Transcript:
6:00 p.m..Scott Roberts - Introduction
well thank you very much i appreciate it i was reading it this morning i was like reading the physics book
6:05 p.m..David Levy – Intro and Poetry
[Laughter] stretched my mind a little bit some of the cosmological stories are are
a bit dense and people love them that way you know but but yeah fascinating stuff
6:15 p.m..Astronomical League Door Prizes – Terry Mann
well thank you we have a big year coming next year the magazine will be 50 years old so we have a whole lot of special
things planned next year
6:30 p.m..David Eicher - Minerals of Planet Earth - Dioptase
50 years old
oh and scott are you there yes that reminds me of something i casually
mentioned to a couple of the editors and we can't do it like next week but i think there's uh interest from the
editors in doing a magazine sponsored version of the star party again at some
7:00 p.m..Karim Jaffer - Cosmic Generation
point great maybe later this spring yeah love to pick an auspicious day you know
where something that uh you know maybe um
7:15 p.m..Francois Quesnel - Astronomy in Quebec
well they get to pick the day the subject the speakers the everything
okay it's awesome it's good to see you up in the back
[Music]
7:30 p.m..Daniel Higgins - AstroWorld TV
did i want
8:10 p.m..Ten Minute Break
hmm
um
8:40 p.m..Adrian Bradley - Nightscapes
feel bad we're all being quiet our microphones are hot but we've got no video yeah because i said the
microphones were hard yeah everybody's like well i don't want to say anything nobody
8:55 p.m..Glenn K. Roberts TBA
even said hi to daniel when he joined hi daniel i i just got together here so oh
i wanted to tell you happy international woman's day absolutely
thank you yeah there you go
i also heard it's international peanut cluster week or something like that
it's got it's it's i can see on facebook here it's national peanut cluster day
and the slogan goes melt the chocolate add the peanuts and stir them together it's just
that easy [Laughter] well then david i assume you're going to
make some and send it to all of us yeah i have to i'm going to have to schedule that for next week
i'm unprepared tonight i had no idea somehow that it was national peanut cluster day i've dropped the ball
entirely i think we're gonna have to tie in today's mineralogy the peanut clusters yes well these are even what
i'm gonna show is even crunchier than peanut clusters yeah that's right
10:05 p.m..Maxi Falieres - Astrophotography to the Max!
oh pepper a dog all right go on
that's pretty
[Music]
this interacting galaxy duo called arp 143 holds the distorted star-forming
spiral galaxy ngc 2445 at the right along with its less flashy companion ngc
2444 at the left astronomers think both galaxies pass
through each other igniting the unique triangular shaped firestorm of starburst
because ngc 2445 is rich in gas the fuel of star formation it holds thousands of
infant stars yet it hasn't escaped the gravitational clutches of a partner the
pair is waging a cosmic tug of war and ngc 2444 appears to be winning the
galaxy has pulled gas from its companion forming the oddball triangle of newly
minted stars by studying head-on galaxy collisions like this we can better understand the
origins and evolution of ringed star formation in galaxies
[Applause] [Music]
uh
um [Music]
[Music] well hello everyone this is and welcome
to the 85th global star party uh expanding universe you know the our
knowledge of an expanding universe started in the 1920s uh and we are still uh
trying to understand uh the universe that we live in but um part of this
expansion also is the expansion of our own knowledge and uh our awareness of uh of our
interconnectedness with the with everything that's in the universe and um so tonight we have uh just a
really amazing lineup of speakers as we normally do for a global star party um just uh
to touch just to kind of cover it a little bit better with you we have david levy that's starting out
we'll have terry mann who's coming on from the astronomical league uh david eicher the editor-in-chief of astronomy
magazine is with us once again dennis coy from eurokeys observatory uh will be
giving us an update uh kareem jaffer from the royal astronomical society of
canada uh in montreal uh franco francois
uh uh quinnell from an astronomer
in quebec i will share some of his night sky photography we have daniel higgins from
astroworld tv who was on last friday with us steve edberg who's a uh
you know professional astronomer planetary scientist uh now retired uh is joining us to talk about a red-shifted
universe uh john johnson from the nebraska star party will be with us then we go down to
brazil with martello souza uh we'll uh swimming back up to the usa with adrian
bradley uh glenn roberts uh will be attending and um maxi filaris uh
astrophotography to the max down in argentina so um
we will uh switch now to uh david levy uh your friend of mine
and uh it is a pleasure to have you on today david thank you for coming on to global
star party thank you scott it's good to be here
excuse me try that one again it's good to be here
and we hope we'll have a world in the next few weeks that we can continue to do these
global star parties from today's quotation is going to be from
charlotte bronte and i'd like to make the um claim that in my opinion she may be the
greatest writer in english after shakespeare the quote today is from jane eyre
and those of you who are familiar with the book will remember that her first meeting with rochester
comes when she spooks his horse and uh he isn't the most polite man to her
about that he springs his ankle he rushes back and then jane goes back
quietly on her own as she's about to enter the house she has an observing session that i would
like to quote now i lingered at the gates
i lingered on the lawn i base backwards and forwards on the pavement
the shutters of the glass door were closed i could not see into the interior
and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house from the gray hollow filled with rayless
cells as it appeared to me to that sky expanded before me
a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud the moon ascending it in solemn march
her orb seeming to look up as she left the hilltops from behind which she had come
far and farther below her and aspired to the zenith midnight dark in his father mustaf and
measureland's distance and for those trembling stars
that followed her course they made my heart tremble my veins glow when i viewed them
little things recall us to earth the clock struck in the hall that sufficed
i turned from the moon and the stars opened the side door and went in
thank you scott thank you so much thank you david um
you know uh david alluded to the the problems that we have going on in the world right now
but uh you know i think that it's important to recognize that um
astronomers uh in particular uh i think are
um often join each other and collaborate with each other from all over the world
and you know the uh the effect of looking up and seeing one sky and understanding
something beyond our borders and what divides us uh is incredibly important uh
if if there's nothing else to learn uh from your your interaction with astronomy you know i
think the most important thing to learn is that we are all we all share this one little pale blue
dot this one one planet and we're here to help each other you know and not to
worry so much about what we have or what we don't have you know because it's uh
you know it is it is really our duty to uh to uh make it all work and to share
and if we do that we'll all be just fine so actually scott it's
i i agree with what you said except when you said it's our duty
instead of judy i would say it's our privilege to be here to look up at the night sky i
i would agree i would agree but while we're agreeing and thanks scotty while we're agreeing i'd like to
mention a couple of things that are coming up later in the year this
late september explorer scientific will be conducting an arizona star party
if you're interested in coming i hope you are please get in touch with scott roberts at explore scientific explore alliance
we can tell you all the details and the other thing is that coming up on the 21st of may
a group of us are getting together with the coconino center for the arts in
flagstaff in order to celebrate the life of carolyn shoemaker
and so you may be interested those two events i did want to point out to you and finally back to my friend scott
thank you david thank you so much okay well it's uh
uh you know it's it's once again a privilege to do these things with uh with david i
i count each one of them as uh as a blessing um uh because it's it's just such an honor
so david thank you so much man the global star party uh and arizona dark sky star
party that will happen at oracle state park in arizona starts on uh september
21st uh and um runs through the 25th of september so we will be putting out more
information as that uh that comes along here but um right now we are going to go to the
uh astronomical league we're going to introduce terry mann terry is a
former two-term president of the astronomical league she's been with the astronomical league for many years uh
tirelessly supporting uh astronomers uh throughout
the um you know the federation of astronomy clubs and and members at large
and you know there's just so many tendrils and and aspects to the astronomical league that supports our
community and you should be part of it you should join uh an astronomical league club or join as a member at large
you can do that through astroleague.org but they have over 300 clubs they have over 20 000 members and
it's an all-volunteer group that does this so it's it's wonderful and um
uh i'm glad that uh the astronomical league works with us the way that they do
and here you are terry all yours thank you scott i'll get ready to share
my screen here okay so i will start with the questions
we always open with a warning about viewing the sun you always have to make
sure that you have the correct filters on your telescope or on your binoculars whatever
you use we want to keep everybody safe out there especially knowing we've got two eclipses coming up 23 and 24 that
many of us are already talking about and starting to put plans together for so always
ask somebody especially if you're new to astronomy and you want to look at the sun please ask an adult or somebody in a
club before you ever start observing the sun to make sure you have the proper
filter to do that so i'm going to start with the answers way back from february 22nd it's been a
while since we've been here and so here are the questions and answers
discovered in 2005 and initially thought to be a new major planet in the solar
system this object was initially named xena what was the name
and it is heiress second question
edwin hubble made his seminal discoveries of the existence of other galaxies in the expansion of the
universe using a telescope with what aperture and that's the 100-inch
mount wilson at 8 p.m on january 26 2022 i observed a
large dome of light extending from the southwest horizon in aquarius all the
way to aries near the zenith what was i seeing that would be the zodiacal like
like that is it's really something to see this was not me saying this this was chuck allen's questions
and those are the answers for the three questions from the 22nd these people
adrian bradley don knabb rich craling josh kovach michael overracker andrew
cortell cameron gillis and rich eubank answered the questions correctly and they were
put on the door prize list and since this is the first star party
that we are doing um for march i want to announce the winners of the february of
the month of february and again that would be josh kovach neil cox and paul and kathy anderson uh
somebody from explore scientific will be in contact with you
and so the questions from rj and this is totally me uh march is aurora month for
me so we're going to talk about the aurora and ask some questions depending on your location you might be
able to see the aurora at different times during the year statistically there are four months when the aurora is
more active would that be a march april september october
or b february march august or october
c january april october and november
which one would you choose
the northern lights are formed by charged particles emitted from the sun during a solar
flare penetrating the earth's magnetic field and colliding with atoms and
molecules in our atmosphere these collisions result in little bursts
of light called photons which make up the aurora when photons collide with oxygen
does it produce red and green aurora true or false
and the last one can coronal holes on the sun cause the aurora
and please join us this friday we have al live coming up and our speaker will
be mike shaw mike is from minnesota he is uh astrophoto a landscape astrophotographer
and he will talk about getting started in landscape astrophotography and as
always we'll have carol myself scott and david and we appreciate everybody and we
will also have an update on alcon 2022
with jim fordyce he is the chair i do believe of alcon and we will be live in
albuquerque this year july 28 through the 30th we'll get the latest details
this has been postponed now for two years so we are all really looking forward to the details for alcon 2022 i
hope you can join us for that too and i should go back and say send your
answers to secretary astro for the questions
so thank you scott i appreciate it wonderful wonderful well terry thank you
so much for coming on uh and we look forward to the astronomical league live event is this the seventh or eighth one
that we've done so far oh no this is uh i think this is the 15th 15th one yeah
okay scott that's so fast i don't know you know it goes by so fast anymore it's
like it's several yeah yeah i look at some of the shows we've done and uh you know we're now
into the hundreds of shows that we've put on for various things so i look at global star party my gosh it's
hard to believe i remember when you first talked about doing this yeah i mean it has just flown by and
we've met so many great people and learned so many things from everybody and you know it's just added
to the astronomical community so you know it's really been a good thing it's been a really good thing for expanding
everybody's knowledge and fun yeah absolutely terry thank you so much
thank you okay so up next is david eicher david
said can i say something oh sure sure i kind of like to get in a dig before
david gets point we really look forward to him but i was especially impressed with
terry's presentation just now the astronomical league is meeting in albuquerque
this this uh july i hope to be there
and also wanted to say that the astronomical league has become very active in a new
group for children called cosmic generations i think kareem's going to talk about it later
but there's going to be this sunday a meeting of cosmic generations organized
run led everything by the kids and i just wanted to say that i'm sorry
david no problem no scar no problem
i i did want to introduce uh david eicher for those of you that might be watching that are not familiar with
david eicher he is the editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine
which is the world's largest circulation magazine devoted to astronomy it has
more readers than anyone and they're coming up i don't know the exact date yet but they're coming up on their 50th
anniversary so uh their devotion to the worldwide community of astronomers is really
impressive and david eicher's been there for a lot of it um so it's a real privilege to have him on
the show uh david not only has a passion for um
astronomy but uh he has a passion for minerals and crystals amongst his other passions this
is a guy with multiple interests and uh he's always fascinating to listen to
um and uh you know he always makes it fun for us no matter what we're talking about but
david uh it's all yours thank you scott and next year will be the 50th anniversary of
astronomy and at the end of this year uh i will have been at the magazine only
for four-fifths of that time wow so
time flies when you're having fun so i will share my screen and see if i can get a slideshow
going and see if i can start the slideshow and go through some more minerals we
haven't gone through the entire landscape of planetary geology yet um but we're getting there
and someday i'll move on back to more astronomical things that are that are a little more straightforward but of
course minerals are the way that the universe assembles planets and so this is interesting because although uh
temperatures and pressures and other conditions would change of course dramatically from place to place in the
universe within galaxies within planetary systems that we know are out there ubiquitously now
the chemistry of the universe is universal we know through spectroscopy that the
same elements are uh throughout the universe in the same way so these things
kind of show us the way other planets might be as well well and we know now at this day and age
that we don't need supernaturalism to understand the universe thomas jefferson a great hero in some
ways said i believe in a divinely ordered universe even before his time
isaac newton one of the founders of modern science if you will said truth is ever to be found in the
simplicity and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things the universe is ordered not by
supernatural design but by the principles of physics that demonstrate how the universe works through physics
chemistry and the rest of the sciences minerals demonstrate this in that their atoms are assembled not magically but in
precise ways by electrochemical attractions inherent properties of the atoms that
make them up and guide them in to assembling into what mineralogists call a specific crystal lattice a form and we
can see that of course in all the mineral specimens that we look at
and there are about 5 000 minerals on earth altogether about species as they
are called different kinds of minerals and a lot of them and we'll look at one
of them today are so-called hydrates that
incorporate water into the minerals into the crystals and dioptase is one of
them it's a very attractive copper silicate oxide hydrate you can see the
formula there it was named in 1797 by the great french
mineral mineralogist and the more or less the creator of the modern understanding of crystallography
renee hui and and it was
sort of inspired by the words through and to see an allusion to the visibility
of the minerals internal cleavage planes it comes normally in a in a sort of a
vibrant emerald green color which you'll see or blue green uh and its crystals
are normally rhombohedral and they're usually elongated and they typically are less than about three quarters of a
centimeter in size and sometimes very very small as you'll see
so this is yet another one the largest family classification of minerals of all
are the silicates of which there are many many many because silicon making up
a good part of the crust of earth is very common and oxygen as we've talked
about already likes to combine very easily with practically everything
so here's a diagram of the crystal structure of dioptase it's a trigonal a
three field rotational axis here and you can see the different colors of the atoms
they're making up a crystal and i'm also going to show by the way a couple of sort of related uh
minerals here with this as well and i have to apologize but i'm getting into
the part where the groups of mineral photos i have are kind of by shelves
here and there a little bit so they're going to be a few minerals with a couple of other related minerals thrown in
there so again i just thought i would show you the variety and sort of the appearance
of some of these minerals and how they look so here is dioptase which is the emerald green with uh shatukite which is
this blue mineral at the base of this and this is a big hefty piece from the
uh so-called katenga copper crescent in the democratic republic of the congo
in africa this is a region that has a lot of interesting minerals and is very
very well known for having many many radioactive minerals as well
and is an important source of uranium this area among other things
here's a sort of a typical diop dioptase piece that that is from one of the major
deposits of more recent times a huge amount of stuff came out of this area in
kazakhstan and so this is a fairly common area for
mineral collections to have a piece of this in
here's a somewhat older time dioptive dioptaze placen piece and you can see that this sort of emerald color is
usually pretty typical of these crystals this sumed mine was mined for the better part of a
couple of hundred years now with germans going and exploring down into namibia
and finding this mining area so this is an older piece presumably
then i've thrown in a related uh mineral or two as well here as i said that we're kind of stuck together in the photo
groups with these this is broshan tight which is copper sulfate hydroxide and and this piece
it's similar in color and you can see this has these sort of needle-like crystals but it's uh
somewhat related and then it's a copper hydroxide and this is from the grandview mine
which is actually within the grand it's adjacent to and within essentially the land of the grand canyon believe it or
not here's back to dioptase a famous mine in
arizona up in the mountains the dripping springs the christmas mine and this is sort of a more typical piece of what you
would find uh throughout here's back to broshen tight and these are very large impressive
crystals of this mint copper mineral copper of course gives this both these minerals the strong green
color and this is from a very famous mine of recent times the mepius mine in mexico
that has produced a lot of good specimens i mentioned some of the crystals of
dioptase are really tiny and and like a sort of a coating of very small crystals
uh submillimetric crystals if you will and this is the case with this piece uh
that's a chilean sample as opposed to that these are big blocky
crystals here and and back to the katanga region of the congo for this and you can see
these are kind of chunky big crystals of the same chemistry of course
here's dioptase from that famous christmas mine again in arizona that is on calcite that gives it a little bit of
a different look beautiful and back to broshawn tight
here from morocco this is a sort of a big piece but you can see it has the basic same basic look more or
less even though the pieces are a very different character
this is broshan tight again in these needle-like crystals again from mexico
and very similar uh asicular needle-like crystals of the
same mineral this time from morocco and i've thrown in a couple of smithsonites which i talked about
previously uh zinc carbonate which also have a little bit of copper in them here to color them um are thrown in here too
because they were adjacent to the the groups and and some smithsonite was wrote with rosacite here from utah
to ellie county um and some smithsonite uh back down from mexico as well and you can see how
these minerals that are sort of related and they're they're all influenced by copper color are sort of nice display
pieces and they show a pretty good variety of form in what we find on
earth and i thought i would mention again scott very quickly and this is something that explorer scientific is going to be
involved with and we can hope that uh there's peace in europe before this occurs in in the fall
uh this will be september 5th through the 10th our sixth starmust festival which i'm on the board of directors of
and excited to be involved with and we've had the first round of speakers announced here charlie duke nicole stott
kip thorne george smoot garrick israeli and jill tarter and even
people as undistinguished as me will be speaking there and we also have starmus
is an international science festival and we've had about three to five thousand people there generally this year it's
going to be in yerevan armenia the capital of armenia the largest city
in the past we've had quite a number of performers there as well
because starmus was really founded by a small group that includes the astronomer garrick israelian who's in
the canary islands they're at tenerife and his close friend brian may who is an
astronomer and who's a co-author on some books with me and who in his spare time
also plays guitar so the idea is that we like to have
science and also the arts represented there and so stars and music starmas
and we've had in the past at starmuses uh as some rock and roll thrown in there
as well entertainment as well as the very serious talks from astronauts from nobel prize winners and others uh and
those musicians have included brian and rick wakeman and peter gabriel brian eno
hans zimmer steve vi grace potter sarah brightman there are some very very important and celebrated popular
musicians who will be there and we'll be announcing many more later as the weeks progress into the
spring and summer as well this year and this year we will celebrate as one of the major themes 50 years on mars so it
was a tad longer now it was actually 1971 when the russian mars iii and the
mariner 9 of the american probe first arrived at mars and we had
cooperation among the powers in space exploring science uh and will hope to
return to that kind of cooperative positive mood this fall in europe and scott i know
you're going to be involved in a major star party event also at starmus along
with myself and garrick and others and explore scientific will basically be the
engine that's running that big star party yeah it's going to be a lot of fun i'm really really excited about it
um and i think it will be the biggest event i've ever partaken of so i'm
really honored and a little frightened at the same time
it'll be a piece of cake no problem i promise you we should have maybe about
a thousand people or who knows maybe more at the star party right yeah
it's quite a few looking forward to that we hope that you can join us in armenia it's actually a very easy place to get
to for europeans so if you can get over there it's it's easy to get to and we'll hope that we
have a peaceful world long before then yes absolutely okay
david yes sir two questions for you please yes uh what is why is this dioptase mined
here in the country what is what is is used for question one question two is
did it evolve here on earth through our geology or is there signs of it elsewhere in the universe that we can
find yeah it's only known on earth and we don't know about mineralogy to a very uh
um extensive degree on other planets not to get into a long detour but about
2.6 billion years ago earth underwent a huge transformation
and that was the so-called great oxygenation event when the microbes that were producing
oxygen that most of the history of life on earth consisted of microbes of course
and there was a flash point 2.6 billion years ago when the microbes that were
producing oxygen produced so much oxygen that there was free oxygen all of a
sudden in earth's atmosphere and that combined and tripled the number of
mineral species and so dioptase which is mostly mined now
for collector specimens not really as a copper ore if you will
was one of those oxygenated uh mineral species now if you go to places like the
moon and mercury and most of the other worlds that we know a little bit about
mineralogically in the solar system there are only a third or less as many
mineral species because there's almost no free oxygen there so dioptase is
really known on earth and should exist all over the universe because there's a
hell of a lot of oxygen out there but in our solar system it's really predominantly an earth mineral
is that a uh not too long of an answer i hope [Laughter]
i think it worked okay it worked so okay
well goodness uh uh david thank you so much for your interesting and uh
beautiful images of these of the dioptes and you know i love the colors and the
