Transcript for Coming Tonight the 86th Global Star Party - Explore Alliance Presents:
Introduction
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hello everybody this is scott roberts
from explore scientific and the explore
alliance and tonight we're going to have
the 86th global star party and i i
wanted to talk about the star party a
little bit and the people that are going
to be on it
but i also wanted to give you updates on
the arizona dark sky star party that
will be happening this will be a real
event actually a real
hybrid event that's going to be
conducted in oracle arizona
september 21st
through the 25th so i just got news
today
that
that biosphere 2 is also going to be
working with us to
have part of the event at biosphere 2. i
plan to actually conduct a global star
party uh live from biosphere 2
with a real audience and a audience that
would be uh
you know contacting us from around the
world like you are right now
anyways
i think it's the future of uh events and
um you know i'm really happy to be able
to combine
what we do here uh with uh meeting
people really in person um
so
mark your calendars september 21st
through the 25th i will be putting out a
webpage uh that you can sign up for it
if you'd like to
and that would be a lot of fun to get
you out under some really dark skies
oracle state park where it's going to be
mostly conducted
is arizona's first international dark
sky park and so
mike wiesner who's watching in the
audience right now
was instrumental in in getting that park
its classification and all the rest of
it
i've talked about this several times on
our shows here and
so i was recently out at oracle and
surveyed the area myself and it's going
to be fantastic so i think you'll have a
lot of fun if you can go
um
tonight uh
i wanted to
kind of go through
the global star party and talk a little
bit about it because
we've now done
86 global star parties um
starting with what we used to call the
virtual star party
and i think there was something like
oh maybe eight or nine of them and then
i changed the name to global star party
because that just seemed more
appropriate okay
we've had some really amazing people on
the program many of them come back uh
each week to do
um you know their presentations and
stuff and so
um
one of them
let me see if i can share this with you
one of them of course is um
uh david eicher
and i asked david to
write
up a little um
you know
the reason that he thought it was
important to explore which is really the
whole point of doing
amateur astronomy and
so you know it's it's i think what's
really cool about being with other
amateur astronomers is that often you
can get them to express their feelings
about you know why it's important for
them to explore
uh you know and
you know what they have found with the
adventures they've had in the sky you
know i've had plenty of them myself and
i know that if you're an amateur
astronomer you have to
um so let's let's share this
Dark Night Sky
this is uh
this is a little piece here i'll bring
it into presentation mode there we go
just like my presenters do okay they
have to go through this process as well
but uh
david said gazing up at a dark sky dark
night sky is great medicine for the soul
when we drink in the enormity of the
universe understanding our place in a
huge cosmos we receive the ultimate
perspective on humanity a hundred
billion galaxies and we are
in just one star system inside a single
one
appreciating our ability to think to
untangle the universe and its mysteries
tells us about the amazing power of the
human mind and the value of the
experience
life gives us
and so that
very well put david i i love that i use
um
i use this on you know when i'm asked to
give talks uh to astronomy clubs
um you know where they just have me in a
zoom uh
meeting or something like that um with
that you know with present other
presentations that i do but i love to
collect uh the thoughts from other
amateur astronomers
david eicher is a great one uh being uh
editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine
Looking Beyond
um
the theme of the 86th global star party
is looking is looking beyond um you know
i'm often inspired by the prior global
star party that i do about what the next
one
should be and uh you know so i'm always
thinking about you know what what is it
that's going to uh
you know trigger our presenters to
give talks and presentations around a
theme and uh
so i felt that looking beyond was
appropriate because
uh now we have uh j west we have uh you
know the uh elt telescoping being
designed we have
just incredible
observatories and stuff that's all on
the professional side but on the amateur
side you have amateurs discovering
exoplanets uh you know
detecting them at least um
and uh you know just doing amazing
astrophotography and just really
exciting the average person i would say
today in looking at some of the astro
photography uh you know compared to
um early spacecraft shots and um
maybe earlier professional shots even
stuff done with like the 200 inch
telescope that amateurs often outpace
and out and blow those uh those
instruments away
Gaining a Greater Understanding
um
the
you know the most important part i think
about the the uh
the theme of looking beyond is that
