and and such and
and uh um uh Gary everything's going well so far with that
right yeah we're still talking right along everything's
yeah lots of happy customers yeah absolutely and again it's just a
matter of sharing the the information that's there right and getting people into the right um into a right start and uh
um you know there's a lot of misinformation out there and some really good information but you know it was
again you know from talking as a dealer like how are we going to engage another audience how are we going to keep people
interested in the Hobbies like let's teach them right let's show them the good information on how to get an image
how to get um how to collect data to get an image and you know Gary's been absolutely
fantastic in in in working with him in doing that and uh uh Gary thank you very
much for for everything obviously um enjoyable and I think what is really
nice is when the customers are coming back you're seeing the same customers come back time and time again so yeah
that gives you that thing where you you know that you've put the information across well all you see in the images
sent to you yeah yeah that's really cool too I you know I get a I get an excited
email a couple days later and say hey Steve look at this image I got because of what I learned uh from one of the uh
one of the workshops and I think that's fantastic because it ignites um uh a bit of a fire in somebody and
then you know they share that with someone else and that some someone else is going to say hey maybe I actually got a telescope too right and it goes from
there whether they buy it from for me which would be great or you know that they just buy one in general to get into
the hobby I think I think that's what helps move things along um and bring in that next
generation of astronomer into the uh into the hobby um
uh one of the things for for me I'll be honest I've never really thought of um and I'm not going to do it now
because it's just I don't like the cold I don't like to be outside is uh getting into solar astronomy and uh um fitting
in on some of Gary's workshops that he's done has really got me got me interested in it so that's probably something that
for myself I'm going to try next year um uh as well and uh um you know at
least I I know I can go to if I need help
is you keep warm yeah you can see what you're doing yeah
um but no it's just fun doing this over um yeah yeah it works well with my sleep
schedule right now too so um that's always a that's always a bonus but you know I'd like to I'd like to
share um a few images if I if I can um you know I uh I started this past
year I started a um let me let me share my screen here um
uh I always had this but I never I never used it I started my own Instagram page
um a little while back uh just to share with that and I had no intentions of doing anything other than saying hey
these are my my pictures and all of a sudden I got more and more followers every day I guess it's all about how I
use a hashtag and uh um uh so I you know I've been putting up my
my images in the past that I've taken the past year or so in processing them out some of them I'm pretty happy with
other ones I probably didn't go back uh to them so I remember this picture
yes I do no I was I wasn't supposed to be in this picture until you called me
over I didn't feel it right cleaning in because I wasn't one of the vendors at AIC and uh
um content nonsense get in here so uh I I jumped in
um but uh that was a great day I I I'm waiting for the day that we can go back to that uh event because that was really
really good and uh I quite enjoyed um being at as AIC and seeing everyone
that was a couple years ago now um you know talking earlier about M51 this is my uh my M51 attempt
um there wasn't a whole lot of data that was done there but you know it was a nice image I was able to take that from
my light polluted guy in um uh in my backyard
um and uh uh no we uh Scott you and I we
have a um Mutual acquaintance if you will uh I know you guys do a lot of
business with Canadian Tire and uh Canadian Tire is right in my backyard and they have this massive Warehouse
with a lot of lights and I gave a ton of Lights oh yeah it's probably where all your stuff is that's being distributed
I need to talk to him about the lights so happy wouldn't mind that'd be great yeah um yeah I would appreciate that
it's until three o'clock in the morning but whatever but yes but you know my M51
and she's always been I mentioned earlier about seeing those sketches at the Leviathan uh telescope at Burke
castle and um you know I've always been mesmerized by the by this Galaxy and and just the
beauty of it the uh uh it's such a simple um
simple spiral and but what it's doing and the fact that it's so far away with a 51 million light
years it just boggles my mind that um beauty of that just comes through
still and and we can we can experience that so you know not not to get you know
nostalgic or anything on it's just one which I suffer from a lot uh but it's just one of those things that I just
enjoy seeing uh talking about Neo wise that was the you know Neil wise and that was literally like
right off my um my driveway I stepped outside and there it was between 2000 across the
road that's awesome and I rushed inside and I I grabbed my wife and kids out of
bed in the morning so you got to see this because really what else would you see something like that it was and I
I remember it vividly it teared right in my head that um of seeing uh that comet
in such a long tail as it was and it reminded me back um in 97 May of 1997 uh hellbop
um which was another beautiful comment to to watch and I can I you know a lot of people have their their experiences
with Haley's Comet um and immediately I last time Haley's comment was here I think I was a little
too young to really understand the impact of it uh and the significance but halebot to me was a was a big experience
and and I was able to share that with some special people in my life at the time um and uh uh it was just a beautiful thing
because it just sat there for so long it was big and slow and
it was awesome um one of the things I really like about astrophotography is the fact you get
this beautiful picture and you can share it around but something I want to show is it ticklers this one right and this
one I'm really proud of it's not really really something that I I didn't even take this picture this was a picture
taken by my son right um oh wow he's 14 and uh he came with me on to one of my
Imaging uh trips in this past summer um and we set him up with uh some gear
you know someone who can set him up nicely and uh um I showed him a few things and and he
he goes and you know out does me for uh for the weekend and gets this
and um super it this is probably one of my most favorite pictures of Andromeda
that I've seen just because of the the detail and the color that pops out um now he did have some help with the uh
um with the processing and uh but you know it all comes down to you he puts
the work in and the patients and he got some fantastic data out of it to get such a nice image I think the color is
just really pop so you know to me this is the the beauty of of astrophotography
um uh and and being able to share uh what's there and see the the beauty of
it you know again you know talk about um uh you know what beauty and the what's
there this is the elephant crunk nebula much like the image behind me that's that's the wide field track
um this is an early attempt that I had at it just in hydrogen Alpha but it's just
think that that just off my my back deck to be able to
to capture such a beautiful uh image of such detail um
or something that you can't see with your own eyes right uh even though it's there
um so I think it that's really cool but you know with this is this is the pat my reflection
for the past year that being able to see some amazing things and get some um
uh share this experience with others I think is just as important as being able
to go out and get to myself um but really quickly finally
I'd like to share this last picture a lot of this is also on my Astro bin
account as well um uh Instagram did a real number on on beating the picture up with this
compression but uh Scott this was actually taken from um virtual Star Party number two
oh wow and uh this is one when you were live Imaging yeah that was great live Imaging
that night um and uh uh the number I don't remember everyone that was on the on the star
party that night but I think there was about a dozen of us or so and we're all taking turns talking and showing what we had and um I think we're all Imaging
trying to image of same Target at the at the same time so um I was able to to uh
to do this from again from my backyard um and actually I printed this off at my