shapes and all the rest of it and uh you know as a kid uh you know certainly i
had rock collections and stuff like that but i nothing on the level of what you uh you had so i'm glad that you could
share this with us and uh uh you know it's uh and you're right it's it's certainly a
uh intrinsic part of our universe and it's good to kind of look down and see
what's what's on this amazing planet of ours so thanks very much david thank you i
appreciate it thank you well up next is dennis coy dennis coy is
the uh current executive director of yerkes observatory
yerkes was opened in 1897 and it has the world's
largest refractor there this was the start of george ellery hales uh
leviathan i mean huge uh giant telescopes he built uh four of these telescopes in
succession each one being bigger than the last but it all started uh
there in williams bay and if you ever go to the yerkes observatory you will
feel the history of uh of the facility the telescope itself is elegant and
beautiful it makes beautiful images i've looked through it many times and
it is i'm so glad that the yerkes future foundation was established
and that they were able to save the observatory to save the telescope and to give it a bright future
and so dennis is here with us to give us an update of what's going on at your keys observatory
and good evening everyone hope uh everyone
can hear me okay i'm getting away in a uh guest bedroom as my kids get put to bed so apologies
for my uh pedestrian surroundings here um i was going to share just some images of
uh work that has been going on at the observatory so that you can get a sense of sort of what we've been up to i know
many of you are familiar with it so i'm going to share my screen here
um and uh you know so i'm not going to belabor sort of what is there i think many of
you many of you know that um but uh scott is everywhere we'll see my screen all right yes it looks great
great okay so i won't belabor what's there but i think you're all you know familiar um
and we took over from the university of chicago uh just under two years ago it'd be two years
this coming may 1st so we're just coming up on the 24 month anniversary of our time there
since we took over and in that time we've undertaken a lot of fundraising
and a lot of work i think when i saw this group if any of you were on the call back in i think was
june or july of this year uh we were sort of just in the midst of our summer season of work
um and that season uh concluded i'll show you some of what we got done and then um you know sort of share with you
sort of what we're doing now and what's coming up um so you know the dome and the
refractor remain uh wrapped that work um in the dome
is not slated until 2023 or 2024 so that area is for the most part uh pretty
quiet right now but when we took over the observatory you know basically we kind of took over a
um you know historic facility that had been you know in essence sort of abandoned in place there were still a
few staff on from 2018 one of the when the university of chicago had closed it
um that sort of dwindled down to one staff member and so when we took over you know it literally was as if people
had just sort of gotten up and left their offices left their files left their books and folders
you know just sort of reams and reams of papers and equipment and things and so we've been working with this is one of
my favorite images of my literally my first day was the box of a thousand keys
um which we also inherited and so you know i spent sort of the first a
couple weeks getting oriented and we have since hired a number of staff and brought some folks on but it really took
us some time to get organized and figure out what needed to be done so this past summer we spent much of the year doing a
significant amount of break work using a company called marine restoration which is out of chicago they've worked on the
us capital they restored the facade of the metropolitan museum of art when i was the chief of design um there
they have worked on the alamo all kinds of places that are really experts in brick and stone and so starting with the
outside of the great dome but also a lot of the parapets and other parts of the building that
just had huge amounts of water and ice damage from years and years and years of leakage and sort of improper use of
historic materials and things so that work has been uh ongoing and will continue on for several more years
as we sort of work our way through the building um so that's kind of where a significant amount of resources and energy are going you see there on the
right that's the outside of that same dome so basically every brick every one of the roman bricks coming off the brick
you know sort of walls behind those uh being hollowed out from the inside which is
the image on the left so they can dry out those walls were so soaked with water that every winter they would
freeze and spall brick off and bricks were literally falling into the observatory dome
and so we've learned that brick dries at the rate of one inch per month and those walls are 28 inches thick
so when it is above freezing which is not often in wisconsin it is uh we are
drying those walls out and it will take 28 months of dry time um we also did things like ripped off
all the parapets put on here you see an image of an entirely new roof uh being worked on
so a whole new roof system was put up all the parapets and a lot of the terracotta was removed pieces that could
be salvaged were stainless steel pinned and pieces that could be
could be salvaged would be 3d scanned and were replicated there's sort of a 3d printing version of terracotta now
by marion restoration and then various pieces had to be rebuilt over the course of the year down there
at the bottom of this image you see a new parking lot going in um the observatory never welcomed visitors before so you know the idea of
that we'd even need a parking lot was a new new concept um so installed a new parking lot installed charging stations for level
two uh for vehicles and for teslas um put 83 solar panels on the new roof so
that's the the new roof with the new solar panels so it's now fully running under its own power during the summer uh
not during the winter in wisconsin and then also similarly undertook a lot of work on the interior this is just
looking down sort of a slightly skew image because i think it was a panoramic but um looking down the
corridor uh at sort of walls were being repainted plaster being repaired stripped back to the raw plaster and
repainted we had conservators in uh who are experts in stone there's just you know
thousands and thousands of square feet of a beautiful marble almost everywhere in your keys and so all that had been
uh you know had 125 years of dirt on it was covered in soot was rusting from
moisture since the building has not had hvac uh in its lifetime or humidity control
so all that work was done and working on things like restoring the original mosaics on the floor um my this
is one of my sort of favorite um you know images or stories because on the left you can see that ridiculously
bright white section which was the conservator's first attempt at restoring the marble and you know
that is the same marbles you see in those little white tiles right so it's you know it looks like the lobby of a nordstrom which is a department in store
here in the united states um you know not what we were going for so once they sort of found their stride
and sort of sorted out how to work on it the image on the right is uh you know a restored section where it's retained
some of the patina of the original um has you know been cleaned up a little bit but you know it doesn't feel like it
was made yesterday either we're trying to find the right uh you know sort of level of restoration and uh work on the
building we've been working our way through the interiors these were originally two
offices which were separated where you see that radiator standing in the center of the room so these rooms are being
combined to allow us to sort of bring in groups for lectures and talks and presentations so a lot of that kind
of construction work going on and some rooms have been completed on the right is a conference room that's in
honor of dr david schramm who was at the university of chicago a wonderful astrophysicist who died in a
plane accident a couple decades ago a donor i wanted to name that room in his honor um so you know some spaces
have been completed and are ready to go and some other spaces are being readied for public visitation
um or for use for fundraising so this is a space about uh of course olmsted who
designed the landscapes at yerkes the grandfather of american landscape design
um and his firm designed the 50 acres of grounds that we uh still operate uh and run and those grounds themselves are
being restored so here's a group of volunteers this past summer we have every month groups come in and
take down dead trees take down trees that aren't part of the olmsted plan we've planted
several hundred new trees from saplings to fairly substantial plantings that require heavy cranes and
trucks to move the facility back towards the olmsted plan
so just all kinds of work going on out of the landscape and way in the back of that image on the left you can see a old
farmhouse that dates from 1897. that farmhouse is being completely gutted and restored this winter which
will allow us to host residencies so we'll be having uh you know science writers artists uh curators
photographers uh you know astronomers come in and do
um summer residency so we'll have a four bedroom home that will be able to host folks in for residencies to work with
the observatory work with the public with the glass plates and the instruments uh so that'll be part of the
programming and these images are literally from today um here in wisconsin today we had a
group of 150 high school kids come and clean out old student domes on the property
just do all kinds of you know sort of winter pick up and clean up and then fed them all pizza you see them
all sitting there on the stairs on the right after their work day so you know some of this is being done through you know with high level professional
expertise and advisement you know the archivist at the university of chicago marion restoration
um the best folks working on web design social media construction all kinds of areas and then some of it's
been done absolutely with volunteer labor and sort of making use of the resources we have in front of us
we have a lot of work going on behind the scenes this is the yorkie's website that we'll be launching
in a couple of weeks um just to give you a flavor of sort of you know what's to come there's sort of a pretty old school
brochure where site this is all just fpo text so don't take any of it too literally but just gives you a sense of
um you know sort of what will be here once that launches in a couple weeks so we've got folks working on that behind the scenes we've got a social media team
working on reclaiming the yorkie's social media accounts most of which were owned by others or by
people not associated with europe's at all so there's you know be a range of activities
and events and we'll be open um for tours as soon as may of this year
believe it or not so while we still have years of work ahead we will still be um
you know welcoming the public in we'll be hosting tours we'll be hosting events um you know talks lectures we've got the
new director chevy humphrey of the museum and science and industry in chicago coming to give a talk this june
um we've got other uh sort of women leaders in science we're celebrating as part of thinking forward to the roman
space telescope going up in a couple years um so just sort of thinking about the the long play for your keys so that's
where we are um right now and i'm happy to sort of entertain
any questions or comments or thoughts anybody has as we sort of work our way through this um you know we still have a
great deal of work ahead we are running a national search right now for a director of science
so we're down to our final three candidates who will be coming uh flying in the next couple weeks for final
interviews so that will be someone um you know a name that i think almost everyone on this call would probably
know from among those three candidates hopefully who will lead the science program and sort of sort out what we're going to be
doing with the two extant robotic telescopes what we're going to be upgrading how we're going to
sort of build a program around what relevant you know sort of science yorkies can
still do to contribute um you know either as it sits or with upgrades so a lot of our work is still
ongoing so questions comments scott anything yeah there's uh there was a question lots of comments like you know
congratulations on on the progress of your ease it's it's wonderful i mean it's really
uh you know does my heart a lot of good to see some so much care
uh being invested into the that uh observatory because it's you know this
is the start i mean you can draw a direct line from that to the latest science that's being done today in space
exploration and planetary science so um you know there there's uh
and when you go to your keys you're gonna learn this firsthand so it's it's important that you make that journey uh
to this place um when when it comes open in uh this year so
uh there was a question if there is a uh james astro watching on youtube maybe a little tongue-in-cheek but he went to
know is there a time capsule uh at jerky so there you go that's a good time capsule
that's okay yeah i feel like we um that's i feel like that's the facility we own as the time capsule but um
uh that maybe we should add one in we have not found one anything that we've taken apart yet although you know we
have uh fantasies about doing various different uh sort of time capsule exhibits i mean one of my favorite
things that's floated to the surface is we have i think somewhere in the neighborhood of 300
abandoned uh pcs and macs that were used over the last you know
30 years at yerke's 40 years at yorkies you know i know nobody wiped those hard drives so i would love to you know
partner up with the tech museum in san jose california download the contents of all those hard drives do word clouds and
searches you know your keys was working on jpl contracts defense department contracts there's got to be some
fascinating stuff on those hard drives and they've just been sitting there for you know a long long time so there's all kinds of time capsule opportunities for
sure that's awesome that's awesome um what do you think i mean uh dennis i mean you've
been working on this how long have you been there now uh i've been there for only ten months ten months okay okay
so so your your experience uh now i know that you have long experience with
museums and curating artifacts and this kind of thing but what do you think is the uh most what is the most interesting
part of yorkies to you personally and what what do you think is the biggest challenges
uh that facebook i think the i think the biggest opportunity the biggest challenge are kind of one in the same which is you know the goal for us is to
create um a site that really is like a pilgrimage site for anyone who's interested in
astronomy science space discovery big ideas you know the philosophical
history of science you know i think there isn't anything really like that in the united states i mean you can visit wonderful nasa sites
you can go you know probably the most analogous i might be lowell planetarium a low observatory down in arizona
but you know we really want to cross-pollinate it through arts culture music science um you know hard science
and and i think that's the opportunity i think the risk is also finding the right balance in those
things and making sure that the work we do is respectful to the legacy and the history of that site you know
there were some amazing i mean you all know the names of the scientists who went through there you know from hubble
the second to otto struve to anti-grace roman to uh you know chandrasekhar i
mean it's an incredible who's who and so we need to make sure that whatever we do is is respectful even as
it kind of takes it to a place that i don't think a lot of observatories have gone as far as their
public program and being much more ecumenical and broad in the kind of offerings we provide
so that balance i think is both the opportunity and the risk uh and the thing that keeps me up at night
right right okay well that's great um dennis i thank you i know you're taking
family time out to do this uh my pleasure happy to know and so it's wonderful to have you on and
um and thanks for taking the time with us here well hopefully we'll have a chance to come back and report again uh
this summer in the fall and sure um you know we're fundraising's going well we've um you know we're all privately
funded at this point and so have raised 13.5 million dollars of our an initial 20 million dollar goal which will then
become a next 20 million dollar goal so that will kind of be an endless process but uh things are moving along well so
fingers crossed so dennis where should people go if they'd like to donate some money towards your keys yorkies
observatory.org you are welcome there's a donate option through paypal on there
um and uh it often works i'm told okay
so even if it's a small donation every little bit everything literally of that 13.5 million dollars
many of those are you know 100 50 donations it's amazing how many people have stepped up so i think it's awesome
and you guys are doing a wonderful job so thanks very much dennis well thanks for the invite and have a nice night everybody take care
all right bye-bye okay so um coming up next is uh uh kareem jaffer uh
kareem is uh uh you know he's a professor of astronomy he is uh an outreach leader
with the uh royal astronomical society of canada and montreal center
but before we go to him i also want to just make a little segment about the alliance of historic
observatories of which he's observatory is one of um they are
uh you know they i guess they could be considered one of the poster childs of of this organization
uh and this organization is now growing as well um so if you go to
historicobservatories.org you can learn more about this and i'll just go ahead and put that down
in chat but um it is
you know a subset right now historic observatories from around the world
and i think you'll find it interesting kareem uh how how's your day been you've
been busy with your students and uh uh you're a busy man as well
yeah no today was test day they had their first test on uh solar system on a
little bit of the history of astronomy so today fits right in there uh we're about to start the second unit on
thursday and we're going to be diving into the sun stars and eventually getting to
the expanding universe so i'm doing a little bit of the history side and a little bit of the expanding universe side for us tonight
yeah so you now you know where i get all my themes from i get them from kareem so i i'm convinced you've got my office
bugged or something it seems to always overlap
oh fantastic great it's great okay so here we go so thanks scott um so yeah
hey everyone uh good evening and uh we are talking tonight about the expanding universe but as i always do i want to do
a little bit of a check-in first our university lowbrows in michigan we just had our newsletter come out and uh
i was glad to see my daughter actually put a newsletter article in about the cosmic generation which i'm going to talk about shortly as david mentioned
earlier a lot of you know me from the rasc montreal center and our public events our next public event is going to
be during earth hour on uh well right leading up to earth hour on march 26th
so you'll hear more about that in the coming weeks but some of you also know me from astro radio and we were very
privileged yesterday in astro radio to have with us a special guest david eichner he came on our reach out and
touched space panel show yesterday and we chatted about starmus we chatted about david's work at astronomy magazine
for the last 40 years about their 50th anniversary coming up also a little bit about david start now
i don't know how many of you are aware of this but david got his start publishing his own magazine on deep sky
and he just saw void saw an interest area that a lot of youth had and he decided
to just go ahead and do something about it and that's a perfect segue to our cosmic generation because the cosmic
generation is something that duvet and i chatted about a long time ago
dina the president at denver astronomical society was trying to start something up with the youth members
there and what they were trying to do was they were trying to come up with a way to bring together youth from
not just across the nation but potentially across the world and we've now arrived at a global
astronomical organization by youth for youth and a couple of weeks ago you saw
the outcome of their first workshop which was some wonderful alien drawings and some wonderful imagination and
learning about extremophiles their next workshop is this sunday it's a 3 p.m
mountain daylight time keep that in mind because the clocks do move this weekend for a lot of us
and their talk this weekend is just going to be fantastic they're going to have a workshop on how big is the
universe really they're going to talk about size and scale and their goal is and this is a goal that i don't even
know if i can do but they want to try to come up with a way to share both the immensity of the universe and how small
we are in comparison and yet share how important our presence is in
the universe and that's kind of pretty fantastic to hear about so
my daughter tara is one of the exec as well as bella grant nathan helner messelman and several others ty
michael we've had some incredible work being done as well in brazil and
nicolina has been one of the outspoken members of the cosmic generation so for
kids up to age 17 we invite you to please join in at this workshop and take
part get a feel for what it's like as nathan and bella both have been saying you know it's it's about being able to
share your passion for the night sky with other nerds other geeks other people who share the same language share
the same interests and want to talk together but i don't want to be the one to put words in their mouth they're they're
fantastic together unfortunately nathan couldn't come tonight but you'll probably see him one of the future gsps talking a little
bit more about the cosmic generation i want to mention and an invitation to anybody who's interested is we have our
next citizen science series coming up on wednesday march 16th at the rasc montreal center it starts at eight
o'clock eastern daylight time and we're going to have a couple of really interesting segments for our citizen
science series we do have a double star certificate presentation as some of you attended our last citizen science
workshop we were talking a lot about double stars and a couple of our members are really pursuing our local
certificate as well as the national certificate and we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the national rafc programs next week
but for our citizen science series francois who's our guest tonight he's going to be talking about a
star tracker that he built for his own wide field astrophotography and he's going to go in depth into the build and
kind of go into a little bit of the nitty-gritty so any of you who are interested in that i think you'll really enjoy the citizen science series and
then i have a special treat a couple of my students have put together some retrospectives on their project
experience with my astronomy course at john abbott and they're going to share a little bit of what they did in citizen
science and what sort of skills and what stuck with them now that they're at university and
pursuing hopefully their career path over the coming years and so we invite
you to join us for the citizen science series the other thing i want to mention is uh
as scott has said before i do kind of try to stay active in the chat during our global star parties and you know i i
love hearing about you know norm and chris and harold and beatrice and lisa ann and others setting up their scopes
while we're doing the gsp and then maybe later at night they'll share some of their images and so just as i was
getting on tonight one of our rask montreal members who's presented here at the dsps before quatran uh deep sky from
downtown he posted this little picture to me uh you know his nice little reflector set up a table top on the back
of his rented car and his camera set up to do some wonderful astrophotography right there in the mounds of snow that
we have here in montreal because hey the sky is showing a little bit of clearing and it's not negative double digits it's
single digits so he figured why not get out there and spend the night under the stars so
when i saw scott's choice for tonight's topic i was remembering the last time we talked about the expanding universe and
you know we talked a little bit about the science and a little bit about the redshift and i saw that there's a speaker talking a little bit later about
the redshift universe i wanted to take a little bit of a different tangent because you know i'm apt to do that
when i started teaching astronomy one of the big things that we talk about with the expanding universe is of course hubble's data and we talk about where
that data came from and how it showed sort of a relationship between this idea that objects further away from us
galaxies further away quasars further away now that we can take measurements of quasars as well
they're ex they're receding away from us at faster and faster speeds the further away they are
and this holds with this idea of a big bang of an expanding universe and the original hubble's data
you know for for the scientist in me there's a lot of scatter there there is a definite type of a relationship but
there's a lot of scattering i need to see error bars to know exactly how good this is but this was the original set of
data and when you look in the astronomy textbooks about the expanding universe you see that when humacen helped hubble
to get even more data and they expanded from the original data work that sliffer had done
they were able to really expand to extremely fast recession
velocity and they came up with a hubble factor this idea of the expansion rate of the universe which was much more
linear and even with your scatter your scatter was much closer to this linear relationship that said that the further
away a galaxy is the faster it's receding from us the problem was that when you did the
math and you looked the slopes you came out with a little age of the universe less than the age of the earth and that
age of the earth was taken from carbon dating of rocks here on earth and so you kind of had a fairly definite idea that
there was something wrong here now a lot of this work was done at mount
wilson observatory i'm going to be talking to you a little bit about the story of mount wilson observatory and i'm going to be talking to you a little
bit about where this data came from and when we talked about this back in the
fall with the expanding universe you know we mentioned the fact that when when he got to work at mount wilson
and got to look at stars and image fainter and fainter stars he realized that there's actually a second
population of stars and that second population of stars is older stars there's stars that were around from when
our galaxy was first being formed and there's even now hypothetical third population of stars that were around
just when the universe was starting to be formed that would have even less metallicity than the population two
stars did but when you account for this difference in the types of stars that
were actually being analyzed by hubble and humison all of a sudden you get a much smoother
curve with an expansion rate that gives us an age of the universe that's something a little bit closer to a
