Transcript:
so we're gonna have about half an hour kind of settled in
my calls were so late last time my friends couldn't watch but now
uh my calls were late last like the nine o'clock calls they were late so my
friends couldn't watch but now they can watch so we we shared the link with some of my
friends so hopefully i have comments the mushrooms
the mushrooms [Music]
there we go yeah just you can just watch it you know so you don't want to
listen to it at the same time it'll start making a feedback loop of
you know yeah i was just like why is it so crushy
let's make sure we're streaming okay
so using restream to go out to several platforms scott
yes
okay so let's see we are not
spotlighted
here we go
hello john and steve
hello david i don't know if you remember me or not thank you all right it's good to see you guys good
to see you we first met at the strategic air museum there in ashland about uh
eight years ago yeah seems like forever now i know
bye everyone hello there hey gary good evening gary
good evening evening steve
no don't think
that's better
how's it looking at this place what's that uh it's looking cloudy
you're out of the outside my back garden but i've not got any kit set up here so uh
it may clear a bit later on so uh fingers crossed so i don't know how people know to get to it but it's over
yeah and you got our the broadcast credentials and everything 444 and then interested in still a password just
likewise right our sky here is completely opaque today
from the fires that are over 1500 kilometers away from us in california good lord
the smoke has totally inundated us yeah the sun
is absolutely on the news over here just look incredible of the smoke and the fires it's kind of unbelievable
yeah and we pretty much cloud the cloud over here in quebec
canada well he's part of canada anyway they say on this day
in 1967 surveyor five landed on mirror tranquility tranquilities
19 049 images
and neptune is at opposition today is that right yes neptune is
rises at sunset and sets at sunrise okay
well david since you decided to join us we will let you go on first um
and then uh we will have um um
we'll probably introduce everybody okay and then we'll let libby go on
okay um and uh and then we'll just start making
our rounds what's your time look like norman i'm good till uh for a couple of hours a
couple hours okay all right well at at least an hour until my wife comes like um
yeah you you want to show the facility
sorry i was being a bit distracted there right and knit outside and saw some stuff so i thought
i've got a backup option i've got a microscope set up with a planetary camera on it just just have something
good which was which is good fun actually
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so has anybody seen the astro photographer of the year in this winner and the controversy over
it today it's all kicking off isn't it it's all kicking off yeah
i i was a bit shocked when i saw the results i'll be totally honest it's not yeah
yeah i think it's uh quite disheartening to a lot of people in the
industry i mean i've seen the merits i get it you
know i think it's it's an attractive you know there's some attractive images but it feels like each year the competition's going away from its
it's kind of roots of of being about amateurs and and you know astronomy um it seems to be getting more
and more commercial i know i went a few years ago to actually have a look and you had to pay to go around the gallery of of of
winners and i i just felt kind of wrong to me that yeah as an astronomy kind of outreach thing it felt like it should be
free the rest of the museum was free to get into but that particular gallery we had to pay and it yeah
left a bad taste in the mouth and what what is this you guys are talking about so in the uk we have the uh astronomy
astrology videographer of the year of the year competition is international so it goes out around the world
but it just seems that each year is less to do with astronomy in some way
yeah certainly on uh the actual imaging side um
a lot of the images that have won it have been more landscape shots the national deep space and they used to
have a instagram page where all of the entries went onto the instagram page so you could see them there are some
fantastic images in there they weren't even getting shortlisted you know they're absolutely stunning lots of work
lots of hours put into them
but the image that was uh chosen today seems that it's been partially done on an app in apple and on
a 3d printed adapter to make it three-dimensional
it actually makes everything look out of focus if you're being dead honest
yeah it was out of focus you know many so many aspects of amateur
astronomy and astrophotography are becoming um a competition for
uh social media followers and yeah and various other things and it's a
big topic you know it's in in the world at night that i'm still involved in since started under astronomers without
borders and uh there's talk about doing
something starting an effort to kind of standardize things which would i think be worthwhile but
we'll see yeah i mean i'm all up for fast imaging i mean we i teach that you know i don't teach really what you can
get within an hour you know around whether constrained to the time constraints but
um and i've used some of the absolutes um you know just
certainly for children some of the real high resolution images we
turn them into movies using some of the apps but i wouldn't necessarily enter them into a competition or think
they're really worthy of anything you know they're they're more a bit of fun than anything more educational so
yeah they can be educational they can be artwork they can be wherever if you're if but it isn't necessarily nature
photography yeah i don't know i think um
i think there's so many different views with social media now that's the thing and so many different aspects coming
along i do like to see some of these new apps coming out i think they're very good and
you know the people who are writing that are really smart to be able to manipulate things like that but it's
whether it's uh really when you come to a true astro photography competition whether that's
worthy to be in there in some sense yeah yeah it's a little bit of the wild wild west uh as we say here in the wild
wild west of north american continent because you guys are all over but uh
it's you know there are there it's kind of lawless you know there aren't a real rule yeah
and um i think uh maybe it's past time to sort of set down some
definitions that people kind of agree on there's sort of the ground rules yeah okay
i know a lot of the groups got really funny over uh remote imaging now um
you know that over the last year here people who keep posting remote images in groups so they've been pushed out the
routes or banned from the groups there's been a lot of controversy on that side as well so
um the visual observer and imager is and it's and there's no
common ground coming out no there's never a common ground that a style party the the images will need to
sit over the other side of the field because there's too much light
gary i think and i don't know uh personally looking at a screen or
looking at an eyepiece give me a choice i will go to the eyepiece
yeah i have nothing to do against the uh email
but um personally i always prefer the live thing
always over the camry you lose a lot of the sky yeah because you're imaging that one object whereas visually you're going
to see a lot more of the sky you're going to go to different objects throughout leaving yeah
um but it's i think i do enjoy observing a nice
image very well done i really do enjoy it but
compared to a live version even if there's less there's no color or there's less details
i prefer the live thing because if we don't get my eye yeah
i've been doing outreach and and getting people's eyes to an eyepiece for very close to 50 years now and
you know you guys most of you have experienced this that somebody looks at saturn for the first time through a telescope and they say is
that a picture that's the wow effect yeah but they think it's a picture because that's what they're used to
seeing and they and the experience of actually seeing it well i i equate it with like you know
looking at a picture of the eiffel tower and and standing there under it and looking at it it's just it's not the
same thing exactly i'll just say scott this visual
is very very hypnotic i'm struggling to not look at it
your credit card
[Laughter]
[Laughter] when i wake you up
hey scott do you do you know olayinka she's joined us here and on my invitation to get some uh representation
and somebody did there's a lot of people have joined us so far we're just all kind of waiting
people get settled in you know so who do we have here oh yeah olayinka is on
she's muted uh so we got uh shaylandra
goes by chalks he's on steve ibbitson is with us norman fulham of course mike
simmons libby and the stars
john johnson jessica buckles down in australia grant
uk uk dovey david lee in
arizona usa carol orange ohio usa hello kansas city
andreas nilsson andreas is in sweden yep
now there's going to be other people logging in later as things go along you know but
they can't be for the entire weren't able to make the entire program but uh
but we got a lot of people here a lot of ground to cover so it's gonna be cool stephen malia said he'd be on a bit
later he messaged me earlier yep and we have people already
people are already giving me their bank account numbers [Laughter] see
comments already uh jason mcdonald because everybody can hear us right so jason
the problem is social media is the move forward that's where the results come from and the payment
okay alistair says i don't knock robotic astronomy but there is a lot more skill
i think involved in configuring control and controlling the mount the telescope and the laptop
and controlling ourselves yes uh eduardo simone hello all i just got
out of work listen to on the way home that's nice alistair says the camera among other
things using a robotic telescope
yes i like using a robotic telescope with pro
in kit gives the edge i see the skill with processing but to me i do not see it as
the owner's achievement it's not the same okay but there are all different views
consider disabled people people like that
we've got kevin watching from wisconsin i think it's a big hobby i think there's room for all of these different
viewpoints and i think the only time i i take issue is when people try and put their viewpoint on to others and i think
you know as long as you're getting enjoyment out of whatever you're doing with astronomy then then go for it that's true yeah i agree with grant and
there's room for everything and everyone you know i knew people who made telescopes
and then took them out to a star party and never used them because they only cared about making telescopes you know
and that was their thing then they'd sell it and they'd make another telescope they're telescope makers
yeah that's why i started because i could not afford a telescope that i wanted so i built my
first one and then got hooked but i'm i'm an observer to start with
that's what brought me to telescope making but you know norman some people would
probably say and people did say back then in some cases if you didn't make the
telescope yourself it's you're really kind of cheating that's true
it was like that yeah yeah and then i i suppose before that there are people saying if you don't pour your own blanks
and you're cheating yeah i mean i i built my first good one
uh i didn't grind my mirror i i just i was about 14 years old i just didn't think i could handle that
a six inch reflector it's still sitting in my garage fantastic yeah that's a big achievement
though to make a mirror you know it is ground to a fraction of a wavelength of light that's
pretty cool you know that people can do that so i've always fancied doing it but never had enough hours in the uh month to even
contemplate starting on it mm-hmm then this is
what scientifically just do it for us so because i know the limits of my diy
skills it would be the most asthmatic mirror ever made i think it was me
and uh optician once told me uh and and not it well optical engineers joke he he
worked on spy satellites and stuff he said uh a guy went to an optician and said do you may make uh aspherical
mirrors the guy said that's all we do make somebody said so this is what it's like
on the other side listening to the pre-show chat
well russell porter said it right figuring a
parabolic mirror by hand is the most uh the skill that takes the most precision
by hand to achieve without a machine you go with within a millionth of an
inch on the surface of glass so it's a pretty big achievement if you do succeed
to make your own primary mirror and that's what's brought me to make my second mirror after the first 12 and a
half inch i convinced my six-year-old son that he really needed a telescope because mine was too big for him so i
had to make a second mirror and a third mirror in the fourth so i never i never stopped but the achievement when you
first look at a galaxy or planet through a telescope that you've polished yourself
the feeling is just indescribable but i don't think i can describe the feeling
fantastic i know i don't want to make everyone cry here [Laughter]
what was that girl i said have you got stars there i can see the roof open i've got stars but not the ones i want
um it's the joys of taking for granted changing your observatory computer
oh yeah no settings at all starting from scratch and i only turned
it on at 9 47. so uh i've got stars just can't tell you what
they are but uh that's what happened i'm gonna
use cheek charlie's giving it so we're about five minutes out folks yeah
i'm just letting phd two do its thing and then i can start on m51
gonna try tonight yeah what we're gonna do okay turn off
the phone skype
in a minute and go old school with a finderscope
actually i have received so many kind of cool things brochures from astronomy magazine
skying telescope astronomy has this thing called the ultimate guide to astronomy which is
kind of cool i think these are largely free handouts right so
and then a guy named john reed or red
uh has this book on 50 things to see with the telescope and 50 things to see on the moon that's kind
of cool and then i found this jpl you guys got to see this this jpl moon
phases uh dial it's a free download and it is totally
cool and then john goss sent me
the astronomical leagues exploring the starry realm guide which is cool
a lot of resources these days okay somebody else wants inside here we
go
and he's joining okay or she's joining
it's god yes i will close my laptop and open my
phone okay yeah i'll see you go in and out it's okay i'm really on my phone whenever whenever i'm on
yeah
gary what's on the um sem 40 sharpstar
uh yeah yeah that's the uh hmt200
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yeah i was just doing a balance test on it earlier um it's a little bit over on that one
which i was actually quite surprised there
uh you were absolutely right by the way about trying to find a stereo adapter for the exos 2 mount i've spent probably
two or three hours this afternoon trying to bodge something together um it got to the point where i got the soldier 9 out and decided that was
probably a bad bad move so i i gave up and ordered one
yeah i i had one that um it was just over very slightly on the
plastic so i uh just trimmed the edge of the plastic off and it went straight
brett blake says scott just a thought you might want to think about not printing the serial number on the silver
colored pmc8 box in white ink it's hard to read brett it's it's laser etched
it's not it's not white ink
we don't use ink on it i want that i want that serial number on there forever
yeah people are already shouting out at you guys okay cool they're happy
a nice little audience already watching
it's not in the wee hours you know so well it is for some people that's for sure
does everybody hear me i hear you okay i'm back on my phone okay
i don't know how to get to my to my camera though to switch
if you guys see that i'm doing something wrong in the broadcast just tell me okay
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you guys see that i'm doing something wrong in the broadcast just tell me okay
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wow [Music]
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well hello everybody uh you've been hearing us in the background and um
uh this is scott roberts at explore scientific this is the global star party
number eight um from europe through australia so we have people from around
the world online with us right now and i'm going to bring them up
in grid view if i can do this correctly [Music] so let's
cancel my and um so let's see we're clear
i don't think this is working right okay here we go
i think it's still in speaker view but um but that's okay so oh no we got everyone
here so um so let me make some introductions on this is not i don't think this is
everyone that's going to be at the star party but um um but it is a lot of people so um
so let's uh let's go ahead and start up here as you see it on as i see it on the screen up there we've got uh
david levy next to me grant from the stargazers lounge
libby and the stars jessica buckles is with us uh we got um
um mike simmons andrews nielsen gary palmer
john johnson uh steve edwardson carol orange
[Music] we have tyler bowman
pranvera hycini norman fulham cesar brolo
olayinka is that right am i saying that correctly
she looks a little frozen there and collingwood so um
but anyways uh welcome to um uh close global star party
eight and um as as is normal and usual during our global star parties uh
uh david levy um starts off our program
and it's nice because david uh really captures in words and
uh and in feeling what it is to be at a star party uh
to uh to to really be in the in the spirit of things um i think that um
you know when you're out under the stars especially especially if you're out under the milky way there's kind of this
sacred feeling that a lot of people have i certainly get it um and a lot of my a
lot of my friends uh feel it and uh uh it is
it's something where you know you're you know you're out for a night of adventure you know that you're out for a night of
personal discovery uh and uh you know to be uh in the midst of uh people like
david who have made many discoveries of comets and asteroids and supernova
this kind of thing it's it's just very cool uh to be to be around people like that
and all of the people here with me tonight uh know what i'm talking about um
it's um uh but uh the other part of uh being in our
community is the mutual support that we give each other um
and uh you know as we struggle through uh trying to learn how to use equipment or how to understand the sky or how to
make an observation or an astrophotograph you know uh we do really
uh work to help each other out none of us are paid
for this okay and so it's it's really awesome
uh to be under that one sky you know and to
to share something that we know that the ancients have shared and have experienced
and so anyways i'm going to
turn the spotlight on to david levy david is a dear friend he has been i
think at almost every star party we've done so far on these global star parties and i think he's enjoyed them so because
we've enjoyed having him there you go david well thank you scotty and i just wanted
to welcome everyone this is the eighth global star party but the first one that is specifically intended to go
to europe asia and australia and uh so we're welcoming a lot of
people and i wanted to say how the original group that was here for the
pre-show contains of about 15 to 18 people
and the discussion we were having was as i was trying to listen was absolutely
priceless what one can learn when you just sit in a group and listen and hear them talk to one
another is just absolutely incredible and that includes libby who may in fact
at age 10 be the most important participant we have here
and the reason is that we are going to bequeath at the end of our lives the beautiful
magnificent darkness of the night sky to libby and her generation
and uh it'll be up to her and her generation to keep the sky dark
to keep it precious and to to continue the sense of wonder in our
enjoyment of the night sky i'm thinking of the people over the
years who have shared this enjoyment and i'm also thinking
of who has written about it whether it's written about uh
the comet of uh the comet of 1811 as john keats did
uh the comet of 1864 which gerard brantley hopkins did or the supernova of 1572
shakespeare probably did or is alleged to have done we won't mostly feel that of all the
writers in the english language shakespeare is probably the best and if
shakespeare were here he would probably agree with us on that however the four most important lines
in uh in english literature were not penned by william shakespeare and i think he would agree with that as well
they were penned by thomas gray who wrote about the beloved sense of
darkness the curfew told the knell of parting day
the lowing herd winds slowly or the lee the plowman homeward plods his weary way
and leaves the world to darkness and to me no matter what kind of a day i have had
when the sun goes down and it gets dark outside and i go out and set up my telescope
i'm feeling as good as i ever need to be and we look around and we see other
writers who have written about this people as most of us presenters most of we presenters today
in a test have taken photographs of what we have seen and one debate that we had during the
during the pre-show is is it better to be an astrophotographer
or to be a visual observer and i really kind of sympathize with the
person who said that no matter how many pictures you can take if you want to see something you have to
actually see it i have a couple of pictures for example of comet neowise
and neowise is coming around for the first time in several thousand years and it is
now gone and it won't be back again for six thousand years and leslie peltier
would not have written about comet nia wise that was never a part of his life
but what was a part of leslie peltier's life was halley's comet as it is a part
of all of ours and it will be a part of libby's and uh
and he wrote within historic times 28 visits by halley's comet have been
report recorded on an early trip it witnessed the defeat of attila as the huns in ad451
it arrived in time to preside over the norm conquest in 1066
in the year 1456 the menacing appearance of halley's comet so alarmed pope
callixtus that he decreed several days of prayer and established the midday and
jealous and with a great clanging of bells he then besought the comet to visit his
wrath slowly on the invading turks in 1607 it was watched by both
shakespeare and kepler so it was part of shakespeare's life too and i like to think that it was also
seen by captain john smith and pocahontas in the frontier skies of
jamestown on his following trip around in 1682 the comet was observed by halle himself
who probed into his periodic past and bequeathed to it an honor name that
it can bear with pride throughout the solar system by 1835 when it returned affairs of
earth had speeded up many a canal boat traveler on the erie canal looking down
could see the comet glowing on the surface of this highway humanity himself had taken to the skies
when the comet last appeared in 1910. remember leslie wrote this in
1965 before the 1986 operation for he was making fledgling flights to perhaps
100 miles in 1986 our historic visitor will be visited actually was visited in
turn for in that year a spacecraft from the earth made a rendezvous with
hallie's comet out in space who could venture to foretell the wonders and achievements which the comet
will witness in that distant year of 2062 or
will humanity itself prove periodic will the huns be back again
and i think it will be up to our generation and then to libby's generation to make sure
that we still have a wonderful planet and a wonderful sky and i now return you
to scotty thank you thank you very much that's great that's great
um so uh let's uh return back to grid view here so that uh
we can see our group um uh david that's i love that you know i just love that so
thank you for the the uh capturing the spirit of this and for the poetry uh you
always you can always uh uh do something new and you always surprise me with
uh you know words i've never heard before in poetry so that that's great that's great
uh we have uh gary palmer gary help
more than helped he he is co-hosting this a particular star party for me and uh
gary do you want to say a few words as we get started uh hi everybody thanks to everybody
who's joined us online tonight and um who's agreed to join us on the panel and
discuss everything tonight um and thanks to david for opening the show um
i've heard davey speak on most of the other star parties and um
his words of wisdom always sink in somewhere along the lines the the things that i don't necessarily think and he
brings to my attention so it's nice to see another side of things
yep that's true that's very true uh gary you and i were talking earlier and you'd
mention that a lot of people in the uk have not uh had a chance to to experience david
before so i'm i'm glad uh for those of you that are watching up there and you're
really happy uh that you could uh participate in this so and in fact all
over the world wherever you are right now so um uh let's move on and uh
we will uh uh i think we're going to come up next on
uh libby uh libby i'll give a little bit of background about libby uh you know i i will have to
introduce libby probably every time she comes on i think that she loves the idea of coming on to uh
you know this live presentation and be able to speak to a global audience um
libby the last show that you did had over five thousand five 5000 views so
you you got you know you you eventually speak to a bigger and ever wider audience you know so that's
that's very cool um what are you going to talk about today
so back when i was back at space camp yeah one of the administrators
she just loved talking to us and giving like conversations about what's out
there because most of the time at space camp we only got taught about nasa's history so she just loved talking to us
about her favorite constellations and all the
like everything she's learned she just loved doing it and that was one of the best experiences for
me because i was lucky enough to go this year with the coronavirus
going on and we would nasa they donated a airplane and they
had like a huge little fake like runway and we would all sit on there
all spaced out and she would just love to share with us her favorite constellations
right after i got back home and i got that cheap little 15 telescope
me and my friend would sit out and she wasn't that interested in space but i
would be like hey look over there that's where black hole is that's where nebula is
and i would always point to ryan's belt constellation with beetlejuice because i
always got so excited about orion and its nebulas so uh
i'm gonna share with you about what uh the lady taught us at space camp about
the orion nebula let me ask you a question though did when she was talking about this obviously you knew she she
was in love with the sky did that make you fall in love with the sky too
yeah a lot she just she was like extremely happy happy sharing with us she was like
but she was meant to run the camp not tell stories and she just
loved answering our questions and loved seeing us love space
yeah so uh hey we have this whole conversation about black holes
and she told us a lot about them and
we would sit and see seat seats in the little movie theater and
she told us there's one by beetlejuice and there's a whole nebulas
out there creating exoplanets and they she's like there are nasa has
found seven other planets out there that are just like earth that we may be able
to live on and she just loved talking to us about
black holes and we got to ask her a question then i asked her what happens if you get
sucked up by black hole she said you get spaghetti fine oh
and she said that's a good google research so of course when i got back home i did
and basically i like went into research about it so the black hole will come and even
without a black hole this can happen your whole body just stretches out into
like a thin noodle oh my god and i was just like what this can actually
happen and uh i was like there's all that in a
nebula other planets i was like there's black holes i'm like
oh my gosh this is crazy right it is
i back when i was seven me and my dad we went on a ride space