shop we have some big printers there I printed it off as a uh poster a little larger than poster
size and it's hanging on my wall um and uh people walk in and think wow like that that's amazing like
who took that and I told him I did and I did it right from my backyard here in town and they're they're amazed that you
can you can get such a beautiful picture um uh from from a light polluted Sky now
I I didn't tell them all the equipment that I used in order to get it either it
um was rather expensive equipment but uh um I think the shot can be taken with uh
uh even the modest of equipment uh as well and and they put some work into it to get a beautiful image
um but yeah I wanted to share that this is uh back from from virtual Star Party number two
um you know looking forward to the uh to the new year you
know um being able to get out more I know there's some some new equipment that is probably coming down the pipe that I'm
really excited to see and get my hands on the uh
[Music] um uh so you know 2022 I think is gonna
hopefully be a breakout year for for astronomy hopefully all the equipment starts flooding in we can get
into the hands of people um it's not stuck on a ship somewhere off off the coast
right yeah like we're all experiencing right now but um yeah no that's my uh I guess that's
my reflection for the year and uh Scott thanks for uh for messaging me today and asking me to come on because
my head hasn't been in the game all that much is kind of keep the business moving you know I know you've been busy I know
that you uh you know you start operating your business um you were you're working two jobs and
then you were able to focus in just on Ontario telescope so yeah again
congratulations for that thank you and your business and um that was you know I I forgot about that
that was actually um I don't want to say a negative thing it was a positive thing all around being
able to leave my full-time job after 17 years um and uh kind of
well I knew what I was getting into but you're still walking completely into the unknown yeah you are walking off a cliff I know
when I when I opened explore scientific the same it's so exciting at the same time right like what of what the
possibilities are and and where where it can take you and and I think well where is it taking me in the past six months
well I've met some great people right um I've had some excellent experiences um I've you know I've let creative
future flow and done some other things like working with Gary right got you and I have talked about certain things
um my other company uh star field right I've been developing that and building that up right so yeah it's really
exciting I will admit the first week after being on my own like what did I do yeah I just
probably my former bosses and watching well Steve I'll tell you just from
experience the the those moments never quite go away okay but uh well I know
you know but uh you know it's great it's great that you've done it and uh you
know I wish all the best so I greatly appreciate that Scott and uh thanks for having me on again uh this evening
um anytime come on so yeah thanks Steve okay thank you so by the way Steve I
just started following you on Instagram so you just gained another follower appreciate that Adrian thank you very
much me too excellent I'm going International
there you go
Scott are you there here we go yeah I'm going to show an
image that was just emailed to me from uh Richard lighthill uh wow this is uh
let me give some details here this was a 80 millimeter F 5.6 uh refractor
um and uh Canon T3i camera ISO setting
at 1600 a 30 second exposure this is a single shot
uh crop to about 25 of the frame uh uh I asked Richard if he'd come on to the
program but he says go ahead and show the image if you like so fast to say I just got lucky and was Imaging shortly
after it bloomed I wanted to take some more shots and stack them but it dropped below the observatory wall it seemed to
me that the core of the Comet must have been rotating to create the twisting in the tail so really nice shot Richard and
uh you know congratulations so I'll come back here
um so anyhow our next uh speaker is Gary Palmer uh all the way over the in the UK
uh he was on a last Global star party it's great to see you back on again tonight
yep and so I'm glad you're working with Steve Malia he's also one of the good
guys out there in in our community so yep of which we will certainly add you
to that that uh list yeah Gary so
um uh last time you came on you showed us how to process uh Comet Leonard which was awesome uh and uh so what what have
you got tonight haven't had anything else on the comic really just due to weather
um and it I really need to go up the mountain a little bit and it's got to be a bit clearer to do that yeah so
um I've just not got round to it and I think it's going to be one of those ones that's looking like it's going to disappear before we get anything else on
it which is a shame but that's the way it goes I'm just going to swap my
screens around a little bit so what I thought I would do is
um I didn't see the earlier part of the style party but I think Jason did some stuff on soda
um but I did manage to do some um solo work a couple of those back
and got an image up um which was uh small Mosaic really of
the whole active area running across the Sun so I thought we'd have a look at uh processing that up as it's a mosaic run
through how we get them together and getting them all aligned yeah it really is the easiest way around it so
I will um share a screen up to start with
there we go okay so these are the videos that make up
the section across the Sun um what I
um was sort of noticing was it was it was a little bit out of place on the first couple
um they had a some nice detail but it was a little bit out on a rushing it
around so if we look at the video that was recorded in the main area
um for December the scene's actually pretty good um here we're really really low on the sun
um in mid-December so I was quite happy with that but anyway
um starting off with the process inside I'm just going to move this out of the way make things a bit neater
processing them up is fairly straightforward I use Auto stutter too I know also stack at Three is out but I do
find if the um the sun's wobbling around a little bit it can mess up the stacks
on the images so we load the file in just drop it in
click on improve tracking click on global yeah for the um The Frame
Alignment and I normally have a Roadbuster somewhere around five on this
um sort of image on the frame slider at the top of the image window I'm going to slide that
across really until you find a steady frame that's what you're looking for
so somewhere around there um click on analyze depending on the speed
of your computer it's fairly quick
so this is just stacking the one video right you don't have stuck in the one video and you follow the same process
for however many videos you've got yeah um once we've got that across then we're
gonna need to put some alignment points on here for this uh scale of image I'm
going to use 104 just Place those on the um grid by um clicking the button
and then we need to look at the amount of frames we've got two thousand frames here not the
um the sun's not in the best position so we're not going to stack loads and loads sometimes less is more yeah if you you
get lots of uh frames that are hit and miss then you can get some issues with
it so sometimes you're better off running down so we're just going to stack 250 frames out of the 2000
captured and they are all in um High bit mode so they're in 16-bit
mode off of the camera so these video files actually equate to about 20 gigabyte for each one they're
first size files um even though they're not that long so we're going to stack these before I
stack them open up registex for the sharpening and then under the more file
options yeah wherever it clicked to go into registrate straight from this program when it's finished
but where it goes
so you've got it picking 250 of the best frames based on the reference frame you
pick I really paying no interest to the Quality graph on the program okay I've
had this down at 25 on the quality and still had really nice images out of it okay and if you get a bit High Cloud
floating around the the quality level is going to drop but the sun's quite bright so you're still going to get a fairly
reasonable image out but so if we open up registax
that's the image come through um I normally go somewhere around the initial layer 2 at this sort of
resolution so we click on initial layer bring it up to two and then I'll just use layer two layer one is always quite
noisy so the key thing with this so if we go there we've gone too far so I'll just do