consistent age with what we thought we'd be getting and then of course more recently we have
analysis that shows that the expansion is accelerating and that the expansion rate actually was much slower in the
earlier times when our universe was first forming out and so there's a definite missing element in the theory
for the expanding universe which we call dark energy and dark energy seems to give us this idea of why the expansion
is accelerating now i could spend hours talking about all of that
but what i want to focus on is something a little bit different when we go and look at mount wilson and we look at the
story of the expanding universe we look at who they credit for the the heroes who
really got all of the research started you know there's george ellery hale who after yerkes set up the 60-inch
reflector using a 60-inch mirror that he had and then used that to leverage to get money and and resources to actually
get a hundred inch reflector which was enabled them to do all that amazing work with the hooker telescope
there's walter adams who did a lot of the amazing work to actually set up the science research groups that worked
under the auspices of mount wilson and one of those was hubble's and hubble's
work is what's credited with understanding the expansion of the universe when we
look at these pictures even when the dignitaries like einstein were visiting at mount wilson and they were gathered
together in the library there's a gentleman there off to the side who i mentioned earlier humison
milton humison is there in the pictures he's mentioned with hubble
but i find often that either his story goes unrecognized or
misrecognized so i wanted to spend a little bit of time tonight telling you a bit about milton humison now
where this comes from is when i started teaching the astronomy course one of the things that i'm known for from my family
is you know we have books you wouldn't believe how many books we have in the house and i still always
going to use bookstores and i still always go into new book stores and i'm looking around and i'm always trying to find a book that could capture the
excitement and sometimes i get a book i'll read a little bit of it i'll store it away and i know it's there for when i want that information again
but i came across this book very early on when i started teaching astronomy and it's called how far is up it's by john
and mary griffin now john gribben was a phd student of fred hoyle in the uk
he and his wife mary they have put together some incredible biographies of scientists but this particular book
isn't as much a biography of one scientist as it is a contextualization
of how one scientist led to an appreciation for how
anybody really has a passion for the night sky they have a way to contribute and that's what i want to talk to you
about humasin for because not all of us on this on this call not all of us in the audience are trained scientists and
i've talked to you before about the importance of citizen science and in my mind milton hewson is one of the first
citizen scientists just in terms of the way in which he applied his
work ethic and his attention to detail to allow us to have an understanding of
the expanding universe so when i look up pictures of milton humison one of the ones that i came up with is this one at
the 100 inch hooker telescope but some of you will recognize this picture because this picture often is shown with
a caption saying edwin hubble at work at the eyepiece of the hundred and hundred telescope and i
tried to find the providence of this of this picture i checked uh the houston university uh library i checked uh the
the actual mount wilson arc astronomical observatory in their historical index and i was trying to
figure out if there was any actual authentication and most of the people who would say
that this isn't humanism and that this is hubble would point out the fact that humison always had glasses on but then
they have this picture of humasun and hubble at work at the telescope trying to install the spectrograph at the early
stages of the work that they did on the expanding universe and you can see neither of them are wearing glasses and
so i truly believe this is a picture of humus and at work simply because humasun was the one who did most of the
observing hubble did most of the analysis in the theoretical work but the observing of the spectra and the
observing specifically of following night after night after night the target
to develop enough photons hitting the photographic plate to know that you have enough photons to make an accurate
estimate of what it is you're seeing that fell to humanism so how did it fall to humanity how did he come up with this
but when he was in high school he was one of those students who didn't really excel and the reason he didn't excel is
because he wasn't really interested in the house in the understanding the the the background or the knowledge
base he wanted to do he wanted to act he wanted to to be a hands-on person and so
he convinced his parents to let him uh spend the summer working at mount wilson
hotel and he ended up never going back to school because while he was working at the hotel
the mount wilson observatory already had the 60-inch telescope up there but they were starting to build more and more
into the observatory they'd widened a track up the mountain to start to actually set up the larger base of what
the observatory would become down the road and so he managed to get a job as a mule driver just to take supplies up to
the actual hotel or to the observatory sorry from the hotel area which was base
camp and just helped get things there and then he saw the way in which the observatory
itself was being built and he befriended a lot of the people there one of the people he befriended was an engineer and
the engineer's daughter helen became milton's wife and so you know once you have a wife
once you have a family you have to become a responsible person so he went and he invested in a citrus farm and he
you know let go of his his joy of being up on the mountain
but he always remembered that he loved being under the stars he loved being up on the mountain and he loved being part
of that new venture that was up there so around mid 1917
his father-in-law who was one of the engineers said that there's a job up there if he wants it
and so he decided you know what i get free lodging i get meals while i'm working even though the pay is awful i'm
going for it and so they sold the citrus farm they moved up there and he took a job as a night janitor
now in november 1917 as a night janitor when the world war was just hitting and
there were really a lack of people available to do the work at the observatory
he was given the responsibility to start actually doing a little bit of the observing of actually moving the plates
around and moving the telescope to keep it on the target because even though the 60-inch telescope had a tracking
mechanism that tracking mechanism needed to be observed at all times and adjusted
and he proved to have an incredible eye at keeping the target as close to the
center of the photographic film and sometimes one day of observation is not enough for a very faint object so the
next day you have to load the plate back in in the right orientation to catch the object and then continue following it
through and milton was the one you would go to when you had a job like that harlow shapley was one of the ones who
saw milton's work and so he suggested that milton be added to the scientific staff
and george ellery hale decided to take a flyer on him and say you know what he has no background he didn't even finish
his high school education but he has a trained eye for an astronomical observer
and he has a care when it comes to working with these photographic plates and so he added him as a junior
scientist to the staff much to the chagrin of a lot of the other scientists there now shapely loved the work that humans
did and he gave humanised a lot of responsibilities for his own research work
but shapely also had a very particular view of what it was he was seeing in the night sky
and so a few years well about a year and a half later himself was going through some pictures
of the andromeda nebula which at the time they thought was just a nebula of gas within our milky way
and he realized that there was an object there that seemed to be a star that was becoming brighter and dimmer and
brighter and dimmer it was a cepheid variable star and so he went back through multiple plates and in each of
the plates he characterized exactly where the star was he drew lines on with with black mark or with black uh
chalk basically and he drew these lines and he took all of these plates to shapely and he said look there's an
actual cepheid variable star here and shapley said no no this is a cloud of gas within our milky way there's no
possibility of having a cepheid variable star in a cloud of gas you're not seeing what you think you're
seeing and proceeded to wipe away the work that humacen had done and the
observation that he had made now he wasn't he had no scientific background shapely
was the one who brought him onto the staff so he decided to let it go and
that actually prevented shapely from being the first one to recognize that
the andromeda galaxy was actually over a million light years away and was not
part of the milky way but had he looked carefully at the observation the humans and had made he likely would have seen
that exact result now what humacin is known for
is his work with hubble and his work with hubble came in a very interesting way now a lot of
us know that what hubble was doing was he was looking at the cepheid variable stars in other galaxies and using them
to determine based on the light that came to us and the periodicity so we know what light
should have come to us how far away those different galaxies are now he didn't take into account dust which can
cause the light to dim he didn't take into account the population of stars so cepheid variable calculations were wrong
but the idea was right and when vesta sliffer first published this idea that for 25
different galaxies that were fairly bright that he could see with a 24-inch telescope that he had access to
for those galaxies the vast majority of them had redshifts moving away and the
further one seemed to have a larger shift which means they had a larger recession velocity
when hubble came across this he knew that this was something that their 100-inch telescope at mount wilson could
shed immense light on but he also knew that he wasn't the one to take those accurate measurements he needed a staff
observe observational astronomer to do it so he approached humasun and he said you know can you do this will you do
this and human originally said no and the reason he said no is something that he talks about in his oral
interview which is on the american institute of physics website this is around 1965 he's doing a retrospective
of his work with hubble and he talks about the fact that when hubble approached him with this idea he said no
because he knew that the spectrograph that they had at mount wilson would require
days upon days upon days of observation of one target just to get one spectra
and that one spectrum would be so faint and so difficult to do
and he didn't really care about it he he understood that there was a significance here there was a puzzle
here but it wasn't a puzzle he cared about at that time so he said no originally and then hubble
kind of asked him you know please at least do one let's see if this can be done and their prism spectrograph was a
really interesting one because it cut out ultraviolet wavelengths so you couldn't do the normal hydrogen spectrum
that you would be looking for so what he ended up doing was calcium h and k line
and the calcium lines that he did allowed him to look at these recessional
velocities of redshifts of galaxies for faint galaxies that sliffer had no
chance of seeing in his 24-inch telescope so he did a couple and he saw what sliffer had seen so he saw that it
could be done with a hundred inch and it was much easier to do with these bright ones and then hale had caught the bug and so
hale called humuson in and said look if you're willing to do this with hubble i will invest in a better spectrograph and
so that better spectrograph will allow us to do all of these things in one night rather than over many nights and
humans was sold he said okay let's do this of course once you have a better spectrograph you
look at fainter targets which again means multiple nights so he spent all of his time looking up through that
eyepiece making sure that the photographic plate was perfectly centered so that you can get incredibly
accurate spectra and when he did so he was able to help hubble to prove that this relationship
of receding galaxy velocities with distance actually was a constant relationship you
could see in the night sky the universe truly was expanding and heberson talks about the fact that
there were problems and there were puzzles that he didn't have a chance to work on because
of the limitations even of the 100 inch telescope but i love this quote nothing in astronomy is a disappointment you
make an observation to try and find out what it's going to do you think it's going to do something
but all of the interesting problems come from the things that didn't turn out the way you thought they might now i want to
end with one of the quotes when they asked him what he's doing with his
retirement and whether he still wants to go back and be an astronomer and work at
it and this is where you really get the understanding that the the puzzle
was interesting to him but the theoretical side was not what drove him he enjoyed his time but he was done and
he said that my son wanted to buy me a telescope for a present and i said my god bill i've looked in an eyepiece all
my life i don't want to look at any more eye pieces no no no i want a fish and that's what i've been
doing ever since i'm up here steelhead and salmon that's my business now
talking with these old-timers around here now in a lot of the books that i was looking
at for my students humacin is talked about as this example of
you don't need a fancy degree to do really good the this this no no no nonsense blue-collar humanism showed up
all those amazing theoreticians by doing what none of them could that wasn't humiliating at all
humuson was an incredibly precise incredibly technical
observationalist and that's what he wanted to be that's what he was and with that he contributed
to our understanding of the universe to a point where even now we go back to his original data and we keep getting more
and more results out of it but that's the story for another time so that's what i wanted to share with
you today um scott are there any questions before i move on to our guest
uh you know people are just um i think you're kind of inspiring people to uh
you know what it would be like to look through a large aperture telescope and so there was some conversation
about um you know what you what you know if you could see color visually through these
large telescopes and i've looked visually through this 60 inch and the 100-inch telescope and actually i've
also looked visually through the 200-inch palomar at the kude focus and
amazingly uh you know those telescopes have such huge focal length uh that big objects like the orion
nebula for example and you could see the kind of the aqua blue green color you know
but i've seen kind of more uh amazingly like ruddish you know red
tinges and stuff in the orion nebula with a smaller telescope you know because you're at much lower power and
that's exactly kind of what you need but i will tell you that compact objects like planetary nebula
wow they're like in technicolor oh okay they're technicolor through a 60 inch or
100 inch telescope i will point out scott for his birthday actually had set up donations to mount wilson because it
was still under renovations after that big forest fire last year um and that
was that was incredibly moving i shared that with my students last fall because that that is a historical place i mean
the science still being done there is incredible right that's right and and the legacy of
the the history i mean it was certainly when you think about uh the formation of
uh astrophysics itself you know it it gets its birth at yerkes observatory uh
you have uh the spectrographs being used on that great refractor but you know
george ellard hale wasn't satisfied actually he was only there for a short time uh
before he started working on the 60 and then the 100 inch and you know i think that somehow george
ellery hal had sensed how short life is and how much he wanted to accomplish you know in that in that time frame so
uh he quickly got to california the people at yerkes felt a little i guess cheated that he had left
but there were still i mean amazing people that went through yerkes i mean carl sagan was there and in a long list
of course they then they moved through uh uh mount wilson uh making incredible
uh observations and understanding the expansion of the universe there and then we get to the 200 inch which has its own
story so yes and i ivan was reading about humans work at the 200 engine i was just like no that's too far i'm
gonna leave that for another night but i think david wanted to add something as well i didn't even know he was at the
two hundred inch so they spent a little bit of time there and was saying that was actually what he was referring
to when he said you know uh the there is no disappointment in astronomy because he ended up
leaving the the profession around that time so he he went there he saw what could be done
but decided not to have himself be the one to do it one moment that i wanted to make kareem
is that uh because i really did enjoy your presentation the historical context
was just beautiful thanks to vip in addition to all of the books you mentioned i'm going to add one more
in the original cosmos the one the carl sagan did
he devotes most a good portion of episode three i think
to the story of milton hummus yes of course we're all familiar with carmen henderson it
was a comet and i think around 1960 very bright one and uh he really really took off
and his story is really enlightening and it's very inspiring
thank you oh my pleasure i was actually i was frustrated when i would read in some of the introductory astronomy textbooks and
they would it would be a footnote that hubble had an assistant named milton humison and i was just like no no so
much important to the discovery of the expansion of the universe so exactly exactly
uh so i i also have a guest with us tonight uh yep let's bring him on i have
been really enjoying over the last few years we have uh we have a couple of
astronomical groups on facebook here in quebec in the montreal area and every now and then i see the name francois
canel and i see these wonderful pictures and you know i've shared a couple with my class i've messaged him to ask
permission and then we started chatting and it turns out he went to university of guelph around the same time i did and
you know he's been doing this amazing work in astronomy and astrophotography as a hobby on the side and so i thought
it'd be great for him to share a little bit of what he does in astronomy and astrophotography his approach his
workflow a little bit of what he does and then those of you who are more interested in some of the stuff he shows are welcome to join us next wednesday at
our citizen science episode and ask him more questions directly as some of you know who've joined our rask montreal
clubhouse we don't go on formality we all just kind of chat whenever we want and uh david will be there so francois
we're looking forward to your presentation okay well thank you very much uh kareem and and scott for having me over uh
tonight it's uh it's a great honor great privilege to address uh all of you like
that um just a note about about me i'm uh an agronomist by by day an astronomer
matter astronomer by night so i have no background in astronomy no for
training in photography i'm just uh i just have a day job and i enjoy the
night sky and uh i i've been enjoying the night sky for
the past 40 years now actually i started out with just a star finder
and uh binoculars and then grounded my own mirrors for telescope
first a four inch and then an eight inch and and and then um
going into clubs and and and becoming president of my astronomy club uh
organizing summer camps for strong young astronomers so i've always been involved in in this
and slowly moving towards uh as i got older to to towards photography
and so that's what i'm going to be talking about uh tonight [Music]
what you see behind me is my equipment that i use usually on the night out
i have two pentax bodies this is an old k5 12 year old and still very good
uh with a little gps on top i'm going to be discussing and this is a diy
tracker that i'm going to be presenting at the royal astronomy society next week
and with a newer pentax uh k-70 the lenses i use are this one is a
samyang 16 millimeter f2 so very fast lens and this one is a
sigma 35 millimeter f 1.4 very fast and uh
so i'll just uh share my screen to show what i do with those
okay so what i'm going to be talking about is nightscapes uh the easy way
because really what i like about astronomy what god means into astronomy
four years ago is uh just stargazing and what keeps me in astronomy is still
stargazing so the photography part has to be simple it has to be
easy uh doesn't need to cast a an arm or leg
so what really i enjoy mostly is uh
just stargazing when on a night on a night out this is my favorite activity uh just enjoying this night sky
in my chair and uh and and i think ever since i began uh
watching this the sky four years ago watching the sky always always comes
with uh uh where you are the landscape you're in and i've always want wanted to
get a souvenir from those nights and so that's what got me into landscape
photography in the first time um and but in the film days it wasn't easy but i
was very impressed with uh pretty sure many of you have a copy of
the burnham celestial handbooks uh if you look through the pages for orion uh
taurus here uh there's a lot of those pictures where
they're nightscapes right you can see in this one played these are a lot of details you
can see the california nebula so it's definitely a very long exposure that's been taken to to reveal all those
details but the foreground is very sharp um so how how did they do that i i figured
well he must have must have the picture of the night sky and danny
and and then he put anot another in in the in
the the the the dark in the dark room you must have put another negative with the foreground
very very contrasty so that you could uh burn all the parts of the image that are
not the sky must have been something like that very complicated i tried mayan at it it was very long it was very
painful and i got something like this that you know i didn't really uh pursue
it was just too too much too much work and the only keeper frame i have from
film photography is uh comet hillbock and i realized
this picture was almost it was taken almost exactly 25 years ago it was uh in
march 97 so um [Music] really the the
in the film days i i never really was able to do uh what i wanted
but uh in the early 2009 i bought the pentax cameras
and in 2011 pentax invented the astro tracer it's that
little gps unit that i put on top of my camera it's a gps
and it's also a compass and so the camera knows where it is on earth what time it is uh
with the accelerometers in the camera the camera knows where it's pointing in the sky
so there's an engineer at pentax that said well with all that information why don't we program the sensor in the
camera to move so that the stars stay sharp within uh within the frame
and so that that that that's a little gadget that i found was very very uh
practical um if you've done photography on uh on a fixed tripod
you've probably heard of the 500 rule which is if you want to know how long you can
expose with a lens you divide the long focal length of the lens by
500 by the focal length of the lens and it gives you the approximate exposure time you can get so if you have a 50
millimeter lens 500 divided by 50 gives you about 10 seconds of exposure before the stars
will start trailing and ruin your photo but with the pentax astro tracer you the 500 rules become the 5 000 room you with
a 50 millimeter lens you can expose for 100 seconds so that's significant
and uh when about the tracer you can i i have set up
a website it's called tracerphoto.com because now with that technology uh
basically anyone that that's interested into photography can do astrophotography and on the
pentax forums i get a lot of questions about the tracer and uh rather than answering everyone
individually i finally decided to to put all the information in that in that site
so if you want to have a look about the tracer that's where you go
and uh the tracer at work well uh this is a connect neowise in the summer of uh 2020
and you can see compared to the hillbock picture it's much it's it it's beautiful
it's thanks it's uh it's a lot sharper it's it was a lot easier to get also
this is a only a 10 or 12 second exposure with a 50 millimeter lens and
so the tracer was on and so the stars appear a little sharper than if
it had been just a fixed tripod photography um this was the the morning of the sixth i
i was very excited when i took this picture because i we we didn't know what what the comment would look like that it didn't just come around the sun and and
it was said it was going to be a great comment but i i i hadn't seen pictures
of it yet so to be able to uh catch it with a 50 millimeter lens like that i was really
really amazed uh a little later on and uh july 18th
night um i went with uh the 50 million millimeter lens
and uh took this picture so this is a 60 second picture with the astral tracer and the
stars are are don't show trailing of course when you do a landscape like that
um the foreground will be blurred with the astral tracer so what you need to do is
you take a picture of the stars with the tracer and then you turn off the tracer and you do
another 60 seconds for the foreground to be sharp and and then i don't have
anything uh very expensive as far as software goes i just use raw therapy uh
which is free and i use i use photoshop elements which is less than a hundred
dollars um so so i don't over process i don't have a lot
of processing tools with my software but it's easy enough to just blend the two
images and and make it look with sharp foreground and a
sharp stars no trails now this lens i realized then right then
that the winter before that we were talking about sub-zero temperatures and i discovered that yeah the lens
produced uh halos around the the stars that didn't used to produce i i had been using it at
-32 degrees and uh kind of it kind of destroyed the it's
it's it's better qualities um this is another
shot taken the same night uh with a very cheap plan so really
astrophotography night sky strong photography doesn't have to be very expensive uh i didn't bring my sigma lens so i
actually i use here it's a it's a pentax lens it's a 100 lens
brand new lens for hundred dollars and uh and and it got uh the color
rendition is a lot better with these newer lens than the old 50 millimeter lens that comes from the the
1980s and so it was um it was here another 60
second exposure for the stars and a 60 exposed 60 second
exposure for the foreground so the asteroid racer really makes it easy to to shoot
the stars um this picture i
dream showed this one to you uh a few a few weeks ago and
this is what i like about the straw photography it's it's how you can show
the place of earth uh in in in the universe basically right
the night sky when you're stargazing is is uh is the only time where you get a
sense of the place of the earth within the universe and having the milky way
is uh is of course our own galaxy is of course something that that really