mountain because my mom loves disney so we were in a ride in the line he's like can you tell me about those nebulas and
i said well it's a bunch of swirling gas they can create planets and there's a bunch of nebulas out there
and they can make tinier planets and they're made out of gas and this is back when i read every book
in the library so i just was like they they make gas and they uh they make
exoplanets right and they have black holes
and the colors are when a star explodes and dies every
billion years a star will die explode and will like be a million colors i kind
of have one behind me i think too right and uh i was like i love those colors
you're so beautiful and they create new stars to blow up every billion years and just more and
more and more and i thought it was so inspiring that there is one happening right now
and i would always find it in orion's belt the constellation and sit there and
look at it and be like oh wow that's so beautiful and be like
there's a black hole up there just waiting for us to get spaghettified
and i just fell in love with nebulas i was just like there's new stars there's
there will be more stars that we can explore every billion years i mean
and i was like there's one right now but it would take billions of light years to
for us to see well not billions but metaphorically billions of light years
for us to go and see it so what is what is the thing libby what is
the thing that really makes you so interested in
exploring space and seeing these nebulas what what is it that
why why do you do it sometimes i like i'm like well look at
those beautiful colors and usually rainbows naturally when you see them in the sky they're made out of mist and
water after it rains so like them will project and it'll have like a prism or something
and i always thought that was cool before i started getting interested in space
so uh i used to be like whoa this cool
nebula with all these awesome colors came naturally right and
the thought that every year like every billion years one would explode and then create more planets to live on i was
like well more places to explore more missions for me and i was just so like whoa there's more
more stars out there more stars to discover with my telescope
right right and my friend i used to be like there's a black hole out there and that was probably the only
thing she probably found interesting about space so right
and and libby you're you're 10 years old now but when you
get when you become an adult what do you hope to do what's your dream
well um for the meantime i do want to remain an astronomer because
i can't go to space yet being a kid not even being able to control a car
um but i can definitely go to space in our research like can people with asthma go to space
what is the youngest age and that is 18 so this week my school we did a send a
future email to yourself so i did it for eight years so apparently when i'm an astronaut i'll
get an email from me now and be like okay
that's really cool that's really cool yeah libby thank you thanks for sharing your your passion
thank you last time i was a little bit nervous because i couldn't find enough research yeah yeah that's all right
you'll have to do this once you do this many times and you will you know you'll get less and less
nervous people want to know really what young people think uh and um
you know especially someone like you because uh you were so interested in exploring uh the universe so that that
is that is great may i ask a question carrying a torch
i think david's got a question for you let's um yeah libby what is your favorite constellation
um before my favorite constellation was the
dipping pot because me my friend she had a little dragon party thing we used to sit there and the
roof used to be open on her little thing and be like look that's the dipping pot
but uh now that after i went to space camp and i saw the
her talk about all the beetle the star beetlejuice and orion's belt
that was so easy for me to identify so easy for me to get my telescope on i was
just like it's so much wonder just it's so easy to get so
much like constellations and nebulas and beetlejuice especially now that it's
dimming it's kind of like a christmas light or plane in the sky my mom wonders she's like is that a plane
right that's great that's great that's right
so um okay all right libby thank you and and and libby just so you know okay as we go
along during the star party if there's something you want to say you know something inspires you or something feel
free to speak up you know because you're here to learn from we have
all kinds of experts here you know and they they love astronomy as much as you do so
um you know it's your chance to spend this couple hours with us and to learn more so i think that's i
think it's wonderful that you're here so um at this point uh
norman fulham has joined us um i think norman's here
right i am yeah yeah i'm here okay all right it's like hollywood squares
here so uh norman um uh i know that uh you've been working all day uh
uh now norman is a he is he is just i mean as a person he's just a wonderful
personality to get to meet okay um i think everybody who has a chance to
meet you in person uh really finds you to be uh um
you know a very positive and uh uh lighthearted
type i think that's great i think that you are definitely someone who loves the
stars you know um you know you're not a lot of people work in this business they
do their job they get in they get out you know uh you are you live and eat and
breathe this and uh and the kind of business telescopes that you build okay and norman is a telescope
builder uh are truly remarkable you know the first ones i saw were these
incredible wooden creations you know they were there's sculpt uh you know
with moons in them and you know all the poetry of of uh someone's love for the
sky is all uh sculpted in wood uh you know encasing a precision mirror so that
you can look deep into space with it so it's totally cool um we looked at one uh one of your original
ones i guess the first one you made with aj segall and and i've been in ajay's home and uh
you saw that's cool i saw it yes it's beautiful scope so yeah um
behind me here i have a picture of it on the wall here right it reminds me that my first mirror is in that scope
yeah so if you could look at that scope up close you would see all the beautiful
wood grain and and
you know every piece of it is celestial it's really cool so
but well i've said it i'm spaced out you were spaced
she meant that in another way not just being like okay but
you know being spaced out as far as being lost and absorbed by um oh yeah
very much very much space so that's right
so what are you going to show us today norman well first of all uh thank you scott for
inviting new word for the for the presentation it really means a lot to me to be able to to share my passion and
not just telescope making but astronomy observing the stars and planets and galaxy that's
what brought me to the my work of building telescope
um today what i'm gonna do is uh show you uh what the an achievement so far
after 20 years of uh trying to do better stuff bigger
instrument bigger mirror and working with university to be able to produce new
mirror new type of glass a new new way to make things maybe a little cheaper a little easier on on the wallet for
people that or research group that needs a big telescope but it doesn't have the
the money for it so we've been toward working towards that goal and now it's
we achieved our goal and it's something real now and we've been uh approached by
many big observatory and research group and we may be in mirror for for a large project like the one i will show you
later on in my presentation and the tour of the shop of the 48 inch replacement
mirror for the great malebone telescope project in melbourne uh it's the history of
one of the oldest large tunnels from 1886 i think it was built it was the largest telescope in the world that that
was the years and um over the years telescope change structure changed place and
eventually the speculum mirror was changed for pyrex mirror in the 1940s and 50s and then it was installed in
montromblo in australia if you remember and there was a big fire bushfire and i
think it's 1990-95 and the telescope was destroyed the mirror had melt and um about seven years
ago they had contacted me to have a price on how much it would cost to make a mirror if they wanted to
rebuild the telescope that was your original structure and everything so seven years later
uh i've got a contract this year to make the mirror the structure is already pretty much
three-quarter of them rebuilt and you're going to be reinstalled in your original uh
observatory in melbourne so this is a very very captivating project for me to
be able to give a second life to such a piece of of work of a heart history
because in 1886 those telescopes were just a piece of art that we were built so uh so um i got to try something and
never tried is to flip my image from from my phone so you'll be able to see what i see but i don't know how it's
done so i'm going to try a few things if anybody knows
well it happens sorry you just keep pressing on the screen until it happens
oh yeah no there'll be like a little button it'll look like it uh like a little camera that will flip
around oh okay is
okay uh is everybody following me yes okay so i'm gonna start my tour of the
shop by the my office here we go and i won't go too much into details because it's very
messy right now uh very obvious that they've got all the project starts here
and got my little kitchen kitchen net so everything is uh i can eat here
no this is a forester that i really like it's my son that made the poster it's about a project that i had many years
ago called the universe on vacation so i was approached from my
resorts for vacation resort to install a small observatory to do
observation of the stars in those resorts at night so we never come off the ground but
eventually maybe one day someone will we catch the idea
okay and in that corner in print it looks like
it's in the corner because it did a bad thing but it's like phillips that i haven't
actually the first wooden telescope that i built not my first mirror but the first my
second mirror that i built was a seven inch f 4.5 and uh this is the structures
wooden telescope that i won first place award at stella feigning that was here the first year that i presented it wow
and it's my son's telescope right now and he moved uh last year and the tube got
cracked and he dropped the tube and it got cracked so he ended up in my shop here for repair
of course so it's there in the safe corner and then when i have time i will have to to fix the tube for
it okay so now we get into the shop uh
this area on this side of the shop is the grinding machine polishing
machine of the all the mirrors that i'm making on the left here we have
shelves filled with abrasive all kinds of abrasive from 40 grit up to 3 microns
we have all the grinding tools that i build myself to with the pieces of glass that i cut and
glue on a piece of of glass and then on plywood
different size for different size telescope mirror it's got all kinds of little tools here
i want to mention that all the machinery that you will see it's all homemade uh because i didn't
have uh enough money to to build to buy
grinding machine a polishing machine so i built all my equipment myself so it is a machine here that i built for
mirror up to 20 inches there's a small turntable for figuring
purposes little larger machine here to make mirrors up to one meter and there's a
one meter mirror right on it right now but we'll come back to the mirror later on uh this one is my first large machine
that i built that can do up to 40 inches also there's a 37 inch on it right now
there's another machine here that do up to 25 inches with the mirror cell underneath so when
i grind and polish the mirror they're all insane type of cell that will be in the telescope so there's no change in
the support here's a 18 inch mirror on the machine
it can take up to 22 inches this is a blanket i make myself here
fuse glass together and then i do the grinding and polishing and this is my first machine that i
built 25 years ago so it's a it's it was in the mirror-matic someone remember it was
publicized on facebook it could get the plans so i built that machine was about 25 years ago
and it made it must have made hundreds of mirror and it still worked i still use it every
day yes yes and here's the big there's the big boy here
it's a big machine that can make mirrors up to almost 65 inches diameters
wow yeah the same principle it's a turntable with an overarm in the tool and i i told my
son before he left today to leave the tool on the measure because this is the 48 inch mirror
replacement mirror for the great mailboard telescope i was telling you about here this is uh
this is the state it's been islam grinded to a sagitta needed for the for
the focal length of the telescope and now i'm i'm doing the smoothing of the circuit and just as an example i'm going
to put the machine on so you know you see how it works
when i do a smoothing of the surface i'm just going to add a little water on it because it has time to dry a bit on
the edge like that okay so the principle is to use
different size grits with the with the tool that will
work on the surface of the mirror and there's a turntable
i'm going to start the team table you will see there you go
wow
so this is how i smooth up the surface
this is how you make magic that's right i don't know if i can put my camera
sideways oh yeah there it is there you go
so it's a very simple turntable and an overarm that deep that placed
the tour on top of the mirror well this is amazing
so it's pretty noisy though but now it's not as bad as it was when i first started to grind it because you start
with like 40 grits on a very large surface like this it's very very you know you need headphones
and everything so it's not too loud and because uh to be able when the mirror is
grinded and polished you have your figuring and you have to test the mirror every time that you do some work on the
surface you need to take the mirror off the machine onto a table that can go
sideways at 90 degrees and back up and then replace them
so i came up with a system that i can do it all by myself and manipulate uh
300 300 pounds mirror by myself without any
accident would be terrible to me for the first time okay it's always tricky but
the entire see the mirror itself sits on on a 54 points
cell that will be exactly the same thing in the telescope and that cell sits on the platform
so when i do the transfer the entire platform with the mirror comes out the mirror the machine
sits on the table with the block at the bottom here and then the edge support is there and
so i can tilt the table 90 degrees into the measurement in the big tunnel here i have here
it's all feasible within i can take the mirror off the machine measure
it and put it back within 25 minutes it's pretty good for one person that is pretty impressive that is really
impressive okay now i have another section of the shop which
is the modded the building and constructing of the mirror the mirrors and the telescopes
we'll go upstairs later this is my my wood shop up there
there we go so here this in this part of the shop is the assembling of telescope the
making of parts and stuff um on my right here
all those big pieces that you see here is the telescope that i'm building for
astro lab of magnetic observatory in quebec it's a 36 inch f 3.5 folded
newtonian i'll show you a picture of the telescope when it's going to be finished
just like this oh wow so it was golden newtonian uh at f 3.5 36 inch and when looking at
the zenith the eyepiece is at six feet only from the ground so it's very very safe for perfect
viewing for anybody children's to go that you don't need a big highlighter
for a large telescope so here's the parts of that telescope all the
the the structure part this is the cage that will hold the secondary mirror with the spider
the stinger here the secondary mirror is sitting in itself
right here right now the second cage and this is the mirror the mirror box
with a third of the 27 uh floating point cell that will be installed here
so it's all aluminum made it's already all on bearings very very smooth
movement it's going to be cerrocat and nargo navis system on it so it's very very smooth moving here
um so at the background as you can see i have a 30 inch
f5 mirror that i have to re-figure for customers so i'll do all kinds of work on
refiguring mirror that doesn't have to figure the the good figure that they should
have on this side here out of my my small vacuum chamber
right here okay so you do something precise it's the smaller one yeah the small one yeah it makes up to
22 inches diameters and uh this is the the bell this is the system
and i just coated a 10 inch mirror today so i'm going to show you the end result of 10 inch
there we go beautiful very good
very nice thank you so sorry about the mess around because um
we only have four in in the shop and we don't always have time to do
[Laughter]
we have engineering as well there's a small an old milling that i
bought to be able to do some uh parts aluminum parts and of the telescope and
also to do uh some pre-generating of uh of curve on the on mirror blanks
so i can use a diamond blade and the head and i can do generate the curve
the pre-generate curves on mirrors when they are solid mirror or fused mirror like i make
now i'm gonna show you fast techno fusion mirror okay this is what i came
up with the university laval university about six years ago now it took about two
years to develop it's a way to make large mirror lightweight fast very fast cooling and much cheaper and more rigid
also so here's an example of a one meter 40 inches
mirror blank just came out of the oven not too long ago wow so the way it's made it's uh
what i do is i fuse i get my borosilicate which is pyrex okay
by the sheets and i wanted to jet them decide the diameters that it's needed so there's no
heat generated when you cut the glass so it's very safe and i fuse
for the top plate i fuse two sheets together in the small tail you see at the back here we'll open it later once
we'll show you when those two pieces are fused together you see all those small columns the same
comes from the same sheet that the the top plate was come from uh-huh it's all multiple silicate
and i assemble upside down it will be upside down when i do a sampling the top
part will be at the bottom i do all the installation of all the columns that you see there
on the surface and then put it in the oven with the back plate on top and then i fuse it like this straight
after that i will show you by opening the the kale it's a small heel i can do a hundred
inch mirror in there so it's a car lift that opens the lid
it's very very big very heavy so as the
detail inside
[Music]
so once the blank is fused parallel to the top and the bottom i get a company that makes mold
with the fabrics and we do a vegeta that i need okay with the curve that i required for the mirror and i just set
the mirror on it and then see all the elements inside the skill here
the wall the ceiling even floor is full of elements and i have a computer
here that control all the heating and the raise and the lower the temperature so i can
raise the temperature half a degree an hour if i wanted to so so i raised the temperature hot enough
so the mirror the glass softened a little bit so it takes the shape of the mold so it's pre-generate the the the
sagitta of the mirror and then after that i just pull it down it takes a few maybe about a week and a
half to depending on the size and the mirror is ready to go on the machine and be
grinded and they already have a pre-generated curve on the surface beautiful of course the back the back is
convex because it is the opposite of the concave but with the 54 or 30 27
floating cell underneath the mirror it doesn't matter if it's flat or if it's curved so
there's no problem there so there's a 40 inch f 3.5 ready to be
grinded this is the 36 inch that will go in the structure of the
magnetic observatory we saw earlier it's ready to be coated this is another 40 inch for a french and
europe french guy in europe that i'm making it's an f4 for him it's almost ready to uh to code right away
and this is my vacuum chamber for the big boys
i can do up to 65 inches of diameters in there oh my goodness
uh see the it's like a shell it will open there is a
drop one side open i installed a mirror in it and it closed the lid and it's vacuumed there
did you build it did you build this coating machine yourself yeah yeah it wouldn't help many people
you know i call it the frankenstein machine with
the big knobs ah it's beautiful yeah look at the big knobs here we got here
you get control yeah yeah very very uh steampunk
it's all manual so there's no uh automation here it's still done by hand
and control the hand and now i look to the to the hub here and look inside when
it's done and when i do the work um it's all again homemade
this is a nice 24 inch for my partner here you go that cannot be here but i'm sure he's listening at
the presentation yeah i'm online i'm talking oh you're there okay
so it's a 24 inch of 3.15 um i'm not going to do the structure for
his telescope my good friend ryan justin of new moon telescope is building his structure because he needed something
very portable and easy to carry around the world because you go working around the world anytime you
have to travel a lot he wants to bring his big telescope away so it's easier because the type of telescope that i
build is pretty much every year on this other thing yes like the 40s
a 25 inch for a customer in australia actually
that i make the blank myself it's three pieces of glass fused together you can't see three pieces
fused together and i'm waiting right now to get the mold to have the the right sagitta for these men whereas mirrors i
will be able to slump the blank and then after that grinder good to know that the person is uh
sorry i dropped a big lift here to manipulate all the big piece of glass and um
that's it that's pretty much my madness here [Laughter]
on this corner here you have another project called solid stream it's a project with the university that we're
gonna we want to manipulate the light of the sun and carry the uh the radiation to a very
special cable and to be able to transfer a thousand degrees celsius heat to our
cable to uh to go and do like uh
use on the turbine to make electricity and stuff like that so it's a project in the making
um other than that that's pretty much i oh yeah it's true i still have the
wood shop to show you i'm gonna go on this side here go up just the last steps
there we go if you turn around you have a nice view of the shop oh yeah
not much place to walk around so the wood shop like i said i still
make those wooden telescope on order only uh i don't have i don't make telescope in advance because i don't
have time i don't only have two hands and um this is my wood shop there i have
one in the making this is the ground board for the 10 inch f 4.5
out of black walnut this is the tube here beautiful
very nice shoe of a black walnut yes oh pretty isn't that pretty libby
yeah it's so glossy yeah you want to see this is the altitude bearings yeah
this is gonna be the bearings that will uh raise and lower the telescope it's all hand carved the man in the moon
festival rising as usual beautiful thank you
so that very basic tooling just uh nothing industrial very basic bandsaw and the plain plane and then
uh just about it yeah a lot of love goes in the scope
oh yeah so i'm going to come down here come back
down and i i promised scott that i would uh play a little song because last time i i
was on on the gst gsp i played a little song but i'm a
musician also and uh this is my music room in the shop
i got my amp it's a couple guitars here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to
change from my telephone to my laptop and i'm going to play you a song so it's going to take about
a minute or 30 seconds for a minute to do the switch and i'll be right back with you guys okay we'll go back to our
group thank you let me know when you're back on thanks
well uh what did you guys think of the of seeing that shop it's very very
unusual uh to see you know someone i mean with this few people i i think he has like three maybe
three or four people working for him and he's making these giant huge dobsonian telescopes you know so
uh he can make up to 65-inch amateur dobsonians you know and uh
i i have looked through big telescopes before i've never looked through one of his large dobs
but i'm very anxious to well we'll surely get you the chance scott
i'm looking forward to it i've seen his wood telescopes many times and
as amazing as they look on the program here
it's completely different seeing them in in real life i agree it's it's i just
can't believe it when i the first time i saw it i think it was at rtmc many years ago
in awe i couldn't believe it it's true uh i've been working with norm
for about two years now and uh every time i see him working on a wood project although the big ones are super fun to
work on it's always it's always great to look at him work on this stuff yeah the art
that's right well we've back so we're gonna put the spotlight back on you
speaking of great artists yes okay
earlier in the afternoon i i realized the date we were 9 11
and that made me think of playing a song for you guys i think it
would be appropriate about all the life that was lost for nothing
yes the song is called would you know my name
no it's not the things that's not the title it's called tears in heaven by eric clapton
yes [Music]
would you know my name
if i saw you in here [Music]
would you be insane [Music]
if i saw you in heaven
i must be strong
and carry on cause i know
i just can't stay here in heaven
[Music]
would you hold my hand
if i saw you in heaven
would you help me stand
if i saw you in heaven
i'd find my way
true nights and days cause i know
i just can't stay [Music] here in heaven
[Music]
time can bring you down time can bend your knees
[Music]
when you please
do
[Music] beyond the door
there's peace i'm sure and i know
there'll be no more tears in heaven
[Music]
would you know my name
if i saw you in heaven
would you be the same
if i saw you in heaven [Music]
i must be strong
and carry on cause i know
i just can't stay here in heaven [Music]
wow wonderful absolutely
for the day thank you thank you good show brother
yeah yeah yeah it's hard eh yeah yes it is
uh so um we're we're about an hour into the show
at this point we do door prizes um and uh it's uh time to have uh
uh carol asked the first door prize question the astronomical league is the
uh sponsor of our door prizes and the way that our door prize program works
is uh the league picks the questions um you will then answer the questions to an
email which i'm going to type here which is kent i'm going to put this in chat
it's kent at explorescientific.com
and we have we have three prizes they choose
the prizes they choose the winners um and uh it basically goes like this you
you whoever is the first to answer the question in email uh will
be the recipient of it but the astronomical league themselves will notify you then they notify us
of others and and we go from there so um and then we will uh after after carol
i i want to kind of go back to the group again i want them each one to basically
uh give just about a minute talk about what they want to talk about next and
then when we come back from a 10-minute break we will uh uh
touch base with each one and let them tell their story or share what they're gonna share with you today so
or tonight as it might be in some parts of the world here so but uh you are watching the global star
party eight uh with explore scientific and the explore alliance um
so let me put the spotlight on you carol uh let me find you carol here
where are there you are there you are okay what's the top act to
follow with music i'm not going to do any singing today ask a question come on come on carol a
little song thank you wanna hear it
amateur astronomers from the astronomical league and the question is
okay and back on september 6th of 1997
a special discovery was made at the 200-inch hail telescope
by that team what was the discovery
okay one more time okay on september 6th 1997
a special discovery was made on the 200-inch hail telescope by the team
operating that day what was the object okay what was the the object they
discovered okay all right so uh don't answer it here in
live chat you're going to want to send your answers to kent at explorescientific.com okay