you know it gives you a chance to get a
to gain a greater understanding uh we're
all
uh searching for our place in the world
in our communities and our societies
but you know few people actually except
for amateur astronomers very few people
think about um their place in the
universe on a
you know daily basis i would say that
many of us that
love to observe the sky always have our
eyes on the sky to a degree
and you amateur astronomers know what
i'm talking about
you know
you start to rise above the mundane you
know your problems start to shrink okay
um
and uh you start to think about uh you
know how you're connected with the
vastness of the universe itself
David Levy
so with every global star party we start
off with david levy and david is uh
he's just an amazing uh amateur
astronomer um
not professionally trained uh
but has discovered many many comets he's
discovered uh many asteroids uh he may
even have a supernova discovery or two
under his belt i'll have to ask him that
question
but he's an author of many books on
astronomy
and uh he's poetic and so you're going
if you haven't
listened to david at a lecture or if
you've never seen a global star party
you're definitely going to want to pay
attention to david because he starts off
our our
events with uh
commentary about the the theme and um
and he always has poetic selections of
uh you know from
uh writers from you know shakespeare to
uh
you know other you know uh
poets great poets uh throughout the uh
uh century so
um
the
Maxi Fellaris
co-host
of our program tonight is maxie fellaris
maxie is our he's our newest
explorer alliance ambassador you're
going to start to see a page uh for him
uh and you know he is just an amazing
outreach uh educator i think and uh
um he is uh an amazing astrophotographer
as well and he's already helped me put
together a global stock party before uh
so on this particular one he's got uh he
brought in harold block and um
uh you know he's got
a couple of others that i will
talk about here in a second but
uh let's let's talk about harold a
little bit harold has been in the
audience of our shows for a long time
and we've begged him to come on to
global star party and uh so finally on
this particular event uh maxie was able
to lure him in and uh so we're really
happy to have harold present uh
and we hope that he finds it to be a
comfortable and fun
environment to you know share his
passion but this is um
Harold Smith
this is a photo of harold if you've
never seen him he's looked like a very
kind happy guy
this was a little quote that he made he
says i find that i stall
and spend time thinking about and
feeling the stars
in areas of the sky where the largest
grouping of stars fill my eyepieces
field of view it's very energizing and
calming i love that because uh that is
something that i also share uh you know
as far as the feeling about exploring
the sky with my telescope so i love to
do visual work i love to do
astrophotography in fact i love it all
so
um
but uh
Presenters
let's go and talk a little bit about the
other people that will be on there
um
and some of you that are presenters are
actually watching um uh navin uh who's
sent to nagapan's son he'll be giving a
presentation
um
and let me give a list of the other
people that will present tonight
make sure i'm getting this in order
uh because we normally have quite a few
percent but uh david levy asked for a
gentleman named david rossfitter to come
on david is
he's a musician
and he's an amateur astronomer he's got
a big dobsonian
but apparently he can sing and i think
he'll play guitar
but he's going to do a special
presentation for us tonight right after
david's introduction
the astronomical league comes on to
every one of our global star parties and
they are the official door prize
uh sponsor uh they uh the
executives of the astronomical league
get together they um
create questions for that challenge our
audience the audience answers those
questions and then they're put into a
pool of uh of people who got the answer
right and then they pulled uh at random
person from that pool
um it's a lot of fun
this time don knabb who's been on our
program before
they're inside they rotate the executive
officers to do global star party with me
and i'm glad that they do
if you don't already belong to the
astronomical league you should find an
astronomy club that is either a club
member you know
or
you can join the astronomical league as
a member at large when you join you'll
be joining the world's largest
federation of astronomy clubs
uh with over 20 000 members
um
then we turn to it'll be dave eicher's
turn uh he has been going through a
series of uh sharing his minerals and
his crystals with us
uh he has
he loves astronomy but
astronomy for david doesn't stop just
looking at the sky it also
involves looking down and
he's going to show us these amazing
radioactive mineral minerals tonight and
i think that that's actually going to
end his series on all of his minerals
and crystals that he's been showing us
and then then afterwards he's going to
turn back to
uh you know discussions on galaxies the
universe nebula etc so
um
right after david eicher will be herald
walk uh
which uh again i'm really excited he's
gonna talk about his journey
through astronomy and i think that's