appeals to me in a in an astronomy picture of course here i wanted also to
show the entire winter hexagon from capella to the to the north
um and to sirius uh near the horizon
so so these pictures uh all done the same with the blending
method of a sharp foreground without tracing and sharp stars with tracing and
here to get the entire 90 degree view i had to do uh stitching
of the pictures and and so it's all done with various very
simple simple tools nothing complicated about that um something i really like sometimes in
nightscapes uh are clouds they they really uh it's almost
when you look at this picture it's almost 3d you can see the the ceiling the cloud ceiling and then above it you
you see the universe i mean it when you when you look at the the clouds and the lake and the trees
there's there's hurt and and and right above that the big sky
is uh is right there above uh above the ceiling and uh so in astronomy in
astrophotography usually clouds you don't want you don't want any clouds in your pictures but in nightscapes
sometimes they do add a little effect
another picture another thing i like to do with my pictures here
i think it shows you know you've got this huge bulge of the milky way here you've
got uh the foreground is a hayfield um and and it's got this tiny farmstead
really really small in the horizon here and so it kind of shows
that the relative sizes of of where we fit in the universe
and this one churches are very great to uh
to shoot on in the night because it really those those bell towers why are they so
so high up so arrow like it's not to remind us of our link to the sky really you know so so
it's only natural i think that uh churches how did you like how did you
like the headstones there yeah the the around
that's in eastern ontario all the churches in in the countryside they have
all surrounded by uh the cemetery right and and i was in a
very light polluted area and there was street lights uh in front of the
uh the church so it was really difficult to to to deal with all that light but
but uh yeah uh it really the church the bell tower
arrow like like that it really makes uh a link between the earth and the sky and
and with the milky way in the back it's uh it's really really gives a sense of place where we are in the universe
um when i get tired of uh the light pollution around montreal i
drive about five hours to the shellaway region that's where i i organized back in the days um
summer camps for kids for uh showing them the night sky and and you can see
it's still just a 60-second exposure but look how the milky way shows up very very easily
i didn't i didn't process more longer or anything used anything different it it's just it's just so
colorful the when you're in the in the in the dark sky like that
um this is a picture uh spruce trees i think like
bell towers you know they because they're so uh they're so straight up and they point
all at this in it and it they they naturally make a very nice uh foreground
for astronomy pictures this was done with the astro tracer and i went back
the near the year after that this is with my diy tracker and i used i was trying to
do the same image instead i i did a two minute exposure so the milky way is a
little brighter and i use a also a filter uh you can you can buy these filters
they're they're by tiffin uh they're called uh double fog three
and they do the fog effect on the brightest stars and uh so i took a two minute without filter
and a two minute with a filter and i blended them in photoshop element and it makes
like the cygnus constellation stand out more the dolphin here then stands out more
uh if you compare with no filter at all so these are little things you can you
can do to to to add to the picture um
one thing i like about the tracer it's so small this was about a 20-minute hike down the mountain to the bay
and so couldn't get um very heavy gear down there and just for tracer being so small
it's it's it fits everywhere and uh so this is this is a picture of
mars in 2018 so this is another thing i like to to shoot uh it's
out to see that when i see the the constellations and the the planets with
with a landscape here the moon was rising it was about the last quarter of
the moon and so it shed some light on the spruce trees there and it wasn't so
bright that it completely washed out the sky and so another
very nice moment to to shoot is when you um
when you get these conjunctions and you really get a sense again of the
earth in space when you when you witness something like this we've got uh
the earth uh with the little shed and the moon with the thin crescent
and venus and mercury and usually usually the planets will line up along
the ecliptics which must be somewhere around there but here they nicely were
perpendicular so it was easier to to make to make this uh this picture
with the the closed foreground and as we go up we move further and further out
into space so so this is uh
this is what i wanted to share with you if uh you have uh questions i'll i'm
here well i think i think um in general
people are blown away so that last image you shot how what
towards your exposure time and your settings on that uh that was a 70 millimeter lens
probably around f4 and one or two seconds
uh with iso probably around 200 400 uh
something like that yeah when you when you want when you have a good dyno
if you want a good dynamic range you you keep the iso as low as possible
beautiful picture incredible thanks thanks
yeah um francois this is adrian um i believe you do your nightscapes for the exact same
reason that i do my nightscapes as a way of showing earth as a part of the universe
your images are well done and have a lot of soul in them your views really do come out
in the images that you produce and i i really like the uh
the idea of you don't do much processing you're showing what's there and when you do that you take people to
those places as if they're sitting there watching with you the night sky
you may it may enhance a little bit because it comes on that sensor but
there's no and for some that can do the over kind of the over process cartoonish look
it's um there's i think there's a time and place for that um i also prefer sort of the very simple
but very uh beautiful natural look so thank you for sharing your images with
us well thanks for your kind words very very much appreciated
right i'm loving some of those landscapes you got nearby montreal i'm kind of curious
now we're gonna have to touch base on some of the locations you've got
because it's close to i think uh alexandria and and uh so you're you're
right in that part yeah but i mean when you talk about the charlevoix region when you go
east past quebec city the skies just go dark yeah
yeah most of the pictures i've shown were shot from bottom four or five uh
skies but but the charlevoix is uh is a two or a three some at some places
yeah i'm curious that uh that eastern ontario church one that you took where
you said there was a lot of street lights and a lot of like pollution but you got incredible detail on the on the sky above it
did you use the same settings or did you yeah yeah wow yeah
okay that's a great camera yeah but but i will i will uh also point out that the compositions
that you uh presented were amazing you know so uh
that such carefully crafted images don't come by accident so
um you know sometimes you might get lucky but when you see uh an amazing image after an amazing
image then you know that the photographer really has a gift yeah right thank you thank you very much and and
yeah you're right those those uh those pictures i as an agronomist i have the advantage of
roaming the countryside in the day so i can see a lot of uh
good interesting places to photography at night and uh that that
barn in the snow with the the winter hexagon i had done uh i i knew
exactly i kind of knew what what it would look like uh with uh
with the camera but um i tried to do it about a month earlier
and uh and when i went there was a big fifth wheel trailer parked in front of it so
it kind of ruined the picture so so i went back and i was afraid that
there would be too much snow i said i'll know my my window for uh for getting there is is is
busted but usually that side of montreal gets a lot more snow than montreal but when i went
luckily there was very little snow on the ground and i was able to get there so yeah you have to
you have to try and sometimes doesn't work and you can come back and try
again right well i know that our audience wants to see you back on global star party again so thank you very much
thanks for participating that's great
i had one more question forum um france why have you ever gotten any
i'll call them easter eggs any surprises with images that you've taken where
you didn't expect much but when you looked at it um you realize you've gotten
something a lot better than you had even hoped yeah so yeah i see what you mean so
sometimes i i get the pictures and i think oh this is gonna be the greatest picture this is
really i've nailed it and and turns out to be very ordinary and and
the order something i just shot as an afterthought or something turns out to
be the shot like the mars shot in the bay i was going down to shoot the milky way
and milky way turned out to be very ordinary and but that part of the picture it's an heavily cropped image
actually that part of the picture i said wow okay look at that mars look at how
it shines in in the water and so that that's that yeah that's an easter egg for you
excellent okay go ahead all right well uh thank you very much
our uh and and we do look forward to having you on again uh francois thank you so much
up next is daniel higgins daniel is a very enthusiastic uh
outreach uh ambassador i'll call him he is uh
he is responsible for astroworld and astroworld tv and astroworldweb and
so i'm going to ask him to come on with us and i'll hang out with you because i
know that sometimes and i'm also he said scott i need a wingman now i am
also someone that needs a wingman you guys have seen me come on by myself and i'm a little awkward and stuff but
if i have someone with me i just feel better so you know and uh so daniel tell us i guess tell us
a little bit about yourself uh because there's gonna be some people that don't know you okay uh
but i know that your your programs are very popular uh and getting more popular all the time so
it's great to have for you to spend some time with us um and uh you know what what got you
interested in astronomy to begin with you're you're uh so involved in it now so
and you're not come your audio's not going across
how's that there we go there we go sorry about that that's i do that too sometimes
for all the people out there that watch astroworld that is the glitch of the night so um that's that's the for those
of you that watch me you know we always have that but um yeah so yeah i'm unable to daniel
[Music]
let me check on my
it's still not quite coming through i'm not coming
through i can't hear you i can okay all right
all right good it wasn't me yes awesome um so um with astroworld yeah well i
guess what first got me into astronomy i guess i was about seven years old i guess and uh
and him my uncle had i guess it was like a straight through 60 millimeter scope
with no diagonal nothing we were in hicksville so hicksville long island just just so you know a little bit about
me and where i'm from i'm from long island so i'm in the light pollution capital of of the world for for the
better uh if you understand i know i know tarek who's out in the uae me and
him talk all the time regarding the the issues with light pollution and it was
just limited so so of course what's the first thing i see out of my uncle's telescope is saturn so so the first
thing i see was saturn and since then really i was hooked and uh and and that was that was awesome
it was it was this little dinky thing i thought it was reading i forget who exactly wrote the the text on it said
saturn has ears and that was a that's what it looked like it looked like this little bubble with a little thing it
looked like a little mickey mouse hat and uh and and that's what really got me hooked so i you know when i finally got
a job and was able to purchase my own scope i i bought a
you know i bought a an eight-inch uh what was it it was a ultima eight
it was an ultimate okay it was my first that was your first telescope yep wow well my first one no
my first one that i purchased myself okay i think my first was like a bausch and
lamb or a yeah exactly we're on your power 4 000
power telescope yeah exactly oh yeah look at these pictures that's exactly what you're
not gonna see and uh but um yeah and and that's how i
got hooked and uh i i became a visual astronomer first
um up to purchasing an 18-inch obsession classic which i still have and uh i i
love doing one of these days i'll finish my herschel 400 which i'm i'm attempting to do but i have a feeling that you know
it's going to be a while got a lot of cherry springs trips um
and yeah and then and then uh basically you know i started astrophotography
and i i loved getting that instant gratification of the picture and
and and all that so so i started doing that and i started doing it with the minolta maxim i started doing a film and
like one of your guests before said that i really couldn't get
what i wanted with film and neither could i so you're not alone uh and and i
was able once the digital age started coming and we were able to get better and better technology um all of a sudden
my pictures started getting better as well um and i found that i didn't want all
the other people that come after me to step in the same landmines that i did
and so that's what uh astroworld and astroworld tv and all
that so so now we do uh two
i'm sorry i thought there was a question i'm sorry um oh go ahead no i will do two live shows a week
wednesday nights at 9 00 p.m and friday nights at 8 pm eastern time
and we have nine nine current people now that come in and out as hosts um and
we got people from new zealand we got people from all different types from pure beginner
to a gentleman that just purchased his first plane wave so i mean so we got we
have all sides of the the spectrum from the asia users to the eagle users and so
on and we're there to answer questions and that's what we do um
we also do we also do the uh astral world picture of the week
um which we do every every single show we pick we critique some of our viewers
pictures and we kind of say okay um maybe a little tweak on this maybe a
little tweak on that uh we are not experts by any means i don't want to say that we are because we're not we
probably learn a lot more from our viewers uh than than we do ourselves so
so it's a really great collaboration of people that are like-minded and and do
basically ask visual astronomers are able to come as well but we basically um
we basically focus on on astrophotography uh and uh
we just broke a thousand uh subscribers and let me show you um yeah we just broke a thousand
subscribers on youtube and uh we're looking actually we're almost 1100 now
so it's it's moving so um if you want to know anything uh about astroworld and
what we do or a little bit more um and see if i could share my screen here this one too
let's see and um oh yeah i do it this way sorry
it's been a while since i've done this so um [Music]
oh sharing your screen okay yeah no i apologize it looks like we're looking at obs there you go there we go
there we go and um so this is the astroworld website so www.astroworldweb.com
um you could actually go right here and it'll show you when we're online and what guests we have a ton of
guests that come on all the time from masters of pixinsight ron breacher juan
keller and peter poole scott you've been on and you're getting ready to make uh your
second appearance on the show um and who else did we have we have we
have plenty of astrophotographers sean nielsen amy astro um adam block
chuck iu from chuck astro photography doug i could go on and on um but we're
starting to get more and more colin haig is going to be on from uh diffraction
limited uh tomorrow night we have roland archer that's going to be on the show
and he's going to give be giving us a rundown on the voyager acquisition software which
is going to be really really exciting and that's tomorrow night uh but um other than that that's that's
pretty much what we do that's awesome so um uh you know the
you know the the feedback that you give to the community uh i think is um
uh you know very uh much needed because a lot of people uh you know they're reading books or
they're just reading uh posts on cloudy nights all of which is very useful okay
but to be able to interact with somebody live uh and ask questions and my goodness to
have your uh your astrophotography uh critiqued live
in a program you know where you can kind of interact is really uh
an amazing dynamic okay you know when i was doing uh my early
astrophotography i know that i would have progressed so much faster and somebody said well yeah okay we can see
that you did this and and uh you need to work on your focus a little bit more and
you need to you know you need a better mount or you need to control that mount better you know so
uh but there were a lot of unknowns for me at that time uh and i was literally you know working
in the dark at that time as well those are back in
my film days i did have the privilege of seeing some of the first digital ccd
work being done by amateur astronomers and uh had met up with the people that started
up the santa barbara instruments group uh the company before it actually really launched and saw some of their
prototypes and stuff like that so that was a real privilege but my knowledge of
operating a computer and stuff was still kind of i'm not even gonna say it was rusty i just didn't know uh really what
to do except to just take notes and follow the instructions of what people were telling me to do
um but uh i think that uh uh the program that you're running today is is great and uh
yeah you have a real friendly uh and fun group of guys running it so yeah and
that's that's what's gonna make it popular so yeah and if you ever go and take a look
on the show or look at the we do keep it very very light so um we
do keep it technical sometimes usually wednesday nights is our more technical show friday nights is more geared
towards the beginner um and and for people who are just starting out okay i
want to get out and i want to do nightscapes or i want to buy a tracking mount a star adventurer or or a sky
guide or pro or something like that and just start somebody said it earlier tonight it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg to
do so you don't have to spend very true you know you don't have to spend 25 000 to get you know a decent picture i mean
you don't have to do that you could do this with with the stuff that you have in your house which is already there and
ready to go just get your dslr get out there and start shooting because there's
nothing more gratifying to me that when you take that first picture
and you say hey i i took that that's cool it could be the blurriest ugliest nastiest picture
but you know what i took it and it's cool because i took it and remember i think somebody else said it tonight too
the over-processed stuff and all like that there is a place for that and you know the over-saturated kind of thing
but you know it doesn't matter what anybody thinks about your picture
besides you it doesn't matter you are the artist and you are the person that's got to be
um not complacent but understanding what you did how you did it and if it's pleasing to you don't let anybody else
tell you anything different because you know what yeah you know what maybe focus isn't very um you know it needs a little
touch here a little touch there but you know what it's your picture and if you're happy with it stay with it
because it's just going to get better that's right i know daniel can i can i
add something to that um absolutely just really quickly um
social media you know affects a lot of things and um
like i remember when i started posting some images on social media and if they didn't get as many likes as
say another image that had all of the type of processing or just a different sort of look
i'd get dejected pretty easily uh the moment that i followed the advice you just gave where you're like
the image you have to like the image doesn't matter if anyone else likes it the moment i did that that's when my
images i would say took off as far as um
i started to like the way they looked what was coming out and when i would post a few of them a
few others might like them too and i didn't look for numbers i just appreciated the kind compliments that i
would get if a picture just happened to speak to somebody so definitely important i think uh real
important point you hit on there i appreciate it no yeah i i you know and that's
something that we preach about on the show quite a bit is where you know what you know feel
free to send us your photos we'll tell you we're not gonna we're not gonna beat you with a stick on it you know it's not
gonna we're not in the pixel peepers we're not you know we can be if you want to be uh but you know
we're more like okay how do we build the community to get a better result if you don't like
the result you already have that's the whole thing and i think you're right uh adrian that
you say you know what once you stop worrying about what other people are telling you and how to do it
because social media could be the detriment to everything you put out there because it could it could just be
uh a complete nightmare because if you're if you're very sensitive in that aspect
then you may stop doing the astrophotography and that's something none of us want because
the pictures that are out there and the pictures that we've just seen tonight from the landscapes and and everything
have just been blew me away totally blew me away i agree i agree
well gosh daniel thanks for coming on to global star party again you are welcome anytime uh you know you're in our group
and um so if you have something new that you want to add about uh astroworld or um you know even have on a
guest uh to come on with you we're very pleased to do that and we'll do our best
to promote what you're doing so i think that's wonderful that's awesome i appreciate it thank you
so much for having me on thanks for listening me bamble i know i tend to do that and if you
i do it's just one long sentence sometimes it
doesn't stop trust me it's something i've had to work on for 40 actually 51
years now and it's now uh i i i've just given
up it's not it's not gonna work it's in new york tell us also a little bit about uh just take a couple of
minutes to talk about camera concepts you you have been there and interacted with them for a long time
yeah well um i've known jeff the owner of camera concepts for
well probably since i tried to start talking slower but um um you know the the the whole
with that so jeff and i have been friends for a long time and i probably bought one of my first telescopes from jeff and uh
camera concepts has been around uh since the 80s and he's been selling he'd started off
selling cameras and went to telescopes and once he started getting telescopes that's when i joined uh aos which is the
amateur observer society of new york i know mr levy uh if he's still there
knows quite a bit of our members from the icon uh quite a number of years ago
um but uh you know he asked me he's like oh yeah you know telescopes and you know
i asked photography a little bit why don't you come and work with me and neith
nice yeah so it's like oh neither i've been there a bunch of times yeah i'll come work for you little did i know what i
was getting myself into it was a complete i mean it was it's nif is a monster show
i mean you're just running around going crazy talking to people and everything it's uh scott you know it's it's
oh my god it's crazy there's not some people running around running in and out from thursday to saturday if you're in
the yak and unfortunately uh nif is not going on right now yeah um yeah but um
whatever the case would be so he so he asked me that so one neve turned into two neve turns into
five and he turned into one day a week um and now i'm working with uh i've been
working with jeff one day a week plus extra for the last six years or so oh
wow yeah so i do all the i do all the run stuff like
the uh any repairs collimations cleanings um
software upgrades i i give people um ideas on how to upgrade their systems if
they want or if they're just coming into the hobby i don't even like to call it a hobby i call it a lifestyle
because it really is it really is it's not even a hobby i mean for those of you out there know how deep this
rabbit hole can go it's it gets pretty deep and uh you know
it's it's i i try and i first thing i tell people what's your budget before i tell you anything i'm not telling you
they're not telling you anything how much you want to spend because i could make you spend 30 grand easy but
um but um it's it's a lot of fun working with jeff is a lot of fun um working in the
business that i love and and it allowed me to take this picture behind me this is one of mine um the heart the heart
nebula yeah this is that's that's one of mine beautiful yeah
but uh yeah well daniel thank you again and um
we will uh we'll move along but uh yeah hopefully you'll be back on global star party soon so yeah whenever you want me
i'm at your uh i'm at your disposal so awesome okay
wonderful great thank you so much thank you well up next is um uh we will
bring on uh stephen edberg and i wanna i i often call him dr edberg but but i
i have been corrected a number of times from him uh he is um
uh steve is a great friend uh when i first met him was in
he'll know i think he can point out the exact year but it was in the 1980s before halley's comet had arrived so
this is about 1983 or 84 something in that area and
we had a mutual friend his name is mark coco and mark worked at celestron and uh we were a celestron dealer this
is back in my days when i worked at a place called oceanside photographic center that became known as oceanside
photo and telescope or opt is known to a lot of you today
and you know i had just started to put together
uh community-based types of programs uh putting on little star parties putting
on little lectures and stuff like that and uh i talked to mark and i said you know i
invited mark to come down and he says he says well who else are you having to come speak
and i said i don't know you know who could we get and he mentioned steve edberg and i said wow
so tell me more and you know he was telling me he worked at the jet propulsion laboratory and i'm going oh my god we
could have a scientist from the jet propulsion line laboratory come to
our store and talk about what's up in the sky and talk about hallie's comment and uh
uh you know he said well i'll ask and so steve uh did come down and since that
time steve and i have have worked uh together on various projects
um and uh you know but he is someone you know when you know someone like him
uh where he's so he he is so accessible to amateur astronomers and he's done so
much for amateur astronomers but he's done so much in the professional world uh he was a professional astronomer uh
working uh an observatories both in the united states in australia uh and maybe
other parts of the world um he had worked uh
i just know a few things he's done the jet propulsion laboratory like working on the galileo mission uh working on the
cassini mission uh you know and he has uh he has insight into
the inner workings of the universe like few people do and so i'm not i'm not trying to uh to
make his head too big but uh i can't say enough about this guy he's a great guy
and we're really really honored to have him on global star party steve thank you for coming on to our program
okay can you hear me there you go we can hear you yes i love your nasa shirt so good
thank you thank you a very nice introduction actually scott it's been a great