and again we want to thank the astronomical league for coming on our shows and doing
these door prizes with us it's a it's a real pleasure if you don't already belong to the astronomical league
you can join them from wherever you live in the world they have a member at large program that
allows international membership if you live in the united states you can be
a you can be a member at large or uh you can also uh join through your
club yes so uh i make it easy if you have any questions about membership it's rosters
astrolink.org yep that's right
that's right so let me let me get the spotlight off on you here for a
second that would be good about that i'm a little bit
i'm a little bit lost here so um hang on for a second there
sometimes the the control buttons disappear in zoom which always makes it
fun so here we go
and there we go so um so let's let's let's start off with
grant and these will be like little one minute um uh uh talks to just talk about what what
you're going to share with us today so grant why don't you give us a little overview okay evening everybody um i was hoping
to do some some live viewing from a remote observatory in spain but i've been watching an all-sky camera and it's
looking a bit cloudy so um as a backup option what i wanted to show was how you can use some of your
astro gear to look at the school world rather than the the big wide world so
and we've got some microscopy stuff here to show people okay that's great
jessica you're up next hey so i'm just here uh enjoying it's
morning down here in australia good day uh just here to have a chat i've got
both feet firmly planted in visual and astrophotography so i'm here just to talk with everyone around the world
about that awesome that's great guitar in the back
i can't follow up there's no encore from my side my apologies
that's right okay how about mike simmons well i'm not going to be showing any
images i'm not an astrophotographer i've been doing public outreach in astronomy for
almost 50 years and a lot of different places uh
uh since uh the the last 10 15 years 15 to no actually 20 years been
international astronomy so i funded astronomers without borders
and left that organization a little earlier this year i've got some other plans i'll talk a little bit about what
i have coming up as well but really connecting people around the world through astronomy is really my
thing and i'd love to talk about that very cool okay and andreas nilsson
i think you're still muted there andrews thank you there you go there we go thank you for having me here
yep now you're up in sweden right yeah i'm from stockholm so you know yes so i uh photographed from balconies in
stockholm in the heavy portals guys yeah so um i have uh
a challenge to take astrophotography here but um i have made it worked
so maybe share some pictures from my view of uh
from my balcony what i have captured and learned these few years i have done astrophotic
photography wonderful thank you andrews and gary palmer
scott hi scott um i think we'll have a look at some solar
processing i haven't done any for a while been doing quite a bit deep sky processing through the last few star parties so
we'll have a look at a few high resolution images and we're processing them up great
and how about you steve everson am i pronouncing your name correctly
steve you're there he was trying to join me all right yeah you are doing a very good job of
pronouncing my name thank you very much i was hoping to show some
live images through the dual rig but unfortunately it clouded over
it okay diverted my eyes and clicking madly a few seconds ago i was looking at the
radar rain radar oh yeah so um
probably got some in wales gary probably because he said in my way
yeah it's been dry i think that's threatening about three o'clock in the morning in here
we've stayed relatively dry for the last few days there's a little bit coming in and then we've got a nice big clear
catch coming up for two or three days so that will make a change i'll actually
forget how to connect all the equipment together and get some images it's very long since we've had a period clear for
that long yeah um so i'm gonna be back in uh
shutting the roof on the observatory uh very shortly um so i was just going to share a few of
the more mom more recent images that i've taken okay all right very good very good carol
you have more that you'll be sharing with us other than giving away fantastic door prizes
yeah uh i might make some brief remarks but yeah the door prize was a big thing for me okay all right okay well carol
carol is the you're now the president or vice president of the astronomical league on september 1st we
changed positions and yeah i'm not president president okay well there you go excellent excellent and steve
callingwood all right
we're surviving it's just clouded over here i had planned to turn over control of the dome
um online for the first time um but we're in the uk
so so basically our internet is basically a piece of string and two cups
and it's clouded over as well so i'm just going to heckle gary okay
all right and hugo you are you're with uh norman fulham but uh uh do you have uh you you have um
something that you'll be sharing with us today tonight uh not particularly uh my just not as one show myself i bumped in
norman two years ago i do live photos astrophotography as well short exposure
especially so for live views 10 minutes maximum exposures
and uh today unfortunately all my equipment is in the middle east i'm in canada right now with norm on vacation slash extended
stay here due to kovid and uh yeah i'm basically just a systems
engineer and i'm helping norma we're breaching for uh other type of clients such as
research and like he said universities and more important observatories
so yeah nothing to share particularly but the no but it's it's cool to have you here so
that's awesome oh it's great i love i love to see all this passion here from everybody around the world it's great
right and prandera from vera hycini so you're in you've been all over the world fran vera
and you've landed in california just in time for the smoke
so uh how are you holding up out there uh well uh the air is quite bad
outside and two days ago it was uh it looked like being in mars
but um i i hope it will it will get better but i'm very glad to actually be
able to be here because i was stuck in australia for like over five months
because of covet as i was conducting a trip around the world in
southeast asia and here in america and i haven't been at home in kosovo for
for almost a year so um all my telescopes that i have are
currently in kosovo and as many of you maybe know that i run the astronomy
outreach of kosovo program so um getting out there and teaching the
public about astronomy uh was my thing like for a long time
and i still keep doing that although right now i moved here to united states
because i started graduate school in planetary science here at uc santa cruz
uh in a few days so i'm getting ready for that and i'm very excited for that opportunity but um
you know astronomy is a really cool thing and it's always nice to join
together and see all of you and most of you i also met in person which is really
cool so uh getting to travel because of astronomy was one of the greatest
experience because i have been to so many countries around the world i even was in argentina last year and visited
caesar rolla who's here with us so it was nice and a great experience to meet
everybody and visit their observatories and get to observe from their telescopes
and learn all of that and get that back to kosovo in a country that has uh you
know doesn't have anything in that regard so we as a as a young generation
are trying to to do activities with a an outreach group that
we want to educate the public and hopefully we will make an observatory soon that
we're working on it and it's slowly coming together but this is what i'm doing currently and
i'm very glad to be here with all of you and looking forward to sharing with you
some more uh photos later that i've been using slu because not
being able to use telescopes and have them with me all the time slu was one of the greatest tools to have with me and i
could observe from anywhere in the world in both hemispheres and i was able to
capture some really really great images of minor planets and comets and nebulas
and all of that so i'll be looking forward to sharing all of that with you soon thanks param vera thank you and we have
uh shylendra otherwise known as chuck's dog so chuck's what are you sharing with us
today hey um i was hoping to do some live imaging but it's clouded over so i
managed to get about six frames of m51 um and it's
looking hopeful in the next half an hour maybe it will start clearing over and i can start imaging it again did anyone
bought a big telescope lately so we have all those clouds well norm i know we set a couple of
mirrors in australia right yes
okay and uh john johnson
from the third party how are you doing today i'm doing fine scott thank you so much for
allowing me to participate in this event uh this is just amazing i
there's a few people here i recognize uh some of the older faces
i've met mike in the past and of course good friends with carol and pran oh my goodness
right she uh she's amazing um first met you met pran at the uh
2018 alcon in minneapolis and i think i was the one that finally said
pran you got to get there and and so i'm going to talk later i i've got to
run off for a little bit but later on here i will give you a full rundown on the nebraska star party i've been
involved with that for oh at least 25 years now i'm currently the director of promotions
and outreach and and uh have worked with scott for quite a while uh
and the explorer scientific has been a super supporter of our event and i cannot
thank you enough scott thank you more or later yeah yeah uh uh john had sent me a
video which i'll try to queue up later for him as well so but it'll show you an overview of what
the nebraska star party is like and this is one of the great star parties in the world under incredibly super dark
skies so um so i think you're going to enjoy that and uh cesar brolo caesar what are you
going to share with us today well i am in my work
i'm still in in my office this is the something that we call the aquarium
because in the box in this box we we work in a clean area uh we have
here uh something like the waiting room for telescopes that they're waiting to be repaired or
cleaning or you know it's like here is like a hospital of
of telescopes and uh i'm still working and i'll um after to
talk now i'll go to my home and later i can show you something of pictures that we
we took uh in i took in the in the last in the latest stop parties globalizer
parties from my balcony and today i found
from in our warehouse something that is very interesting because it's a telescope
from gmo optical company a company that maybe you know oh yeah that we we wow a couple of this
telescope f5 right you know this yes for for our
staff um uh like we move a a office in a store
i have i i don't remember where i have a group of this today i found it
and uh we i'm changing this because normally we have a
f5 uh mirror but we uh change this uh this inside
have a variable lens uh you know with a one meter uh
meter uh with a with a focal standard you have one meter of focus
but i found that the the mirrors with difficulty are
amazing and i'll change this i need to to
design all of this to make a f5 real system to our stuff
and to try with the xs5 exos 100 that i use in my my balcony yes i'm preparing
an experiment i think that i prepare a place here
to haul the a ccd oh okay okay
idea the idea of this is is something that it will be very
interesting to because we'll we love play like trials and yeah an optics all
that we can can uh do it it's amazing why was affirmation
with the machinery of uh the mirror machines and the big uh
what's incredible that i see before
before so thank you very much caesar thank you see you later i go to my home
okay okay we will see you in a little bit thank you all right so uh at this point uh we are
going to take a ten minute break uh you may hear us chatter in the background or whatever but um
uh uh we'll just take a little break and then we're gonna be back with all of these people that uh
were with us and um i think there's some others that may join in later uh as as
we go along with the global star party aid so thank you for watching so
uh maybe go get uh something uh hot to drink get some coffee or you know
take a break do whatever and we'll see you in about 10 minutes okay so
okay uh
so are you gonna sing us a song gary please do please do
absolutely no chance yeah one chance of getting struck by lightning in the tunnel
um it cleared in spain for just long enough for me to focus before the roof then closed again so uh ah
at least your focus is good you're cheapo roll off roofs mate
well we're kind of uh in this last minute here we've got a lot of people who've been chatting with us um so i don't know if
you guys have been watching all this but uh lots of breaks um
i'll just read a few here you've got brett blake david ing from l.a john percili
paris chile okay marco polo uh tim lowen richard eckles
uh we've got a lot of people who've been chatting with brian fanning eduardo simone
jerry hubbell internet troubles right now so he'll try to get in touch with us later
diane24 can't push headley
ken says uh well we'll get back to it here
well everybody we are back um and i hope you had a nice break um
so we're gonna bring back up our our uh our astronomers here not not everybody's
back on the video yet but that's all right um and uh
so why don't since uh jessica got up really early this morning um
maybe the earliest out of any of us what time is it there right now jessica
we just made it to 8 30 a.m a.m okay all right so do you have your
did you have your breakfast already or we had a couple cups of coffee we jump started uh
jump started today uh trying to get up i think yeah everything
started and kicked off at around 6 37 a.m so i just needed it
right okay well um uh so uh
you know jessica used to work here at explore scientific she was one of our star customer service people she was
starting to manage the customer service department and then she fell in love uh with a gentleman down under and uh
and she moved to uh land on her feet at an at another telescope company called
uh bintel and um so why don't you tell us a little bit about the story and what astronomy is like down there in
australia yeah so i never expected lightning to strike twice
as you know it's a hobby that a lot of people like but not a lot of people get the opportunity to to go to work every
single day and work with telescopes so i was very happy to get another opportunity um and get a little bit more
help polar lining down here i think i needed the entire team uh to learn how to polar line in the southern hemisphere
so um where it has its downfall that'll definitely be polar lining but uh the
objects down here are just really really impressive and i've loved the opportunity to see some southern
hemisphere um targets uh it's it's been a wonderful experience to
say the least that's great tell us a little bit about bentel it's a that company's been around for a
while is that right it has been for for longer than i've been here i've got a lot of folks that
remember it back in locations that i haven't had the chance to work in so um
pretty uh pretty long-standing i think it's at least 20 years old here in
sydney uh there's a temporary melbourne location um but i work at the one in sydney right now and um
and yeah we cover everything from everybody getting their first scopes up to
really advanced astrophotography so i'm happy to get that wide variety of conversations every single day
right and so and plus two uh astronomers down there had to go through the same
suffer the same uh problems with fires and everything down in australia is that now kind of abated
is that for the most part um now the shocking thing about australian wildlife
and flora and fauna is it thrives on uh bushfires so a lot of it has
already seen a lot of regrowth i have heard the joke that there's nothing left to burn
this year uh but it's it's kind of shocking how fast everything
regrows down here so um we're already doing preventative back burning hopefully we're not going to get nearly
as bad a year this year because uh last summer was just completely smoked out i don't think anybody got any astronomy
done last year right right and uh the uh
in sydney is there there must be a largest astronomy club or clubs down there what is it like uh for what what you
know what is uh offered to amateur astronomers down there yes there's a collection of a few
different astronomical societies down here i'm a member of two uh so i'm a member of the astronomical society of
new south wales as well as the astronomical society of northern sydney uh both of them put on some really great
star parties down here i absolutely loved uh okie tex in the northern hemisphere but
uh being down here and going to their star parties has been really fun they hold one in the wine country that i was happy
to go to because they give you something to do during the day which is
right no dutchman here i got my own beer right now [Music]
so you get a little bit of wine tourists to do during the day um but the astronomical society of new south wales
has an excellent dark sky site called varuna and they put on the south pacific star party um probably
it everything was canceled this year due to the coronavirus um and
i'm excited to go back most definitely we haven't had any star parties um but
the the wildlife that you run into out at a dark sky site in australia it can be a little bit scary so maybe a year
cool off period of seeing those spiders that size up there is okay for me oh my gosh
so um and of course you went you and i went together to the okie tech star party how
is what's is there any cultural difference or any anything that
they do special at in australia that would be different from a star party up here
they they party pretty hard down here uh last south pacific star party was abba themed
so we all had abba playing uh for the intro night um it was a bit clouded out
the first night um and it gets really really cold out here i wasn't expecting how cold it was going to be
for how hot it gets here so you kind of have a battle of the extremes uh but we just partied out to abba for the first
night um as far as as difference goes i would say
the biggest difference that i remember is uh just be having um
native southern hemisphere observers star hopping to targets that i've never seen before in and i always like to
buddy up with somebody with a huge dobsonian that's where my campsite is going to be right next to you i buddy up
to somebody who's got a car big enough to house a huge dobsonian um and seeing
just incredible things for the first time i think the first time that i saw
the hercules cluster was that oh what was that okie tex i think uh and then the first time that i saw omega
centauri so kind of the two different clusters uh was incredible uh i'm not gonna lie be
coming from the northern hemisphere the first time i saw a cluster i thought to myself maybe i'm not a cluster gal
but i saw a mega centauri and that made me a cluster gal
that's right that's an amazing object to look at but aside from clusters what's your favorite object to see in the
southern hemisphere so far tarantula nebula is
very very intricate the first time that i saw it there was so much going on i still don't think that i've been able to
to resolve everything in my eye at once because there's so much to be looking at um and i love the karina nebula looking
at the homunculus is really really interesting i do miss andromeda i love
those really really huge uh galaxies and nebulas but karina's got it going on oh
yeah absolutely that's great so if someone comes down to australia to visit you let's say sometime next year when we
can hopefully travel uh whether what are the top three things that an amateur
astronomer should do in australia you should come to siding springs
siding springs has so much going on down there um parks observatory the the
lesser known uh you know kind of lunar assistance down here that um you know
coming from america originally i had always heard about the lunar landing uh but the lesser known thing that i hadn't
really even thought about was the the kind of pickup of communication that
australia had assisted with so learning the the down under history of the the lunar assistance and everything like
that was really cool so i would say parks observatory um siding springs out of kuna bear brand
and see the opera house right absolutely because there's more to
do than the stars um and bintel uh
what has been tell how are they special do you think for the amateur community down there
um i think it's just the wide range of um
you know we're gonna start by helping you from the smallest telescope that you can buy
just starting off um and then i am also blessed to go all the way up to people
who have remote observatories out at martin pugh's place i've seen
people from every single walk of life and the wide variety has just been really really nice
and then we're we're always there to offer assistance even in the middle of the night uh so so even if you're over
on the other side of the planet i'm still happy to answer any questions because it's daytime for me all right
that's right yeah and uh so and what how how what is the sphere i mean how large
of a range what's your most far-flung customer from australia
ah well we do have a fella who lives in canada for right now but he does all of
the satellite tracking for australia australia is pretty special because they trap and identify every single object
that passes over their airspace every single satellite has
has been basically identified and it's done by somebody remote all the way on the other side
that's amazing that's an amazing story that's us canadian
there's a lot of satellite tracking programs in the governmental going on right now uh that makes sense definitely
right right well that's great now uh well let's jump now to pran vera
privera you are probably still studying quite a bit right now and
i know that you're that your time is squeezed so let's uh
let's go to you and and what can you tell us right now you've been doing asteroid work with hap
griffin uh i know you love asteroids um what what's going on in pram vera's
universe now uh yeah um astronomy is really big and i
love it all but you know we definitely have to focus sometimes in something specific especially when you
think about continuing and uh doing research in school and all that sort of stuff so my favorite area is the minor
planets and i i grew up reading books of david levy and uh reading about the
discoveries of of david and the hail bob and all these
guys and then coming here to america and meeting everybody like the astronomers of kitt
peak observatory and then at louisville observatory brian skiff he also does some amazing work with asteroids i
really was inspired and i wanted to do the same but when you don't have the telescopes it's
really not that easy to do that but it was a good opportunity when i discovered
slu and i was given a free membership by the astronomy league
last year so um i upgraded actually that because i
wanted to have more time with slu because it was just a great thing to have and i happened to be traveling for
the last year all over the world and i definitely needed to have access to the
sky and with slo it's so amazing because it's just a platform that you can access from
your computer from your phone i mean you you can be in the car or in the bus and you can observe in the other side of the
world in the real time and you can snap photos of anything like that so
if i was not home to do outreach all the time social media allowed me to
to present my work and my photography and also do asteroid work and i was very
happy that when i came here to america and i went to visit my friend have griffin who lives in south carolina so
he has a private observatory and has a 12 inch telescope so we were trying to find
uh asteroids that were discovered within those nights uh so we wanted to confirm
some of them for the mpc and that is the most exciting thing because you're like
probably the second person to see that new object that was discovered just like
a night before so you're confirming a discovery somehow so it was actually a
full moon and we were going after this comet that was 19 magnitude so it wasn't the
best idea but hey come on nothing to lose so we did that
and we actually happened to see it and confirm it for the npc so that comet
happened to be one of the brightest one in may which was a atlas comet very
famous one yeah so i was like so happy that i got to comfort confirm that
comment with hub and right now in fact we're together starting today uh being part of the
isaac asteroid search so we're gonna be uh having data provided by the uh
telescopes in hawaii but the university of hawaii so hap and i will be able to
analyze that data and report uh to the npc and uh see if we can get actually
something new uh so that is quite exciting but i wanted to share with you
my screen if i can figure out how to do that yeah at the bottom yeah i think i found it so some of these
are uh images that i have been able to capture from slew telescopes still have
telescopes located in the canary islands and also in chile which allows you to
observe in both hemispheres which is really cool uh this is the comet neovice and i was
unable to see that because when this appeared in the northern hemisphere i was down in australia and i was
jealous as hell of all the people who got to see it so but i got to photograph it with slew
so it was pretty cool you can see the tail of the comet is really nice yeah you slew a couple of times it's a great
thing yeah i had this first image of the horse had nebula i it was my dream to be able
to to ever capture this one but i don't have the equipments and the cameras and
everything so uh with slow i was able to do that and share this as my own image
and uh send it to people or publish it on social media and all that and also
the orion nebula which is you know very bright and it's always uh so cool to be
able to see that or photograph it uh this is another comment um i i can't
remember all these comments but it was also another um
down there comet lemon yes the lemon one was also very bright during june so um i
was able to capture this with a 17 inch telescope
this was the swan comet which appeared early in the morning usually um
and that's the dumbbell nebula of course these are
all single shot images so they are not processed or stacked or anything they
are all just uh raw data from the telescope that i was just able to
uh put it here in my desktop and that's the hamburger nebula
so that jupiter another one of jupiter and you can see all the moons
and that is a traffic nebula i'm trying to remember all the names
and sometimes you had to wait because andromeda was not visible like in early april or may so i had to wait a couple
of months until you would be able to actually see it and with these telescopes it
allows you to have uh different settings you can set
the camera what exposure do you want to do or if you want to do a color image and all
of that stuff but being uh stranded in being uh not
being able to use a telescope i think i did a pretty good job at being able to use that this was the
newer solar eclipse uh and slu was streaming it from i think a
an observatory somewhere in asia i can't remember which one and that's the whale galaxy
uh you guys can see these uh great right on my screen because i'm not sure if the screening is
yep it's working it's working that's great that's great alex nebula and um this is the i think it's a mega
century and i was so happy because when i went to australian access to the southern hemisphere i
could see the mangellanic clouds by the naked eye and i went in fact in the
outback which is my favorite place on earth and it just was stunning seeing
the sky down there and then i got to image pluto i mean look at him it's so cute and so small
hey pranvera uh there's a question uh jeff wise wants to know can you explain
what slu is yeah absolutely so slu is a platform
that is uh being run online and uh these guys have telescopes as i
mentioned in canary islands in chile so if you want to use slu you would have to
pay a fee a new annually that is actually not a huge fee and it's very
uh reasonable price especially for students just dollars a year
and you can have uh access to slu anytime you can have uh the