very very cool
uh sebastian jeremias i believe is also
from uh argentina like maxie is and
sebastian
has been uh he's an i.t professional but
he's uh been into amateur astronomy for
a couple of years now and apparently
he's made a lot of progress and so
maxie wanted to bring him on
so if you're watching tonight you know
i'll let maxey introduce him but uh i'm
excited to have new people on i think
it's fantastic
um
and then of course
maxie fellaries will give a short
presentation
kareem professor kareem jaffer uh from
the royal astronomical society of canada
uh the montreal center uh who's been
joining us on many global star parties
uh which i'm very thankful for because
he's just uh he's just an amazing
educator
his talk tonight will be looking beyond
the naked eye
he is introducing uh blake nancaro who's
the royal astronomical society of
canada's national observing committee
he's the chair um so the i know that
he's given presentations before i was
kind of reviewing some of those on
youtube and so i'm real excited about
having blake on
then young nevin sentel
who's given
maybe
eight presentations i think something
like that on global star party um he
always picks a great subject uh and uh
gives his presentations
presentation style gets better every
time he does it so a very knowledgeable
young man and we expect big things out
of him as he uh as he grows into
adulthood but
you're seeing him young
here and you know prepare to be amazed
we'll take a 10 minute break and then
we're coming back with uh dr marcelo
souza
marcelo is
you know
an amazing
outreach educator and professional
educator in brazil and uh so he'll be
with us
and um then of course uh adrian bradley
who's been on many many global star
parties now uh
uh covers nightscapes
and then for a second time on global
star party daniel higgins from
astroworld
he has his own program called astroworld
tv
and uh so he'll be at the end of the
program
uh there were a couple of other people
that had wanted to
chime in but it was
it was getting late for them and they
just didn't have time to prepare the
presentation um but we'll see them in
the next global star party after this
one
so
um
i think that's all i have to share with
you today um and uh you know i hope that
uh you you join us now remember uh we've
gone through daylight savings time okay
so we're still holding the global star
party at 6 00 p.m central daylight time
but uh it's about an hour different than
what you might have experienced before
so
um
but until that time you guys keep
looking up and uh
we hope to see you on global star party
on the channels that you're watching
right now so take care
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Transcript for Looking Beyond - 86th Global Star Party - Explore Alliance:
7:15 p.m..Maxi Falieres- Astrophotography to the Max
i chatted with steve and a few others from uh from macclesfield yesterday they were so
happy for your visit they had such a great time they found you so inspirational they said that you brought heart into
astronomy for them they loved it thank you thank you i'm glad that you enjoyed it
7:30 p.m..Karim Jaffer - Looking Beyond the Naked Eye
i did write to donna to ask him to ask her if the group would be interested in my
skyward column for the newsletter but i have not heard from her uh i will let steve know
7:45 p.m..Blake Nancarrow - RASC National Observing Committee
thank you yeah of course montreal skyward is the name
of the newsletter and uh but skyward's also the name of the column
8:00 p.m..Navin Senthil Kumar - Young Astronomer with Special Guest
and any of you who uh would like it for your newsletters all you have to do is write to me and ask
you the list
david's columns have been a cornerstone of our newsletter for years now it's it's fantastic and whenever we have a
8:15 p.m..Ten Minute Break
new newsletter editor one of the first things that we let them know is okay you're gonna get content from david so
don't worry about uh having to reach out to him he's going to be sending you stuff and it's going to it's going to be the the cornerstone of all the parts of
8:25 p.m..Marcelo Souza - Sky’s Up Astronomy Outreach
the newsletter it's it's great so we ended up with two students who actually did newsletter editor as their first
position in an executive as a result because you knew you could count on some content
8:40 p.m..Adrian Bradley – Nightscapes
thank you well this will be a very exciting meeting especially the first 15 or 20
minutes of it i hope you'll all enjoy it we see david warming up there so we're
8:55 p.m..Daniel Higgins - AstroWorld
looking forward to it yeah
and if all goes well david and i will be out at the chirokola astronomy complex
on sunday do our monthly observing session a little concerned about the forecast
but um
those are the things we can't control we usually can here we um
we usually throw brooms and boiling water up at the sky and that tends to clear things off
but we'll see i don't know when it's minus 30 and you throw boiling water all you get is snow
oh it's actually mild here it's it was 2 degrees today it's going up to 10 tomorrow
no thursday it's going up to 10 yeah spring weather just in time for the
equinox we're up to right now about 30
about 34 35.