a dual so you can see what goes on oh wow that's just processed too much yeah
it's um we want it a lot softer than that and it's going to allow for the most out to
go together a lot better so we're going to bring it down a little bit
now you do see lots of images I see a lot of nice data online you just look at them and go wow that's so over processed
if you'd just be a little bit more gentle in this area here sometimes you might look at it and go we need to go
through initial layer one yeah and actually raise it up a little bit more in the initial layer one and it will be
softer and that's what you're really after you're after flowing structures not
harsh lines in it okay so that's one of the images done we
would save that off yeah and then um repeat the process the
main thing to keep an eye on is that all of these files here are processed in the
same way in ready Stacks when you're doing any of the sharpening if you get harsh with one and then yourself with
another you're going to get into all sorts of problems and you if you're not sure you can save this yeah so you could
save this setting and use it time and time again just give it a name um and if you accidentally close the
program or make a mistake you can reload the skin back in once that's done
yeah I've already got these saved this is what we created out of this so this
is what we're after creating now this is what we're trying to to sort of show so
if I go back to the images in here that's saved just give me two seconds
so I'll pick them out of the folder a lot easier and a lot quicker
okay so there's one of them I'm gonna take that one yeah open it in
Photoshop and we're going to type the next one
okay so there's our three images that make up the complete image first thing we need
to do is crop all of them very slightly so here's the crop tool just take any stack
lines off at the edge they really affect mosaics when you're putting them together so it's easier to
take them off like this just go into crop and then repeat that process for each
one foreign
it's a really good idea and it doesn't matter whether it's a deep sky or
whether it's um solar Luna anything it's a good idea to
have a good overlap if you don't have a good overlap on these you'll find they don't go together that well and you have
to remember that these images twist with the atmosphere
so if you do complete images one of the largest mosaics I've done is about 120
panels of the Sun um each one of those images is very very slightly twisted and what you'll find is
the atmosphere when it's flexing you're going to get um issues in the corners yeah where the
images don't quite go together if you're not careful so this is one of the reasons why you have to be fairly quick
on what you're doing but also as the cameras fairly well lined up otherwise you're going to be all over the place
trying to get the detail into this so if we start off with a central image yeah this one first
yeah what we're going to do is going to go to the canvas size first off
yeah and we're going to increase the canvas size on either side of it so we just go to percent yeah and we change
that I'm going to go 200 for the minute if it needs a bit more you can always add it on later the Heights on these
won't need a lot so I'm probably just going to go 115 just give it a little
bit more on either side if you click on the Central Point here yeah then it would expand the canvas
around this image accordingly if we double tap the hands there there's our image in the middle
now what we need to do to get these all to go together nice and easy and really simple is duplicate this
yeah um what we're after doing here is getting rid of the background copy so
if you duplicate the layer and then remove the background copy we're not interested in the background
one so we can just delete that okay now what we need to do is this area
here we just need to come in and crop this off what this is is when the background
layer is there wrong way do that again
we'll just go back on that
so just cut this out do this all around the image so you're just leaving your image in the center
3 am over here so the mouse is slipping every now and then so cut that one
last one here
okay now what we can do is go back to our other parts to the image yeah so we've already got it highlighted around
the edge so we can just copy this go back to the main image
yeah and then paste it there we go
here's the move tool at the the top there we're not going to align it exactly where it is needs to go at the
moment we're just going to get it roughly in place somewhere around there yeah and then we're going to do exactly
the same to the other side yeah copy it
back to the main image yeah and paste it in there we go
I'm going to move that one roughly in place so you need to look at where it's put on a line up with everything and
whatever's going on hey Gary how are you I'm very well thank
you I'm glad to hear it you can in the in
the in the layer that you have selected if you do do
the right click of the mouse okay you can get the the options of the of the
layer and then you can get some maybe a 50 of transparency and that will help
you to get more yeah you can um so aligning these up you you can
change your um opacity or your fill on this yeah opacity right that's right
yeah um but on these particular images really you don't need to do this all you need
to do is just make sure that each layer is aligned with the next layer and that
that's really your main sort of key thing here yeah so if we look across here we now need to line this one up so
we need to select that layout which is the second one yeah select the move tool and we're just going to get this back in
and get this aligned over where it needs to be I'm just going to be about there
okay chopped up a little bit though
so if you double tap the hands now what we can do is look at this and run
the crop tool through so you can take off the edges here the later versions of Photoshop if
you've got very very small gaps here and you don't want to lose something you can get it to fill in
when you do this next stage so what we're going to do we're going to just leave those gaps there for the minute
and I'll show you what it does we're just going to crop the image
roughly on the first panel to the left okay so we crop this now remove all of
the backgrounds that's our image size we'll get our three layers here all we do now is go to
[Music] um select go to select all layers and then
if we go to the edit panel we're going to go down to we don't need auto alignment of the layers what we need to
do is also blend the layers so it's going to look at the the image intensities and it's going to
blend the layers together providing everything goes correct
um do it as a panorama seamless tones and colors content aware if you've got these little gaps here it will pick off
detail there so if you have been slightly out and this works on lunar as well if you've been slightly out in your
running across with camera or something like that maybe it was a bit wobbly on one of the
panels and you had to crop a little bit more off then it will bring this back in
there we go once we've got it like that all we need to do right click on the lower layer yeah and
we're just going to flatten the image yeah so we get all the images become one
and then we're going to remove any of the um highlighted areas we just deselect that
put the hand double tap it that bring the image in now all we need to do is add some color and sharpen it so next
thing to do put it into mode go to grow scale into
mode again turn it into a bit and then we're going to go to mode and I
use duotone to color them I know other people use different things you can use a multitude of colors on your palette
whatever you want this one's tritone always keep a black in
we've got a very sort of light pink there you could change that to Orange for instance so if we look in the orange
area of the palette you could come in somewhere like this that will turn it like that it will highlight a lot of the
active areas a lot more you the world's your oyster on this if you're actually being true it's in hydrogen Alpha so
hydrogen Alpha is pink but people don't like a pink sock yeah they tend to like
it yellow orange red anything but pink um so we're just gonna we'll stick with
that for the minute doesn't really matter as long as you've got a few colors if you want to add a fourth one in then change the tritone here to
Quantum once you've got your colors in there you need to turn the image back via the mode
button to an RGB image otherwise you won't be able to adjust the colors on it
so what we can do now just going to go into the levels just kind of boost it up a little touch just
give it a little clip not too much just brighten it then we're going to go into adjustments