that it means uh if you wanna use a telescope you can set a slot you can put
on the coordinates of whatever object you want to see they have multiple catalogs of galaxies and nebulas and
planets anything and then uh you will tell the telescope that i want to see an
image this object so the telescope will take an image of this object even if you are not there right now the photos will
be saved automatically for you so that's a good thing because sometimes you can set the telescope you can go to
sleep and then in the morning you will have photos and you can edit them you can share them
so it's kind of bossy and you don't have to to to freeze out there in the cold
with a telescope and all that this was one of the supernovas that was in uh
orionis galaxy uh uh that photos before it happened and after it happened so kind of nice to be
able to see things that not all the people can see i mean you can have a telescope and see light years away which
is really cool and this is another supernova so i was just trying to use the slew telescopes
to see different objects minor planets or nebulas or anything and
share them with people and just let the people know that these are some cool
things out there that probably someone never heard of so we're back in the beginning i'll stop
sharing my screen um i've never heard a and that's that's interesting to know um if i want to
actually image the southern hemisphere so that's that's beneficial for me for sure yeah that was a great thing because uh
when i was down there or even here now i can i can image anytime anything
so their telescopes are located in really great locations and they are quite big they have a 20 inch telescope
two 17 inch two 14 inch and another 11 celestron which is a really wide angle
and you can capture like longer you know like a huge areas in the sky so
i would definitely recommend to all of you who don't want to spend a lot of money in telescopes because all of us i
know have spent a lot and in fact i've been very happy to have the support from scott and from celestron and from the
all the astronomers that provided us telescopes in kosovo so we can bring this sky to all the people out there and
share all the wonders with everybody so thank you so much scott and it's really a pleasure to share all of this with you
thank you i must say that uh i've used myself last year i was stuck in the middle east and i didn't have my
telescopes on site and i've i've tried slu and it's a very interesting platform as you say
uh there's also well of course as an engineer i always like to tinker with stuff so of course i'm not touching the
telescopes and doing all what i want but it was very convenient for for a situation where i couldn't do anything
else and i really appreciated what the the service could get you and it's not too expensive as you said it's really
nice yeah and actually i was very curious because i have one of these minor planets named after me and you
know when that is very special and i wanted to be able to image that so i
tried so hard with lucas that was my only opportunity to do to be able to do
that myself and i had a lot of help from friends to try to image it and then
friends around the world have taken images of it but it's so cool to just see things like that and
you know have access to telescopes and you don't have to pay like thousands to be able to use telescopes of that range
right i think i subscribed for a few months it was not more than a hundred dollars yep
yeah that's a fantastic deal so for the cost of a inexpensive eyepiece you can be using some of the most amazing
equipment in the world that's great now uh gary i think
um you were sending me a chat saying that we got some clear skies somewhere is that right
i'm not so sure that it's clear but steve has opened up his observatory and
agreed to give us a tour around the observatory and i thought it might be an idea as
it's open that that always dictates it's going to rain in the uk so um it might
be an idea to actually have a look around it pretty quick sure it does rain so
it's really head over to steve colliwood and um go from there okay steve if it rains
you're fixing it i don't know any telescope engineers
gary yeah they've all retired now
yeah yeah that's me i'm just gonna i'm gonna hideously name drop for a minute and
show a picture just because we've seen loads of great pictures this evening yeah and i'm gonna if this will let me
i'm gonna show this this is my desktop
this is here you may recognize that as m42 sure yeah
right so talk about being lucky to work in the industry that we do because we are a bit
lucky um i've been a telescope builder for 20 odd years and an engineer and all sorts
and i happened to build a telescope for stephen hawking once
and that is a live view taken on my iphone of m42
leaning over stephen hawking's back on the night
you can use all the ccd cameras and auto garden you like i've beat you with an iphone
actually my dad has studied in cambridge university and he he went to a talk with with uh stephen hawking he's physics of
course but just uh i gotta show him this video later on now that you've said that
to be honest it wasn't the best evening if i'm honest it was uh but yeah he he was hosting a little do
for lots of his colleagues and they were just talking about maths and didn't understand a word
different bits there keeping them going yeah so my hobby if you like is keeping
the telescopes at the rgo at hurst monsoon going um so we've got a
26 inch refractor we've got a 10 inch refractor we've got a 36 inch casa grain
um we've got a 36 inch kudo focus newtonian
and a 16 inch made lx 200 yeah the rgo is
it's a royal greenwich observatory which moved from london to sussex yes and then back to london
because that's what you do in the uk and um but
the the uh the ministry decided to stop using it for research quite some time ago
but then we managed to get it reopened basically as a family science centre so
it's now an organization called the observatory science center you should visit it online and um
yeah we we show families the night sky through these historic telescopes beautiful every opportunity that's great
that's a bit the same idea that the 48 inch we're redoing the mirror they're gonna use it at a great melbourne
observatory uh that's the whole point if it's not being used for you search it
should be used by people i must admit i sort of think it's the best use for it
you know yeah when you have a queue of 50 kids that are just about to see jupiter or sand for
the first time um that's astronomy yes absolutely you know
when we um normally go down there it's for events or an evening event or things
like that so you really don't see what they do in the daytime and we've been fortunate enough a few times to be there
for different reasons in the daytime and it's amazing the amount of kids that go through on the programs
down there um yeah it was literally packed the last time that we went down there i tell you what
makes it worthwhile so the floors in the domes if you google it
you'll see the pictures the floors in the domes are rated to take about 48 people because they were never designed to have
a crowd in them and when you actually have to turn people away
until we've gone round the queue you know and and then you know what what will happen is when i
worked in the the telescope shop for a while you know people would come up and say i want to buy a telescope no
why'd you want a telescope we were at the observatory science center and this guy showed us jupiter through this
massive telescope and he did swear a bit but it was really entertaining and we had this fantastic view we want one at home
and you can say that was me it makes it you know it makes it
worthwhile so working in the industry you know exactly a bit lucky i think and
uh i'm lucky enough to to now build observatory domes so in a very low-tech
way we're going to go on a tour of my garden in the dark okay you can't criticize the state of it
it goes dark here i've got the white light on at the minute so this is what the internet was made for
wasn't it that's right so there we see the
ah okay interesting these are traditional domes
so we build this is a 2.2 meter uh fiberglass dome
so in here we have i should just say explore scientific
will be selling these zones in the united states that's right you will we're working on it and there's there's news there
so basically what we have the 2.2 meter dome we have a
our own proprietary control system so we can we can move the dome
left right it's fully automated it's fully ascon we have a remote shutter drive as well
everything is bluetoothed in so let's move that count away
i'll hit my head on that later yes it's dead easy let's be honest um
we we used to use all the complicated systems the shelliaks and the lesbian domes and stuff like that which are very
good um but we put our heads together and thought wouldn't a one-button system be
better so
we have a self-calibrating dome system you don't you don't need to know any maths you press a button it works it out
we use we basically use everything from bluetooth inductive charging on the back
batteries and they're they're diy assembly
and that's one of the other things that make them uh remarkably unique you can build sure one into a house
you have a range of sizes i was wondering you have a range of
sizes you have a 2.2 here do you have bigger smaller so we do we do 2.2 and 2.7
okay good now um we we thought about doing a three and a half but
for the two inquiries we get in a year it isn't really worth the expense that's that's the usual problem right now me
and norm are looking for probably a four or five meter but as you say it's
not a it's not exactly a very booming market are you excited but i know the smaller
ones are so you're right we on average um me and my business partner gary walker
we do on average a minimum of a dome a week every week and have done for 20 years
wow it's very good a lot of time there's a lot of domes but uh i mean strangely enough during
covid we've been off the scale yes same for us
yeah it's it's the ultimate self-isolation product isn't it really great everybody's at home okay let's
work on these astro projects we never finished very true and it is
to be honest it's one of those things it is the ultimate man shed
that you know it's if you've gone to the expense of buying
a decent telescope you might as well have somewhere decent to put it in
and then it's like having a flash car in a decent car
you want to put it in a garage don't you actually if you got spa skies
yeah sorry i mean this this is probably all ultimate woman shad too
of course we have a long non-sexual vehicle but it's just
it's starting to get a bit wet palmer this is your fault [Laughter]
that's right i knew as soon as i said to you open the dome yeah you're gonna get it right
yeah so leave this you can see this for me this will be closing as we speak
[Music] this is entertainment people yes it is
i reckon this is entertainment as well
there we go so that's slowly
it's not very noisy it's um no it sounds quiet
so it sounds amazing
and that's a brain sensors on these in the uk can't you yeah so let me just get in here so
that i don't wake up the young lads next door to be honest that was prime internet
entertainment all that needed was some kittens and we'd have been made
yes that's right no you can it's basically you can connect him to a
weather station which um we're currently working on so as an auto close if the dome loses power to the rotation
drive it automatically shuts the shutter within 15 seconds but you can change
duration um they're 100 remote i had planned to actually
assign control over the whole thing to anyone that wanted to go the problem is
that i'd have to do it through team viewer to the pc sure because i'm on a mac so i don't do computers
and that just crashes it so i'm not going to go there that's right
we have you know we have regular reports so a friend of mine that has one um
phoned me up and said oh you know i've uh i've just come back from a cruise
no well great because and a couple of my friends from
home texted me to say i'm missing some great dark skies so i sat in my deck chair got my ipad signed into my
observatory opened it slewed round i got an hour and a half on m42
and then shut the dome process the pictures and sent them over to them within a few hours
all from the deck of a cruise ship wow so you know you can technically sign in
from anywhere because it's basically a case of just team viewing or something it's exactly what grant does
with the spanish stuff but you can do in your garden
right so grant are you still uh are you still clouded out in spain
unfortunately yes it cleared for about three minutes during the break earlier and then it's cloudy again i see i see
okay well maybe we'll get maybe we'll get a whole again so uh at this point i think that uh we'll
go to mike simmons and then we'll jump to gary palmer who can show us some image process
well uh fine i'm not sure what you want me to talk about but i could use up the next
eight hours as you yeah so jump with what's been going on with you
and um you know you've spent uh you know more than a lifetime i think of doing
educational outreach and astronomy you brought you were the one that uh
really created the concept of the global star party uh with a hundred dollars of astronomy you had a million people go
around the planet uh participating in a massive star party uh as a cornerstone
project for the international year of astronomy in 2009. um i do not know how many people
uh were over in the history of awb how many people you worked with you might have
that number in your head i don't i'm not sure you know you are you are one of the
people that has affected and inspired and uh and has brought together uh more
people under under our sky than anyone i know wow i shouldn't let you talk i'm
embarrassed it's true you know what that means it means i'm really old i've been around a
while yeah so 100 hours of astronomy was really amazing and uh probably a million people
i know at least a half a million probably a million people look through telescopes in one night
uh all around the world and most of the countries in the world uh i had been doing international
astronomy before that starting with a uh an eclipse total solar eclipse in iran
connecting people in the united states and iran and i've been there many times
now uh also in uh iraq a couple of times and that's what led to astronomers
without borders to try and make these connections all over the world and before that i'd let's see la
astronomical society in the 70s i let that the griffith observatory ran
a big telescope there a bunch of people on this and probably looked through most
more people have looked through that telescope than any other in the world and
uh mount wilson observatory for the last 30 years and created a support organization there so i like to
make things like this but you know when i found out it was really going to iran and i i realized man they've got a
really young uh population and they're crazy about astronomy they don't have any resources
and i realize man i can just take what i've done and have a bigger impact here and then that spread to bigger things so
i don't ever get to look through a telescope anymore i just make it you know things for other people to look
through telescopes and in fact most of the observing i've done for the last 10 years it's been up in mount wilson on
the 60 inch which i i'm not going to complain about uh that that's good but i
don't you know i get outside and look up at the milky way i can see a little bit from here not lately i'm in southern
california so of course we've got smoke so that's what what i do now i'm not with astronomers
without borders anymore is with with it a long time as far as me i get distracted easily and
i go you know squirrels or whatever and but i have a lot of other plans now
um one was to lead tours to the upcoming eclipses which i've done for other
companies before we have a new company to do that and i was going to take people to tanzania to an educational
observatory to nigeria and other places because people always said man you go to these neat places i want to go with you
and i thought let's do that well it turns out that you know starting a tour company um in 2020 wasn't the best idea
so that's on hold but we'll see but it's going to happen in fact i invited a couple of people
that come along here at ole inca in nigeria and i think she lost her connection and then in bonte and
cameroon i think still on here and people do amazing things around the
world and i love sharing that with others because it's just like when we do outreach you want to share
what you're passionate about with other people i mean just look at this it's like john dobson used to say when he
first looked through a telescope for the first time he said man everybody's got to see this and that's what we've all
been doing for so long and sharing the rest of the world you know that's pretty cool too because you can
see through astronomy it's universal that people are doing this everywhere
they're just as passionate they're just as smart that you know they're really driven i've
been to places where they're doing astronomy outreach uh in a club they don't have a telescope
they talk about it they make posters and they don't have the opportunities they
don't have the resources so the um couple i've got so many things i've
gotten sucked into now i i can't even describe them all um
i will be working on continuing that work in a new organization it's going to have a
particular focus oh before the end of the year i'm sure that has to do with continuing that
connection between us all and supporting and so on recognizing that we're
all in this together we're all on the same planet and um trying to educate people about things
um i'll mention one other thing that hasn't been announced at all yet this is uh with the
partner who's waiting for me to have time to work on this it's a it's a website but it's reviews for
astronomy equipment and a place where people can find everything and where the industry can uh share their news there really
isn't a single place like that where you can get reliable things cloudy nights is great but it you know it's you don't
know who's doing what that's called astro gear today.com and
the website's live and i think it's polished up good enough for human consumption at this point
and so you can check that out so that's that's live right
that's live it is live now and if you find any problems with it let me know because
you know it's like with a new with a new site uh many other things that i'm i'm involved
with having to do with the space community i've also been involved with space space exploration
and other things but more than i can do that's true well you know you you've led a uh an adventurous
life uh you have you've gone to places mike that uh
many of us might not go to because of uh you know the you know perceived danger or whatever
but uh um you know uh you know i've always seen you as a brave soul in uh
educational outreach in astronomy and you have sacrificed uh
many things in your life to get across this message of one sky that we all share it is a message of peace
and it is a message of connectedness and a message of
uh seeing less of the differences between us you know and what we have in common and that that
is the that's the deep wisdom and philosophy of of what you've been doing and so you
know it's really um pleased to be a little part of that you know so that was that was great scott
you've been a big part of that you were on the board at the very beginning and
uh you've always had a big part in i mean you've been in astronomy for so long and not just selling scopes
i mean people on this program know and a lot of people in the audience know you've been not only a booster but a supporter of
people in the us and all around the world so yeah your your influence has been really
big and will continue to be and and i'm going to suck you into the things i'm going to as you know i already have a
little bit yes you already have a little bit that's right that's right i wish we could do more there are times where we
run into barriers ourselves you know but um uh we keep trying so yeah
barriers but you know you don't beat your head against the wall you go you take another path go
around oh absolutely absolutely there's plenty of things the ways to get there that's right and and um
and so even people that lived in in uh areas where things are really challenged um
you know uh inspiring them to be creative to work together with you to get a problem
solved is is really a big deal and and so that's uh that's where we're at
with that yeah well you know i i just have to say that um resources
the thing that made things like 100 hours of astronomy and astronomers borders and all the other things i've
done uh work was not money uh it was passion
and there i have never been involved in something that wasn't
all volunteers are almost all volunteers the awb had some staff
and you know something like a hundred hours of astronomy you i calculated what it
would cost paying amateurs five dollars an hour or something like that in order to put on this event and it was
millions of dollars yeah and we did it for practically nothing and all of us that spent a year of our lives
organizing this uh were volunteers and uh so it cost everybody but you know
what they're they're everywhere so that passion for astronomy is exactly the same that really does unite us
thank you mike that's great well gary um i think it's time to get
down to the nitty-gritty of some image processing uh you know we um we grab the
images when we can when it's clear and often often when you want to sit down and do a
a session uh like like this global star party that we're doing many times we have been clouded out but
sometimes sometimes we actually get some data um i think i
think chox was able to get a few frames here so we're going to come to him in a little while um
andreas you're out there in sweden you've been very very patient i i don't know how late it's getting out
there but we want to see some of your images um and uh you know john before we go you
said that you had a question for mike simmons mike uh i ran across of one of your
proteges i didn't realize i mean i've been a good friend with him do you remember mike urweiler or mark urweiler
mark oh gosh yeah mark mark was staying with us while he was going to college when he was yeah
well he's you know he's uh kind of we've reconnected i've known him off and on
for 20 years but we've reconnected over the last couple years and and he comes up to the nebraska star
party now and uh we were sitting around one morning here in july and we started talking about
where we've been what we've done and he started talking about mike simmons and i said well i know mike
and so he he uh yeah amazing story how you got him along and got him excited
about it he was passionate as could be lived two blocks from me yeah uh he was like 13 or
14 his father was wonderful drive him driving him up the lockwood valley where we built the observatory but this was in
the 1970s yeah and i used to pick him up and take him up to griffith observatory for the
las meetings and and so on and uh he's yeah fabulous guy well he's doing well
uh lives in a little town called o'neill nebraska uh he he spent uh how many years as a
physics chemistry teacher in kearney nebraska and then he retired here a few years ago
has uh built his observatory where the 1770 whatever that colder mirror was
he does public outreach in the little town of o'neill nebraska and just has a blast so he's got a good guy i'll tell
him hi when i see him next yeah absolutely and it's a weird feeling when the kids that you were
helping out are retired well yeah i know what you mean yeah i'm known as
the grandpa now when i go out and talk to kids but anyway okay enough on that for now yeah
okay all right so um gary i'm gonna give you the stage here
thank you share your screen yeah let me just run into sheen's
screen share and hopefully we can shrink this down and
move everything out of the way okay yeah i gotta get a pen and paper knowledge let's know
i'm just gonna close a couple of these boxes down because i was actually hunting around for
some reasonably clear solar but that isn't normally the coast in the uk we do get updates that
are nice um but what i wanted to look at was just processing up some sunspots and closer
up images uh taken in hydrogen alpha so this is the actual video
and as you can see by other standards or other country standards it's not the clearest video in the world
but with a bit of careful processing you can produce some quite good images from
something like this so um i know in a lot of places a lot of people go the scenes really bad or
there's cloud there um it's still worth a shot you know because the software these days takes into
account a lot of um bad scene and things like that the camera's frame rate
yeah if it's a higher speed um it will allow you to remove a lot of these frames uh that report from the
image so the idea is is to run through some of this and just really see what we come up with
so the first piece of software we're going to use for the video which i've already loaded it into
is auto stacker now when we've got these poor videos i have found that auto stacker three um
does fail sometimes on the stacking and that is because it's actually picking up the c and going past
the sun it's picking up our atmosphere um if you get a nice steady scene then
also stacker three is very fast these days and um it's very capable but just
finding that auto stacker two is a lot more stable um to do it
or to process images when there's a policy so what we need to do with this
is set a couple of things up so once the video is loaded yeah we're going to click on the improve tracking
click on the global and just get a few things set we also need to
really decide on how many frames now here because i'm working on a 4k screen it's only just showing but there's a
thousand and ten frames in the set so because the scene is poor we're going
to cut down on the amount of frames now normally i'd like a little bit more um the more frames that are there the
more depth the image has got but what we're going to do is stack 200 out of 1000 frames
so the first thing we need to do is find a reasonably good frame so as we move the slider through here
you can use your mouse wheel to scroll so some frame like that one there so we're seeing the structures inside
the actual sunspot and some more clarity in the light bridges that run through
once we've got that frame and we do hit analyze software goes away faster your computer
is the faster it works this is coming off of a hard drive so it will be a little bit slower than what it
is normally but it doesn't take long
the way it goes so you can already see it's taken into account on the edge here how the image has been moving around so
it's going to stabilize the main image itself already as i've said before the quality graph i
paid no interest to um in the uk it works well in other countries but it's
not really taking into account the the seeing conditions here
so what we need to do next is set this up on our alignment points and how many on images taken with this sort of size
of camera average planetary camera i use somewhere around 104. for the alignment points and then
just click place on the grid once they're placed on
we're going to send this into registex afterwards to do the sharpening or the wavelets or whatever
you want to call it so in this particular piece of software
if we have registex open we can tell it after it's processed to send it straight through so
we're going to stack the image and once it's stacked it automatically goes straight through to registex for us to
do a little bit more work on
that's it sorry we haven't enough room for stacks now
i'm gonna open up full screen and show the full image so that we can actually see what's going on so we can see the
stack line problems around the edge there we're not worried we're going to crop those off and when you get in this close you will
get some vignetting on the systems or you will get the camera and not quite see
and the movement on the edge of the image but we're not really worried on that what we're interested in is the sun
spot and any of the active area here down this area
so if we double tap on the sun spot that makes that area of the screen active
and then all we're going to do on this side is set up our initial layer and then we're going to adjust some sliders
to sharpen the image the main thing with the initial layer is to think that if i was imaging with a