the lunar eclipse i think you can hear you can see uh in the north
especially yeah in may 1516 that's going to be really great
nice sunday then we have another one in november right november 8th
um i don't know yeah we get two lunar eclipses uh this this year
maybe two would not look right it would be partial like the last one but
let's see let's check it out i believe they're both total they're both total right yeah
we have a we have a partial one coming next june i believe or something like that but uh two totals at the moment
and harold is learning all of his techniques so he's going to take pictures of the lunar eclipse for us
and the rest of us are just going to go out and watch it
now i've seen a few of harold's pictures on facebook he's been putting up some really nice stuff try
i checked the the age of november and here in argentina would be
not possible to watch it it will be a download of the horizon maybe
in australia they could see it wow
i think we've got it visible from here if i'm not mistaken i think they're both visible from
arizona
i like this quote from sandra faber far from feeling dwarfed by the vast
reaches and energy of the cosmos what we really learned is that we are the most remarkable and complicated product of
cosmic evolution and our potential is unlimited
if that's impos isn't that if that's not a positive outlook i don't know what is so
i had the pleasure meeting sandra faber two years ago uh really great great woman
where did you meet her mount wilson observatory at uh the
captain cottage area where hubble used to live
wow and the um the alliance of historic observatories meeting our initial meeting was there
it was really great you know so we had sam hale sitting in einstein's chair
reading passages from his grandfather's notes so it was just uh just really incredible
that's incred yeah that just sounds like such an amazing experience it was it was
we'll have to reproduce it uh again and invite all you to attend so
it was excellent i can't wait to do it again
okay i think we're close to getting ready here so here we go
david you can unmute yourself now
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well hello everyone this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and welcome to the 86th
global star party we have an incredible lineup of speakers uh that i was just talking about about a
couple of hours ago uh just kind of giving some background on how global star party started and and uh
why we continue and uh you know and a little bit about tonight's event
i'm really really excited to ex to see some of the new people on global star party tonight
which you'll get to see here real soon with every global star party we start
our program with david levy david levy uh is uh
really i'm not going to say he's a fixture of global star party but he is an integral part of it um he has been on
every global star party event that we have created and he is
an amazing author uh lecturer you know and inspiration to amateur
astronomers everywhere for us on global star party he's a lot
of them a lot of us would call him as our best friend so um and it's awesome to have him here live
with us every week and i don't know what to say but i love it and um david's got a special guest
tonight which he'll talk about later but uh i'll i'll bring david on now
well thank you thank you so much scott and it's really it is a true honor to be here i've been to
everyone except one and uh so i can't say that i've been to every single that was that was the moon
party that was the moon party we'll have to fix that we'll have to fix that but
global star party you've been to everyone well i don't know how we can fix things
unless we go back in time but time is something we're going to do about now as we talk about
this universe that we live in and if you think about the universe
and the wonders and the long wide view that it offers us
takes us away from the daily news it shows us something about our civilization
that we really want to hear and see our civilization can produce such
horrible things like it's doing right now with the war in ukraine
but our same civilization [Music] also is responsible for aristotle
galileo shakespeare and vincent van gogh about a about a month ago
david rossiter who i will be introducing you to in just a moment and i were
driving back from our shurikawa astronomy complex site
and i told him about the idea that that i wasn't allowed to play don
mclean's wonderful song about vincent van gogh the song called vincent
and i said there's one particular part of it that really gets me to tears every time
without another breath david started singing that part and i thought he did it every bit as
well as don mclean did so i invited him and he has accepted
to come on today to do a performance of vincent
one of the things about about a letter that i have here was written from van gogh to his friend
bernard he writes a starry sky is something i should like to try to do
just as in the daytime i'm going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions
you wonder how much if he if he even sold the original of starry night or if
he just sent it in the mail to his brother theo perhaps after he was dead after his
suicide right now if you wanted to buy the
original of starry night you can't you can see it at the metropolitan museum of art in new york
and i think if they were to decide to sell it you'd probably be able to get at least
100 million dollars for it but what we can do today for free
is to think about the beauty and the joy that uh starry night and vincent van
gogh has brought to us not by showing this his latest astrophotograph but by bearing his soul
and now i would like to present david rossiter to sing vincent for us david it's all
yours good afternoon or evening everybody uh vincent van gogh had committed
himself to an asylum with mental illness which is what we call it now and he would spend hours looking out his window
and then going downstairs to paint and taking his memories and painting him over what he saw outside his window
which included the night sky a starry night and uh dom mclean read his
biography and uh and wrote this song about not just that
painting but but about vincent van gogh and a lot of his paintings but centered around the starry night
[Music] starry starry night
paint your palette blue and gray look out on a summer's day