and color balance and now you can play around as much as you want getting the shades that you
want a little bit of Reds and yellows I'm moving these around for all of the
mid-tones Shadows highlights it's really tough to tell that there was
any separate image I mean you can't see the no that's why I use that process
yeah um I've done some massive Moses like this and you can build the Mosaic
up as you you're going along and it really doesn't do a really good job you can use the auto align sequence on
it I've used it for up to about 20 panels one lunar and solar but over that
um you'll generally find it messes it up and there's all sorts of problems so that is a bit of color in there
what we need to do now give it a bit of a kick so you can go into contrast click
on use Legacy just be careful of your active areas when you do this sometimes
you can overexpose them but you can give it a little bit of a boost using this
and then maybe go into the curves just give it a little bit of a kick in the
Curve
okay and then sharpen it up so if we want to sharpen it up first thing to do is de-speculate going to the noise run
these speckle because it will have a residue left over from the wavelet sharpen it so effectively you're going
to sharpen noise if you're not careful Serenity speckle and then go back in
yeah go to the the sharpen filter and then an unsharp mask add that on
and see it suddenly boost up there and if you wanted a little bit more Readiness or something like that you
could go to the selective color now yeah and just give it a little bit of a pinch
in whatever Direction you want bring out a little bit more color in each area
and so on um if you want to get a little bit more blackout in the image go to the blacks
and that will highlight any of the darker points the sunspots things like that and the black edges as well
so it sort of sets the image off that's your image done if you actually zoom into it a little
bit yeah you'll find it's got quite a lot of detail in there
it's just that it will compress it down to fit on the screen it looks great
there you go that is hey I can see that like stretched on a
metal print that goes across your living room you know so yeah or a triptych when we do the shows that
sort of image works really well on banners you know when we do the video yeah right
um that sort of image works well but if you actually look at the sun there it's got so much going on right the way
across one area um really it's taken an image like that across the whole of that area on the sun
it tells the story it tells what's going on yes um very uh if you did print out that
image I mean how large could you do it and oh yeah you could go really large and also in
the stacking there is um I can show it because it's still open while we're
there if I just share that screen back for a second in the stacking area if we go back to
the the um Auto stacker there there is a thing here where you can drizzle these up so
you can either resample it yeah or run it up um uh 1.5 normally I would say three is
pushing it it's got to be a really clear day to start pushing there three times but if you you drizzle it up you're
going to increase the image size um and this particular software does a
fairly good job so if you just click on that um because we've already stacked this we
could click on um use the the last stack as a reference that speed it up a little
bit you have to bear in mind the size of these files as I said it's a 20 gig file
um this is quite a powerful computer uh to run this sort of stuff if you're doing this on your average laptop gonna
sit there for a good five minutes waiting for this to um process through right yeah I was thinking you must have some
horsepower because this little computer I got has a hard time um I click one button and I wait for two
minutes so yeah I had probably not gonna be as fast if I tried on my own
so that's it if we open back up the stacking software now what you'll notice is it is a little bit
softer the newer image that's coming yeah it looks more natural will have to increase the initial layer here because
it's so large so this image is a lot larger now um I'll just go to two and then drop it
right the way back down and then just bring it up a little fraction
now sometimes on the drizzle I do run a little bit on layer one it's just to
sharpen it a little fraction once that's done click the wall
and you can already see that it's increased the size of the image by it quite a lot so that means then when
you're printing this out the the world's true oyster on how large you print this out and just repeat the process for all
three of them or however many you've got as I said I've done some of these for sure
um which are huge you know they really are a large large images
um and it's good fun it allows you to get a lot more in the the main thing is
aligning your camera it's making sure that when you're moving the amount it is moving horizontal across the Sun and up
or down and that's really the same image in the moment yeah if you do knows Oaks of the Moon if you start getting your
camera running up at an angle you're going to start moving it down and as you're coming down because each of these
panels when you do large mode so it's they're all done manually if you rely on a bit of software you're
going to miss something and you're going to kick yourself if you've got 100 panels here 120 panels that you've done
of a moon or the Sun um that's probably going to take you about 50 hours to just process it into
Stills and get it into a Photoshop and get it sort of saved that you can start
moving this all around and it is a manual process of aligning it up so it's manual when capturing and it's
looking at features so everyone there so for each part of the Mosaic really
um you're looking at a feature you're looking at maybe this feature here for this side yeah and you're looking at
maybe that feature there or something else sometimes when the sun is really quiet yeah you've only got tiny bits of
feature and I can promise you it drives you nuts when you've got a massive one of these that you're putting together
because your eyes just see you know all of these different things and you really
do have to take a break when doing it but the main thing with the camera is to make sure that it does go across as you
move the mount it goes across you probably want about a third on each side
so if we put that back into um full image yeah you want a good
roughly about a third there of an overlap on each side you might think
that that's you know quite a lot but you might have when the image twists
um sometimes you have to cut this off yeah so I have to go trim it and the last thing you want is a big gap in the
middle there where you've had to trim it because it doesn't fit but there are other tools you can use in
Photoshop these days um the the latest photoshop's got
um quite interesting if you just go to that Mosaic end go back before we flattened it
yeah once we get these in just come down to history a little bit there we go
okay so once they're moved around we go to somewhere about here what you
can do is you can select one of these layers and one of the good tools is to use a free trance film a free
Transformer layer okay um that will allow you if you bring in this
section here you can really you can move this around so if you do get a twisted panel you can start to move these around
and you see there so I can modify the panel to fit in yeah
so if you get a very slightly Twisted Edge on something when doing a mosaic
this is a really good tool to use and you can just pick off at one of the points in it yeah and you can generally
just pull the panel very very slightly back where the atmosphere is Twisted it
and I have noticed uh with different telescopes that um you know you get some
um curvature uh you know effects that can happen so you can have you know if
your telescope has a little bit of pincushion or a barrel Distortion which
all Optics I mean there's it's impossible to get Optics in a telescope perfect perfect perfect you know so
um you know you're going to have some of that but the free transform would would help out quite a bit it really helps
with it um I've used it on a couple of those outs generally you don't get much of a
problem with the Deep Sky stuff um you know that that doesn't need much of a
um I'm messing around with but the um the solo you have to remember that
the sun's rotating so if you're gonna image the whole of
the sun you need to image that in an hour yeah if you don't image it within an
hour you're going to get the rotation of the sun between the top and the bottom so you have to remember that the middle
of the sun is moving faster than the top of the bottom ah so we we went for a