smaller solar scope something like a 50 millimeter 60 millimeter maybe a pst
the initial layer would probably need to be on one if we run the initial layer up to two
and we start adjusting the wave that goes then we're going to get all sorts of problems with the image being over
processed or looked too sharp so for this image it's quite high-powered i know that it was about a
seven meter focal length that we went into the sun on this image and even in poor conditions um we're
still producing something there so we want an initial lower three
we set our wavelet skin to linear and then a wavelet filter of
d4 and then again i just use slider two on here don't touch the other sliders
just bring up about a third something like that have a look at the image and then we'll adjust so that's a little bit
over the top just gonna go back a little bit on there and then we click double
okay looks so easy when you do it
so just gonna go back a little bit more that was just a touch noisy i can certainly see the noise on my screen
anyway so just gonna go back a little touch there and we're gonna save that out so i'm
just literally gonna save it to the desktop just so it's nice and easy to find
you make this look so easy
and you don't even have these great skies that's the greatest part of this this is
about um making the most of what we've got so we're going to edit it this up in photoshop now
and we're just going to trim it up and make it look a bit nicer so i'm going to trim the edges off you
always get the stack lines there on nearly all images
so we crop that out and then we we've got a couple of ways we can go about this this depends on the
dynamics of the image if you want the image to hold a lot of scientific data then
really we just need to contrast this image or adjust the levels on it basically just to make it a little bit
darker and a little bit more contrasty and bring the areas in but what we're looking at here is
keeping the detail in and around the light bridge that would be more a scientific shot and then maybe
some sharpening so we could go into this um i always run a de-speckle on this
because the wavelets can leave some residual noise across the top and we can just run a real simple filter on this
just an unsharp mask yeah bring the sunspot interview
and then adjust it accordingly to whatever you want and just a bit of contrast again
use the legacy mode and that will pull out the white areas
so that would be more a scientific based image that that would be the simplest way to do that if you want something a
bit more artistic um and you like to have a bit more
uh depth in the image then you can use we can turn the image into
an 8-bit image and we can turn it into grayscale now with the grayscale um we can run in
there and use hdr toning all right now we can make the image look
a lot more dramatic yeah and we can bring back the over exposure here and
play around with these settings to our hearts content so we get what we like in the image the only thing with this is
you will darken up the areas here you could play around and mask them but with the light bridges you generally end up
getting into issues with really destroying the light bridges too much so you can play around with the
gamma levels in here and we could play around with the histogram if we wanted yeah so we could
get this in and we could put all the histogram around set some markers on it and play around with it and do really whatever we
want depends on what your your personal choices um
if we were just contrasting this up on the levels nice and straightforward
it's beautiful and then i'm just going to put a curve on it provide and i can see it
there we go
i have a question do you reckon you can do the same with pics inside or photoshop is really cool yeah
i do do pics inside but also i know i actually process a lot of my
images in pics inside and planetary images and things like that but a lot of people
you know can't afford it don't want to pay for it um i paid for it but i can't get these
results i have pics inside and uh seeing you
work around photoshop i think there's similar stuff in pixar you can do but but i
i guess you just have the nap for it um for years
each picture really takes um it's very hard to sort of uh set out
a routine because each image if you're imaging from a country like this is going to be totally different
that high clouds can cause you lots of problems with um so i'm just going to do the inspector
again and then we're just going to sharpen it i'm going to use astro image just as a plugin give me a slightly
nicer sharpen on the image i've already got some presets in there we're just going to run that on the
image that's it now if i wanted some coloring now it's
nice and straightforward we now go to grayscale and then we're going to adjust it
to duotone and here we can make our colors to whatever we want we can add these colors
in i use a tritone palette so we've always got black in the image and i generally use a light orange and a
light yellow but you could pick whatever colors you want literally yeah you can go through the color chart
go into yellows you could turn it for yellow green red the world's your oyster with the colors
um so we'll go back to something like that add the color in and then we need to
turn it back to an rgb image for photoshop to recognize it and now we can play around
we can adjust the color balance on this to really whatever we want
so i can have really whatever shade in i decide on this
now what you have to remember is if you're using the hydrogen alpha filter it's in the red area the more red you add in the less
detail you see so if i start adding in red here you'll see all of the details starting to disappear
so you have to be quite careful with the reds as you're adding them in there a little bit at a time
so really whatever choice you want and then just contrast the image we use a legacy contrast on it you'll be
able to deepen the colors yes you know i've i've often heard people
talk about the high cost of pix insight and uh just from hearing that uh you
know i thought that pixel insight might might must cost two or three thousand dollars or something
that's 300 bucks about it it's under yeah it is not expensive but
you know um it's quite a bit i i found this before you know people
spend five thousand dollars on um [Music] on equipment no problem whatsoever
but software they seem to be wanting to use free software like deep sky stacker and and other things
um now with coloring of the images there's lots of arguments on this and i do agree with
some of this i like to see color images but i also know that they hide lots of detail going on in here
and that is the problem with the color image yeah so if we go back on this yeah
and we just adjust the blacks in the image um just let me make it
rgb again yeah a minor zone is going to be more collected and just bring black in for a
second just darken it up a little bit and just contrast it there we go
we can start to see things like element bombs and other things around the sun spots and there's lots of
things going on in the image all the time but also image rotation certain cameras
are quite wide um and more letterbox style what we call letterbox style so they're very
um narrow in the way they display the image so sometimes it
is better to rotate the image around and the eye will give you a better view so
if we rotate this something like that yeah now we start to see the detail that's going on in the
image and i'll just shrink that to fit in the screen so now we can see the structures you can
see any of the element bombs hanging around and we can see some of this area here and you could go in there and just
brighten that very slight area in the in the sunspot so you can see some of the connecting structures
but that's a simple way of processing up uh some spots where you can retain some detail and make it look
like a carpet really is the easiest way of carpet
explaining that beautiful that's awesome just mastery
right there i i like having um uh you know gary palmer show image processing
because i i'm an old darkroom guy okay i used to love going into the dark room
developing film and developing friends and stuff and to see somebody that has mastered uh processing uh i i see that
as a as an incredible skill and uh you know to bring all that data out of of uh
uh you know those light frames that you're capturing through their through the telescopes and cameras is really
um quite a craft and so you know i really i got to take my hat off to gary he's if
he was benchmarked against uh uh you know the best artistic black and
white photographers of uh you know the 60s 70s and 80s uh he would be he would
be held right up there he's he's he's quite good so it's it's cool to do it live in front of
us here uh at the global star party okay uh
who have we not gotten to yet okay we've done steve and gary and and
and um uh we have not steve ibbitson what do you have to show
us out there you're you're muted
first yes i'll get the hang of it in about 20 years time
[Music] yes green uh
that one to start with i think this is what i do for a living
oh wow mobile plateau well i did until
earlier this year ah his skills not been there
and uh covered etc i haven't been
doing the planetarium unfortunately so that's what was
um but this was for school children right and mainly school children i've done
from preschool up to um senior citizens within the dome um
which can be interesting getting the younger and the older
dip over the zip the the sort of step on the edge of the dome
without tripping right we have to explain that sort of thing tripping hazards and stuff like
that um i can get i think my record was about
52 kids in there which was don't tell the insurance company um
the smaller kids in there um but generally a class of about 35 in there
probably the longest show i've done is about off the cuff
two hours in a rather small
space and it gets a bit still free after a while so yeah yeah so that's what i do
but what i want did want to show you actually was the um the images um
perhaps go to is that showing up
uh we're still seeing your your um ah right so do i have to stop
share and then reshare perhaps yes
share screen again need that one
yeah so what what inspired you to go buy a dome and and start doing this well
actually um many years ago when i was at school yeah
the chemistry kit teacher ran uh an astronomy club lunchtime one and
they also did evening classes and we sort of blagged our way in um we weren't supposed to be there
because we weren't old enough i see the evening classes
uh and dennis was my teacher my chemistry teacher in school and when he retired took early
retirement he started a mobile planetarium and the plan was
or our plan at the time was i was going to buy him out when he finished when he retired unfortunately i got my redundant
from what i was doing which was civil engineering
before dennis was ready to retire so i bought my own dome and started that
21 years ago this year okay i've been doing it a while and basically
it's been semi-retirement for me because to be honest i very very rarely
call it work that's right because you love it i enjoy doing it
actually some of the kids is brilliant that's some questions they ask because
they they're not um not inhibited like we are when we get older so they'll ask
anything that's what they want to know which is great that's right
that is cool yeah yeah so it keeps you i think you know when i
interact with um uh kids in teaching and astronomy no matter how old
those kids might be uh you know i find that um you can see them kind of opening up
you know and uh uh you know their their minds are filled with wonder and uh and
you can tell they're actually in actually really engaged in learning something and that is it's it's
fantastic to see that happen and it helps you also learn more you know so it's it's a
it's a very much a uh especially if they ask you something you don't know
right and you turn now you say that's right they ask you you just say you don't know right you
ask to get the classes details or school details and say
i don't know but i'll find out and i'll let you know that's the best answer it's uh that's it
yeah i don't know but i'll figure it out and come back to you here's the worst answer pretending that you know and
making something up and then that there's always someone in the crowd that knows the real
answer correct that's why you got to be humble and just
keep on learning that's right you don't know you don't know you could have a fifth grader absolutely blow you away so
yeah don't pretend to be
um any good at solar imaging
but i do tend to do full discs i find it easier doing than than doing the high-res especially with the small scope
i use so this was from earlier this week the ninth so
a few uh filaments
a tiny little spot there i think down at the bottom and a few problems around the
edge that's a false colour of course
very tranquil days with the sun these days yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you can
say that well there's a little activity right there uh yeah when you when you play with different colors and contrasts and flip things
around a bit you can see a bit more around the edge
and of course when you zoom in then something like that i did i did have a little tinker zoom in yeah that's cool
yeah that's what i did and i'll stop sharing with this one i'll wrap this up quickly
share speed and i'll just show you what i've been playing with from
can you say that no you can yeah that's a crescent c30
yeah yeah ngc six eight eight caldwell
jumping up jill rigg i was hoping to
do a bit of live stuff with from tonight that's um
how did you know whenever you broadcast sorry do you broadcast your live streams yeah
you said you said you did you have a dual rig do you do live shows um i have done in the past i i did stuff on
uh was it night sky network networks that's why i usually some years ago yeah i used to do that
but solar mainly solar um but i
done a few bits with youtube doing the entire mercury transfer from
about five meters from where i'm sat now
yeah oh sorry not the entire one uh because um
the roof nebula got in the way
this one this is a combination of the old um fs
type fs102 with the qsi camera on it and the
william optics 132 with the old sx 694 camera on the back
and there's a couple of nights worth of data there and and hopefully
i get something reasonable out of it when i finished because that's just a that's just a stack
i haven't done any real processing on that yet that looks pretty good as a stack so i might have already
i might have overblown it at the bottom the the subs might have been too bit too long but you never know about they'll
pull it back a bit it's good to be self-critical i think correct that's what i'm working on at
the moment so if anybody wants a planetarium shell um
i do very reasonable rates but for you guys in the states or down in australia the
travel might be a bit on the expensive side might be maybe
that's why we're doing the global star party exactly exactly that's right no plane tickets here that's right
it's very cool that's beautiful and then okay thank you well thank you and uh i'll stop this year i think okay i'll go back
to you okay thank you sounds very good okay uh
chucks shailendra what do you get to share with us
hey so i've managed to get some clear skies um just for some of the guys that probably
don't know me um i've only been doing this for four or five months and just
certainly can't take this camera with me um so i've only just started getting going
and i've had a couple of issues over the last couple of days okay can you
yeah we can see your screen 51 minutes down there
it's going now i was having pulse guiding issues but that seems like now that's m51
yep great great so i'm doing three minute subs
uh-huh jobs do you have so far uh so far we're on
the sixth one at the moment okay on this one but this is the second one i've started so
i've got six from before so it's not looking too bad at the
moment the skies seem to have cleared up um i've managed to do a little bit more on
my image processing and i've just been sort of looking around
the sky seeing what there is because i'm probably on less than libby's
scale at the moment really um i don't really know where anything is so i'm using stellarium to help me
figure out where i am and what's up there and also the mobile phones sky tracker apps
so there's m57 that i took i have ten subs without docks or flats
just processed in cyril uh i've zoomed in a little bit on that one
and then that's my m27 that i took but that was in a ball four so i'm in a ball tools six stroke seven
at the moment so that's the only one i've managed to get there because otherwise clouds came in
water went this is uh m101 this one i did a couple of days ago
oh yeah subs yeah so yeah uh
and there's my andromeda and that's my only copy one of the nicest ones i've got
um an m51 i didn't really process very well so
i'm waiting for these ones to come out and see where i can get with the processing on that sure
so but i'm only doing light processing stretches uh curved stretches and level
adjustments because i've really looked into anything else at the moment
um so fingers crossed i'll be able to get some good data tonight and go from there yeah so that's great
now uh shylandra it seems that you really enjoy imaging
galaxies is that so or or do you just like to image anything uh yeah galaxies i've tried some nebulas
i've tried the wizard nebula um but i think i only got 20 shots of that one um
and to be honest i didn't really get any nebulosity so my camera's not
modified that's what i got from the wizard nebula that's just a tiff
file so i didn't get any nebulosity in there really i tried to pull some out um
and i don't think i got very far so i think somebody i put it on facebook
and a lot of people said to me that i need to do i need to get a lot more data for the wizard nebula
so that's m27 was one that i wanted to get which was i googled you know the top
10 um beginner astrophotography targets and then i started to try and tick those
off a great target to work on uh when you start for sure yeah cheers so um i've just been trying
to figure out what targets are gonna fit in my field of view i didn't think
m57 was going to be that small and i've zoomed in on that so that's what it looks like really i tried the capsid nebula a
couple of days ago as well and i think that was even smaller than that so yeah i've been entering a big huge field and
uh you know so sometimes uh even if you've got something small
there is faint nebulosity around those objects as well you know it's if you just keep shooting keep shooting keep
start stacking you know you're gonna eventually it seems like you can almost shoot
anywhere in the sky and it's hard to avoid uh getting into some nebulosity
somewhere you know yeah i think because i'm using a modified camera as well i
think that probably doesn't help um so that'll be next on the list
just getting a really cool camera you get the cool camera you get uh some
narrowband filters and uh are you uh how close are you to the
to the city um about 20 miles out from london
okay so it's a portal six is what it says on the flo map um
so it's fine yeah it's not too bad um some of my images have been coming out white
recently because i think art since covid's finished there's a lot more light pollution
around um neighbours turning their lights on garden lights going on and cars going
past before i could image and after 10 o'clock there was no cars going past at
all whereas now i was out there what two o'clock in the morning and there was cars going past
all night really so that's made it a little bit more of a challenge just to check the data before i process it but
that's fine there's other ways to do it just takes a little bit longer right um you've got a rung coming up now yeah
so that the whole area of orion's up by it still at 2am um and with the knights
extending the on you you know you're going to find loads and loads of things in that area that you
can image and you'll get a lot of detail for short uh exposures yeah using any imaging
system really it's a really great target to start with yeah that's on the list
i think if you go there even with a color camera you'll still get lots of detail in it um
the flame all of those areas around there um and they're good practice things they're
good things to work on where you're trying to keep the core or the trapezium area of maybe orion
nice and then bring out the subtle detail and the outer edges so yeah that is on the list definitely
orion um just i couldn't see it yet um i figured out on stellarium using the
date and time and forwarding by about four or five o'clock i'd be able to see it um so i might wake up for
that and see yes at the moment still that's the only
the only problem but um it's there you know there's lots of other targets around it even the uh
rosetta nebula will fit in that field of view that's up a bit higher
um that's going to start coming up soon so there's a lot yeah rosetta is i've been
trying to get rosetta because it's um over there somewhere um and saturn and
jupiter because they're over there but i live in the middle of a forest so
those big pine trees have just blocked my field of view completely
i need to find somewhere that i can go where it's a little bit so i've joined the local astronomy club
um because this is my my second star party ever and they've both been virtual with
you guys so next step is join your local astronomy
club try and go and learn from those guys as well and
find some local sites that i can shoot from rather than front or back of the garden
yeah but even in the light polluted areas you can still get a lot i mean i used to live literally 15 miles outside
london not far from where you are we were imaging all the time there it's
just about cutting exposure times down into account about the light pollution or using different filters
uh and most of the targets we're getting some of the phonetics you're not gonna get
but most of the general popular targets you'll get you get some good detail on it
yeah i mean i tried spindle galaxy yesterday and even on a three minute image i could see it i it was quite
clear um i've done m81 and i've got some better shots of that but again
just clouds you know i was sitting there and i was thinking oh look it looks great
and 30 minutes into shooting all i heard was ping ping ping and i was like
[Laughter]
is to cut the imaging times down and that is to run around the 60 seconds and
take more shots so again light pollution coming on to the center
and that doesn't matter what what camera you're using that is the real ways account
counteracting um if you get an old camera one of these cmos cameras you can run 30 second
images and just take more or more of those uh exactly and your data is there but you get less
problems for that light pollution filters as well um but i i watched a
couple of videos on filters and um again it's a minefield there's so many out there
i think there were cns ones and l pro and god knows what else
is the cls filters everybody jumps for those and if you've got um like canon cameras you know dslr
cameras they really get hit by the cls filter and you're actually removing a lot more data
and that's the the problem um i mean when i was in london i used one
of my favorite filters was the bada
l pro i think it was um it was something like an all-pro filter
it's a neodymium ml pro filter um and that was really good you could use that on any camera
um okay fantastic filter but i have found some of these other ones coming out over the last few years
quite harsh they really do hit the coloring um and then you can't draw anything out you've
got your object there but it's really quite faint so
i always have the same thing with equipment if you're not sure on it have a look around when somebody suggests it type it into google and then
go to images and the first 20 images via the product and all of the other images will be of
the what have been taken and google is searching all the different forums and groups and things like that and you can
make your own mind up there because what's good for one person isn't good for the next person that's the the
key thing with this you know um their skies are different their equipment is different or their knowledge is
different in their processes so it's really a case of having a good look around on the websites and seeing what comes up
for these different um filters yeah cheers thanks i've been looking on
um was it astro being i think people's images um
one of those um and i've been doing exactly that looking through and i think octalong l pro seems to come
out quite um favoritely which looks fine
i've got one here i find for me my scars are quite dark so it counter balances
that sometimes yeah so then it's actually removing data but as can still
clip light pollution here and sometimes i've run with the cheapest light version filter possible
literally a 12 pound sky watcher 20 pound sky water filter and we just put that on the
camera and it knocks it back i mean you're getting the images coming through
um
yeah yeah well as you know i'm still using beginner gear you know it's not going to
yeah we're all there yeah i think the easier thing now is with the internet and with social media
um you've got the information there you know whereas before a lot of it was costing money and trial and error you
know and i bet there's a few people on the panel here that have bought lots of things over the years that they they
wish they hadn't and you know it didn't get used and it got sold on you know um all right when i
went under the bed or in the cupboard um you know that that's part and parcel but
very you know get the information on stuff
and get good information on the stuff right yeah yeah gary i i'd like to go to
uh waiting they have images they'd like to share uh who would like to go first
i wouldn't mind okay all right here you go all right uh so
um coming back a bit to the uh subject of uh shorter exposures in light
pollution i had the problem for a couple of years i was living in montreal and then in
the neighborhood of montreal in canada so i have like a portrait nine sky at first and then a portal
seven sky which was a little improvement so i've dabbled around and uh i didn't
join any astro club until until my third year in the hobby of course i read all over uh so
i started learning on my uh how to to produce images from from light blue skies and i figured out that
well i figured out with a lot of help and reading and some figuring out i figured out that
short exposures would be the way to go uh for for light polluted skies
and i've produced some quite decent images out of live sessions that i used to
do on night skies networks as mr steve ebbett's uh was talking about
earlier and
if i can share my screen [Music] and the important part to remember is are
not more than 10 to 20 minutes integration of data meaning that i'm using eight second
exposures four second exposures 15 x 15 seconds exposures that's it and these
are all shut off some alt azimut mount so you don't yeah so you don't
have the rotation because of the short exposures uh getting involved
uh of course over the time i've i've gradually increased my gear even if it's still ah it was still a 14 inch meme
back then and i also have a raza 8 inch on a azimuth eq6 from skywatcher
but the results are quite surprising when you get the stack out and you go into pics
inside and you play a bit with it and uh this is what this is the kind of stuff i was getting
uh i know everybody's seeing that right now this m27 everybody everybody knows that
uh so this is basically a 10 minute total exposure integration i mean for eight seconds
and i got yeah i think it's 800 seconds a little bit more than uh
is that it 896 seconds of eight second exposures
and this is the result i got of course uh this is no gary palmer stuff
you don't get all the outside nebulosity and everything but for a live show to inspire people it's it's pretty good
you know yes it's really good there's a lot of nice detail in there and
such short exposures um but this does fall back to what i've
said in the past that you get what you pay for in the software and correct
you know programs like pixed inside are just so powerful this is what you get things like this
five years ago with that amount of exposures was really really hard and right now this software is allowing
you to do that correct and and uh depicts insight one uh it's a program we use for that one and to be honest my
routine it's literally i know you don't do much of routines because the sky has changed a lot like you said and and if