pleasure uh working with you and playing with you over the years it's been a lot of fun so
i i likewise likewise well so scott asked me to
talk about the expansion of the universe and not so much that but just the doppler
effect and of course when i do things i try and make sure it's complete and
able to share so i started pulling together the demonstrations you can see over my
shoulder and i'm afraid that it is the limitations of the camera that i have
on my top of my screen right now that's going to prevent me from doing much with that
though we can try and you can tell me if it's working or not but i am backed up with
a few slides from powerpoint that that i'll use to discuss it and the question scott
asked me was about the doppler effect and just as an example
of how i like to be complete i want to say be complete then with
uh what could be considered the full name of that uh that it's the doppler fizzo effect
also known as the doppler shift and more common and quick language
and so i'm gonna kind of begin at the beginning because i could do a lot of
different things that would that would just be hand waving and but i want i'm hoping
that i can give you enough background if you don't have it that you'll be able to
uh think about this more clearly and and even apply it to your own observations of the sky
so what i'm going to try and do here is
uh change and maybe scott will have to do this for me
but um i'm going to start with
a full full screen and at least try it once i get there there we go
and now if you're trying to share if you're trying to share do i okay so there's a green
button at the bottom it says share screen okay and you click that and then you're going to see a display of your
other programs that you have on your computer okay ah there we go and you click on that and
then you commit to it so all right and we'll see when you start sharing
i can unshare you but i can't share you okay got it
all right there we go you want to bring that into presentation mode you can do that too i've been doing doing it there we go
ah perfect all right so let me go on
um i'm going to start actually with the spectrum of the sun
something simple something that was studied even by newton though uh he didn't get very
far with it uh he said that he showed actually that all the colors combined to make white
light after he'd spread out the sunlight with the prism in his in his room cutting a
slit in the curtain uh letting it fall through the prism and then putting the light coming out of the
prism which was a rainbow back through a different prism and combining it back and sure enough it
turned out to be white good science but for some
well for a reason that nobody actually takes the time to explain and it took me a long time to figure it out and i'm not
going to share it with you we can do that another time i'm easily distractible um he did not see what we call the
fraunhofer lines those are those black verticals that you see at the top of this picture
and uh all of those are representative of the various
elements in the sun and i've tried to uh show what those are
uh with a minimum of effort uh for for comparison so for example
this is this actual set of lines in the sun right here it's called the magnesium triplet
and here is the magnesium spectrum in the laboratory lined up with the sun now
you might be wondering and you would be very good to wonder why
am i showing like bars of light for the laboratory and dark lines
in the in the solar spectrum and all of those are actually more
simply due to the fact that we have to use a very thin razor-sharp slit
to let the light through to be able to get this resolution and that's part of
the answer as to why newton didn't see the dark lines across his solar spectrum
projected across the wall there's a more subtle reason as well
uh if you look at hydrogen you can see uh this is the probably the uh
beta line h beta that you sometimes hear about for using for looking at deep sky
objects here's the h alpha line that we certainly look at the sun in and can also look at these objects
sodium has a very prominent golden line i'll call it
it's right in the yellow orange and it's actually a pair in this much higher
resolution higher resolution solar spectrum and the difference of these
is due to the fact that in the laboratory we're exciting the element itself
to glow in a vacuum tube so it's just the pure light ideally
and when we get the sunlight we're actually seeing elements in the sun's atmosphere that
are cooler than lower levels and they're absorbing exactly the same
wavelengths colors of light and so we see that
this was first seen by fraunhofer in around 1813
or so and he cataloged a bunch of them and in this picture you can actually see
uh you can't quite see the a line but it's deep down over here on the right
and the sun this is probably b this i know being hydrogen alpha is the c line
d1 and d2 are from are the ones uh actually the redder one
is d1 the yellow the on the bluer side would be d2 and helium
d3 is illustrated where'd i put here i thought i had helium on this it's not
here darn i'm going to show it to you later i think anyway there's one called the d3 line
which we usually only see in emission as a bright line
on the sun or actually above the sun in prominences and so these are all named uh you can
barely see them and maybe not at all actually this is a pretty good copy right down here these
are the calcium h line and k line and they're going to come back to haunt us
in just a few minutes so we can identify these we have these lines and
besides being fingerprints for all of the elements and helium was discovered in the sun
before it was discovered on earth um they are also a way for us to measure
the doppler effect so i've already mentioned the emission and
absorption spectra so i'm not going to go into more detail on that with you just to show you and remind you that a
hot gas hot element if we put it in the lab we'll have an emission spectrum
a cool gas with light either from tungsten light or
sunlight coming from deeper photosphere going through a cooler gas will make an
absorption spectrum and even reflected light off something like the moon or a planet
will make an absorption spectrum that matches the source light so this for the sun
shining on the moon we see an absorption spectrum where the moon gets more interesting
besides subtle differences in color is in the infrared when you can start to identify minerals
that are very different from what you would see in the sun for instance because the sun
pretty much vaporizes everything when we look at gaseous nebulae
the hydrogen regions that are usually glow red
mostly because of hydrogen but because of oxygen and nitrogen as well
and again there are subtleties i'm not going to bother with there are also
as you can see here neon helium here's some more oxygen and more helium as well as more hydrogen
visible in this spectrum of the omega nebula but it's primarily red because there is
so much red the big emission being hydrogen with oxygen and nitrogen occasionally adding a bit more in that
part of nitrogen especially in that part of the spectrum so
uh christian andreas doppler was an uh mathematician and physicist from austria
uh armond hibolit luis fizeau was a french physicist and they
independently realized that if you had some way of
measuring and they're here with these dark lines in the spectrum of the sun if you had
some way of measuring a fixed wavelength it would change its wavelength or
frequency their interchangeable meaning difference but but for our purposes
any one very very narrow color that helium d3 for instance
is a very bright gold line in the spectrum of a prominence
or hydrogen is a very prominent line in a gaseous nebula and so if we look for
motion in those we may actually see a change in the wavelength because
either earth is moving towards or away or the nebula is moving
towards or away and so
we can we can see that actually by reflecting sunlight from saturn
and from its rings and this is uh
really actually i went looking for to find one this is a very interesting combination here uh i have added this
black line here i should have made it a little bit more apparent that's the one between the fe that stands for iron and
the ca that stands for calcium and this is again the reflected spectrum of the
sun uh these numbers are actually in angstrom units which
have been retired uh but i grew up on them uh this is actually would be six one two point
eight point eight four five or decimal eight point eight four five uh nanometers
so this is 612 decimal 845 nanometers so we're in the
in the red portion of the spectrum of the solar spectrum this is saturn
in the center section as you see illustrated here and this is the rings
and notice if you compare it to my added black line and i should have picked a different color for that
you can see that the separation between this very intense
meaning dark spectral line in the sun is at different places with respect to
the ring the planet it's even tilted here and the ring on this side and what we're seeing
is in this on this side is a red shift away
that is called reflected light of the ring saturn itself is reflecting
light at that spectral wavelength and is also redshifting it because it's
rotating and here we're seeing a blue shift and a blue shift on this side of saturn the
zero point would actually be right about here this is
i think a very good very nice illustration of this if there was enough resolution in this spec spectrogram we
could actually see tilting along the
rings with greater shift greater redshift on the inner ring and lesser
redshift in the outer ring due to the orbital motion of the particles that are reflecting the light
it's really an amazing picture even though it doesn't quite go to the full resolution
but it shows what's possible so what i want to do i'm going to take a
break here i'm going to shut off the light for a minute and ask if you can tell me if you can see the spectrum that
was is actually presently showing it's a helium spectrum and that's why i wanted to show it
if i could partly because it was bright enough and
it doesn't look like it's big enough you should be seeing some color over here
and if you can't i understand and i apologize
um getting this set up was sort of uh oh can you pull your camera off your uh
computer yeah maybe i have some range for it let me try
okay
and move down a little bit okay let's see because i can't see what i'm doing now so
ah can you see i see a spectrum over here
no we're not seeing it yet uh do you see any light at all no
okay that's that's telling me something too oh okay let me see everything looks like can you see my
here wait a minute yes okay you can see me
and okay oh now we're starting to see a little bit uh what do you want me to move right or
left uh move uh do i see it now i can see me
okay okay on i want you to be looking on the left side of the bright white there it's
actually not quite it's really kind of let me let me stop your your screen sharing and then we'll get to the full
screen there we go okay okay the downside here is with that with
the magnification it's just too bright oddly enough i rarely complain about
something like that [Laughter] but i'm afraid i it's here it's all lost in
in we're just saturating the camera right not handling the light um let me
try one other thing okay and i have to just wiggle and let's settle things down i'm going to turn
back the light on in the room and
oh now you can yeah now we can interesting so
what you're seeing there is a violet line that's closest to the bright white one
in the center you are also seeing next to it
outwards on both sides a greenish line then there is the bright yellow line
that is the brightest on either side and that yellow line is actually
uh d3 as it's called by solar physicists
and then there's a red line which i can't even see i'm sorry i'm tilting this uh but
it's just too faint it's it is visible here but those are emission lines by excited
helium and so you're you're getting an idea at
least of what those look like in the real world i'm going to do one other thing i don't know if it's going to work
but now i have more hopes so if you'll bear with me i got to put this down again
and i want to show you some real life a real live absorption line
and if you have mercury street lights or high pressure sodium you can also see
that now i'm going to turn this down
and in fact i'm going to cover up this so it's not a distraction and
let's see what we can see here
now it's again it may just be too bright but
bear with me
oh okay right now
if you look in the area of the purple circle yeah there is
a spectrum blocked by part yeah locked partly i'm gonna let me get
something to point better with because i can actually see what i'm doing now um
you're seeing a spectrum that runs from blue to red on this side and there's a black dot in front of it
yes and actually the same is true on this other side but it's not quite as clear
now watch what happens when i move this off
that area and notice first of all it gets very bright but you are actually that there
is in the spectrum that you're seeing over here
there is actually a dark zone right across the center of it and there's only red and blue
visible in the lower portion where the purple is and the whole section that is green is
is gone and that is actual absorption if you have a diffraction grating or a
prism you can look through at a high pressure sodium light you are seeing
the absorption of sodium in that spectrum that's more complicated too and i don't want to keep spending a lot of
time on this honestly but i did want to try and give everybody a chance to see this
so um i think we'll chalk it up to try it a different way next time
and and go on from there if you don't mind
because i don't want to blow my time here okay so i'm going to go back to my
screen and
so we'll go on i hope okay yep you're back okay
page down i'm not oh there we go
all right so when we look
at galaxies out in the universe we can see absorption lines and you
might remember that i mentioned and tried to point out that they were really hard to see even on on my slide uh the h
and k lines of calcium and
they're visible in this spectrum of ngc 221 anybody know what that happens to be
this is a test that's m31
yeah and you can see
where that position is notice that it has been indicated that it is that the velocity the doppler
shift is minus 200 kilometers per second
and when we go to the ngc 4473 which is in the virgo cluster
it's plus 2300 kilometers per second ngc 379
is at 5500 kilometers per second uh some unspecified
galaxy in ursa major cluster 50 over 15 000 and
in the gemini cluster over 23 000. now these were all done in the 1930s that
would have made them they were made with 100 inch at mount wilson sorry folks it really is a hundred
inches two and a half meters for our international friends um
uh by milton humminson and published in the astrophysical journal
and hubble himself edwin hubble um made the first plot and published it in the in
the proceedings of the national academy of sciences in 1929 and i picked that
out so already the pictures that i'm showing you are are beyond what he did he was working with
hummus further on but you can see on the right in this figure the first hint
that distance and speed away
means something because that's what the velocity distance relation is
he was wrong in this plot this is this value if you plot what's called the
slope of this line is about 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec in other words
it's fast uh per million uh per three and a quarter million light
years we now know that number is right around
70 kilometers per second per megaparsec
and we know that because
here again just uh just some more pictures a little better you can see here the calcium lines
and i should have taken out that first one in fact i didn't need to do that but you can see the galaxies
in here a little better than that previous slide sorry um
what we see now is done digitally here is a spectrum of a
quasar um near well i don't know
five maybe seven billion light years away this red shift is 5.82
what that essentially means is that the a spectrum line this is hydrogen but
it's way way into the ultraviolet it's called lyman alpha at
nanometers or that 1214 angstroms i was mentioning earlier deep in the
ultraviolet has been shifted into the near infrared uh here's this these wavelengths are
again in angstroms 8 this is 800 nanometers 800 chain this is 800
nanometers and this is way out at about 80 300 nanometers
or 830 nanometers sorry and this
is a hubble plot one of many i tried to get one that was out at as far going as far as 5.82 but
nobody's publishing them there aren't that many objects that we know at that distance but
in any case um this is what a hubble plot looks like and this is much like the one that has been used to
determine uh out in this range why we think there is dark energy
and uh hubble's original one that i showed you over there is somewhere right down here at the bottom
it hardly got anywhere at all but but what he found back and reported
back in 1929 i had started everything that is leading to what we
know about uh the universe now so i think
that's all i have yep and just a more complex absorption spectrum for you to ponder
and uh scott unless somebody we think somebody's gonna have some question
about what i've shown we can just go back to the talking screen
okay i think people are getting a great education from you steve so
no uh particular questions right now but uh uh you know certainly
uh you know you can do spectroscopy as an amateur astronomer there are companies
that make spectra graphs for amateur telescopes um but what's what are there simple ways to
do it that are low costly yeah let me tell you
there are very simple ways to do this and and i have been doing it since
i started doing it in college um for a class actually but it was my own
figuring out you know using a little bit of what i read in sky and telescope to get started and that was essentially
putting a diffraction grating in front of a camera lens and doing star trails
and and basically you can take if
if anybody knows what a 35 millimeter slide is anymore i know our first first
francois does very nice pictures francois
um you you can cut you can get those commercially uh at least in the united
states um rainbow symphony it's called they're on the web
we'll sell you some that are very that are reasonably efficient for a dollar or
two a piece and i i tell you to get two just in case you make a mistake because they're a
little bit fragile but uh you cut that down put it in front of your camera lens and start with
bright stars that's the key but bright stars and bright stars means first magnitude but a star like sirius
uh vega and antares
all will show spectral lines beetlejuice will too and um to a greater and lesser extent
but pick go go learn some some of the spectral classes of stars and experiment
and it gets it can be real it's really a lot of fun uh you can also actually
again with your second rainbow symphony
diffraction grading you can though i have to tell you they do need to be more
efficient than that but if you were to uh dig out and put it in between
your telescope objective lens and your camera sensor whatever type of thing you
use um you can actually take get a spectrum of
the ring nebula for instance and you'll discover it has a spectrum that is a
bunch of overlapped rings rather than just uh
a continuous one or something like that um so it's it's a lot of fun to do same
thing with the it's even easier with the orion nebula and you'll see that it is
quite different for a spectrum from the other all the other stars in in orion and those stars are generally
bright enough so um crank up the iso if you're using a digital camera because that will also
serve for the inefficient to counterbalance some of the inefficiency of that and then if you find this
intriguing enough there are a number of of commercial gradings that are available
um but we're talking costs now getting up in
you know in the hundred to two hundred dollar range which you can do the same thing and more with with that equipment and it's
they're usually more efficient too but uh it's something that i keep doing and i'm still trying to get more yet
another meteor spectrum and those are hard let me tell you uh that would be difficult that would be
difficult there is a question um there's a question from uh tarak in
the uae he's wanting to know do does the spectra of the sun change
yes um not very much it's subtle uh for example in fact let
me go see if i can get up my get my just the spectrum of of the sun
up here again so i can just point at it if you were to
observe this is hydrogen alpha here in the red and you notice how wide it is if you
catch a solar flare occurring you can see that on occasion
uh become visible as a brightening in the hydrogen alpha and in fact some
of these other very dark spectral lines scattered across the
spectrum especially if it's a very bright flare one of the uh so-called white light solar flares like the
carrington event in 1859 you will see a lot of these light get lighter uh
you can also um one of the tricks
here we're getting deeper into this i could spend hours so i gotta control myself
um i can't pick it out for you it's a little hard to see on even here um but
there is there are certain spectral lines in the sun
iron has a number of them that are actually magnetic sensitive
and with a polarizer and i've done this um
you can actually take a picture of the spectrum and keep
the line gets split by a strong magnetic field and a strong magnetic field had there
been a sunspot in this where the slit of this spectrograph was placed you would have seen a dark
horizontal line not the black ones that you see in the strips but in the middle of each one of these red band
each one of these color bands running sideways and that would have been the spectrum of the sunspot and near the
sunspot you can see magnetic field lines either have be one stronger or one and
the other weaker or the other way around depending on the polarity of the magnetic magnetic field of the
sunspot move a different sunspot those two can reverse especially if it's a if
it's a pair of sunspots that are magnetically connected so yes the sun spectrum does change
interesting that's cool and i suppose that's true of also stars is that is
that is that right oh stars get even more interesting okay with stars they do have flares and
you will see some stars uh develop bright spectral lines in their spectrum
much as i described for what what's happening in the sun but you can see it from light years away
we have not fortunately had any solar flares of that size and wouldn't anticipate any from
the sun but uh red red dwarf stars are sometimes very magnetically active and they will
have brightenings that are all a stellar flare
also variable stars that have a wide range typically also
not only change their color but they would because you're seeing different levels of the atmosphere and temperature you
will see the spectrum change as well and so that's something that you can monitor
even in cepheid variable stars and miras so yeah
stars do it too awesome that's great well thank you very much steve uh we'll
have to have we'll probably have to have another program that deals with this um
because uh it is through analyzing spectra and this is something amateurs can do uh with your telescopes they're
you know there there's software out there uh uh there's uh there's a
package uh from uh a company called uh rspec that uh and i put a link in in
chat about it but um uh you can see some amazing uh spectra in
uh stars and and not just first magnitude stars i've seen him do it with uh much fainter stuff and it is really cool
to analyze what's going on in the interiors of of celestial objects so
um thank you so much steve scott i have to add to that that tom from our spec is
just incredible with his support for teachers he goes out of his way to help students
work on projects with spectra and our spec is really an approachable package first for for amateur
astronomers and for teachers yeah and and tom fields who who creates
this uh uh our spec is uh just uh so enthusiastic and so uh
amazing in his presentations that it would make almost anyone want to get started uh but uh we've got a great
primer here from steve edberg and uh exactly uh it is something that uh
uh you know it makes you want to go beyond just looking at beautiful objects in the eyepiece yeah let me add actually
one one more thought and that is uh thanks to francois i will say you can
also get comets i've gotten comets as faint as magnitude 6 uh through the telescope or just through
the camera lens when we have a really nice bright comet and so um there you can see
molecular emission lines that's a whole separate story from anything i've told
you today and uh just you can even tell sometimes how
dusty a comet is by what you're seeing you can separate the the spectral lines of the tail as
well it's it's just it's it's a whole different way of looking at the sky
absolutely absolutely i did point out steve that you were you
uh conducted one of the early pro-am projects which was international ali watch that was my first introduction to
doing any kind of science and steve wrote the book on
how amateurs could participate in the observation of holly during its
85 86 apparition so i'll also add that steve edberg is an
incredible visual observer he is the one that taught me how to see faint through a telescope and uh so i i
have a lot of uh gratitude to him uh because i was able to see
uh tons of faint galaxies and and um you know to see galaxies visually
with my own eyes was really was my dream uh to do in amateur astronomy
and um so steve made that possible for me so thank you very much man
pleasure okay so up next uh we're going to go to
john johnson uh who um is uh
one of the top guys maybe the top guy of the nebraska star party and uh
and you've got a you guys held i think uh the first
in-person star party in the country uh last year uh with the nebraska star party i mean that that was
uh you know formally announced and everything there were people sneaking out and in crews and stuff to to do some
uh some stargazing but uh uh nebraska's star party did go off last year
and of course it's going to go off again this year so
so i'll turn over to me okay can everyone hear me can you hear me all right yes
well i know we've gone way over but i just have to pass along some thank yous and
and some just oh wow what a neat time uh of course first of all
uh mr eggberg uh i have met you i'm sure you don't remember but uh
at my very first astronomical league convention in dallas
in 1980 i met oh really okay remember that we have
both of us had a lot more hair back then yes we did you have like a little bald spot
starting right here i remember so much uh if you don't mind if i can call you steve i'm fine thank
you it wasn't that that was when you introduced uh the that we bring they
were going to start having the leslie pellier observing
award i i i maybe my memory's failing but uh i i was so impressed
with your talk on that and of course rubbing shoulders with some of the other uh amateurs that that was my truly my
first a um you know national convention and uh to meet the
guys like you and i think walter scott houston was there and of course jack marlin from lumicon
and clay shroud so it that was where i really started to get a kick out of
meeting the the national scene and uh i'll never forget that
another connection i think steve i'll just mention quickly i think you have worked with uh gianluca masi haven't you
the italian i thought he said he admitted you he he's quite a
you know quite an astronomer over there in italy um but anyway uh
the the people you meet yeah virtual telescope project
uh no but might have been other something else uh the name the names yeah well he's you
know he's uh googling he's an amazing guy and in fact what prompted my memory cell was the