with eyes that know the darkness in my soul [Music]
shadows on the hills [Music] sketch the trees and the daffodils
catch the breeze and the winter chills in colors on the snowy linen land
now i understand what you've tried to say
to me how you've suffered for your sanity
you've tried to set them free they would not listen they did not know how
perhaps they'll listen now starry starry night
flaming flowers that brightly blaze swirling clouds and violet haze
reflect in vincent's eyes of china blue
colors changing hue the morning fields of ambergrain
weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand
now i understand [Music] what you've tried to say
to me how you've suffered for your sanity
how you've tried to set them free they would not listen they did not know
how perhaps they'll listen now
for they could not love you [Music] but still your love was true
and when no hope was left in sight on that starry starry night
you took your life as lovers often do but i could have told you vincent
this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you
[Music] starry starry night
portraits hung in empty halls frameless heads on nameless walls with
eyes that watch the world and can't forget [Music]
like the strangers that you've met the ragged man in raggedy clothes
the silver thorn the bloody rose lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
[Music] and now i think i know
what you've tried to say to me how you've suffered for your sanity
how you've tried to set them free they would not listen they're not
listening still perhaps they never
win [Music]
wow okay yeah
wonderful wonderful thank you i read that a lot of people
when they looked at the starry night thought the big swirlies around the moon and around jupiter
were um influenced by uh the lord lord ross's leviathan of parsons town when he
first discovered the swirly nature if you will of uh the whirlpool galaxy i'm not sure i buy it
but but i kind of like i kind of like that visual yeah yes
that was amazing that arpeggios that sound that voice that letter
it was really faithful and i i love music i played the guitar also but not
like you but you know that's that's really really enjoyable enjoyable
thank you very much yes yes um uh david uh
tell us a little bit about yourself uh your astronomy maybe a couple of little stories that uh
of your adventures wow my adventures um i i've been
i've been doing astronomy since uh the mid-1990s the two great comets which i saw over
the schwangong mountains in the mid hudson valley of new york and that's when i said i had to get into it
fairly early on i found out about this amazing star party it was better than a star party it was a astronomy retreat up
in the adirondacks run by this guy you may have heard of him david levy i've heard of him yeah so for 10 years i did
that with david and wendy made some wonderful friends up there and that that's probably
my greatest joy in life is uh those ten years and then still continuing to observe with a lot of
those friends and especially with david which we uh do every month out at our dark sky observing site in the cherokawa
mountains but wonderful that's that's that's really where i learned my passion from that man right right in that little
window i'm looking at right there right well that's wonderful were well if i could just
take things for a second those of you who might have read my biography which we've been really
keeping quite a secret lately uh there is a section in it about the most
impressive moment that i've had at the adirondack astronomers retreat and that moment was climbing the ladder
and looking through david's 25-inch telescope
at messier 15 the globular cluster in pegasus
it's not a cluster i wasn't looking at the cluster i was walking through
the pathways in the park that separate the stars in this cluster it was that good and it was my most
impressive memory of all those years we did at the retreat that was wonderful and and the best part
about that was putting wendy on top of the ladder which he didn't like to do and and her exclamation
at at seeing that site and that that is one of my great thrills just hearing wendy
wendy's thrill i agree with that and she loves you more she's right here
listening wendy i love you
thank you wonderful well wonderful okay um
we will uh i want to introduce um maxi flares uh now a lot of people here know
um about maxie and he is
you know he's on many of our global star parties but um and he's he has been co-host of think of
one other global star party had some great guests on at that time but i asked him to um
uh co-host this particular star party with me uh and he did bring on a couple of uh new guests so uh we'll be uh
talking about those later but right now maxie i'm gonna have you introduce uh the astronomical league and um
uh you know they they come to every one of our global star parties uh to make uh
special uh prizes and door prizes uh and special questions for our audience
so i'll i'll turn it over to you maxie well thank you scott thank you for inviting me
and again to be your co-host for me it's my pleasure an honor to be here
and well tonight we have too many advice invite people and now i
want to introduce to uh i i i'm sorry if i don't pronounce it
right it's done it don't nab is that correct that's right you got it
thank you uh so i'm trans introducing to you to
a to present us of a astronomical league okay
first of all to show i won the right shirt tonight this is my nasa story nice shirt oh excellent
that's the topic of to tonight excellent and he's got he's got starry night in
the back background too in the painting behind him all right i'm gonna share my
perfect now we'll start the slideshow
okay i'm going to see you see that yes
so we always start with a warning about solar observing there's only one way to
safely observe and that's with equipment that's designed to view the sun
either through special binoculars or telescope or special uh sunglasses that you can wear
that are often worn for a uh eclipse so never never use a telescope binoculars in the
daytime unless you have the right filters installed it's a really dangerous thing to do and
you cook your eyes and be blind the rest of your life so always get someone that knows what
they're doing with the proper solar telescope or solar binoculars and never try this on your own
i'll say first of all we're going to do the answers from march 8.