you want to be perfect you need to adjust every time that's basically running a routine of 10 steps
takes me about 15 minutes per image after the night i'm done so the live image doesn't look like that it's pretty
close but it's not like that then i run it to my 10 steps and i get this result and i always thought it was satisfying
to run like marathons of deep sky objects like 10 15 per night
so this is basically i think what i'm going to show you today is about maybe three days worth of data so the next one
is the the c4 cowbell 4. not not so much to see there as usual
gary would tell probably that you can get a lot more uh data out of there but the bright
center of the actual c4 is still there and it's still another 10 minutes of data
so for fake net velocity skirt exposures are not necessarily the best but you still can get the core of the nebula
which is still great to see if it's the first time around but for galaxies it's actually pretty
convincing like the next one i have is that i think it's the deer lick c30
this is what i got after 15 minutes of that wow that's pretty cool i love galaxies look
at all the struck yeah and the thing with the structure it's the trick is there is okay short
exposure won't let you go as deep but since you're negating all the the
mount movement the imperfection of your mouth the wind the vibrations
your image turns out to be pretty sharp when you're running short exposure you see a lot of structural data around the
center of the galaxy there yeah and that's and it's not data it's really because it's just sharp because there's
no movement almost no vibration no seeing well of course you still have seen in your in
your way but not as much as if you're exposing over three minutes right
what camera oh yeah that's a good point uh if you want to do short exposure photography
you really got to go down the sensitive way i was running a asi 294 pro
cool yeah right and i know i've just checked out and they're probably putting out a moto camera next
year or this year that's going to be some fun as well because i also do appreciate that multiple images hugo um
there's a person asking a question he wants to know what the time on the subs there on this particular galaxy this one
was eight seconds i swear to god brother only eight seconds ten seconds how many
concepts it was uh 150 subs let me check maybe i have it in
the details this is a flicker it's a free one 107 frames
wow okay off of f6 system at 14 inch
and the gain was probably at 350 on the camera it's of course i shoot darks and flats
everything but i keep it short really it's just so interesting at the moment
to be around where this technology is here that you're right it's getting down it's getting there it's really getting
there and for now the 294 pro is the best uh one-shot caller you can figure out
for achieving these these images in like 20 minutes right 15 minutes or whatever
again here i think it's m98 i'm not sure uh just a small image i got after about
100 frames as well 101 frames here i don't remember the exact call out
maybe it's m98 i'm not sure now here are these are all shot in all towns
yep because of eight seconds exposure you don't even have to worry the the the
rotation of the image at that focal length at that point in the sky
it doesn't it doesn't overlap on one pixel with eight seconds right
so so basically whatever you point in the sky you have different timings that you got to respect
sure uh and and uh the higher i think the faster you need to shoot and the
lower you need to shoot a little bit longer you can you get to shoot a little bit longer these are all shot about at 40 degrees
so so i could go eight seconds and you would never see a star uh actually full field rotation sorry
so i got a couple of these i'll just pass them through this is m98 actually sorry
some decent amount of detail for something like that this m94 really liked it
the structure is there because you're doing short exposure you got really sharp images but the external structure
the the deep stuff of course you don't get so what i'm doing now actually is i i've moved up in the world i'm getting
uh rigs that can expose for longer i haven't had the time yet and i want to do hybrid pictures of the
core shot at the shortest short exposure and the outer
structure shot and longer exposures to get some of these details out sure but
slow process i'm still learning i'm doubting myself said m98 a couple
times but anyway that might be it i should have taken them down i didn't have the time over here yeah 3751 we all
know this one this was also all these were eight second shots not about the hunt yeah
that's a spectacular shot that's one i think i want a little bit more maybe 200 frames i just want to
check yeah i got 200 frames on that one of eight seconds that's about 1600 seconds which means in our case
not more than 20 minutes yeah actually no actually it's 25 minutes
sorry it's really beautiful
so if you have if you don't have an eq and you can track this guy my point is
you can get something done if you got the right camera for it right this is a pillow nibbler i believe uh
pillow galaxy sorry uh this hamburger same same technique
everything just fast exposures yeah a bunch of them
a couple of twins here in the virgin area
m106 a little bit higher in sky uh i got some air glow here from the game as you can see
bar in it really nice it's good it's all right it's good it's good m101 but it's a really close shot so i
should have went for 15 seconds on this one i'm missing some some some uh
some of the deeper stuff here there's still lots of detail in this it
is there's a lot of detail it's very sharp like but but the exterior is not all there but
i'm very pleased with that and it's very satisfying to do that like 10 images at night right right
what you might like to hear is is that there's actually a 294 mono on the horizon i know i know that's what i was
saying oh yeah i i got a little bit uh i got some sweats from seeing that the
other night you could actually run over these in the future with the 294 mono
yeah and just add the color and go back over the top of them with a longer luminance and that that would a
lot more detail in them that would definitely do the trick for sure
i got a couple more and then i'll leave you guys this one i really really like the structure in it that i got the m64
yeah that's the black guy that's the great yeah i love that uh i love that so short exposure have their shortcomings like
you can say but uh definitely sharp sharp sharp sharp subs you get from that
even on long exposures it's not an easy target though but when you do get it right it's
amazing how far out the galaxy goes because quite awfully
about double what i got there from what i saw yeah and but i wouldn't get the same core detail
from trying these long exposures okay or well with my experience i think maybe
some some some really really good guys out there with the best best of the best uh mountains out there may be able to get
it but hugo i i you do galaxies what do you
think about when you when you're imaging these distant galaxies and is it about distance is it about
what's uh wait is it what gets you why are you doing this
i'm gonna go back to one of the earlier speakers and saying uh it's something that brings us all
together in the sense that you can look out there and figure out that we're just
you know nothing really and and it brings me peace to know that
i got good hopes for a human race but at the same time when i look at these galaxies out there i'm like okay we're
probably not the only life out there so there's there's hope everywhere right that's right it's something that i
really think is um mind-blowing to know that there is no way there's no slow balls chance in hell
that we're alone out there so so from the drake equation or if you guys
like physics i don't know uh i'm a guy that likes physics in general and astrophysics is a major thing that i
like to read about and i'm convinced that there's things out there so just to image their home
from very very very very far away this is really fun for me and i i i have a
lot of emphasis on galaxies like you said but i do other things i got orion in shots that are
pretty good later on yeah beautiful thank you
no worries thank you you tell me when you're when i have to be done with my images because i cut a couple of these like that
this is the needle okay i think i'm going to stop the galaxy around i'm just going to show you one last thing that i really love uh
planetary nebulas are easy to shoot also in short exposure okay uh you can get
really interesting oh maybe just eagle first so that was uh i think that's eight
seconds as well wow that's 84 frames that's great
not perfect but it's pretty good it's not about that it doesn't really matter whether it's it's perfect you
know even when you've been doing it a long time and you you've got the best equipment in the world
um yeah you can still look at other images and somebody's got a clearer sky than you or something else
oh you know that image is better than what i've taken you know so it's about what you enjoy
oh man i enjoyed the process everything about it the process of gathering the process
of playing with the image i try to keep it as scientific as possible you were talking about earlier
about scientific and being more artistic i try to keep it more scientific but
the process itself is just suiting it's just relaxing to me to like acquire old photons from who knows where right
yeah definitely something i enjoy that's right that's so cool
so that's eskimo we got in north right and that's m13 that was talked earlier
i really like the short exposures these ones are four seconds because four seconds you really should go in there
and find the detail of the uh sorry
and go for the detail of these small stars in there not the most unblurry image i've done but
it's all right and i wanted to finish with the
m42 because i i read somewhere and i read an article and
about hubble finding the proto planets or the protoplanetary disks around some
stars there are seven of them apparently in m42 and i i i managed to uh go in
there and with short exposures i think two or four seconds oh this is what i was talking about
yeah and i and i figured out to how to actually observe those
protoplanetary disks and uh they're right here oh wow
look at that so i don't know if you see as well i'm seeing them but uh
definitely and i i counter checked hubble images and i was like okay that's that's crazy that
okay the gear i'm using for this one is a 14 inch of course
it's not cheap gear it's some good gear but but at the same time the fact that i can reproduce some
images that are not closed but good enough to to to identify these
protoplanets to be just mind-boggling the reason why most people don't get
this is because they're more interested in the wings of orion
you know when you look at like say over the next four months all of the orion images will start coming out they'll be
all wide shots correct yeah and most of the callers are white but
i want to read comments here guys um from the chats uh
um eduardo simone says he actually i actually agree with that statement the
process is just relaxing uh book davey says that's part of what gets
me it takes thousands millions billions sometimes uh billions of years sometimes
for that light to get caught up in my telescope and those photons are mine alone so it's you know people
have like this the sacred moment of communion a lot of people they don't
know how to articulate it or they don't want to say it or whatever but
they they actually have these uh these special moments that you know
with their telescope alone in the dark or or yeah their their mind can slow
down a little bit and they're you know doing their astronomy and uh it's definitely a me time for sure
yeah yes and and to be able to share it with images is very special so i don't really
share my stuff and you are right now you're sharing the whole world
thank you that's the ufo i like that one as well yeah yeah that's cool
anyway so so that's pretty much it for what i had to show tonight it's just
showing that there's different ways to get these photos on pictures uh short exposure photography with the
new technologies like gary said are really coming up the alley and there's possibilities that are going to
be incredible and working from with norm with these fast big huge telescopes at
f3 f35 yeah in the next two years right now i'm i'm
working i work for norm and i also work i'm a contractor i work as a consultant in system
engineering for some other companies in the middle east and and uh in the next two years i'm
going to try that technique but one of one of uh norm's telescopes and when i do i'll make sure to warn you
guys okay you'll have to come back and show us absolutely thank you man
no worries i'll give you back to mike now all right and we're going to uh we're
going to move on um
let's see here i can i can stop that here we go and we are there you go
all right so um andreas
you have the stage love to see some of your images
yeah i think you invited a lot of your friends to watch um uh
swedish commune and we have a facebook page called us astro pixlr and
that all the uh oh they interested in astronomy
gather there to share their work yeah that's cool and uh i should i start to shoot with an
explorer scientific key data and move on with a celestron with a hyperstar
and i shoot from my balconies one to the south and one to the north
and i shoot with different kind of set of cameras the latest is
2600 pro and 940 pro with
all kinds of opti-long filters i see so now i
share my pictures
this is the latest process i did from portal eight nines guys
over stockholm yes
and this is the m third
m33 triangulum i shot a couple of weeks ago now we're just
we're just seeing the smaller thumbnail images right now okay
you're probably just sharing the wrong screen you have dual screen setup do you okay
run in that problem all the time with job
yeah you can see when you go to share you can see all the different options for sharing
do you only see uh but do you only see your thumbnails i see the thumbnails okay we're seeing
your folder basically if you want to drag your image back in the other screen you probably see it
still back at the thumbnails okay that's the only screen i've got when i'm
sharing uh maybe just minimize that thumbnail folder and the image may be behind it
don't worry i run into this problem myself
here we go that's different let's do it front yeah
there we go there you are very nice well nine skies since over
stockholm 1.5 hours with the hyperstar system wow that's beautiful and you have a 2600
pro camera mm-hmm i don't know about that camera you tell me
this uh new uh solar imax backlit sensor so it's a very sensitive pickup
faint detail and works very well in the overstock come with the outer lung elk
filter so that was shot to a filter galaxy through filters are hard man that's a good job
yeah and this short couple of weeks this is the m31
triangle galaxy very nice beautiful 1.5 hours i shot
with this one and you have you said portal eight or nine skies
yes wow i i live outside city core and stockholm so i
shoot from balcony so i have uh hidden views i have um
i have a custom stellarium that i have fixed so i
can see how much integration time i can have
i have photographed um the new stellarium with a panoramic view so i
can not know how much sky time i can have yeah that's great results for m33 is a
very faint galaxy it's very large and disperses the shot with the earlier camera this is a 294
pro nice well i started uh i have only
done this for uh one only less than two
years portal eight or nine i mean you could just see the brightest stars naked eye
that's about it so that's that is really impressive yeah
this is ox this is uh sombrero galaxy showed with the hyperstar system
but i'm gonna go revisit the shoot with the native f7
in later next year when it comes up
i do this is all shot with the ellen hall's filter
last year so this is the flame and horseshoe
nebula i think is two hours through uh ellen
hull's filter with a 294 assist and 294 camera with the optilong helen hans filter
spectacular and this is thor salmond also shot with a hyperstar
system with ellen hall's filter that's pretty two hours of integration and that one
gonna revisit that one as well uh-huh
this is near-wise through mlc clouds shot with uh
explore scientific over stockholm here when that visited wow i really like the effect that it gives i like yeah i like
the clouds and uh it is it's spectacular uh very artsy
this is called uh this is called our earth moon you shoot two exposure then
you blend it together call it earth shine moon when you take uh one exposure of the one side um
one overexposed on the other side and then you do a gradient filter to blend the team together and then you
put the shades matching up and then you have a earth shine moon really i really have to
try one of these it always looks great i see them not too often sometimes pop up on the different
forums and always amaze some planetary work this is mars from
two days ago i think okay with this shot with my c8 with uh
with uh with uh um
the don't call borla it called a teleview powermate
that's about 4000 millimeters shot through a mono camera with filter
wheel and you're pretty high up there too it's impressive
and this is neptune and triton also shot with
filter wheel on [Music] a couple of weeks ago
then i have uh uranus also shot with the [Music]
same system also filter wheel i think we see ovarian up there yeah
and then i do in the summer i started to do some uh solar work so i got um
h alpha from daystar and i use my explorer scientific
to shoot on the sun nice very impressive then
i mainly use pics inside and use uh photocop on
lightroom for uh processing so that's uh you use the quark
chromosphere right yeah crop and crop and chromosome yes really nice with the explorer
that's what i used to do as well i uh set the settings to uh
you can set it in two ways other than the prominence or the other
way so you can see one more on the other so i connect to the metal so i get uh
data from both it's really nice to have a half filter that can do uh both
prominence and and and surface detail and that you can pair it with any refractor you want so i used to have the
80 millimeter explore scientific triplet uh it was a great great combination
this is i film some prominence this is i take over expose some and
then the the you can see
more detail when you do that and painted out the black for uh for a nice
viewing yeah that's really nice to compress this it's a trick to a
trick filter to to capture the
sun storms and if you expose it and film it and stack it and then you can process it
yeah it really gives a good effect nice effect this is um
this is um masculine attraction this one high
that's one of my earliest sound photography
this is also shoot with a h alpha so i mainly use uh
photocopy and lightroom too with the custom presets
that i've fixed on my own
so um saved them and then i also do some
high power luna work that others do with the mono camera
and shielded and stack it down um process it in the lightroom to
see high power 4000 millimeters on my c8 system
nice so uh this is uh i can share this is my um
it's my location shoot from my balcony wow this is really portal eight or nine
skies eight or nine yes that's right this is my uh
celestron with cdx standing in my living room okay oh yeah
nice rig yeah how's the girlfriend liking this one
and then one day i'll pick up the star link this is the star link i shot with one
frame yep
we have terrible weather we have very unstable weather so we have uh wind at
all it's wind everywhere it's very unpredictable well there
it's most of the time very cloudy so i get maybe
one two one two two times a month with the clear
skies that i can shoot on photograph very similar to the uk then
see i'm not right i'm lucky and i'm in canada i say i'm lucky but when i look at other
people in australia or texas or i'm like okay i'm not that lucky but still
you're making the best use of what you got you know so that's what we need to do that's great yeah i found that the
hyperstar system works best for me because i have a limited sky time
that andromeda i only have a couple of weeks to shoot it and
because of my location and then i have to quickly get there gather some data and
process it correct and this is what i always say short exposure photography go with low f
numbers that's the best way to go you get a lot of image in la in short times with the high fast ratios like
that yeah i shoot at f 1.9 so i get um
it's uh 25 times faster than f10 so i get a lot of
data and with the right combination filter then i got some really nice data and with the
new 2600 camera i get some even more detail and
more data i get from earlier so um technology
right so this is my sky and then we have in sweden we we only we have
you know we call it mid-summer from uh from may to august you come to do
astrophotography it is so bright you can see the stars there so that i turned to
a little work a lunar and uh some work right and then i shoot the deep sky i'm
planetary at the rest okay andreas thank you so much thank you
uh we're going to turn back to um uh carol org from the astronomical
league uh and uh he's uh he's gonna ask question number two um
and uh so i'm going to put the spotlight back on you carol [Music]
do we have some information about uh winners from the last star party yes we do we have winners from
the uh star party number six which was on september 4th
okay question we asked what was the new observing award approved at the annual
2020 council meeting had four words two of the words start with a l the winner is drum roll dusty hack
haskins hms and the name of the club was alternate
constellation observing programs so that was that one
then the uh the the winners from uh
number seven yep uh first one is what is the name of the
astronomical league observe program created for kids 10 and under the winner
is white frontier p-r-u-n-t-y yeah and the
name of the program is sky puppies very popular
yeah congratulations and the second one on that one is what city and state will the next astronomical league conference alacon
take place the winner to that one is uh matthew walsh and the answer is of course
albuquerque new mexico first week of august up to 2021. yeah
and [Music] get the third one as well okay
which was who is well known who's well-known name appears in the header of the astronomical police library
telescope entry form and everybody should know this one well when i say it you had to kind of dig on
this one but the answer is jack horchemberg the winner is
see love so i didn't get the first name but it's c less so congratulations to everyone
lewis chuck lewis right yeah must be congratulations chuck that's great so
now why don't we do the second question for tonight
and the second question is what astronomical league observing
program is named for a wrench for the party race
astronomer what astronomically observing program is named for a french
astronomer french astronomer okay all right so send in your answers email them into kent at
explorescientific.com
great yep and we'll have the next question just a little bit later okay
we'll do that okay all right so um we are going to take a 10 minute break
okay uh we still have uh john johnson who's going to talk about the nebraska
star party jerry hubbell is going to be with us cesar brollo is set up in argentina
right now and i'm not sure if he's getting live images or not he often does um
so we will uh we'll come back uh and uh john you're you're next up after this
this break here so excellent sounds good yep
so let me do this and do this
here we go
well i will just let the dogs back in and it's still cloudy out there
it's raining here now you put the mochas on it we had a few spots earlier i'm glad
shut up when they did but nothing he's hardly wet the ground
it cleared in spain for 20 minutes and i've got 15 minutes stacked on pac-man
excellent that's cool yeah with the weather going as it is
steve and uh sorry change camera and uh telescopes to one of these uh ultra fast
things as well hey me uh steve huh
but one of them wrasser things with a tiny tiny backfall focus
i used the 11 inch one of those and it was it was stunning it was very very
good i have to say i really enjoyed using the eight inch because you just don't need much mount
at all for that yeah just don't have to worry about guiding and
i'm looking at um forward to putting that 2400 on that and i think um
that's going to be a blistering imaging system fast imaging system
i think it's going to be the way to go that sort of thing especially with cmos
i know i've been hanging on with the ccds uh and they're still inside
i think we've got a little bit of an edge still but i think they're getting towards the end
of the day
good to see everybody here i don't know how many of you know me i'm jerry hubbell um
the vp of engineering for explore scientific um
i don't know that i've met all of you but uh i'm my internet wasn't down earlier so i came in late
you might want to turn your mic up a bit jerry you're very quiet oh no yeah it's because i'm muted
i thought i was muted can you hear me now yeah we can hear you guys
oh it was faint earlier okay maybe i thought i might be muted but i guess not that's yeah
jerry where are you where do you uh where are you at i live in virginia in virginia okay um
you know where uh fredericksburg is i'm west of there about 20 miles
yeah okay and a place called wilderness virginia which is a pretty famous civil war
area around here so yeah it's been a few years since i was
back there i um i did 30 years in the navy and a lot of
the last few years i was commuting back to washington dc and
spots around down there did you do any work at the naval surface
weapons laboratory or anything or or uh i'm i was with the naval sea systems
command my last tour i was a reserve but yeah but i was on the
inspector general staff there for nav c and i can't remember all i mean we went to
various sites around the dc area
i was i was never in the active military but uh i was actually
i've considered myself being in the nuclear navy because i went to work at the nuclear stations here in in virginia
when early after i got my degree in electrical engineering and so i was the first civilian
hired at the planting instrumentation engineering department all the other people were were navy
people practically all the people at the plant were all navy uh you know so i felt like i was in the
navy when i started working at the plant oh yeah well see i the better part of my civilian side of my career
was at fort calhoun nuclear power station although i was not in the nuke navy oh okay i was surface line out of
san diego for about four and a half years all over the pacific
was involved with the evacuation of vietnam and
so yeah i've got uh i spent my whole career work in nuclear instrumentation and control systems
protection systems oh yeah all the stuff uh with the nuclear you know i was
fortunate to have a pretty diverse career and started out
at the plant as a technician and worked my way up to the through the engineering departments and went to design
engineering the last part of my career i did i worked on plant computer systems also
scada systems so i've got a i've got a very fortunate to have a pretty diverse
uh work experience well then my kind of the middle years of
my navy stuff um i was in england probably once a year
for about uh eight years running and i was over there when we had the desert storm conflict uh
oh you uh you brett's i i don't remember meeting any of you i did attend a few of the back then what
was called the junior baa meetings um that's what's called the society of
popular astronomy or something like that
i remember meeting robin's schedule he and i visited he took me out one
night west of london there for an observing session that's been almost 30 years ago now so
he's still around yeah i i've seen pop up every now and then
and of course i you've made the acquaintance through facebook with damien peach i follow his
stuff he's oh yeah planetary photographer and he's amazing him and christopher go yeah
crisco yeah i um i actually met sir patrick at a
talk he gave back in the mid 90s i got him to autograph a couple of my books that he wrote
oh cool and and uh andres uh
my heritage three quarters of my uh ancestors came immigrated from sweden
so i was cool for sweden
we have some relatives in u.s but i don't know where
my my namesake of course back when he came over it was johansson
he and the two eriksen brothers were the swedish immigrants for the first three settlers to uh
homestead in in my home county out in central nebraska 1870.