world record a few years back of the largest image of the sun I
developed a system um that got around this hour problem
yeah of Imaging and that was good fun um but unfortunately on the day uh usual
thing clouds came in and then the following year we were just looking at the sun it was starting to go down on
activity so we just simply we're going to leave it a little bit but we've developed the the systems where we can
image the Sun yeah in under the hour and roughly to give you an idea of the the size of the
Mosaic there's somewhere around 160 to 180 panels yeah going in so these are
serious amounts of work and then another 40 panels around the outside picking up
the prominences that will be Blended in you know right the way around so we have
most of it and we have no rotational issues so we basically upwards of weather issues yeah
um so it's something that we're looking at doing again yeah now the sun's getting more right yeah that'll be great
that's awesome I'd love to see the result of that yeah thank you Gary it's
good fun thanks for having me thank you I've I've included uh you know if you'd like to take a master class with Gary
Palmer you will see the link at uh which I already placed in Chad but Astro
courses.ca Co dot UK so thanks thanks again Gary thank you
okay so our last speaker tonight is Adrian Bradley um uh he he was uh uh we had a good
conversation uh panel going on but Adrian does have a nice presentation that you'd like to share
all right well thank you Scott and I will go ahead and
as Gary says move a few things around here so that I can this time I'm actually
going to try slideshow it's a slideshow that I did for one of my um
uh societies now this is University liberal astronomers here but I also I'm also a
part of a couple other astronomy groups the Warren astronomical societies one that I did this presentation for
let me uh start the slideshow and then I'll share my screen
and I will see if this works so okay
this is us share screen one here
we go all right so there you can see my screen Okay so
so this is a presentation that I put together I recently got a certificate for uh from the Rask for some wide Field
astro Imaging um so those are society and I added that
I'm a frequent guest here at the global Star Party thanks to you Scott and
um I definitely enjoy coming out so
uh in my presentation I talk about what a nightscape is and these three terms
tend to I are Incorporated in what nightscape is
but if you go to Merriam-Webster you won't see an actual uh definition for the word nightscape
even though you can find hashtags for it on Instagram um to me a nightscaper incorporates
these three things and not necessarily astrology although if I
take a if I'm looking up at the night sky and I'm sharing with doing Outreach
I'll often ask you know if you were born at a certain sign and we'll look for it
if it happens to be up in the night sky um that particular night but uh
astronomer astrophotographer stargazer um
now I note that it says outside the Earth's atmosphere but what I like to do with nightscapes is try to include the
Earth's atmosphere because of course classic wide field you focus on a part
of the sky and um you image that and you know Earth is
nowhere to be seen um in here it's you know we're focusing on something there's comment neowise
here's the my image of the great conjunction it may be a little small on your screen but I gave it my uh best go
at the great conjunction there's the little star um
that was aligned with the rest of the uh the planets along the uh not planets uh
the moon it's what 11 kind of like for me too these are some things that I've tried this is the latest one was this uh
our 97 lunar moon with the Pleiades now Colonel showed a uh Mars image and if
you recall Mars was not far from where the um moon was and as we recall the
ecliptic runs along here and the moon is within the ecliptic when it's uh when
you have a lunar eclipse it drops into the plane of the ecliptic so it's not a
surprise that it's not as far it's around a similar distance from where Mars was when it was near the Pleiades
so I found that to be pretty interesting and Orion Nebula recently shared this
image I printed it out and shared it with a friend of mine who uh is expecting and it said this is these
nebula nebula for you the heart and the soul um so I shared those images very nice
um so this is how I got into
um if you remember if those of you that have stayed on all this time may have remembered the presentation from this
gentleman he was a a tad bit younger back then and I had no clue how to do selfies so we were at the University of
Michigan in 2017 where as a part of his presentation he showed this image and he
was proud of the fact that he was able to catch the Southern Cross yeah yep and
something about something's got about the uh him having these points of light representing the Southern Cross just
made me go well that's interesting you can catch Starlight so so that stuck with me
um so learning about Starlight the reason that I use these uh Caspian turn images
um you understand what your target is so even if you're doing nightscapes
you study the subject so for night photography it's about watching the sky
move and knowing what's going to be up at a certain time knowing where to look
and planning for it and every once in a while you may come
across with something you progress from taking a shot like this where the turn
is kind of high above the water it's closer and then one day you end up with uh you
know with the lucky shot that you know that you're looking for now notice the
turn is turned away so you could imagine another part of this where I take
another shot combining these two angles to where I have a turn that close to the
water but Wings open or Wings getting ready to fold
um that would be the next shot in line with uh with the progression night shots
do the same sort of progression and it can involve uh Cloudy Skies so here we
have Lake Huron and um you've got clouds this is a long
exposure so the clouds as they're moving form this sort of braided look over and
you can recognize Orion procyon um serious and I do believe this is
Capella everything I ended up cutting everything off because I wanted some scenery here and
clouds will create a unique night skate but staying in the same area and waiting
around sometimes the clouds dissipate and now you end up with
another shot which you've got everything clear so here you go with a little bit
different angle but that's the same area that I was pointing at and I took the modified camera and aimed it right at
the right at the same part of the sky and you've got clouds framing it so it's
uh so if you you stay at a location and if
you know that the clouds might be dissipating you may still get a chance to
take the AHA shot you know there there are so many shots you can take that
um you know that might come out of nowhere you may not have it's I didn't expect to
get a clear shot on Orion and the winter Milky Way at that time but I ended up
getting one all right so we talked about
um what to use um when I started out I'm using an old
Canon 30d and an 18 to 55 millimeter kit lens and I tried taking these images
now I ended up getting some of the Milky Way to show up after around 49 seconds
in a rural area I was just proud that I got to see some
of the Milky Way structure here you'll see how things have progressed uh on the slides later but then I also got moon
with Earth shine as it was setting over uh Lake uh Hudson over uh Hudson Lake
here and all with old equipment there was a tripod involved of course with both of
them no tracker at the time I was just seeing it and shooting it it's before I
took a formal photography course but thanks to all the astronomers and the
astrophotographers I had talked to Prior um I had an idea of what to do with ISO
and with shutter speed and I wasn't so aperture just sort of figuring out how
to make the camera get an image that I would like so that exploration kind of on my own
fast forward a few years later we have the modified lens we have a faster wider
angle lens once you I think we were talking about this you can once you get a process down
and you're able to get data then you can work your process a little bit
better and you end up uncovering more data this
is uh the northern part of the lower Peninsula of Michigan
um where it was really clear and it's about a portal 3 sky here and with the
modded camera I'm able to get this much detail um similar detail to what you saw over
the lake that uh past slide that I had um I do tend to love shooting this
region when I can the winter hexagon um and then you've got if you look closely
you'll see everything but the Pleiades it got cut off again over here but you've got all the stars of the