depending on your location you might be able to see the aurora at different times during the year
statistically there are four months when aurora is more active was it a b or c and the answer was a march april
and september and october northern lights formed when charged
particles emitted from the sun during the solar flare penetrate there's magnetic field collide with atoms in the
atmosphere they result in little bursts of light and when the photons make up the aura
when they collide with oxygen produces red and green as it's true or false and the answer is true it does
three one can chrono holes on the sun cause aurora absolutely the answer is yes
okay so now these are the uh correct answers from march 8th rich crailing
andrew corkill cameron gillis neil cox teresa pippet plymate billy beckett and
john williams and they will be added to the door prize list for the uh the march drawing
all right now the questions for tonight as always send your answers to secretary
astrology.org uh send them as soon as you can but they have to be in the end of the week
so secretary astrology.org first one
and i'll take my little bit of time because when i when i try to answer these more is writing these down like crazy so ngc 2169
an open cluster in the constellation orion up here where he's holding his club
ngc 2169 what shape do the stars in this cluster form
a a 73 b a 37 or c a 33
and here's ngc 2169 and as always send answers to secretary
at astrology.org most of the planets in our solar system
are named after what geological features
or ancient astronomers or a greek or roman gods
okay what are the planets in the solar system named after most not all but most
third question comments this is a comment i got from uh for nasa
i'm not even gonna attempt to pronounce that but this is a comment all right they inhabit the outermost
regions of the solar system how fast do they typically travel
as fast as an indie race car as fast as the international space
station motor they travel near the speed of light
okay comets in the outer solar system as always send answers to secretary
astroleague.org answers have to be received by friday march 18th
and uh two quick announcements from the astronomical league uh astronomically live will be back
friday april 15th i guess that's tax day right yes okay so friday april 15th uh john
winskovic the garage points in the james webb space telescope
and the last thing is astronomical league live uh that's normally convention as we always call alcon the
website is now live i just became active and i'll click on it and show you there
this is the convention site from albuquerque astronomical society
so you can start registering and uh seeing all kinds of information about the uh the upcoming convention in july
all ahead for tonight awesome awesome okay all right well that's great
um we uh
we will now come to our next speaker hold on for a second i'm a little bit lost myself the third david
yeah that's right by the way all right well you know the third david maxie so i'll let you introduce him
well thank you again uh well now we it's the terms of david eiker he is the
the the the the producer of the astronomy magazine so
david wha what's he going to present us today tonight tonight i'm going to be
talking about radioactive minerals oh nice
i i see that you like i besides astronomy the geological
parts of our earth and also i think astro geological
astronomy yeah well i need to have something to do during the daytime and and so uh
you know playing with rocks is is a good thing and this is how the universe makes planets planetary geology really um and
so it's an interesting thing to look at how the substances come together and and make up the stuff that we're standing on
here and these are not i will not be sending samples of these around to people though
in this case tonight these are dangerous rocks that you want to keep a distance from
you don't keep them in your pocket or anything no no not for long at least yeah you can but not for terribly long
and of course the amount of energy that they uh emit varies a lot but i'll talk a little bit
about that too okay okay should i take it away take it away all
right i will share my screen as always and i will see if i can share the right screen as always
and i will see if i can start a slideshow as always and talk a little bit about an
unusual aspect of mineralogy of of planetary geology here
uh radioactives this is a rhodochrosite crystal it is not radioactive but it's
just setting the scene here and as we always have as an introduction here to
mineralogy um the universe is ordered and it and it's assembled in a specific way
uh by by order thomas jefferson said i believe in a divinely ordered universe
long before jefferson's time isaac newton one of our founders of modern science
said truth is ever to be found in the simplicity and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things the universe as
we've learned over the past several hundred years since newton's time and before
is ordered not by supernatural design but by the principles of physics minerals are interesting because they
demonstrate that their atoms are assembled in precise ways by electrochemical attractions and that's
what brings the atoms together to assemble them in a specific way and guide them into
what mineralogists call a crystal lattice and so it is not magic as richard
dawkins likes to say but it is nature doing its thing
radioactive minerals are of interest for a variety of reasons and of course they're dangerous so you need to keep
them at a distance generally speaking their minerals that or substances that
contain unstable nuclei that are losing energy by radiation
radioactivity by background it was discovered in 1896 by henri becquerel
and marie curie the dangers of high energy radiation
were noted even a year before that by william rentkin when he discovered x-rays and this led
to lots of experimentation about high-energy electromagnetic radiation
the dangers of radioactivity were understood pretty widely by the early 1930s by 1938 you can see in at the
national archives sometimes it's on display and usually it's just on their website the famous letter that albert
einstein wrote to franklin roosevelt recognizing that immense energy could be unleashed by radioactive elements in
nuclear reactions which led to the manhattan project and by 1945 the ending
of the second world war including by the way as a personal aside the participation of a certain chemical