nice now we're gonna hopefully i can do this uh
um uh john uh i am going to load up your video here and
we'll watch that first the people okay yeah of what the nebraska star party is all
about
um we're talking about these new sensors that 2400
right you can get the light on this and see the size of the sensor that's on it
oh yeah you got the big chip camera it's cool yeah it is absolutely huge pretty cool
yeah that's a huge chip the thing is with these now is there's they're um
the colors on them are absolutely stunning it's taken these sensors a few years to come along but the colors that
you're seeing in the images now from the cmos sensors they are really really stunning
so i think it's going to be quite interesting to see what you can get off of this considering the last full frame
one we had was a few years back here and that we were doing um 30 second
shots at f2 on andromeda and it was a stunning image
i think the interesting thing about that 2400 is there's slightly larger pixels than some of the other cmos's that have
been out yes just under six microns isn't it um so they're starting to get a little
bit bigger again i've played with a couple of these cameras for the um
uh nine pixels yeah the nine um pixels
and they're a bit here and there i think they've just gone a little bit too large with them um
they're producing quite a small image they don't seem detailed um that that's
one of the things i've noticed i'm thinking that this is probably about right it's going to be quite nice on
some of the systems guys i'm going to try to pick up the
video that i was interested or that john johnson had sent over to me
and this is it right here [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
so [Music]
so [Music]
very cool well uh thanks for uh sending that video over um
uh john so you've been doing the i've always known you associated pretty
much with the nebraska star party um uh you are always someone that uh
has stayed close to our company um and um you know it's been a pleasure uh you
know interacting with you and and uh i've gotten to know you as a friend and
uh um have been to uh it's been a little while since i've been to the nebraska
star party but i think the last one was what about three years ago or something
oh let's let's see you might yeah oh well that was shot i think actually it was 2018 i think that was
shot yeah that video with you uh with your team there and everything yeah
right but you were also out there uh as a mead wrap here long time ago
that's true that's very true yeah oh but uh i can attest to the super dark
skies uh that uh is out there in the uh you know what is it called the sandy
hills region is that right yeah i i have a few
quick slides in a powerpoint uh if we would want to show the rest of the world
where this actually takes place um hey scott i just want to interrupt real quick we can't see you on
the screen we still see the music credit oh do you okay
i thought i had him well i can see myself but i don't know i can i'm watching the the video um on
twitch right now and it's on john yeah i guess it was just on the zoom
here we couldn't see your face when you were talking zoom is different than what we're
broadcasting that's cool go ahead john
uh as i said i could i could i could show up a quick
uh one of these uh uh you know scenes from the night where you see all the
it's not the actual lights but it's the uh outlines of what's mortal one two three four five okay
so let's see so i have it in a powerpoint so if i
okay um if i share screen
where to go yeah point up first and then and then come back to zoom yeah
okay let me uh you'll focus on your powerpoint okay
that it you are starting to share okay
okay yeah beautiful image of a comment well here here let's start here okay
i'm sure many of you if not all of you have seen images like this before
um and uh you know obviously the united states
and you can see how basically there's a line that pretty well divides the the country in half
just uh on the eastern side of nebraska through eastern texas all the way up to north
south dakota but you see that area right there
that really black area that black area right there is my my cursor working on it yep yeah okay
that is called the sandhills area uh of nebraska and it's
it's truly a uh interesting unique uh uh ecological environment
now it's it's sand underneath a very uh um shall i say uh
unique uh grass covering uh but it's but it's it's very uh
what's the word this it could it can change it could in a dry year if you get something blown open then you get a lot
of sand but in a good rainy year it's just a gorgeous country up there as you saw in that video
right um oops here's a close-up of it
and this this okay this over here is denver
and this is kansas city and here's omaha where i'm being you know i'm coming from tonight
and here is this area magnified and i'll do it one more time and x marks the spot where we hold the
nebraska star party we've been holding the star party well it would have been our 27th
uh year uh if we'd have been able to have it this summer and and we held off
to the very end and and then finally had to uh
give up uh the the parties held on the um uh uh it's actually
a land federal government land called uh bureau of land recommendation because that lake
you saw in that video is a um it's an irrigation lake they have dammed up this river called the snake river and
they use it for irrigation and of course it is a recreational area
now a park that the nebraska game and parks commission
manages so it's on public lands and and of course with all the the rules and
regulations through the government that were coming down uh they said well we just don't want you
having a large gathering of people up there we typically get around 300 folks to come
up there and um so we
relented but we still had sort of a semi-private party
we had about 50 or 60 folks that did show up and you saw i here i'll show you you know i
i'm just overwhelmed with all you uh imagers i i've tried through the years
i guess not hard enough but i i'm just overwhelmed and i'll i'll never get there i figured
at this age but i do do some i dabble in a little bit wide field
stuff and of course this year while we're up there uh comet neowise was really
putting on quite a performance so there's there's a shot just with a
an old canon camera digital single lens reflex
being driven on an ioptron star tracker and i oops it went back on me i use um i use
a lot of old nikon manual lenses that i've converted to do the wide field stuff
and i think that was probably a 50 millimeter lens um so everybody else showing images i got
to show you one more here's a typical scene uh a little bit worse down either again i'm
not the processor that you other guys are either but that's a typical scene looking south uh
in our the milky way up there and we are truly in bortle one skies up there
yes so i think that's that we'll switch back here um
yeah i can take it back you can take it back then okay um
here we go so anyway i've been involved with it um
probably at least the last 20 years as a major uh player in putting it on
uh it's kind of like a perpetual convention i mean those of you that put on uh
you know like in the united states we have a the astronomical league convention and then we have the various regions but on you know the regional
conventions well we essentially are that at that level every year putting on
the nebraska star party um we name it we we may not be the the
biggest party as far as attendance um but we uh we rank right up there with the the
dark skies we offer up there and we do get a lot of uh astro imagers that will come up there
and and rave about our our skies um so we
we have a great time as you all if you've been to any events like that it's it's the camaraderie you you gain
uh the folks that come year after year and um it's just a community
my personal thing i'm basically been a visual observer you know all my life you know as i
mentioned i think in my quick intro i i've been involved with amateur astronomy since i was a child
growing up on a farm in central nebraska where every night you went out you
you got to see every night that was clear you got to see literally thousands of stars
and of course as you can tell by my age i was uh enthralled with the early
space program and it's like every kid that age in the early late 50s early 60s
uh thought you could you know wanted to be an astronaut so i i had aspirations of
that too but there was there was three events i always tell people in my life i think
i've told them to scott already that really solidified you know my passion
uh in astronomy and it was my first telescope everybody has the
first telescope story mine was a little three-inch admin reflector that i
begged my folks for i think they got it for probably my was either my 13th or
12th or 13th birthday uh and i remember the the first night i got it out put it together
i i knew there was a couple planets i didn't know for sure which one but i i got it focused you know the little slip
tube and and cardboard finder scope and everything and there was saturn and it
was just amazing running back in had to get the whole family out to take
a look at it and then a couple years later
uh too bad davidson uh uh libby you know this he'd enjoy this i
uh saw comet ikea sikhi as my first real comet to see
i remember one morning we were i was in the boy scouts we were camping in the river out there and we got up early and
you know the entire tale was stretched you know halfway across the sky and that was just mind-blowing i i
couldn't believe that that was a comet that had gotten that big and then the third event was the uh
landed meteor shower in the fall of 1966
you know in november and i i saw the storm i saw the storm that
year from my backyard out in the on the farm uh south of this
little town called brady nebraska and you know i i thought i mean it was
apocalyptic i thought it was the end of the world i mean there were meteors coming
the only way i've ever really can give you the impression of what i remember seeing was the um
uh if you're ever driven at night in a snowstorm with your headlights on that's
what i was seeing for roughly a half hour that morning from that point on i was
you know i was cast to be an amateur astronomer in a very enthusiastic one
uh you know careers as you all seen careers interfered with it but um
but once i've settled in omaha uh i got very active with the omaha
astronomical society and then the nebraska star party and
one of the other passions i have is is outrage you know kind of like what you know mike has mentioned
there i haven't had the time or the resources really to go as far and wide as some of
you others but uh i've i've headed up you know the omaha
outreach high astronomical society outreach program and and we typically see
anywhere from fifteen to eighteen hundred uh kids and of all ages and adults through
schools scout groups and you know civic organizations so
we have a blast doing that i have a you know a very good active group in our club our our astronomy club uh believe
it or not we we are starting to see some younger members which is very encouraging
and uh we have probably 150 160 members in our club up here now so
of course the the the pandemic has really slowed things down much to them many of our many of us
are chagrined with that but um but we will we'll recover we'll get back
out and and obviously we're we're trying to do um you know virtual outreach type things
too um i'm open to any and all ideas uh that some of you have tried and
and have succeeded at um but yeah but it there again to me you
just still don't get that visceral reaction other than being out there with the kids and hearing the oohs
and odds and you know getting them excited about something and uh
and and that's and when i and when i you know i was on what the a few nights ago when you had the you're number seven
and and saw a little libby and that's just warms the the heart to see somebody that
young get that excited and of course abigail ballenback she's another one i i met her
first there at the 2018 mid-stage regional convention and right
then uh met her and or was up at the the at the whole national convention up in
minneapolis and uh so anyway uh back any other thoughts or
questions um well i i i can add some here you know when you think about the the kids uh
i i i'm really you know i'm really happy to get people on like libby and abigail
because uh they're very comfortable being online
you know especially with the classes that they've had to uh
take you know virtually with their teachers and stuff like that so libby told me she's spending several
hours every day on on the zoom platform uh going to school you know she
she is uh she touched on uh the fact that she has asthma um you know so yeah that's
something that uh you'd have to be careful of be very careful with you
but it's uh she absolutely loves uh sharing this you know and uh
this is the only i mean john this is the only way to have a virtual global star party is oh yeah yeah i mean
like this there's just no other way to do it but i i do agree with you too there's nothing
like being out under that uh you know the the still night air and to see a
huge meteor streaking overhead some bullied um you know lighting up the
ground uh uh those experiences uh and just to see how dark a sky can really be
and so when we can get back out um you know you definitely want to put the
nebraska star party on your bucket list uh because this is this is a place
that's worth traveling to yeah it's it's relatively easy to get to
uh as far as driving i mean i mean if you're coming from afar you know omaha has a very nice airport and it's about a
six-hour drive from omaha now we don't have necessarily the the fancy lodging
and conditions that you might find at uh at a winter star party or texas star party but uh
i'll guarantee you we'll have the skies because we you know we we brag about it and but
we'll prove it to you uh you get your your eyes dark adapted up there when
we're up there and the milky way casts the shadow it does absolutely does
that's right and another thing yeah let's uh we are actively pursuing
uh getting that area designated as an international dark sky park
it's been a dream of mine now for probably 12 15 years and here within just the last couple
years we've got the spark lit because we've got an entity within the
state now that has really jumped on board uh we've got the whole nebraska tourism commission
uh back in our efforts now and really kind of taking the charge uh to us because uh or to it because
yeah let's face it we're just we're volunteers we're amateurs you know we can get out there and you know beat the
drum and and toot our horns about it uh but until you get a
a government agency that's bought into it and is committed to to make it happen
it's pretty tough to do i don't know if any of you others have been involved with an effort to to try to get a idea designation or not
but there's some real hoops you got to go through and we're finally making tremendous progress
uh i'll go out on a limb and say maybe by next summer by next year's 28th uh
annual star party we'll have our designation but uh we're hoping anyway so
okay it's a it's a tough process i did it over here about six years ago
but luckily the it's a 73 square mile site but luckily it's uh
technically privately owned um that would help yeah that helps but
it is leased out so there's lots of individual properties around there which all had to be consulted and
um lighting regulations and just people generally adhering to
those conditions so it is there are a lot of hoops there to to jump through and the light
measurements on the site right the way through um repeatedly it's a lot of work that everybody has to put in well we
yeah the the one advantage we have is that this is so dark up there of course it's because there are very few people
that live up there yeah and you know we go in you know well throughout the united states we have counties and the county
in nebraska that that is in is called cherry county cherry county is
i think bigger than the state of connecticut and there are way more cattle living
there than there are people so that's the advantage we have is we don't have a whole lot of lights i mean there's a few
around the resort and everything that we're we're managing we're going to have to get lights replaced and the plan
right now is to get those done this fall and uh but it's just the getting the the
bureaucracies and the the gears in motion uh because as the
the nebraskan game and parks organization will be the ones that will have to kind of with you know we're all going to help
out but they're the ones that are going to have to you know into gratuity keep this thing going but
but we're very excited about it and and we hope to have it uh probably up and done
sometime by the middle of next year okay that's getting close that's great
wonderful john thank you thank you scott for allowing me to set in here all right
we are going down to argentina right now um with uh cesar brollo he looks a little
old i don't know yes i feel like in a ship in the middle of
the sea because it's terribly windy now i'm trying to
take some pictures of some southern hemisphere object i i am
pointing to uh 47 to canada but the problem is that
i have some clouds let me check i can i can
share the screen to show so hard is maybe if
a little clouds so fast like a wheel
maybe i can show you
i am taking pictures now with the canon
in the telescope with a very interesting high technology adapter
look this here is 47 to canai but the problem is that i have clouds
moving from the south and i need to know maybe in the next picture
if the um
no no the open
sorry the blablar cluster that i am my intention was show you
something like like this but not like this
yes yes just if you expected to see something like ability
yes well i know that this is not
i'm trying because it is this is something like you know something like extreme astronomy
yeah using something like a patagonia street you know
some people think that maybe i am the at the top of the mountain but no
uh well what's my intention but you can see this is not this is not so bad the the
sky here like this color if you move the telescope
uh to another place like i can i can show you how is the the sky
now if i don't have in this area clouds too
let me check i i would like to try
anymore one time if the clouds are moving from this area
maybe we are doing the next shot i'm using only
i am using only uh i can't believe yeah it's
i don't know if you if you can see this like a star this is a very huge uh
globular cluster you know it's so big like omega centauri the two clusters
from the south the biggest are foreign
and omega centauri cluster they're huge but there's this knife with a very
strong with this very strong
wing it's impossible and it's incredible that i have really a
line of layer of
but i can't believe because it's most of the of the sky now it's clear
but you know we have with this area that is from this to the south
yeah is it well caesar deep here
sorry do you want us to come back to you uh in a few minutes yes yes yes
to some pictures if i have something more reliable
more information than this
in um
okay i feel like we're on the weather channel with the hurricane there's like a tornado out there yeah
okay so let's see i'm gonna give you
10 out of 10 for commitment on that yeah yeah he's got clear skies so you know
yeah i can't believe i wanted to share something and i'm
going to say now for something completely different yeah that's right i'm going to i'm going to talk about uh
what some deep sky imagers hate i don't want to say hate they just don't
like it because it it takes opportunities away for imaging and that's that's uh imaging
the moon and doing high resolution lunar imaging and some of the things you can
do with the images in terms of science um i like getting into the science side of
astronomy um probably more than uh doing deep sky stuff
but that's just me i know a lot of people enjoy a lot of different things so
i grew up in the 60s like john was talking about earlier so my first interest in astronomy
uh centered on the moon basically so that's that's really why
i really enjoy that a lot so i want to introduce a couple of programs that i use
to do my lunar imaging uh and to plan my uh plan my imaging
the first one is called uh the virtual moon atlas which i'm sure a
lot of you you guys probably are familiar with um i gotta share my screen i guess i gotta
remember to do that yeah that helps so let me uh yeah
so i'm just gonna share my desktop because it's easier
all right you see that oh yeah so this is a this is a program called
the virtual moon atlas and uh if you want to scott you can probably
search it on the google and and find the link to it it's also i want to basically
i want to show you this let me show you where it's really at it's uh
on the aopa website i'm a staff member of the aopo the association for lunar
and planetary observers i'm in the lunar section i'm an assistant
coordinator for topographical studies so there's a couple of programs i'm going
to talk about that we use but one is uh the virtual moon atlas and the other one
is is uh this one called let me go to the lunar section
called the lunar topographical um i'm sorry
um the lunar terminator uh visualization tool okay
so down here i don't know if you can see over to the right here we've got we've got a look we've got a
link to it yeah okay actually let me i'm going to zoom up
just a little bit here i should be used to this since we do a show every day you know
i tried to give you a lot of practice yeah i know so
if you look here on the right on the menu you go to the lunar section and then you'll go to the menu on the right on the right hand side and you'll see
we've got the we've got the tool available for download on our on the aopa website and also the wiki
is available so i'm not going to i'm not going to click on those right now but i just wanted to point those out
but uh if we go to i mean let me type in uh virtual
just to be atlas
all right let me get this out of the way so
there's a couple of places for one's on sourceforge this other one is is here
i guess there's a there's a few places that have it available
the sourceforge is a good place to go get it
but so there it is just search for virtual moon atlas and you'll find the links to
it uh and this is what it looks like this is the virtual dude atlas okay
virtual moon atlas and it's pretty cool
you can i'm trying to zoom out so you can it's basically it's it's a regular atlas
but it's got some choices on how you can figure it and what kind of charts you have available
as you zoom in it's got this one chart but then it starts to when you select it and configure it it'll start loading
images uh from the lunar orbiter images those types of
things and you can really get you can see how close you can get this is theophilus which i'm going to highlight here
with one of our images that i'm going to show you that or one of my images that i took to do some measurements with the
other tool but so this is a good tool to plan your observation and check so
right now i've got it set to um the first quarter but if you compute the
current you can it'll show you the current moon phase right here you can see it
that's what we have right now and so you can see what's on the terminator you can you can see the terminator
which but it also shows you if you look at the terminator tab you can it'll tell you
all the all the creators and everything that's on the terminator and it'll give you a lot of good
information uh let's see i'm going to pick something something big here if i can find something that's
fairly big i think i think it start it orders it by the larger craters and then as you go
down it gets smaller and smaller that's what these numbers are here on the side so let's go to kepler
so that centers on kepler okay and then if you go to notes i don't know
if notes are for your own notes if you go to information that's where it shows all the information about kepler
so it's a really nice tool you know gives you the dimensions the description you know
what the it's got uh rookal atlas
reference it's got other atlas information where you can find this object or this crater
you know that type of thing so it's really got a lot of good information it's really a great tool
and i enjoy using it quite a bit so i'm going to go back to um
the first quarter
and i'm going to zoom up on theophilus oops come on
because that's the crater i'm going to highlight with an image that i took
and i'm going to show you how to use the lunar terminator visualization tool to do measurements and that's that's a
cool thing when you can measure uh like features on the moon like these peaks that are on
how tall they are maybe yeah you can cut you can measure how tall they are and then you can then you can compare that to
lunar aeronautical chart information that have the you know the actual values that the nasa
decided they were the features were and you can measure also not just peaks but you can measure crater sizes
there's a tool to do that you can you can reorient the image to show you what it would look like flying directly over
top all that type of stuff so let me go to that tool and this is it right here let's see if i
can make this a little bigger um
actually i think i can make it even a little bigger
all right so there's there's theophilus okay right and you got different uh
different types of charts too that you can do here so i can let me go back to the
gain you have to this is more of a manual program where you set the zoom level and then you click on the chart and
it'll zoom to that level like so that's that's the high resolution chart that i've shaded relief
chart that i have chosen but it's also got a low resolution chart so let me let me click on that again
um
and you can see that's the low resolution chart so if i zoom up on five which is a scale a zoom level of five
and i go here you'll see it it's blocky because that's the low resolution chart okay
that's why i use the high resolution chart and you click on it again and it'll bring up that view okay
i see so what i want to demonstrate is a way to load an image and do a
measurement on it
so i'm gonna i'm gonna do this from scratch i'm gonna calibrate so you
calibrate a user photo so what you have to do is you have to pick out features on the image
and match it to the chart or to the to the uh to this chart that you have so i'm going
to open the image let me see if i can remember which one i want to do here
take me a second to get to the uh
let's see the msro
astrophotography and then it's i can remember the dates 2019
110 moon all right see which directory is it
it's this one right here so if you look i've got some several pictures of theophilus here that i've actually done
measurements already on them but i'm going to bring up this uh cropped should i use a cropped one yeah
let me see here which one do i want to use here
i'll use this one all right so there it is so this is an image that i
took at the msro in 2019 it's got you can see quite a bit of detail here see these little craters
here yeah uh it's pretty good really uh let me let me move it around a little bit i
can show you more uh where would that go i guess i need to make it bigger here so like here you can
see see this group of three craters here yeah those are probably
i'm just gonna guess three miles four miles in diameter maybe but we can measure that we'll be able to see
exactly what they are um i'm gonna zoom out a little bit
and what i need to do is set the time of observation okay and
uh so i've got that the time and date are in the file name so that's really convenient and so that's one thing i
would suggest people when they name their files to put the time and date in the file name so that if you ever want
to refer to it um right in a program like this and you i don't
know why this is gonna get that makes a science file then yeah
so this is 2019 if you uh use
um software like sharpcap and firecatcher they're allowing you to
uh name your files in the windjugos format and that uses your date and your
times and it exact so that programs like when you plus can calculate rotations
right so this is in the this is in january so i know that
utc is five hours for me so i gotta add five hours to the
time that's a local time so that's 22 44 just close enough
and uh of course this isn't configured for some reason so
i've got to remember what my longitude and latitude is and longitude here is um
77 or minus that's important
and it's it's uh 0.71 and my latitude is uh
38 and i can put the elevation that's uh
that's about 100 it's about 100 meters so uh
once i do that i'm going to identify a reference point
okay see it's got the crosshair so the first one i'm going to pick
is the easy one it's in creative theophilus it's this one right here let me see if i've got to do that
right here on this peak i'm going to click that
step two or step three radio button checked okay so
is that not
just copy from main screen i wonder if i got to click that oh yeah
there we go so now i've got to do this again so you have to copy the
the image over here into the thing so put this back 1901
[Music] whoops one
then 22
44 that's good enough and then that stayed the same and say okay so i want to identify
i'm going to sit there and go
copy from main screen okay oh i see what this thing
i've got to set a reference point over here
i think i'm supposed to do that first i set the reference point here and it's got a little tiny cross and
then i go back to this and i copy the reference points
okay from the main screen so you just
and then i click on here with the pixel location in the image okay
and and it fills it in here so this is the longitude and latitude on the moon that's correlated with that xy
position on the image that's the first and then i do another one so now i've got a i'm gonna i'm gonna
pick this right here i'm gonna set a reference point
here which is on the edge of this crater here which uh
on here so i'm gonna copy that location and then i'm gonna set it it's right here
oh step three that's checked why didn't it oh it did
it didn't it now poppy from main screen
put the reference point and then i'm gonna what the hell
it's not taking it demonstrating it that's why yeah i know
right exactly so i'm gonna i'm gonna set the reference point again here and start over
and then i'm gonna copy it okay it copied it
and now set with mouse okay so now set by clicking mouse on the point so i'm gonna click it
what is a step two or step three radio button let me see what i'm missing here
ah that's what it is that was hidden but now
now it's gonna work let me go back to step two and make sure i get this point here
okay now see it went to step three yeah so now i can click this
i don't know why i didn't do that now i went to step four okay all right
now i'm gonna hit save all right then i'll close this
and now what i've got to do is i've got to go here in and load a calibrated photo so we just
calibrated the photo to the scale okay and it's going to show up at the bottom of the list here
all right so you celebrated the photo to the scale of like in the chart the lan latitude and longitude
on the on the moon okay so i picked locations on the moon that correlated with the image locations
so now i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna uh select that photo which you can see it here and then i'm gonna say
select and what it should do is it should load that photo and there it is
that's kind of cool okay so it loaded it on onto the map onto the sphere of the moon
right exactly where it should be right exactly where it should be so now i can
let me zoom up on some so i'm going to go to 10. okay
all right now there's some neat things i can do here let me just show you for example um
i can right click on it and i'm going to draw a circle all right
and i'm going to show the center and i'm going to see here i can set the diameter of the
circle okay so i'm trying to guess what the size of this of theophilus is i'm going to say
it's 80 i don't know we'll see that's close i'm going to draw it oh that was not too
bad it's really closer to 100 so let me go to 100
raw but i didn't select the center correctly it's a little bit smaller so it's probably like 92
[Music] and then i'm going to clear it but i'm going to close that and i'm going to set it right
in the center of the crater i'm going to try to get it now i'm going to
draw circle and set the 92 and i'm going to draw it and that's
pretty close see there yeah so you can adjust this
94 okay and clear and i'm going to draw it
again and then you can also um there's a way
to i thought there was a way to use your cursor to increase and decrease the
this the the uh change the uh location so if i do the arrow
let's see is that working no that's not really working
there's a way to shift this with the cursor but i don't remember exactly how to do it right now
but that's how you can do that okay you can measure the the size of the crater
the other thing you can do like i talked about is measure how big these peaks are so you can see the shadows right so let
me zoom up even further on this i'm going to go to 15 and i'm going to
center on it all right now you can really see see these the shadows right here
yeah these peaks so what you can do is you can and then also on the crater rim
see the see the relief here you can see
my my daughter's coming in uh-huh so the dogs are barking of course
the uh so let me select uh the mouse options
and you can set to uh display elevation difference
inverse shadow length mode which allows you to set a reference point and measure the elevation
of the peak so that's that's what i do here i hit ok and then what i do is i go to the on the
shadow i go to the peak of this location right here and i right click
and i say set reference point and you see how it draws this line
that's pointing to the sun that's the direction of the sun
that's casting that that's crossing this peak right here so that point in the shadow right here is this point on the
peak where it's bright got it okay so now i right click here
at that intersection of the light dark shadow line and and the and the direction line the red line and i
and i say record shadow measurement all right now of course you can't see that because it's so tiny it's green
it's um in fact i can't even really read it either it's a
teeny it's eight what is that i see just like a little tiny
looks like actually it shows it i see it oh okay okay i think it shows
it over here yeah um oh
height difference that's not right okay so i think if i move my cursor here okay there it is
so if i put my cursor here if you look on the right where it says mouse position yeah
uh let's see here height difference so if you go right where i clicked on it it's 3 500 meters
3 500 meters three and a half kilometers is how high that peak is above this
point on the plane 380 you said 385 is that right
it's uh 30 well it's about 35 35 37 meters where that
pixel i'm on right now so it's 3532 meters
all right so let me do this other peak i'm going to right click here on the tip i'm going to set the
reference point again there's the shadow you can see on this edge of the mountain there
that that looks like it's very close to the peak right so i'm going to sit there i'm going to set reference point or i'm sorry record
shadow measurement and again that's going to be right there is 4 400 meters
now jerry the is this from the floor of the crater to the tip of the spire
it's from the point on the shadow that that's on the floor yes it's the most accurate measurement is when you can get
it on a smooth portion of the floor of the crater okay if you if the shadow goes up the wall
then it's not accurate in terms of the height above the floor of the crater it's got to be you got to make sure that
the when it's in the of the crater right so it's really close
it's very close to this edge so this might not be this might be within three or four hundred meters nice measurement so this is the tip of
the spire to the edge of the shadow correct right so that's that's about a little over two
miles yeah so that's pretty cool right so let's see
let's go to the crater rim and measure this see this peak right here okay
let me i'm going to right click on that i'm going to set the reference point again you can see
where the sun shines this is the point on the crater rim
that's forming that shadow all right and i'm going to right click there as
close as i can get it how high do you think that rim is i mean uh
we're going to let you guess before i uh record this rim itself yeah above the floor i don't know
2 000 feet 2 000 that's a half a mile you think
it's much lower than the mountains are in the center yeah okay let's see
it's actually 4 521 meters 40 oh wow 4 521.