who was at francois that had a picture of uh hail bop that was probably my first successful sort of what i thought
uh comment picture with film and that's when i met uh john lucamasi
in 1997 i was headed over to italy for a naval reserve
event and we hooked up and we've been lifelong friends ever since
anyway just dropping names but okay back to the subject at hand yes uh nebraska star
party uh we did it in uh i think we were the first one last year
uh to have a quote star party um yes and it went off extremely well
uh we had one of uh our best years i think we ended up with about 375
people uh show up during the week and uh it went very very well other than
you never get enough of nice clear nights but hey that's why we always advertise uh you have to come up for at
least three or four nights to make sure that you uh you catch the the night uh and when it
when it happens it's it's unbelievable uh it is some of the darkest skies in the country up
there and we're planning another big one this year
the the dates are going to be the 24th of july through the 29th the last four
week of july and um i got i don't know scott if i can make
this work or not i've never been very good about this sharing thing um if i try i have about a two-minute
trailer that was from okay though well let's let's give it a shot
okay and i'm also sharing the nebraska star party website okay uh you know
john is is uh was trying to describe how dark it is out there unless you've been
to a really dark side you really can't appreciate um
what that feeling is like you know when you can actually see your shadow cast from milky way light it's that is
amazing and you can do it there so okay all right so you're sharing right now do
you have it okay let's give it a moment here yep okay you're good
can you hear it it's kind of loud
[Music]
the audio parts not uh coming across very well but the video is fine
the sound isn't coming through um before you share uh you have to click a little box that
says share system sound it's going to be on the left and so if
you want to stop sharing and go back and share again we'll let you do
that here i'll i'll un-cheer you back okay
okay try that again so you're going to click the green share screen button
and before you commit okay you're going to see a little box off to the left-hand
bottom share soon there you go and then you can start your video over
and it'll share it
now that's that's the website here let's try again
okay is it there uh you're still on the website
we see july 24th through 29th yeah
like then cherry if you'd like sure and share because that seems to be once you do it i can't go back okay okay let's
make sure this is up okay
how many years has nebraska's star party been going this will be our 29th year wow okay that's a long time
okay you're back where you were i tell you okay let's we'll make sure that
okay you'll have to unshare me again it looks like no problem okay let's let's get the
click on the dialog box that has the video
okay i think he got okay we got it i'll back up just okay
there you go now you got now you're good with gas how does it sound yep okay
we have a gentleman uh down at lincoln that's quite the um drone photography guys
i can actually hear sound coming from my sub now so it's really good yeah he put some really nice sounds hey
look who's there look who's there
[Music]
so [Music]
[Music] so when i eventually make it to
that's a beautiful picture when i eventually make it there i know where i'll be setting up
we have plenty of room oh yeah
[Music] look how dark it is all the way down the
horizon
hater males in the evening at high school in town on wednesdays
for speakers i'll mention who we got in a second here
[Music]
vendors swap made over the contest
[Music]
okay i'm on oh no i'll insert it right now and then i was
gonna bring let me see here okay let's bring the website back up
let's see if that works okay
so is that yeah that's the website back up there okay there's the website again
and there was this yeah we have registration is open you can click and uh either sign up online or
download a pdf form there's the the beautiful beaches up there lake
reservoir uh absolutely gorgeous place to bring the whole family and water ski swim
uh have three-legged races whatever okay uh
there's an overview of it now uh as i said registrations are open uh it's the july july 24th 29th
we've selected a couple of our guest speakers uh one of them is going to be
this gentleman stephen ramston of the charlie bates solar observatory yeah
steven's going to be up there is probably our keynote and thanks to me watching um global star
parties and scott being so generous inviting me on here's one of our other speakers
ah and the stars of those of your regular attendees it was gsps libby and her mom
are going to be up there and she's just thrilled uh that we've invited her to come up and actually give a talk we we really
emphasize the whole thing as a family gathering and and to bring children and young adults up to
experience what we have and we felt that libby would be an excellent uh
example of up-and-coming astronomers and maybe fire some interest in some of the other young
people attending and we're we're still trying to decide on what others speak we usually have
three keynote speakers uh plus the other things like i said that go on at the high school on
wednesdays and uh plenty of dark skies uh when the weather
cooperates you just never know but but it's it is uh
uh we're getting a lot of excitement a lot of uh publicity from obviously you scott and
and uh various uh the if you if those that are members of the astronomical league if
you look at your march reflector magazine we have a nice um ad in that uh
that issue this month and um so anyway uh is there any questions i i know i want to spend a
whole lot of time because things are running over here so i guess people where people are generally impressed
with the video and um you know and uh i think that you're gonna have some
people uh from the audience coming to the nebraska star party there's also
people that wish that they could go but oh i know have other commitments we're uh since we
opened up we've been the the registration has been open just a little over a month and we have uh
uh check today there was we have 50 registrations so far 50 people registered so we're on our way
yep and and explore scientific is committed to participating and yes appreciate that and we look forward to
uh i think kent martz for sure and we'll see who else right
right well that's great thank you very much john thanks for hanging in there and uh thanks for
coming on global star party is not a problem and uh we'll drop in again here
okay sometime later good enough like i said once again i i'm just
always impressed with the uh the quality of speakers and obviously i was very impressed with uh
steve here and uh uh kareem and i i think uh francoise is
francoise still there looks like he is and i i sent a message to daniel
daniel yeah uh actually uh i didn't realize he worked with jeff norwood there at camera
concert jeff uh in his early years was a big supporter of the star party too
yes okay thank you so much okay so uh
we're going to take a 10 minute break uh and then we're coming back with uh dr martials is uh down in brazil um so stay
tuned be back in 10.
i'm going to uh take advantage of my new um coffee making machine and
go go get some coffee famous last words i just finished a cup of earl grey
that's that's usually my thing i got they've got carrot cups with earl
grey i got to go get some of those did you see norms first again he managed
to beat harold just barely yeah very close
same time stamp same time stamp yeah there's a millisecond difference in
there how are you maxie
what's up guys how's it going supposed to do a star party um oh hi maxie it's good to
have all of you guys on today it's amazing talks today really i mean i always i mean we always have great talks
on global star party but every time i i get to sit back and watch this
parade of knowledge and inspiration go by it's just uh i pinch myself it's just wonderful so
i agree yeah it's free and i think it's growing in steam as far as
um folks that are presenting or that are coming on to present
um by the way how's my audio because once again i've changed it too it sounds
really good sounds good i think i finally have something that works hopefully you're
not hearing much of an echo with the speaker i've got off to the side no but i thought you were going to do some auto
tuning there and uh you know mix in a little bit of a beat and nope i left that stuff in the truck
i could go get the i could go get it all but i uh it's been a while since i've messed with
that stuff i i switched over to doing photography so that's it
one of these days one of these days but now i'm glad this setup works this mic obviously seems to work and
i'm using a real webcam so yeah just i had to try and step up the
game from just using the uh phone uh scott i don't know if you're seeing in the chat but norm seems to be uh not
just oh norm knows he has a standing invitation but he's now gone to volunteering harold and jeff to also be
joining us up here on this side of the screen oh that's good that's good we got to get
the moon yep so absolutely really any of you right back
you're watching the show you know if you love astronomy you want to share your passion show some of your images show some live
views talk for a little bit you know uh global star party is a great place to
do this you know uh i've had people ask me you know why are the uh you know
why are our talks uh or time a lot is so short it's it's it
it came about with an idea that i had about doing astronomy outreach as like a
pop-up event where you would go you would just show up a lot of cars would show up people would run in set up their
telescopes put some soap boxes down and then astronomers would talk for five or
ten minutes while people looked through telescopes okay and i thought well maybe we can do
that um in the virtual world here and it's worked out pretty good um
but uh you you get a healthy dose of uh astronomy education in just a couple of
hours here on global star party oh yeah it's fine it's fantastic speakers you
know so it's also it's great with the audience just the back and forth and hearing from them and then during the week i get to
see you know harold's moon picks and norm shares a few things and you get to see
their like their astronomy adventures and honestly most of them do more astronomy
than i do i don't get a chance to get under the telescope these days i live vicariously
through everyone else you're right yeah i i often the same deal but i when i do i just love it you
know so so so far we've had you've got to see david levy you
uh terry mann from the astronomical league david eiker from astronomy magazine
dennis coy from yurky's observatory was on um kareem who's talking to us right
now uh you know from the royal astronomical society of canada montreal center
uh france francois you know yeah yeah how do i pronounce
his last name again it's kennel the s is uh there he is he'll speak for himself
okay yeah yeah i lived three for two years in ontario
and everybody were there was saying quinnell that seems to be the easiest way no okay and there's a town in bc
spelled exactly like my name it was apparently one of my ancestors that went there and and it's quinnell
so so yeah quinnell is nice daniel higgins from astroworld tv was on
of course steve edberg who you just uh saw give a presentation in john johnson so up next is going to be uh marcela
souza and i'm going to run the back here since we have a couple of minutes and fill my cup with water and
i'll be right back sounds great and i can't wait to see harold's moon picks and norms nebulae oh
it's going to be fun
so francois are you going to come back we're all loving your your your framing that you were sharing and
i think you and adrian can do an entire clouds episode with with your awesome landscape pictures
thanks yeah yeah well well uh well uh
we're not moving anywhere anywhere so maxie had a fantastic picture he posted
on facebook the other day with uh the magellanic cloud visible up in the sky and
oh yeah i have to too much material to it tonight
a lot oh my jaw dropped looking at that one i was just sitting there that
and then francois started his with himself on a on a lawn chair staring up at the milky way and i'm just sitting
there looking at the street lights outside my window going no
all right folks i gotta go prep lab for tomorrow but i will be watching on youtube enjoy the rest of the evening
and uh marcelo maxie adrian i'll be watching yours from afar
okay kareem take care and say folks again of creating this is largely the study of life
each kind of light carries different information that adds to our picture of the universe
the upcoming nancy grace roman space telescope will detect a key range of light for
studying the universe visible into near infrared
infrared which starts at a wavelength of about 0.75 microns will allow the roman
space telescope to make many critical observations roman engineers now plan to add a new
filter extending its range from 2 to 2.3 microns
this seemingly small change will make a big difference our galaxy the milky way is filled with
bands of dust and gas that block our view of the stars behind them part of what makes infrared light so
useful to astronomers is its ability to travel through this gas and dust
infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light which means it is less likely to be scattered and absorbed by small dust
particles as it travels over long distances upgrading from 2 to 2.3 microns
allows astronomers to see through two to three times as much dust this opens up much more of our galaxy to
study including surveys of small dim stars that glow mostly in infrared
infrared is also good for studying the more distant parts of the universe as the universe expands it stretches the
wavelengths of light along with it a process called red shift the farther away an object is the more
the light from it has stretched by the time it reaches us distant galaxies have all of their
visible light shifted into infrared stretching over distance makes redshift
one of the key tools for measuring the universe since astronomers can usually determine what wavelength they would see
from up close they can tell how far a galaxy is by how much the light has changed
closer to home is a search for water within the solar system water ice absorbs specific wavelengths of infrared
light providing a fingerprint of its presence as telescopes see farther into the
infrared they can see more of this fingerprint if objects in the outer solar system
such as rocky fragments in the distant kuiper belt contain water ice light reflected off them will have gaps where
the water has absorbed that wavelength this allows astronomers to detect water at much greater distances
the nancy grace roman space telescope will form an unprecedented partnership
with hubble and the james webb space telescope with its extremely large field of view
roman is uniquely equipped for large surveys of the infrared sky allowing astronomers to identify interesting
targets for more detailed study using hubble and webb's overlapping wavelength ranges and smaller fields of view
this collaboration will usher in a new era in infrared astronomy
[Applause]
okay
[Music]
well we're back thanks for uh we're watching the first segment of global star party and now we get into segment
two uh with uh dr martial souza all the way from brazil um marcelo how old are
you how's everything going down there hi hi scott
it's a pleasure to be here good to see you assistant here
that's great a young cosmologist right there yes
wonderful wonderful so uh how is uh how are your programs
going in uh down in brazil yes i we had carnival then this week we
had turned to to work and oh
my god sorry nice yeah
uh we have caribou and this week you returned with activities because you
have one week that's nothing work here in brazil and even with the kovitch
we didn't have the sun by schools in the streets and
dancing streets but we had the holiday but
i saw a lot of people dancing also you know that's good it's it's impossible and
then we had this monday yesterday reflectivities in school i
will show some pictures of the activities in schools but i saw something
that's fantastic in the presentation of uh stephen
about the the contribution of a person that say i'm
fun and yeah i included here some information about him
i don't know what you think about him but for me uh mutual assault homosexual
is a fantastic person and he he saw
and stephen i think that's why stephen that's a short er images
taken by
and he's a fantastic person i'll share here
some information about him i ever talk about him
to my students because he's an example for our officers here because he he was
i don't know if he's correct my pronunciation i'm newly skin it's correct
like i said merely skinny is this not that you say no
he worked very young with the moon
to build the montreal's observatory and during this work
he felt in love with the data of
an engineer that was working in the
attitude observatory by the to build the montreux observatory he met with her
and he worked in a farm during five years i think that's more or
less five years and then what he he would like to
offer a better life for his family and then
the the engineer uh knew that he
you have a vacancy at the observatory to work at the janitor there
and he was invited to be janitor of job servator and if
one year later he he began to work with the astronomers
and one year later he
even he didn't study astronomy in schools and
he he was not an astronomer i think that's the first time in history that he had
this and he made a lot of discoveries and he worked with
hubble and the the work that he did with herbal that
allowed herbert to [Music] show that the
universe was expanding
[Music] and the biggest telescope of the montreux observatory
here is
observatory this is fantastic amazing yeah yeah this story is amazing i mean here he is he
he's the guy has not even graduated high school didn't have yes yes right and he left
the school he left his school when he was very young to and then she moved to los
it's amazing amazing and here he is uh with some of the greatest men of science
in the world of all time okay yes uh and and making major contributions himself
so this this proves that uh um you know if you if there's a will uh
you can you you too can be you know making contributions to science too yeah
i ever talk about him to my students here as an example for everybody
here is humor soon he was already retired in this picture
and we have a book where what where is the book
when i find i've i took a copy of the image but it's not here
and something that he he was talking about the universe is fun
explaining something that is fantastic in this history we're going to talk about the big bang and the
the model that you have because we have things that we cannot explain
in this module until today and the
something that few people know about when they talk about cosmology
that it is the best model that you have but have many things in this mode
and the that we cannot explain you know
you cannot use the model to explain everything that you measure and here is position of
i will show only this before i talk about this here is position of the sun
in our in the milky way here is where we are i'm showing the
measure of the galaxy because one of the problems that we have when we talk about the universe our model of the universe
and what's happening in the galaxy is the rotation of the galaxy the
velocity of the rotation of the galaxy here are the stars
near us right in a 3g mode here is alpha centauri like the
triple system here prosma centauri is near us but
i would like to show this this uh a fantastic image of a lot of
galaxies the deep fields in maze taken by the herbal telescope
and here you can see a lot of galax and the
when we studied the movement the rotation of the galaxy that appeared in one of the problems
of our physics that we can't explain with the physics
that we know and as we don't want to change the physics
is the last option we try to find a way to explain
uh what we measure then we are now
you know here here is amazing
trying to show our model the mother the best mother to have for
the universe imagine that one moment you had the old
universe in a small very small and
everything together in very moment legs
that is very much peace and we don't know what happens at this moment because you don't have
physics to explain there's a lot of energy and the physics
that you know can't explain what's happening but as we now
need to consider that the universe is expanding then to begin the expansion the expansion and
in one moment we have here out of the things that you imagine in a
very small piece and when i talk about this anymore that happen you have nothing there
unless it isn't then when the universe begin to explain to
we expand to begin to have the lights well the air that dominates by
the hadith and then we have the first particles that appear
and now we found in a few years ago uh it was possible to found the bosom of
higgs that was what we need to explain the moment that
the particles appear in the universe
then we have the expansion of the universe but i will not talk about this i'm showing this because i only
like to talk about two problems that you have that see they are not so
uh one of them one is associated with the expansion of the universe
and the other is this this is the composition of universe
for us to today uh 23 almost 20 percent
maybe it is composed by dark matter and that's 33
uh 70 30 of the universe for the dark energy
and for four percent of the free hydrogen and the idea
and one percent more or less it is the matter
how we know that half of it is
we have in the stars heavy elements of universe is a very
small part of his universe that you know and for me
uh when i talk with you the students here and we begin to talk about this mode of
steering grass two things that we have that
we don't uh we can't explain and we have this the dark matter and the
dark energy is something that you need to consider as hypothesis
to explain what you measure and you don't have a model
well to explain the first one problem is when we
measure the velocity of the rotation of the galaxy
the prediction is this one that is calculated here
according to our knowledge according to physics
and then we have the estimation of the
mass of the galaxy the distribution of the mass that we have in the galaxy
and the with this information using the physics that we know this a red line here is how
we imagine that see israel is [Music]
we know that in in the model india when we analyze the the solar ceased
what you imagine about the rotation of the galaxy i have calculated this but you what you measure some is this here
in the white line then we can't explain what's happening
why we have a high velocity then
he was calculated when we go to the
far from the center of the galaxy to explain this we imagine that
we don't know out the mass of the galaxy
well because we need more mass in the border of the galaxy to explain what we
measure but as we don't know we can't see well we don't see this mass
we imagine we consider that cds we have this mess there
but we can see then we called these messages the dark matter
and the but for science we need to find
what is the dark matter and we didn't find and as you see in the model we have so
to to consider the physics that we know we need to find this dark matter
in the galaxy and this is possible for 23
of the universe that we know is something that we don't know what it is
and you don't know if exists it is reconsidered only because you can't
explain what's happening you have two ways to solve this
one of one way is to change the physics that we know
but see as this is the last two option we try to find
what is this dark matter that she we can't see and you we me we imagine that
can exist the other
thing that we we consider also because the universe is expanding faster than we
cons we the predictions of the module nowadays
and to explain what's happening we have two options also
to change the model automotive or to find something
that see is making the universe expanding faster now
then the easiest way is to consider something
that we that see we don't know what he is but he
exists the universe and this is possible to expand faster the universe
and the code is the dark dark matter and
as to we move we have the universe moving faster we need a lot of energy for this
bands we need to consider 70
and three percent of universe maybe it is composed by this definitely
that we don't know what it is then we have two problems that we don't know what is
and we're having hypotheses and try to find what can be
but see we didn't find until today it's something that is fantastic for me
because uh sometimes here in brazil have this problem i don't know if united states and the couch because we begin to
talk with about the big bang with kids in school
and the teachers that talk about the big bang
they they talk is something that see is the
model that explains everything but it's not a model that explains
everything we have many things that we don't explain with this mode
like the how that begins to form the galaxies in the universe
and these problems that i showed now and i think that this is something that
is good for the future because the young astronomers will have work for a
long time and to find a solution for this problem and it is like here
the we have here a fly i don't know how to say in english that's a fly we call
here fly off banana that is a small fly that
live is only 24 hours approximately approximately and we are
like this this flight line because we live we have
maybe 100 years at much more 100 years something like this
and we try to imagine the universe that's heavy almost 400 billion years
well what's hap what's happened in the past and the
what can happen in the future then it's some the same thing of this flight because they live on 24 hours how
that they can know that see a kid one day will be announced now books
that's a he he see that is the same thing that's happening first
trying to explain the universe then this is a topic that's for me is
something that is fantastic well even in these
[Music] hard moments that you are leaving after the cold view to have your war something
that is very sad very sad but something that we can think and you
know that you are very small in this universe don't
have you live is so uh is so fast the time that you are here
in the earth that it's not possible to to imagine if you when you use jerusalem
to have fights like you have with yours and here uh our project well the
youngsters of tomorrow yeah and support and here as the last
activity that we did in schools well he had the team well today he is international day of
the um women and indeed our team we have eight girls
that you work with yes well these are three of these girls well academy that
produce cartoons isabel that she's doing
[Music] apps for android
and here is stephanie that's she studs in fundamental school
and she's a work in development of episodes and
his participation for the students and our public schools here in brazil
near us two students that did the best to work we give prizes to them
well i have another stick is there is some
price to give to the students and the other students he said we also
saw a glass that sent to stephen armstead said to us
and this is the directive that you return this week right we are planning until
the end of the october we will
be probably develop we will develop activities in more than 50 schools
real red developed these activities in 21 20 23 schools here in our seats
and we think that see new york plans will probably
develop activity more 30 or 40 schools then until january will have more than 50
schools that we developed the works
and we are i'm now organizing the international meeting
that's here happening 22 and april 22 23.