engineer john iger who was at columbia university in new york then
many things in the universe are radioactive you all of us are radioactive very weakly
though we have about 5 000 potassium 40 atoms that decay in our
bodies every second if you eat about 300 bananas or more per day you can get
radioactive poisoning through eating bananas but generally none of us are
that hungry too much radiation exposure breaks down cellular structures and damages dna
which causes cancers and other disease of course because of the ionizing
radiation the energy that's escaping from these radioactive elements
so we need to be careful with them of course of the 118 natural elements that are known 38 of them are radioactive
the most common one is uranium which is shown here in a crystallographic diagram
here it's your it's your uranonite rather is shown here which is uranium oxide uranium
and oxygen atoms as you can see and of course the inverse square law is in effect and in the
universe for us all with electromagnetic radiation so if you have
radioactive specimens of things whether it be really low level stuff like
trinite the the gla the sand that was fused into glass at the trinity site in new mexico
or very hot stuff as as it's called radioactively if you have all of this stuff
you can test this obviously with a geiger counter but if you have this stuff about oh 25 feet or thereabouts
away from you um the radiation from this stuff drops back down uh generally speaking to the
background radiation uh itself that's present always so it's relatively safe
stored out of bounds of where you are spending all of your time
so i thought i would just show as usual some examples some images of things that are in my collection in a safe place in
the basement a long distance from here and these are examples of radioactive
minerals i'll just quickly talk about them talk through them zipyite is potassium uranil sulfate hydroxide
hydrate it's the yellow stuff here on this rock which is from a
zone of radioactive uranium minerals in utah and you can see that a lot of
radioactive minerals are very brightly colored for a variety of reasons here too
to yamunite is a calcium uranil vanadate hydrate
this is an arizona arizona where some of you are in particular areas of arizona away from
where you are of course is a very rich source of some radioactives as well
this is samar skyt here the the dark stuff yttrium iron urano thorium calcium
niobium tantalum oxide a lot of these combine quite a number of elements here which is also
from pima county arizona described decrespignite um uh yttrium
rich is copper yitrium carbonate hydroxide chloride hydrate this is an
australian piece and the bluish color here comes from the copper content in
this flaky stuff a lot of radioactive minerals are particularly
dangerous to handle and be around because they're powdery and and some of the
mineral flakes off as a sort of a surface coating on rock like this that you can
see here and of course you don't want to breathe radioactive stuff either that's
not good for living things david i uh brought this one in your
honor tonight this is davidite uh lanthanum cerium yutrium uranyl iron
titanium hydroxide it's not the most attractive specimen in in the world but it is an interesting australian
radioactive mineral here thank you david that's really quite
quite the thing davidite there you go you have should be david it should be
that we will have to get this renamed this is not right yes yes
that's right thank you for uh mentioning that of course
sejkoite is sodium uranyl carbonate this is from the czech republic here and you
can see there's that yellow greenish color once again here are fibrous needles of uranophane
which is calcium uranil silicate hydrate from new mexico which is also a very
rich area for radioactives in the united states uranus circuit
barium uranus phosphate hydrate this is a portuguese specimen that's just a very
very bright electric neon green yellow green color
these uh tabular crystals here this is the most common of all the
radioactives uraninite and it's also very hot it's the black stuff that's up at the upper left of this piece which is
a german piece from the father abraham mine if you will uranium
oxide pretty common stuff torbernite is is again colored by copper
atoms here uranil phosphate hydrate uh from one of the most radioactive regions
in the world the katanga copper crescent where it was discovered incidentally if you want to look into this a number of
decades ago that in pre-history millions of years ago there was so much radioactive stuff that formed in the
katanga region of the congo that there was a huge radioactive
event explosive event that happened in prehistory underground in what's now
the congo interesting stuff to read about thorite is another fairly common
radioactive mineral this is a russian specimen here and this is just to show you some
of the kind of variety here scladowskite okay now we get back to
marie marie curie before she married pierre curie uh was marie skladowska and
so spladow's guide is named after marie's uh maiden name
sladowskite here from mexico this piece
coffinite which is very aptly named for a radioactive mineral especially for
those who didn't quite know and kept it in their pockets for too long
that's a wyoming piece boltwoodite another fibrous uh very
bright yellow uh acicicular and needle-like crystals here you can see in that piece california piece
uh ghettolinite um there was an old uh you know there's an element gadolinium and so there's an old chemist expression
my dad used to say all the time gadolinium that was an expression as if something bad had happened there this is
a swedish piece here autonight this is french stuff that is
another uranus uranium rich piece from france
ashy knight which is a complex piece here it's just the black ugly
stuff here another russian specimen and here's a nice piece this is maybe my
favorite piece in my collection that's cupro skeletal skype named after marie
curie and it is copper rich stuff that is very very vibrant green bright green stuff
so that's just kind of a quick walk through what some of the radioactive specimens look like
um in the world of mineralogy and again uh for myself and for scott i will
quickly mention that this fall we are going to hold the international science festival starmus once again it's
going to be in the capital of armenia yerevan september 5th through the 10th we will
have dozens of speakers there including charlie duke nicole stott kip thorne