winter hexagon showing up in this image
Okay so this image was supposed to be for you Scott but it didn't show up so what I'm
gonna do okay is look for it uh
I took a picture of my gear and if I go you won't see you'll see it when I uh
find it let's see let's see if I can
I'll launch it there we go so there you go Scott wow
sure you'll recognize one of those for sure if not both
um so what a setup yup those are so one's a
Sony the other is the Canon the modified 6D I've got um remote shutters one's the wired
remote shutter so you don't have to actually touch the camera but if I'm not using this or if I forget to bring it I
can use the timer delay on the uh on either one really and I can hit the
button and give it some time for the like the shaking to stop both of
both of these track of course um with the pmc8 mount
I did find the setting to slow the tracking speed it's it's half sidereal
you get about 30 seconds and you don't have to do a composite image your
foreground stays relatively sharp and your your stars don't Trail
um so you can use that in order to eke out a little more time
and that'll enable you to pull in a little more detail with
um with your Mount so imagine that picture being over here this is what that gear
is and carbon fiber tripods for those who are still who are still watching carbon
fiber tripods dampen vibration so if you've got some wind or if you've got
you know anything else where there's some movement the uh carbon fiber tripods
are designed to dampen that movement so that you can um
you know you're not camera Shake isn't so much of an issue um do you find with carbon fiber the
carbon fiber tripod is it lighter to carry as well yeah it is lighter
um you know I can and damn vibration so that's awesome that's an awesome yeah it's it's a good it's a good type of
tripod if you're coming out with just a small kit and you wanna you know you want to shoot some you want to shoot a
landscape or night skate um they can be they can run you upwards
of 400 bucks for just a tripod um I find that it's worth it
um so let's continue on
so basic settings if you're using a tripod and a camera
only you know basic settings you you go with higher isos and your shutter speeds
between 10 and 20 seconds and wide angle focal lengths I would say
24 is about if you're going 24 you can
get around 50 I'd go 15 seconds or so with the high ISO and one thing I forgot
to put here um fast lenses at F28 you're trying to have
it pull in a lot of light um at a short amount of time because
at some point the Light reaches your sensor and they and the Stars still
appear around kind of like they do in this image but if you let it go a little
bit more and you're not tracking now your stars begin to Trail so you um
you want to get as much data as you can which is why you're turning your ISO up
and I find that even in cameras that are very good with higher ice with higher
isos around 6400 is a good kind of a Max
I've seen good shots taking that double that especially in dark sites the darker
the sight the less overall noise you end up with you
use your ISO and your uh you know your aperture to
you know sort of to set your camera up for absorbing light and then your exposure time
um you can end up with some uh really nice shots they're just at dark sight more
light is coming into your camera coming into your eyes you see you see a lot
more um at dark sites especially the Milky Way itself it looks the Milky Way at a
dark site looks about the way the Milky Way looks here in my picture with there's a little less of this detail but
you see this um you see this region here you see these spots you don't it it may not have
quite the level of crisp detail but you see this at a portal one site which
is pretty amazing so the tracking Mount you can dig in a
little more get a little more detail now you can see the tree here is fuzzy but
this was going I think this was going for about a minute because uh unlike
Gary and all the other good astrophotographers I haven't gotten into guiding
um which would allow me to track for even longer um as bright as the Milky Way is you
tend you typically you know this this part of our galaxy you typically don't
need a lot of time and you can always stack
um you know one minute frames you can stack a few of them depending on the type of
detail that you're looking for but uh you know and using a DSLR mirrorless
your isos come down um with guided tracking which is you
know what I would look for then you can lower the iso to base um a lot of photographers especially
daytime would swear by using an ISO of uh you know a hundred or call it base
ISO to cut down on the type of luminance noise
but with the you know with the way the cameras work these days there's less luminance noise to worry
about um especially with full frame sensor and I'm not sure I mentioned uh full frame
sensors are a little bit better although as you just saw from um from Gary's
presentation most of the um the camera the Astro cameras you can buy
our crop sensors but they're cooled thermal noise is an issue it doesn't
matter what ISO you use the longer your camera's running the more thermal noise it'll generate so there's always going
to be something to clean up and post um when you do longer exposures and you
still want a foreground you will need to do composites and that's you know kind of like what
you saw um past presentation you layer in different parts you know if you
do you do something to focus in on your foreground you do something to focus in
on the night sky and then you combine them a lot of um a lot of night skate photographers do
things that way depending on how I feel I sometimes want to get it all in one shot so I'll use you know I'll I'll use
settings and I'll use the tracker to go at a you know a slower tracking speed so
that I can with wide angle lens and I can kind of have Best of Both Worlds in one shot
this is I find interesting here's the Milky Way at Okie text this is
um this is the Border one Skies I've got the specs here for the cameras
that I used and at the time I didn't have my
um a7r4 which if I had shot with that I don't think we've seen much difference from the A7 III the megapixels in the
a7r4 are up to 61. um all that means is crop factor you
know I'd go in here and you know I'd have more megapixels to play with that
you know if I crop it but if it's fuzzy it's I hear it's a lot worse on a larger
megapixel camera if you don't achieve Focus you've just got that you've got a large file of Goo an even larger file of
Goo than you get with these two but you see the detail here there doesn't appear to be too much difference the H Alpha
regions or show up like if you notice here this little Dot
um the Lagoon nebula and you notice how it shows up you know the AHA region the coloring
shows up um with the modified camera
the details the sky if you you work the white balance properly you get the sky
to be about the same color which is this was about this is without having to edit
any white balance so I used it as a reference to make sure that I did the
white balance correctly on the modified shot and so this I got it pretty close
the reddish tones of air glow I do believe that this is what was really there that the modified camera picked up
more so than there you can see a hint of it with the stock camera both you know
this didn't pick up the green because of my processing a little bit of the green got you know
washed out a bit whereas you could see it here so really any kind of composite of both
of those if I were to nail them spot on is what I would do but um there isn't much difference other
than that I mean both of these images I think are you know them if you look at the Milky Way itself
they're both pretty sharp and there's a lot of detail just slightly more a slightly more
Fuller I would call it yeah you know detail with the modified camera
it looks more Rich yeah that that's how I would I would say it too
so you know any camera you got you can shoot with but if you get one modified
and that's also why all these red chills up down here as opposed to not it
doesn't get absorbed so you've got a more natural foreground
look so you just have to you have to do a little more playing around if you've got a foreground that's got a bunch of
red light because it's it absorbs faster when you take that filter the ha filter
out of a camera so let's uh we'll move along quickly to
places I have images imaged at you may not be able to see it well but the dippers here and this I believed it was
a meteor but you know about it's Crossing all these Stars it could also be a plane and there's a lot of planes
are everywhere but lots of stars that was the first place where I looked up
and said wow it gets dark so here's one there's no image here on purpose I call