and so i will have a new edition of disguise up
magazine thank you scott for the invitation
thank you marcelo i will never tire of seeing that magazine cover for some
audrey right that's right it's a great shot uh adrian
um a couple of comments or questions as well um harold locke says the
implications of so much dark matter in energy would suggest
that before the other heavy elements and gases that there was only dark matter
and dark energy with is that is that the current thinking no uh no because they are
yeah when they talk about dark matter we imagine that something like a
intellectual force between the matter that makes the matter
uh yeah no i forgot to do a word in english now
but it's different from the gravity that makes the mass
come together this is something that make it be a part man go
then it's something some kind of energy or a force that you being out universe
and the but it's a mode that somebody knows what can do this something like anti-gravity something
like this but we don't have this now don't have negative mass of a particle right then
then the interaction of gravity only bring things together
you know there is something that you don't know what is now but we know that universal expanded faster than pre than
the prediction we have in the model then we need to consider something to explain this and the dark matter is
something different from this because dark matter is something that
you imagine that we have in the border of the galaxy
that is affecting the rotation of the galaxy to be according to what we
measure that's not to what we calculate from the [Music]
the idea that you have of the mass of the galaxy in distribution of this mess in the galaxy
then if you use the physics that we know
we can calculate the rotation of the galaxy if you have information about the mass
of the galaxy then with this information the calculus because the result of this
calculus it's not according to the measures we did that from the data that you we
have about the potential of the galaxy then as
we know some the only thing that we know that can affect is the gravity then we imagine that is some kind of
mass there in the body of the galaxy that you can't see
then these are different from the dark matter that the dark energy black energy
is something that you're having out the universe that is making university expanding
faster this is called dark energy if some fingers are unlike anti-gravity or
something like this but you don't know what is i think that's a difference what is
something that's affecting the body of the galaxy no andy is the only thing
that we know that can affect because we have it for force for interactions right
that we have gelato magnetic the nuclear strong
and the weak that is inside the atom the nuclear the nucleus of the atom we
have the electromagnetic force and you have the gravitational force
when you talk about the board of the colleagues you have only what can change
this is a big mess a lot of mass
we we need to consider the gravitational force then we need to as you can see
we don't know what is but we we imagine that something that have
that has mass is what you are looking for
it is things that are different
so i don't know if i answered the question right
it makes more questions um uh so there was someone else um uh on uh
looks like uh twitter that is asking why aren't the galaxies slowing down
doesn't gravity drag and drag help slow down the expansion rate
but there's no no no no no no no what's happening is what's happening what's this the prediction is that we have a
low velocities in the border of the galaxy this is prediction
this is what the fisk explains okay it is not this that it is measured i'll
show i can't show here again i i don't know if
this is doubts what they measure is that the velocity is like the same
here let me try to return here
this one this is the observation okay this is what's expected
different yes this is something that is measured we observe and here is a calculate what
is calculated you see that in the body of the galaxy the velocity is love
then you you have here and what you measure is is that
is like disabled or something that is is bigger yeah
then we don't have we can't explain these with the mass that we see
these emd physics can't explain and we have two ways no one you can change the
physics the model that you use but this is the last show option well we
tried the easiest option uh see that uh say saying that is something that
we are we can't see no we are not we need to find something that can explain
this behavior of the galaxy but uh is something that you
don't see but it exists this is the first the easiest option that you are
trying to find but we didn't find until today
this is what you asked all right well thank you
i answered correct i think i think so i think so
um okay well thank you marcelo it is
fascinating and uh uh you know i have i have many more questions myself but uh
i don't think we have time but uh
we look forward to um the next issue of sky's up magazine i look forward to uh
your program for youth and their activities and um we have a telescope here at explore
scientific that's waiting for your students to use so wow great it's great they're asking me about this very
sometimes yes thank you all right thank you marcelo thank you thank you very much for the
invitation thank you thanks okay um
so next up here is um adrian bradley uh we love nightscape
images adrian's shown us uh many views of uh of uh uh
you know where he his his his neck of the woods is uh up there in
michigan and uh but uh he showed us some beautiful shots that he's done also in
oklahoma uh and uh we know that he wants to get around and and
uh explore more of the night sky around us uh so adrian thanks for coming on to
global star party we are running we we've run a little bit behind i'm sorry for that um but uh okay i'll try
and make my presentation quick okay uh i gathered a bunch of images
um let me just go right into it i'll share the screen where all the images are
and i am i built kind of a little bit of an outline
so that i could show so i could uh rifle through pretty quickly so
what i'm doing now you're seeing some imaging that i did of the orion
area um i'm gonna go over i decided later i'll go over kind of the difference in what
you see in the night sky depending on where you are um
this is a portal 4 site and if you compare that to
this was with a a non-modded camera and i'll i'll talk about that um later on
so let's see um
i've attempted to do some imaging there's the same it's the same night and these clouds moved in
so the clouds can create that halo effect that uh same effect that a filter can
create and this was the last shot i took before i gave up for those of you in the southern
hemisphere you can see starlight still makes its way through
depending on where the clouds are these this lets you know that these are medium to higher
clouds whereas the lower clouds tend to block more light
and um this is uh the north um uk calls it the plow
uh america we call it the big dipper and this would be the little dipper and this is our north star right here
that's my truck and that's an explorer scientific rig i'm actually trying to uh
do some classic wide field so how did that turn out
it turned out kind of like this with the orion nebula the running man
ngc 1977 because it was hazy um i got this haze around the stars but
i also got some detail as well there's the horse head there's the flame
so a rough draft there's barnard's loops so a rough image
with six minutes had it been a little clearer a little bit better i think my data
might have turned out so other thing that i like to share about the moon
this is just a quick image taken uh handheld with a 600 millimeter lens
at the growing crescent moon this past saturday sadly we won't have a we won't be able
to do this this was taken 20 minutes after the
lunar x and v [Music] terminator was in perfect position
there's the lunar x there is the lunar v during a daytime moon last month in
february so whenever the lunar x and v are visible and if you
take the image at the right time you can see those two
um features they they are the x is created by surrounding craters
in the way that the uh terminator hits them the lunar v there's a
there's a rim here it just it looks like a v it looks like an x and uh so for those that go after the
moon it can be interesting jumping ahead to may 15th and 16th is
when we're gonna see a total this wasn't quite total as you recall
but the whole it will be total in the americas um north america gets to see this
however i am going to be on the west coast um this is going to be above the milky
way so i'm rather torn apart by how that's going to work
um i'll briefly show here's the milky way as it's going to
look um the moon the eclipse moon's going to be up here
somewhere so those of you that can get the shot
definitely want to mark down this um total lunar eclipse because the
galactic core will come with it so speaking of the galactic core i
attempted to capture it at daybreak i'll show you this was a picture
that i took from a spot overlooking here on river
um last year i had a lot of the galactic core and this was you notice the color of the sky
around it and then later i took some pictures
and you notice the color of the sky started to change because at the moment of daybreak the
bluish light from the sun's light beginning to scatter out the atmosphere
jumps into your photo and you get around a five minute period
where all the stars in the sky and the milky way itself are visible but
you don't you have a different color of night sky
this is actually the moon rising light coming from the moon that's peaking behind the clouds at the
time that i took this so i tried it again
and i was met with cloud cover um would have been in my estimation a
beautiful picture this was at the moment of astronomical twilight
i took a couple of other photos and um as you can see i still have the
north american nebula here we still have the cygnus region and there's cassiopeia a couple of meteors
that uh photobomb the shot and this is below coming from towns but
the as astronomical twilight continues by the minute
and you'll see with this uh i took a longer exposure image
but you can see it's beginning to disappear the brighter it gets
so that's always an interesting time more meteors that show up it's an interesting
time to image um francois mentioning
excuse me about how clouds can beautify a um
how class can beautify a landscape image i went ahead and shot anyways here's an older
so here's an older view of the same thing from last year you can see the milky way
beginning to be washed out by the ever the presence of um
the astronomical twilight and you cannot you can kind of see a shape of the moon here too
the fact that it's coming up as a crescent so
so before and after shots um we talked a lot about a portal one site
and what it's like and i will share with you really quickly
on some of these images before i do um this aurora happened during the spring
equinox and the spring equinox is coming back so
there's usually a good chance of a rural activity during the spring equinox we've had an active sun
so a rural activity could be going on for quite some time
um so let's let's talk about what really quickly let's see
a 401 site looks like so compared to
um say portal 2.
these are a couple of good pictures this is a naked eye representation
of a portal 2 site and what the milky way looks like in a portal 2 site you can
see the detail that you're seeing in this picture your own eye sees
roughly sees this same detail um since this is taken with a wide angle lens
your view is more like this
and that's what you're seeing naked eye when you process something like this with a camera
all of that detail appears this nebula here the coat hanger
shows up there's royal fuyuki the roof yuki complex over here oh yeah
and um all of that shows up when you take it an image that's portal 2.
when we go down to bortle 3 we can still get a pretty good milky way
but we don't quite get the detail and of course my processing here wasn't quite the same so like the
barnard's e is right here the coat hanger
shows up up here those are some some of the things that i
look for in a uh in a detailed milky way shot you've
learned a lot about the sky by doing these kinds of shots yes absolutely
so now quickly here's portal 4 so if you notice what you're seeing here
same sort of things are there in the sky the coat hangers around here somewhere i believe i'm
actually not seeing it not usually oh there it goes there's coat hanger there's barnardy
those are the stars tarzan that is altair
and this was back when jupiter and saturn were close but notice about what
you're seeing with the milky way here that was 30 seconds
here's a border one sky and that's eight seconds notice now this is with a 50 millimeter lens
but notice about the [Music] the coloration and detail that you get
in eight seconds at a border one site
say there's clouds notice how the milky way shines
through those clouds it you look up and you see a glow and when you take the image you'll
recognize there's in there's the lagoon right there there's a sagittarius star cloud
it is bright enough and these are a couple of stars that's nunky i believe a couple of stars of sagittarius
it is bright enough for the milky way to show its light through the clouds like the
full moon does in the lesser zones um
and if you go for 30 seconds at a portal one site you get
this much detail in fact the processing here made makes it look a
little crunchy but all of this this entire part of the galactic arm and core
easily visible m16 and m17 i believe this is something
different here there's actually some nebulosity here that's you know ophiuchus that's
beginning to show up it isn't just an artifact there is some
this is a uh this is an ha
emission right over here um so if you don't have a modified camera a
lot of those were shot with modified cameras say you don't have a modified camera
well let's look at the difference here's here's a portal one milky way with a modified camera
and then edited to show more natural lighting and notice the grayish blue here
then i took an unmodified camera essentially took the same type of shot
and we didn't lose very much a lot of satellites and things streaking
through the sky which is unfortunate um so milky way light reflecting off the cars
yeah that's amazing milky way and starlight yeah
reflecting it's that that's how dark it is at a border one site so that
that tells you this was 30 seconds and a lot of heavy processing
to pull this milky way out this was 30 seconds
a couple of routines in photoshop that's without
the hydrogen alpha edit this is with the hydrogen alpha edit so
you see a little more the reddish that's why the red is coming out more down here
because the camera is more sensitive to the hydrogen alpha or the the spectrum of light that is in the red it's off it's
often called infrared by um other photographers
so if you this is again portal 3
and was not shot with a modified camera
shooting at orion with a modified camera results in
images like you get to see the rosette
and things of that nature so one of let's see that is one of my goals this
is this was taken maybe a month ago
looking over the el salvador river this is south south by uh southeast
so you can imagine if you take milky way photography
this is now happening at which will soon be four in the morning
the milky way is going this way the galactic core so that's the next picture that i would like to acquire that
and a good galactic core daybreak shot because this one was sort of washed out
so [Music] the attempt was to kill two birds with one stone i don't know if i'll make it but that was that was going to be my
goal for my next um image that i was going to try and
capture and then finally because i know you love the bird sky
yeah i'll share when it's cloudy outside you have to find
the uh great horned owl which this is a tough shot actually because that's the other stuff in the universe
yep there other things that make up the universe like eagles
flying when it's uh when it's really dark and you can still get as good of picture as you can
and then you've got the seagulls oh wow that's a good one
yeah let's show that one again sand hill cranes landing
wonderful and finally i thought i had another one for you scott but about oh
you practice your uh oh that's beautiful that is really nice yeah
similar camera that took that shot also took this shot
so [Music] use the gear that you have and um actually the
i may have mentioned the zodiacal light is back yeah and this is the same this is the
exact same camera that took that those bird shots took this dyke a light shot right here
and the exact same photographer the exact same photographer just a little different uh
different technique to get those and definitely different lenses
so that's where i will stop my presentation um
thank you all for uh looking at the images and and following along so there's plenty of
plenty to look at um in the next couple of months um a lot of milky way shooters call it
milky way season when you when the core of the milky way is visible for me milky way season is year
round depending on how dark a sky you go to you can see
you can still see the band of uh light coming from the milky way even if it's
deep in the winter in the northern hemisphere or southern hemisphere
you know you all get to see the milky way rise high overhead as winter is coming your way
and uh that's usually when the astronomers in the southern hemisphere that brave the cold
um often give us beautiful shots of the core of the galaxy high above
the uh high up in the night sky and um
and so with that i'll end um if there's any questions uh it's just
you're an inspiration adrian uh you're you're uh you know it's wonderful to see your
milky way shots but i i love to see the birding shots too um especially that one of uh the geese
uh flying that was uh incredible composition and uh your sense of uh
capturing things is uh very keen so uh thank you appreciate it that was kind
of the last that was a oh the geese are moving let me go take some photo shots so i was
very happy that that turned out oh it turned out very well turned out very well thank you so much
you're welcome thank you okay well up next is maxie uh from
argentina he's been waiting very patiently there um uh here on global star party maxie what
do you think of the global star party so far it's amazing our party i'm talking a
little love love louder because my wife's sleeping right now but ah okay
we'll try not to be too loud quiet yeah there we go yeah
it is international women's day you know so she can sleep yes she right she
deserve it so well thank you again for inviting me hey
hi adrian marcelo john scott francois and everybody and
i want to to talk about this past two weeks
that we've been in the last gsp well i've been the last gsp
and first of all last week we
did a a local star party with a couple friends
in alberti because we have a holidays of carnival
and [Music] you know and we have two days
to to celebrate or do anything and
that weekend it was raining but the other two days was
he go okay so we decide to to get mid and
[Music] well first of all let me share my screen
okay well uh
the last gsp i couldn't be here i think it was the
the 23rd of february or the 22nd of february but
the 23rd i practice with my with my gear
using only a uhc filter
in portal 5 skies taking pictures of m42 and eta carinae
and this was the the results you know uh
practically it's a lot of information that you take inside of the nebula
and i have this kind of reflections of the of the
of that filter but uh you know there's
in anything of contamination or that i have to take
anything there's nothing almost and also the the the
the shapes of the nebula and the gas you know this place i really love the
of this nebula and
also i did this in the eta carinae enable pointing to the south
and i think in this case i went a lot in colors but
you can see this place uh really this structures there there are
jumping inside of these clouds it's amazing you can this this place
i really love to to to to watch it also in this
in the in the corner areas there
there's a lot it looks like the
the lava the lamps you know the inside of the lava and the lava lamp sure
so then i did some pictures of the moon
and this is where i get without that filter this is only because i say okay let's take a picture
for you let's scope and stack it so
there's a lot of details and because i'd love to take pictures of the moon in this kind of the way because you have
mineraly but also you have the the craters and the shadows
that gives you contrast and i i really love to to take pictures
like this so the day is passing by and the
another week we see that sunday it was
the sunday 27th and this is almost a midday but you can
see it's a lot of club but to the south it started to open so we decided to
to to get meeting we started to to travel to valuarity you
can see this is the really really plain the the field
there's no more times in lots of kilometers and
but we have this sky this clouds lower but up above there's no
almost no clouds this is the the dusty road uh
heading to to the observatory but it was okay there in the
the in the road because that monday and the last day it has
raining but the the the road dries
and we can get but almost when we get there we have a little trouble because the
road it wasn't really good there's a lot of mud but let me tell you still continue
here's our cars and you can see like a
dirty yeah and this is this is nothing comparing you're going to see in a
couple of minutes and this is this is my car it's like chocolate everywhere
i i felt like it was a in a ralidakar or something like that
and but we we can get there but this is uh
except for me well this is leonardo
he came from another group that he wants to to go to a farmer area
and [Music] of course we we invite him and so we've been the first one to to
get here a couple of minutes of these pictures they came
another two people and then more later nicole hammer
but he couldn't get there because when he calls me i said oh no
he gets stuck in where i get oh
[Laughter] we are for and we have some kind of
tools i have a a cable to to to attach the car to something
but we are walking because it was really dark and that time
and this light is the car of nico
and this is the truck of the neighbor that was passing by
when we are when we the the four of us was walking in this
modern a mob road and in the dark dark a with our
flashlights in our house and a lot of bugs in you you can't breathe
but he said let me help you gets a up
in the truck so we head up to to help nico
you can see the mob in the place you have here nico
this is me putting that cable to to to attach it to
the back of the truck and then we pray to
to he both don't go to the the border
because he was filled of water then
they start to start to they pull an ego more back
so he can put in more safely ground and then
start to came more safely in the road
this is behind where nico was stuck in you can see here's a lot of
water in the other side [Laughter] and this is how
oh [Laughter]
you know and this is only maybe
a 700 meters from
maybe less 500 meters from where we in the observatory he
was almost there oh no [Laughter]
so well he he can can he can he came we we start to get
jokes and laughings and and everything so well then we
take some matters and start to grab our equipment and
so this is a picture taken a more later for a from
he's one of the our friends that came you can see the the royal school we are
in the back and he in this case the the milky way
started to rising up this is the east the south park and
you can see the the large magenta cloud the smaller is behind in this case
and you can see the surgeons to get fog because there was a lot of humidity
but the milky way coming up that's beautiful this is a beautiful shot and the cables