so the peaks in the middle are just as high as the crater rim 2.8 and the peaks are like 2.2
miles yeah right so it's just the the rim is just slightly higher
that's crazy it depends on where you're at in the rim of course but yes okay so we know this this looks this
shadow is much higher so let's go to this shadow that's a little bit lower right here yeah along this edge that's that's a
pretty flat edge along the crater rim but let's go to this part right here all right i'm going to draw a line
so these shadows are telling us how high the the spires were and
how high the crater rim is from the floor of the crater yes okay
i'm going to record that one so again see how consistent that is
oh my gosh 4 546 meters and this one's 4 520 meters you
see how yeah consistent that rim is yeah
that's really cool 2.8 let's let's find out how small these
craters are here these little ones right here that you can see i'm gonna i'm gonna try this one first
i'm gonna draw a circle you can use a tool to figure out that much detail on the
moon you know so that that crater right there you see i just
drew the circle around it that's just outside the rim it's five five kilometers that's three miles
all right so it's actually four let me go uh let me clear it i'm going to put four kilometers which is two and a half
miles raw that matches that
a lot closer and the other thing it tells you it gives you the exact latitude and longitude of that crater on
the moon so you could do that so you can get that data from these measurements also
so that's just an example of what you can do with this tool it's a lunar terminator visualization tool and it
makes it's the coolest thing that i when i discovered this thing i just
was in heaven you know being able to do this kind of stuff with the moon images
so are there any questions that's about all i've got really to show dusty hoskins was asking me to put up a link
to that program so i did yeah i put it up earlier but
and the thing is you can find images online as long as you know the date and time and the
location where they were made yeah you could do this kind of measurement on those on those images
very cool jerry thank you sorry sorry jerry those
um deep sky images don't do the moon and just to prove it can i share my
screen yeah
oh very nice yeah that's nice there was one other image
the clue actually is in the title
oh mosaic yeah exactly no luna luna yeah oh yeah
yeah yeah yeah swear word it's not a name it's not a name of a crater it's just lunar yeah
it's the swear word the moon yeah right so let me show you this one image that i
wanted let me get rid of this so i've been doing i've actually been
doing lunar imaging with the deep sky camera too without set up correctly it's not it's set up the opposite what you
want to do for high resolution loom imaging it's a full disc image with the 165
let me share my let me share my stuff again i'm sorry about the dogs barking
like there's like a dog dogfight you guys be quiet
so let me let me go to this uh other screen here there's my uh
where's that here so i've been doing these images of the full disc moon with the deep sky camera
and i want to show you what kind of resolution i can get with just a deep sky camera no a full disc
uh let's see this is a good one to start with
so this gives you an example this is a 21 day old moon okay uh
third quarter but i'm gonna zoom up on this i've already got zoom so
on these images okay that gives you an example of what you can see
okay look davey says barking at the moon yeah barking so this is copernicus
okay okay see these little craters here they're not so little these are like
i've got another picture i can show that shows the measurement i think these are like eight to ten miles in diameter
wow okay and that's with just uh you know
that's with the whole disc image actually the field of view i cropped this the field of view of the
camera is one and a half by one degrees so it's got plenty of black space around it oh and then also down here let me
show you this this is a straight wall yeah
this created thebit and thebit d i think i don't remember exactly which one is steepit uh d i
think is this one this one again is like eight miles or six miles or something in
diameter so you can really get high resolution images even with the telescope set up
for deep sky um let me bring up another one that really
has some measurements on it that i did
all right let's see here jerry how long have you been working
with the alpo and the lunar section i've been on
i've been on the staff for about six years now okay
um all right and but i've been submitting stuff for probably eight or ten years to
the alpo and uh i'm gonna zoom up on this one
all right so this is just the full moon or pretty much the full moon okay and
there's there's the information i took this last year okay yeah and uh all this data that i put in
the image is from the um virtual virtual moon atlas so it's easy
for me if you you know this is use that as reference information you don't know that stuff by heart you don't know you
know you really i i know a lot of the creators on the moon but i don't know every one of them so you use tools to
identify things and to measure things and to know what's going on so here's so here's the crop
okay from this image all right
messier and messier alpha 10 miles in diameter and you can see craters that
are smaller you can detect these other craters right yeah and then lagrangia the greenish is 80
miles in diameter but that just gives you an idea
it's cool full resolution of this image is is uh and it's plate scale is one about one
arc second per pixel on this image um let me
close that let me bring up one more i thought i had
different ones those are all the same ones i think it's because it's the date
um [Music] oh there's some mars images i took last
year year before last oh here's something else you can do that's kind of interesting
with the ltvt you can rotate the moon on its axis
and see what it looks like from the side okay
so this is as if you're up in orbit around the moon okay yeah and uh
and you're right above americrisium looking down on it
that's another thing you can do with that program you can map it to the you can map it to
the sphere and then rotate it around yeah that's cool
all right so excellent well we are going to go to uh carol
orange once again and he's going to ask the final
door prize question and then we're going to let him get some rest so
there you go all right thank you scott yeah a little question is
when does the next solar eclipse happen in the u.s
and not only the the date but also the approximate ut time of
totality are you talking about oh a total eclipse right total flips eclipse
okay so you want to know when does it happen and the approximate ut time
for totality yes okay all right so again you're going to send your answer to kent
at explorescientific.com
and there we go and uh uh carol i want to thank you for uh
hanging in there with us for this we we've been on on the air now for quite a while uh we're uh
uh we've gone over five hours of the global star party eight i wanted to show
this um this guide here this is a this is the um
uh exploring the starry realm by the astronomical league this is a new guide
that you guys have i i don't know what it costs but uh you know i've been going through it and it's got it's got great
illustrations it shows you how to um you know to observe the sky
um and gives a lot of explanation a lot of the basics that might be missing from like say your
instruction manual from your telescope in fact you won't find instructions like these in an instruction manual on any
telescope but these are this is how to uh you know observe the sky become more
familiar with the sky which will make you more proficient with your telescope so if you're just getting started and
you want you know uh or maybe you've never had these kind you know you've been doing it for a while because you
never had these kind of basic um uh you know pieces of advice and tips and
stuff like that this is something that i think any astronomer could benefit from so exploring
a very good price very normally oh yeah right and you just go to astroleague.org
and uh place that order and um you know and while you're at it you might join if you're not a member
join the astronomical league and you'll get this beautiful magazine called the reflector
and the reflector is you know full color magazine
and it's just uh full of great articles astrophotos league information
you know their awards their conventions and how you can get involved in outreach
or observing programs so thanks very much carol thank you scott has good talking to everybody
tonight thanks take care good night carol
okay so we are getting down we're getting down to the wire guys so
um at this point uh [Music] checking in with caesar
caesar do you have uh how's uh your skies down there in argentina
well we are not lucky today but uh i'm trying to
to make a better focus i'm i appoint the exodus 100 to antares to make a better
focus and return to to um
uh to to to quarantine to canada because now we
don't have clouds but the problem is that uh
that the focus of of the zoom um
i i can show you something that it's fun because the
i i i told that uh my my uh camera adapter
for the exos 100 was of high technology but of course it's a joke because
you can see something clear this is it's really good is a part
of booth because i i made this adapter in the
lockdown of the quarantine in april uh because all was closed and i
not
[Music] you available uh top tier vixen or
something that they have but was for me was impossible because for all
people in every year the knockdown was absolutely and really i needed to make something in the
quarantine time and i found in my home
i would stick up wood because i i buy a lot of good
harvest things and you know the the the size of the doptile
of uh bix and doctyle has yes were probably
yes it's a high technology adapter yeah very high technology
actually actually is one of the best that i have but don't talk to anybody
no no yes it's high technology you know you know yes well i i need to try if you
i i uh maybe if you uh like to
to return in few minutes i try one more time if i can make focus
i will show you something more respectable more
about 47 all right
okay we'll come back in a minute yes okay all right sounds good sorry i'm
sorry but sometimes it's it's a little difficult no problem no problem
so guys uh while we're waiting for that does anyone have anything they want to share
um yeah we've actually got a couple of images from the last euro star party i think we showed the andromeda
on tuesday's star party if i remember rightly so
if i go into the photoshop screen
we had the andromeda one of the main reasons for sort of mentioning this was it was actually shot in bright moonlight
that was the key um i was picking up on injury saying that most of the images don't like the
moonlight and this had no filters on it so there were two images we did that
night and the other was m33 and again no filters
no nothing on there just literally a camera straight on with a reducer flattener you've got a little bit of flaring
around the stars which i would expect with the the moonlight being out but the point is is a lot of people are
turning around and saying oh you can't you know you can't image when the moon's out you can't do this when the moon's
out you can yeah um take every opportunity you can
especially in your area and to be honest as we all know quite often the clear skies come along when
the moon's in a you know a bright face so um the other point i was going to go on
was just really on um fast imaging on fast systems like and
andreas was on about in sweden um this is 230 second shots using
an f 2.2 11 inch browser so
again the details there i'm just going to fold it through the processing so that you can see the color
go into the image and the detail fast imaging works with these new
cameras you know fast time so you can beat lots of tracking issues you can be
lots of light pollution issues and you can generate some quite nice images with lots of detail in them
beautiful beautiful so you know it's really a case of taking
the opportunities um you know that that's really the key
thing with this and um enjoying what you do have fun with it
yeah it's uh what you need to do is to try and enjoy it so it's not hard work yeah this is
the key thing when it becomes hard work it's not fun
that's true it becomes frustrating yeah yeah that's it frustrating
tonight and i have those nights that's right the loads and the equipment turns up you go out there with it and
nothing works how you think it's gonna work and um you know that that's the key thing to it
right that's right well let's look at some comments here on from the uh
chat room here uh let's see
astro beard says i call the moon the enemy all right
well let's see what else moon is your friend the moon is your friend your friend yeah
um you know i think a lot of us i mean we became enamored with the moon certainly with uh the apollo program
because it was just so unbelievable that we're going back to the moon uh or not going
back we were going to the moon we were going to put boots on the moon and i remember as a kid
really it was almost unbelievable it was uh and and the tension of them landing and
all the rest of every time i watched the scenes uh you know with them
with 17 seconds of fuel left on the lunar lander and everything and
you know you know i know over the years i've gotten to know buzz aldrin and you know he was just telling
me uh what it was like and he was he was really you know i mean they were
very concerned but that you know they're pilots so they're they were they were staying very focused
but he said he really did not want to destruct uh distract neil armstrong from
even a second okay because this was almost a do or die type of
thing so i think it's just kind of being that kind of uh uh intensity and watching them
land on the moon and uh all the stuff that we learned about the moon as kids and stuff like that
uh spawned a lot of people certainly i think if you went through the alpo and um you know talk to the different
people there that are so interested in the moon and its features and all the rest of it i
think they'll relate back to the apollo program as being a big inspiration but it's going to
happen again you know if we go if we actually do uh land on the moon again in 2024
uh while that's going at least here in the states that is going to be i think and i think worldwide that is going to be a a
huge thing for another generation of people to get re-interested in astronomy
um space exploration stem all these all these things that
came forth during during the 60s and the 70s around the world
when when we have astronauts do something like that uh you know i know that uh certain
countries take you know pride in what they're doing and it becomes maybe kind of a nationalistic kind of thing but
really what happens is that you know i've traveled the world and people feel like that that was a humanity thing you
know that we that we achieved something like that so um
very cool i think the moon has a natural interest with us right from childhood it's in
lots of books that we are given our first books you know um there's always
um lots of nursery rhymes and all sorts of things all around the men so it
there's a natural thing that's built into us from an early age of curiosity
that's true and all the poetry and all the romance and everything else that's locked into the
moon you know a lot of people don't know this but when the sun and the moon are together in the
sky uh it lifts solid earth up one foot higher than what it would normally be
the tidal tug on the earth and over open ocean it raises the
water another three feet higher you know so as as it's pulling against against us
so just really um you know without the moon i think we wouldn't even have life here
you know so it's all these things the the size relationship of the moon our
orbits all these all these uh these points to make it just perfect for us to live
on this uh this uh blue dot way out in space you know so
so cool well i'm going to check in with caesar one more time and see what uh
how's it going caesar what do you think yeah i i i
tried i tried but you know uh so too much windy
they match i have i don't have if i have a little problem of focus or
yeah simply i can show you that
it's in focus it's in focus okay it's not it's not in the center but maybe
we can try again
but this this night was not able to to use a telescopic too much windy really
you can see my
i can show you something or if we are lucky
with your imagination you can see the the cluster
let me let me share it's like it's like looking through an eyepiece if you use your
imagination it's like looking through an eyepiece
yeah it's such a surprise to the imagination
oh come on it's terrible i think i think we got skunked here yeah here here is
something here we go here is here is it is the cluster okay
and the the mount is incredible because with the wind and
with my totally out of of uh borderline alignment maybe
i have a hero and hero or error sorry of more that i
don't know but i really i don't make a good polar alignment because
i i was really fast and really the the
only two stars alignment in 10 minutes you can see a really
uh point to the start but the chicken really worked really really very well my
my full hesitation my to my congratulations today to the
author of this software because it's at the moment this is amazing um
we can we can try more shots if
if we are here
if you have some idea gary because i using only the canon
with uh the only way you could make that brightest easier is by dropping the f
ratio down so to bring the f ratio down to a little bit lower if you can it depends
on what lens you're using so next to that is the f ratio to see
whether you can reduce that that would make the image a bit brighter in the shorter time
yeah
which globular is this that that we're seeing is look look this where you have
a a cloud here passing right here
is yes i return i return to the 47 to canal again
but is if um with the wind i can use a telescope only
a a zoom 100 300 that
for the e aps-s sensor is
you know by 1.1.6 times
the real focal length maybe i use it no more that one
135 millimeters but for this father you could also increase
yeah yeah i iso there to 1600.
if you've got yeah and 800 with it being a short exposure you can take your iso up to 1600
sure the problem is that i lost the focus when i try to use more uh long focus
from the with the sun with the sun is it's a really is it's a
this song is not for the the new ones is is the old one uh you
know for for the the all models uh ultrasonic uh series
from the 90s and some it's a little terrible because when
you move the zoom you lose the focus and the problem is that maybe i have a
good uh i can see some shape of the of the
of the block can you see the outside of the cluster there i can see the answer
let me check because i am a little confused
because i i like to center
left i'm confusing for
the problem is that i don't have any any star visible to to move and center the cluster
right we can try or nine sorry
i forget that i i had the velocity of nine
that's pretty high i i no the goal two is is good because it's
returning to the out center but
but it's not the guilt of of the mount if noticed is that i make a very very fast go-to
setting so the audience knows more about what you're going after food is
not a globular scar cluster it's a
i don't know yeah i don't know i don't know now the
the size is of course that is uh less stars that omega uh
omega centauri cluster that omega centroid many people say that this
proto-galaxy is near to to to be considered a small galaxy
that and that's interesting because then in 2017 some astronomers uh professional
astronomers
um well i can i can try with rye
in in two now in nine they move a little
and we can try
we are respect outside the the screen or more center no it was
nothing only only go a little
the problem is that i can see anything to to to have a reference to the center of
this yes i'm still giving you 10 ounces because i
can hear the wind here yeah that's going around you so i'm
still giving you 10 out of 10 for commitment to astronomy on this
yes it's amazing commitment
that's amazing anything you know
yes when the people that normally found people from people like us that making
astrophotography think that we are crazy because sometimes uh
well of course our attention to the screen and but uh
many people uh using the camera when i'm using the camera
come to advise me when i take the darks with the cover of
the objective and say i'm sorry you can you can take pictures with the cover in the lenses
okay no it's it's okay they say okay bye-bye
you're doing yes well i'm sorry i i don't know it's it's not easy for me
to center this okay it's okay you know here here is the global cluster
story is god that this this night was not successful with this
it's but it's not it's not successful either it's just very challenging
right so well gentlemen i think uh you know we
have been on for about and a half hours um
and uh i know it's late in the uk um in fact i think it's very late they're
very early in the uk uh caesar what time is it in uh argentina
argentina uh 11 25 11 25.
i i'm eight pizzas i made the pizzas
no was not the delivery here was my my i make that though yes my speciality
yeah one time i i can uh uh
meet with with you and uh the people from from there
and one opportunity i promise that i can make pizza for me for us okay really yes
you can sign my my promise that's great that's great i look forward
to it so thank you we had a we had a i think a very interesting uh global star party uh
everything from sweden down to australia we had um we got a great tour of norman fulham's
uh shop uh seeing him polish everything from what a 12-inch mirror up to a uh
was it a 45-inch mirror or 50-inch mirror something like that um
he showed us how he makes uh uh you know norman is amazing i mean he he
constructs he constructs his mirror blanks he constructed his uh
his um uh vacuum chambers his polishing equipment uh you know just to see the craft of all
that to hear him sing this song and watch him play his music that was really cool
uh you know jessica buckles was on with us from bentel
uh um you know of course chuck schacks is with us here jerry hubbell uh gary
palmer thank you well all of this together it's not easy
steve uh you are welcome back anytime you want to come back of course um
and uh you know uh thank you i think everyone probably could use some
uh you know so and i think i'm going to go uh
because it's too late that looks really good
so i'm going to say goodnight if there's any last words any last words for the star party
no i just wish to thank everybody for watching and everybody who participated in it it's been really good
and thanks to you for putting it on yeah that's
just in a few days on tuesday night again we're going to have our next
um you know we want our sponsor again the astronomical league for the door prizes
magazine for offering free subscriptions remember
caesar uh rxe martial
is knocking your sound out i think uh we can't quite hear you all the time scott because caesar's got his mommy here
that's that's there we go yeah marcelo souza from uh from brazil is going to be
the new senior editor for our our uh global free it's going to be a free
digital magazine and uh there will be um uh you know he he's a cosmologist
himself so we'll have everyone from scientists from all over the world amateur astronomers submitting astro
astrophotographs uh gary i i hope you you submit some of your work and
actually all you guys you should submit your uh your astrophotos if you um if
you're listening and you want to submit uh articles uh we will be putting
up a link to uh a groups.io
site where uh it will be called explore alliance outreach and you can you can
put up uh you you can submit your articles there i want to thanks thanks everyone again
and uh we're gonna call it a night so we'll see you next tuesday night global
star party number nine this was number eight and uh take care and we will see you
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