it the Gladwin fail the Great Lakes stargaze I had my 30d there I thought the images
looked good on the back of the camera and when I put them into the computer
they were blurry I had Donuts all I got are memories
um of what things look like so I've since taken pictures the Pleiades were
Rising Taurus was Rising um I've since taken pictures of these
regions um to make up for the fact that I didn't have them uh here but maybe one day I
will go back to Gladwin and get images the San Francisco experiment I'm in San
Francisco and it's getting dark so I take a picture Golden Gate from the Sausalito side I get back on the bridge
afterwards and these little Comet looking things these are actually Stars
I went to a part of the bridge there weren't as many cars as you know seen in
this longer exposure image there's actually a couple Stars here I got to
this part of the bridge and I aimed it up towards the North and um these are the stars of Cassiopeia
that's the double cluster that's um stars of uh
Perseus here and the stars of Andromeda are over here I don't know if
maybe this right here may actually be the Andromeda Galaxy
um this was just a proof of concept all of that light coming from the uh bay and
you know where Ryan was if I'm not mistaken the Pleiades tried to make an appearance in my shot
right here it's possible to get Starlight depending on what part
of the bridge you're on and it's you wouldn't think that you could get Starlight from something as bright or
you know like the Golden Gate Bridge but you can it's moving so the Stars don't stay
steady because if cars are moving you know as cars move over suspension bridge it
wobbles so this was about a 15 second exposure so I just thought it was neat that I was
able to do that um off of that busy Bridge
so shooting in Ann Arbor Michigan you can find some places where you can
image there's a meteor right here you can get you can get some pretty good
images from some of the uh nature preserves that are away from lights
they're not super far away the Border rating here is somewhere between four and five
but you can still get some Milky Way Photography done that's Ann Arbor Michigan it's it's a pretty busy bright
City Alcona County gets to about uh Portal 3 and there's an image missing
here which um The Light Pillars image
that I uh here's the Light Pillars image that was going to be over there as well that's
nice yeah and of course Light Pillars not quite Aurora man-made light and ice crystals
flight ice crystals in the sky produce those uh Light Pillars
so up in the thumb this is Eagle Bay that's pointo bark
Lighthouse that's not me although it was another photographer that showed up this
was the morning after the solstice and he showed up a couple photographers showed up to catch the sunrise I wished
for them they had come a few hours earlier they would have seen the Aurora that was going on
um that particular night yeah Upper Peninsula Portal 2 Skies when
it's not cloudy every time I've tried to shoot this night sky at Tahquamenon
Falls this is the parking lot this is the falls in the winter of course and it's been cloudy but one night as I was
headed there I looked up it got really clear and I took that Milky Way image
and until I got toky text that was the brightest and best look of the Milky Way
that I had had then I got to Camp Billy Joe and Kenton
and the pictures that I chose here highlight just how bright the Milky Way
was this is still Twilight on the right side and the Milky Way is still that
visible and easily uh photographed here and over here it's shining through the
clouds as bright as you know the full moon where I am will produce a bit of an
effect like this but the Milky Way does it when you're in truly Dark Skies
so I found that very very interesting and I think that's the end of my presentation
um what I uh did for the uh Warren Astronomical
Society was um there we go was play a slideshow I won't do it here
because I think I've gone well over time but um in the slideshow were a few of the
other images that I had taken and I can what I can do is just here I'll reshare
uh one more time and just a couple of the images that were on the slideshow
um if I move us over share the screen so a couple of the images
that were part of my slideshow um this is one
you can see it you know there isn't much nebulosity or you know Milky Way here but it really came out this pine tree
really is leaning like this that came out pretty clean Alcona city has been
um place that I've enjoyed taking photos
see if there's anything else in Ann Arbor Michigan
um my favorite tree of course this one's come in a little dark but my attempt to
capture the moon setting Behind These trees here
um that's from uh this image that I took
that you're seeing on the screen um was a I think it was a two minute it was a single two minute exposure
in the thumb off of a highway and I just looked up
and noticed how you know how easy it was to see naked eye
um you know a lot of stars and I could see the winter Milky Way I aimed my camera and a 200 I think I
had the lens at around 100 millimeters and ended up with NGC 1977 and the Orion
Nebula this is I would go on and process this and rotate it see what else I could get
um the one and only chance that I tried sunrises oh I like that this is uh the
interesting image because you got the sun it almost looks like it's an orb floating on Earth but it's 93 million
miles away and there was fog there's a cloud Bank this is Lake Erie and you had fog rising
up and um this is an interesting image now I showed this to the sun and the whole
thing looks kind of eerie I mean it's really um it's amazing
yeah I've named it Dante's Inferno it's a good one I think that that aptly
describes yeah it was very cool very cool
um my attempts to image of all the images that I did at Lake
Hudson this is the composite image where I did two two minute
um images and then with a little bit of processing I ended up with this
nice image but this simple one
it's a it's a nice this is a nightscape you've got clouds
you know nothing special other than you'll recognize some of the Stars here in the sky and because there's haziness
the start the larger Stars shine a little brighter
now I would go on later to shoot that region and get a lot more detail
and I'll uh let's see if I can kinda we'll move it along
so this is what's going on the night before
um that sunrise was Aurora and
it's uh here's an interesting so here's an interesting tale of Lights
I took this image um yeah this is
it is it over processed it is I think but it also
you know it highlights the type of detail you could get in the sky
um last time I went up there and I tried to shoot from the same angle there were
lights back here bright yellow lights and that shot is now impossible unless you
turn those you turn those off yeah now
let's see what else I've also there's a uh Rising Sun eclipsed
partially eclipsed which I thought this was a pretty powerful shot because you
definitely don't see it's like this is this is not normal sunrise here the part of the disc has
been chopped away so I thought that was a pretty unique picture from
that's one of my favorite places to go in image yeah and uh
that's the last but not least is Kenton Oklahoma and
we'll just show a couple so there's there's my there's my that's a very nice
one yeah the this was one of the ones that I sent to
um Trisha by the way is this image yeah and I think this was the other one
of your images well one of those images will appear on the cover of sky's up
magazine uh you know I really do like this one a lot so yeah I'll put it back up
um yeah this one real deep image of this part of the Milky Way a lot of times
when people shoot um and this was the third option they're
shooting the core the Milky Way and um I of course shot the core
much as I could you know we got this image of the core but I do like getting
other parts of the Milky Way especially when it's dark because um those are parts that I don't see as much
and I've seen the zodiacal light I find it interesting this is what I'll end I'll end on this if I can
go to let's see if I have the thumb image I do
so first of all this moonlit I thought this was beautiful I was like wow that yeah it's cool I like that shot but
here we go so I have this image here's the zodiacal light in Spring
and I was lucky enough to see this is the the zodiacal light in both spring and
fall so this is the angle the 47 or so degree angle in the fall both
go towards Orion when they're visible Orion's in the picture somewhere and the
zodiacal light ends up above Orion since it is on the ecliptics
but it highlights they hear it's shining through the Pleiades there's a there's
Andromeda over here it's shining through the Pleiades here whereas over here it shines through