get you some kind of reality you know because sometimes you say oh this is the
perfect big picture but the cables give you that this is in a real place
so this is another one picture uh
here's me with my equipment and here's the nico
sitting and watching this is the the scope of leonardo chazutake it was a
40 inches telescope it was a huge
a huge telescope and well the the this is a
in eight inches a f5 this is a
six inches i think and well you can see this is the light pollution
of alberti this another one is from bragado the next city
and behind here is childhood this the they doesn't
bother too much to us this is another picture from diogen didi
this is an amazing picture of the well this is the light pollution of chewikoy but the racing up of the
milky way is amazing you know watching this
starting goes going up that's amazing
so there's another picture of the s
[Music] you can also see the rotation around the
south pole yes and we don't have a polar star
but it's paint [Laughter] when you get to to get polar alignment
you this is kind of blottery if you find the the stars
that it helps you to to get really good for enlightenment
yeah i thought atkins or something was the closest star to the area where it's spinning around
so hey there are inochtans there are four stars that you have to
get in a pattern to get pointed to the
southern polar axis so yeah it's a little more complicated than it is for us
you have one one single star and it's really writing when you are in
urban skies it's kind of you can find the the
the dance but when you are in rural skies you have
a lot of stars to find that four single stars in the middle of whatever
so uh well this is a i really love this picture because it has a lot of
contrasts of course of the structure of the school and well on the grass the background sky
and so well this is the next monday
yes and yeah the another day we was taking a little of
breakfast and lunch time with of course mates
biscuits or some masitas that we call here here's me he's leo chasutake diogen didi
nico the hammer and this is the the the author of these pictures
and well this is another selfie of me we have a lot of humidity that night and
you can see in the fog but you know it was only in one hour then the fog went out but the grass
was really wet really really wet and you can see some clothes of mine
drying with the sunlight because there was a
really not too much club a cold but really really wet
and and the wind that morning it was a
blowing from the south so the the sky is kind really blue
because they they dry everything and well the sun starts to goes down
hears me preparing my equipment nico and well you can see the the 40 inches
telescope besides nico this this piece of telescope you know
it has go-to and and motorcycle mode and when he puts
oculars getting zoomed you when i saw the the ghost of jupiter
nebula you can see the the shape and the center of the
of the of the star like it was a big eye watching you and
when i also i saw the antennae galaxies
you see you can see the the the the core of the
of that they crash galaxies now it was really a huge amazing
telescope and he was searching quasars
he has a list of 10 almost but he could find only one
in two nights uh well this is a picture of diogentili
that took off my my gear contrasting with the sun
and [Music] here's the the nikola hammer telescope
the 12 inches and the size of a
a little 40 inches and this night you know when
the the neighbor of the farm of the observatory helped us
to to get grateful we want to get him money but he said no
that doesn't problems don't worry it's okay we decide to invite them we invite him
and his family to if you if they are interesting to
to see what we're doing because this is an open place this wasn't only for us
okay everyone's it could be here but
it doesn't have the the commodities or or
to for staying too much time maybe but
that night they came with two cars and
they bring theirs their sons and their
a child with them to to see the skies and
we did a some kind of tool a showing them
a way here through these two scopes but also doing a astrophotos
in real time so they can see what we are taking or or watching
and it was an hour like i felt and everybody felt like a
a professor's teaching and you know it was amazing because they were listening to us
and they were in com comprehending that with we were
saying so then they goes away
and we continue to to start taking pictures and
well this is another picture in the full area of all the scopes that we have
and you can see the there's bottles of wine mate
everything and well this is a
um that that night he came a also aria rodriguez
is a friend of us that we say him that not come the last night because the the road it wasn't really
good to drive it at night so he came the another day
and he did this picture of the on the front of the
of the school you can see the pictures
sleeping oh yeah there are all the birds up there and
and also the ledars canopus and syria
stars and this is a work is the brand of him a astroptica
and [Music] here's another picture that he took of
everyone else or here's me watching my cell phone because i was
controlling everything from there this is diogentili here's s watching the
sky and this is leo shasudagi he has this
a bench to get set and because when he the testicle goes up
it's really difficult to to still watching without mob so this is a really good
tool to to watch and beside him he was a nico
that was also observing and doing his drawings but you can see this is the sky
looking to the west you can see this is orion
down the the sword of orion and
and this is cydia star um well this is a picture of nico that was
taken also from ariel rodriguez uh he asked him to to take these
pictures to him and they're watching the the dark machine
club with his scope you can see the the it was really what
but not that like the last night
and this is a beautiful picture amazing
picture and well this is some kind of what i get
from my own stuff and this is the the heart of the
rosetta nebula this is an open cluster stars and also the nebulosity is that
surrounded and it's almost two hours of two nights
stacking and and this is
in urban skies without filters is almost as possible but in this case
it's amazing also one of my goals was the
the triplets of leo and this is what i get
all also two nights taking pictures to there
and you can see there's a lot of stars galaxies but
the shape of the galaxies i never could get this kind of
forms and this is the the american galaxy and also you have here another
ones galaxy they are really far away and [Music]
also i did they was beautiful sorry
yeah i love that yeah i i really don't see what 3628 over
there and m6 m65
yeah and then i did the sombrero galaxy m 104
this is only a half hour of taking pictures but
it's amazing that the shape of the galaxy that i could get i never never
could get this done at besides the the galaxy
and the the different contrasts in the nebulosity
in in the galaxy now this is an amazing picture that the most
i i could get and also these three stars or four oh
yeah look there's a little galaxy down below yeah there are two
get two of them that's right and also there are too many more i i compare of course with they have a
picture but it doesn't have comparison and
and also i don't remember the another one picture oh they need the galaxy this is kind of
some kind then somebody 91 ngc 91
a ngc thank you for the spindle 65 yeah 45 65 i think it's a spindle
yeah the the needle galaxy i i know this
i don't know if you well the catalog of stellar
and but also you can see here there's a lot of galaxies yeah that is 45 65.
then it's also called the needle yeah yeah yeah i got it wrong it's not the
spindle galaxy it's the needle and here's another and look at that one
that's cool yeah yeah now this place is huge of galaxies i i
really love to this place they are not on the start
there are galaxies here and also in this place there are too many galaxies
ah let's this is unbelievable so i think some imagers call it galaxy
image season because uh leo and virgo come in and so many super clusters are
in the line of sight of those two uh constellations yeah
exactly and also i did some pictures from
another objects that i i didn't process them
and i'm sorry this
yes also here this is a single picture of three minutes there's some a
spiral galaxies and lenticular galaxies
also no this wasn't
a galaxy i think the last one here here this is only a single shot
of three minutes i didn't process this because i
i had some [Music] troubles with the focus and then when i get focused i say now
let's go to another one and and say that's it
but and you can see there it is a lenticular galaxy
but also you just i i could get this place
that in urban sky is almost impossible you know and the color of the galaxy is
amazing yeah and
and also well i did m 100 i
i don't know this is stretcher yes some kind of stretch let me open it in
in pixel inside because the
single light
[Music]
here
this is m100 and also there are too many galaxies
here this is a really spiral galaxy but it was
some kind below and i have some reflection that
from a led light that
ruined my my my soaps pictures but
this is a really good place to to take pictures of galaxies and
i i really loved this this was a diocese idea to take pictures in this place yeah
and i don't know well i also did some pictures of the moon
because it was a coming up in the east you know look look
at venus it was really amazing but
watching this i did some pictures uh
taking with very nice with the earth shine yeah
yeah this is the most beautiful you can see there's a
star but this is a not process this is on the stack
but i really i try to do some
i try to do some stacking but i couldn't get nothing
for now so i don't know if i have another
i show them i think this the last one that i
yeah i tried to do pictures of this place
and [Music] you know this is kind of antenna nebula
i think but i think the these galaxies are a
this one is in the background of this one they are not touching i think
but you can see here there's
also a lot of galaxies floating in the
dark matter of the universe they were stuck in marcelo's
a couple minutes ago and well i think i don't know if i
get the stretches
almost this
processor process screen strength
i this is
now to stretch it you can see the the the lines of the satellites passing
by but
i think in this place the focus and the guiding and everything was really really
fine you can see the the stars are really rounded the spikes are really good
the details of the galaxies they are really really good but only i did i think i had an
hour only but it was some
kind of a practicing see the field of view with
the camera and the scope in these places to get
more data in the future and you know still learning about this
so well thank you again for inviting me this is you maxie thank you
sorry if it wasn't a little longer no that's fine that's fine
that was very informative to show and um so it was impressive and uh we always
love your images uh maxie i i love your astronomy stories
especially you know so uh you know because it's uh you're bringing
us to your star parties with us yeah i i try to do some kind of that because i
i love to talk i love to talk too much and
well my wife and my friend says maxi get shortly come on no i can't
i just i can't so also my brother
dali maxi come on come on [Laughter]
that's what uh i i i think i was born to
to to get to or to write books of a
stories of some kind of that that i i love astronomy for now
[Laughter] it was very cool thank you so much max
all right well that's great well i think that we are at the point where we will wrap up uh this global
star party i have a little video to show about james webb and some of the people involved with the james webb space
telescope i know that we're all waiting to see some high resolution images from
uh from james webb and and i'm most certain that we're going to see those uh but uh
they're still calibrating they're taking their time and uh as well they should you know it's
been i had to calibrate my scope for one year
this and this is an eight inches i i can't believe that only in a few months
in a few months they're going to be ready that's hot yeah yeah so i i would like to make a public service
announcement beware that youtube artists are at it again um
i uh marked a few images or a few videos on youtube as misleading where they're
saying images from james webb space telescope um
yeah there's there's a few um folks that are pushing some
you know or pushing out that this beat that their image is already captured
from the james webb space telescope and they appear to be images that are
um captured from you know other space telescopes like hubble um
so just just be aware there are no official images there's the one star
that i think uh they calibrated the 18 mirrors and so now they have a single star that they picked i think that's the
only real image that uh james webb has created as of yet but it's it's got
more to go like we mentioned the calibrating of the mirrors so yeah yeah there i think there will be an
official outlet of images from the james webb space telescope when it
starts doing its uh when it starts doing its thing and um
so we'll look we look forward to that so just uh public service announcement
for those that are still with us at uh eastern time it's 15 minutes till uh midnight
absolutely past my bedtime i'm going to 2 a.m yeah it's 2 a.m for you maxie so
well only 10 44 here so it's good you've got time to party sky party's just
getting started that's right that's right all right well thanks guys thank you so
much adrian uh maxie thank thank you so much and uh we will be back next tuesday
with another global star party number 86 so
all right great all righty thank you scott thanks and hope to see you next week
i've got some presentations coming up so i'll let you know if i'm able to make it
all right all right good luck and good luck on your trip to the west coast thank you bye-bye adrian okay guys bye good night
good night maxie take care okay we are going to run a little video
as i as i mentioned about uh some of the people that are uh
operating the james webb space telescope i thought this would be interesting to you
[Music]
most of us can picture a telescope typically a long tube mounted on a tripod telescopes come in all shapes and sizes
and they're some of the most powerful machines in the world and in space but how do they work i'm leilan from esa
education and today we're asking an esa expert working on the james webb space telescope
welcome thank you little studio thank you very much
dr giovanna giardino thank you for being with us today thank you thank you for the opportunity i'm very excited
so what do you do at esa so i'm an astronomer and i work for isa on the web
space telescope i think a lot of people envision a telescope
like my childhood telescope so it's sort of this tube and even the hubble space telescope is is what everyone pictures
as a telescope this kind of giant tube in space how does the telescope work
so in very simple words a telescope it's a bit of a bucket of light buckets of
photos so using a lens of a mirror that is inside this tube you collect
the photons the light from an object and concentrate it uh you know focus it in a
specific point so that you have much more signal much more light for that object that you would have with your
naked eyes and that way you can see far away objects weak weak signals
but then you have the james webb space telescope that looks completely different and yet it's still a telescope
why does it have such a unique design the main elements of a telescope are really the needles or the lens that you
use to collect the lights and focusing right so those what you have to have the tube is that you see many telescopes
that we use on the earth as mainly two functions
one is the the the holding of the lenses the the lenses that you need mirrors so
you have to have a structure that keeps them in the place with the right distance from each other that's very important for focusing going for the
tube allows you to block off extra light from the surrounding that you don't want to
come into the lenses and disturb the clear vision that you have on the sky
it also keeps it clean right in the the environment every day there is a there
is dust and things the tube keep it's clean so the fact that james webb space
telescope doesn't have this giant tube yeah how is it structure being held together how is it remaining clean right
so um the structure is all together so uh by you know the primary mirror is
mounted on the spacecraft and then there is a if you notice a tripod going off
from the primary mirror to what we call the secondary mirror right and the lights for
gets into the primary mirror the big bucket that i call right focus on the secondary mirror and then
focused again into the primary focus of the telescope where the instruments are and we we
actually collect the lights and look at it in the camera or
so the camera it's really a camera so like the name says we are called images
so the telescope collects light focuses and this camera collects it and records
with images we can see the stars nebulas and the spectrograph
the light entering a spectrograph is dispersed uh with a prism or we also use
gratings but the principle is the same the idea is to disperse the lights and look at the components of the light so
like when you have invisible light and you shine into a prism you see the colors coming through no that's the
spectra of the light these are the components of the white
light you know the red blue yellow the component and the same we can do in the
near infrared and in the infrared and we look at the components and why do we do
that that's a good question yeah because uh in a way the light that an object
emits it's a bit to the signature of the object it tells this as a lot of what the
object is made of which elements are present what temperature what the
pressure what the physical condition and then what about the famed honeycomb mirrors why why is it a honeycomb what's
the structure right so as you know the web space telescope is
one of the largest telescope ever launched is a 6.5 meter in diameter the primer mineral even the
primary mirror would not fit in any of the fairing of
existing launcher the diameter is about three meters so the design has to be such that it could
be folded for the launch to be fit into the rocket and i suppose the honeycomb structure is
what really allows you to to be able to fulfill that radiant combat so that you
want a continuous surface right you don't want gaps so the hexagonal as the bees have discovered
it's a very efficient way to tile a surface and also give it a
rounded shape you could do that with squares but then you end up with a square telescope which is not ideal to
focus the light so the the honeycomb mirrors yes are not just a honeycomb shape but they're also this beautiful
yellow gold color what material are they made out of each of them is covered by a very thin layer of gold and white gold
why gold because gold is a ideal reflector in the infrared
so in for infrared for a normal visible light we often use a silver or
or aluminium right it reflects very well in your mirror
but in the infrared light gold performs better okay and that's um sort of that's
the surface the technology behind each of this hexagonal segment was developed
especially for the web space telescope to make a large mirror that is light so
the material of beryllium was selected to make the structure
that you see under the gold coating and beryllium is a very strong
very stiff it's got good properties when you cool it down is stable but at the same time
it's a light material so we could make a large telescope that is not too heavy
and can be launched in space so you mentioned earlier a sun shield yes can we talk about the the the sort
of structure of the sun shield as well yeah essentially it is very crucial on this mission it was very challenging to
design such as such a huge science shield five layers
of special material as big as a tennis court or obviously will not fit in any of their existing rocket so it was
designed to um yeah to be in a compact configuration folded around the primary
mirror at launch so that could fit in the fairing of the aryan fight rocket
and the reason is there it's because the web space telescope is optimized for
observation in the near infrared in the near the mid infrared
part of the electromagnetic spectrum that's the light that we can't see with
our eyes exactly and that's the reason of the sunshine to keep the telescope and the instruments the scientific
instruments always in the shade of the sun and the earth the space is very cold
it's minus 270 degrees so by keeping the telescope always in the shade of the sun
we can cool it down uh to very low temperature minus
220 230 degrees celsius really cold and that it's great to observe infrared
light because then we have a very sensitive instrument and how many detectors are on game swaps so there are
four scientific instruments with different uh functions for different type of science that you can do a new
spec the near infrared spectrograph infrared instrument mirkam the
near-infrared camera and mirrors imaging
okay and what are you hoping that information will tell us about
distant galaxies just through the early stars we see objects that are 13 billion light
years away from us we expect to detect these so means that we're going to see
objects as they were 13 billion years ago
so these are the very young galaxies we want to know uh
what was going on there what was temperature what was the pressure how many stars
and and we can do that with a spectrograph exactly analyzing light and they learn how the galaxy form by
looking at these very young galaxies if we come closer to home we can also
look for instance at the atmospheres of planets plants in our
solar system jupiter saturn you know again with a spectrograph learn what's
going on on this on this and web will be looking at planets as well yes planets
in our solar system and also planets that we call exoplanets which are planets the orbits stars
in the galaxies do you think james webb space telescope will help us discover life on other planets
that is a difficult question life per se i think it would be difficult i think
it's not really something very likely but because of this capability of looking at
the atmosphere of exoplanets um and and also forces the moon of jupiters
i think we could learn a lot about whether the um
elements are present that could sustain life so if we look at the planets that it's
what we call the habitable zone so in the right at the right distance from its own stars to have temperatures that are
not crazy cold or crazy hot right so that's a temperature range that we think okay life could exist and then we look
at the atmospheres and for instance we see that there is oxygen there is a water vapor
there's methane that could give us a hint that life is present or it's possible on that
planet so that's very exciting rajivana thank you that was a lot of information but i think it might be
helpful if we went and saw the model of the james webb space telescope yes sure we do that
let's go take a look at this model yes
[Music] wow that is incredible
wow yes it's quite impressive even at this size it is it is it's a very striking
shape right giovanna thank you so much for talking to us today it's been a pleasure it's really inspiring that a
little girl who looked up at the stars in her hometown uh ended up working on the world's most powerful space
telescope it's very exciting and was very fortunate thank you so much thank you thank you for the opportunity to
talk to you if you're looking for more astronomy educational resources check out issa education's teach with
astronomy webpage and keep an eye out for more videos coming from east education [Music]
[Music]
[Music] two
[Music]
you [Music]
[Music]
us