um m44 The Beehive and then the moon Rose
over in there there's a picture somewhere but I'll I will go ahead and uh close down the presentation
but um so that is that's my presentation on
nightscapes and things that I've learned and done over the years
um and uh there's still more to learn
um and you know with the the uh gear that I've got I'm looking to do more
there's a couple of uh images that I plan to try and catch once the moon drops
um uh wanes in the sky and it gets dark again um a couple things I'm gonna try and go
for so um thank you Scott for letting me present and um
thanks and I want to thank everybody that uh still on right now
um uh you know presenters that were watching in the background thank you very much uh for your uh great knowledge
and inspiration John Briggs uh thanks thanks again uh for your very
informative uh talk on Mariah Mitchell I've I've just kind of started learning
more about her myself so I've always heard of her and but uh very interesting
uh person in our you know in the history of astronomy and um and just uh you know
and generally just a very brave individual so um those of you that are watching the
audience thanks for following along and your uh your questions and comments it's
great to have you on as well you're as much of global star party as as anything so thank you so much
and for all of you uh that are not in chat um you know thanks for uh uh giving uh you
know uh the global Star Party a watch and hopefully you found something inspiring and informative and uh we
welcome you back next week uh where we will have uh the 78th Global star party
on Tuesday night um uh you know part of this will be in
celebration of uh Sir Arthur Eddington who was born on that day so
um thanks again Adrian and and uh and uh
until next time you're muted Adrian
oh good so I was swearing no I wasn't um thank you everybody for for watching
us um thank you again Scott for having a global star party for those of you that are still online well if you're in the
northern hemisphere it's dark and if it's not cloudy going outside and look up and see what you can find and uh
Maxie you're still online and we we need to get some sleep buddy yeah me too yeah
yeah so uh good night all thank you all for joining us good night thanks again
good night see you guys good night Max
[Music] I was the only woman in an operational role in Mission Control in the whole
mission control center when I went over there and ate and I believe I was still
the only one through 13. did that in and of itself provide any
challenges well I'm sometimes you felt very isolated and uncomfortable
especially that first mission because it was like they had to become accustomed to the idea that there was a woman in
there on eight I remember one day hearing some
chatter in the background because you know you listen to various channels I kept hearing them mention some
particular Channel and they would say hey check out what's on channel whatever and I was busy so I didn't have time to
look at that and then after a few days I thought what's on channel whatever it
was me they had a camera they had a camera on me why
just because you're different I guess that's fascinating I think it was you
know look at the woman that's I can't really understand that I'm proud to say in this day and age I
don't get it right well I'm glad you don't get it I'm glad you haven't had to go through that especially as a woman in
Mission Control we get asked all the time how hard that is or does that make the job harder or whatever and my
standard answer is that women like you broke all of that down so that the only thing I have to deal with is being asked
the question and figuring out how to answer it and hopefully the next generation won't even get the question well I'm so glad that you you know that
you don't have that to go through I would have much preferred to have been the 10th woman in mission control or
20th or whatever when you went in how many other women were flying controllers oh goodness when
you first went in yeah so I was a flight controller for about eight years before I got selected as a flight director and
I would say the ratio of women to men matched what was at my engineering
school at the time so maybe 15 to 20 women
it was never really a thing either I'm just really insensitive to the bias or
there just hasn't been as much bias I think the NASA culture and the JSC culture in particular and even
specifically the mission control culture has been very inclusive well that's a
big Advance versus 50 years ago because 50 years ago building 30 was a Bastion
of white males I mean there were there were no Black Faces in there either okay wasn't just women I don't think they're
winning Hispanic faces I mean it was white males with white shirts and pockets protectors I got out of college
in 1965 which was about the time that the 64 Civil Rights Act was just going
into effect and even then it took a while before sex discrimination for example was
recognized by the courts everything that was litigated at the beginning I mean you've probably heard of something
called hostile work place okay that terminology didn't even exist I didn't even if somebody had said you know what
are you going to do about the sexual harassment I wouldn't even known what that terminology meant nor would I have
known where to go to report it nor would there have been anybody to report it to there was a big change over that period
of time were there moments where you would recognize that change was happening where that was a part of your
Consciousness or is it only in looking back when you transitioned from NASA to your post NASA career or at the
transition from being a computer to working on trajectory Ops
I recognized I recognized it definitely I mean first of all going from being a
computress to being a member of the technical staff was a very big deal and it was a very big deal in terms of
pay and part of that was because of the restrictive wage hour laws that affected women only in terms of how much overtime
they could be paid my Consciousness about discrimination
really grew very rapidly from the experience of working at that time and
it's fascinating even after all these years my boss the chief of the flight director office is the first female
chief of the flight director office so it's interesting to me that even you know going on 50 years later we're
still getting firsts in some of these areas in some ways it just feels like timing you know well it is timing and a
lot of advances have been made but also some things have have fallen off and and sort of gone back because when I just
came out of school I think about 30 percent of the computer programmers were women and my understanding is that's now
dropped off to about 18 percent it's it's a little fascinating how the the social mores change over time and so you
go from calculating as a woman's job that's women's work and computer
programming is women's work to it's a completely male dominated field
not 20 years later and socially I don't understand how that happens really that is to do with money
well I guess that's true because as the money goes into the field the number of women goes out they're really just
there's a there's you know they're inversely proportional I guess that makes sense it's the same thing is in
the teaching profession I mean when males were predominantly the teachers the salaries relatively to salaries in
general in the community in general were much higher and as women went into the field as the salaries dropped off
so what's next where's the next flip in male Jobs versus female jobs culturally
although legally we don't have them classified that way anymore where do you think we're going next I don't know I
mean we now have uh half of the people in med school are women so
if history continues the way it has in the past I mean doctors will not be
making as much money as they used to it's fascinating relative to the rest of the population and programmers will and
programmers will
[Music] foreign
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[Music] 19 vaccines are safe and effective at
protecting you from covid-19 especially severe illness and death vaccinated people are far less likely to be
hospitalized or die because of covid-19 including the Delta variant covid-19 has
a much harder time spreading in a vaccinated population when more people are vaccinated we are all better
protected against covid-19 even if you're young and healthy it's still important to get vaccinated vaccines can
help end this pandemic to get the most protection make sure you get all recommended doses of a covid-19 vaccine
getting vaccinated helps protect you and others from covid-19
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