george smoot garrick israelian the starmaz founder joel tarter myself many
more to come to be announced and a rock and roll show that will include many many performers of note who will uh give
us some music as well as the astronomy scott you're going to be there at a major star party event we're going to
put on there as well as an astrophysical school with explore scientific
telescopes there in force so we're very very excited about that we will have a huge crowd looking at the sky
with uh uh drinks in hand and guitars in hand and looking up at the universe so we're
gonna have a lot of fun with that sounds like the perfect uh the perfect event so i can hardly wait it's gonna be
impossible so i will and of course everyone here is invited right so of course of course
we'll be celebrating uh 50 years a little bit more than this now 50 years on mars we're hoping to do it
literally 50 years um but it's going to be uh 51 years now
thanks to the pandemic and i will stop sharing my screen
and thank you for paying attention to the world of planetary science once
again right thank you so much and david before you go uh
uh what can what uh what can you tell us about uh the going ons the goings on at
astronomy magazine we have as much going on at astronomy right now as we ever have and part of
that is a bunch of secret surprises um that are coming up in the next year one of which i've just enlisted our
friend david levy to be involved with which we can't quite talk about yet but soon we will be able to
um and another one is a big issue that's never been done before that's coming up that's going to be a state-of-the-art
look at astronomical art done in conjunction with our friends in tucson
the iaa um kelsey poor and the people who put on space fest there that's going to be an
incredible issue coming down they wrote and we're really excited next year because next year marks the 50th
anniversary of the magazine and so we will have a whole slew of special things going on both in the
magazine and in other ways next year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what
is the largest uh publication and brand celebrating our hobby in the world
wonderful wonderful it's going to be a fantastic couple of years here so it's going to be great
all right so we will um move on to uh
back to maxi and uh maxi uh we'll introduce his guest harold locke thank
you david thank you thank you well uh
my first guest of tonight is a a friend that i been knowing here in the gsp a couple months
ago uh he also is a material astronomer
he sometimes when i post some pictures he starts to talk to me
and ask me questions and also i ask him question two
and his name is harold luck how's it going harold
pretty darn good maxie thank you for enjoying for joining us well you know
god you know i feel really do feel unworthy following david eicher following david and david
uh david you know and uh you know they're all all so eloquent and uh learned men
and uh you know i'm not but anyways yeah thank you maxie for all the help
you give me you know i have a que you know yeah i wouldn't i would have been going
around circles you know because i watch you on star party the uh the after party
you get into talking about what you're doing and you've given me some brain brain
breakthroughs and then i i called you up out of the clear blue sky i think i've done that to
scott and i got i don't know if it beat him off or not you know but anyways you
know i do stupid stuff like that and you answered and you walked me through we went on video you walked me through
everything and by the time i got i got my eight inch cola made mated and i took the first picture i
haven't progressed much since then but i got the field of view my stars are in focus overexposed
because that that eight inch newtonian let's see a lot of light and i hadn't planned on that when i was taking the
pictures so and um and so but my journey you know it's going to
be beyond beyond the future by the time i'm any good is what i think you know so you know it's definitely
going to be a journey and i put together a little presentation here about how i
started and you know thank you to explore scientific and everybody that's gathered around
these star parties you know and you know you know i haven't progressed very fast
as good as everybody else does in six months you know going on a little over two years and i'm still a beginner
yeah that i could say i know that i think everybody learns each other
together in our experience so yes i i saw uh on scott's neowise this morning
it was pretty darn good i think that was scott's photo no not mine not mine i was taken in
arkansas uh yeah but not me okay that was beautiful
it must have been tyler i could have been tyler we do have some astrophotographers here that's right
okay anyways i got does that show up on the screen yeah
yeah not yet welcome to the issue of the screen
well i think everybody has to do that and then i tell you yes that's the the ceremony that everyone
comes here first they have to have the issues with the screen so okay all right
harold you're sharing now okay i can see it i i now i actually understand a little bit better
okay and i'm not going to lock up everybody's screen i don't think let me just i can't do any more than that is
that readable yes
gracias max thank you everybody thank you everybody for letting me come here and
present my uh humble journey maybe i will enlarge that i don't know no i don't know how to do it okay
anyways uh i already have my ticket i think i said my thank yous to scott
and explore scientific and all the great people that i've met here kareem uh
maxie nico the hammer uh my marcelo you know i enjoy reading
his articles all the time and uh sky's up uh you know god it's just it's been
tremendous anyways i got my boarding pass from nasa you know uh at least my name is going to make it to mars someday
and you know sometime in 2026
now okay my journey started somewhere around july 2019 right around my birthday
i have a cousin tommy who lives down mexico you know he's down there pretty low
you know he can he can see from where he's at he's right around uh uh chiapas uh you know right up there in
the mountains so he can see both south and north almost pretty darn good and i
don't think he gets polaris very well he should get it down there on the horizon and then he does pretty good uh
astrophotography and uh my buddy john the stargazer that's his real
real name he's had it since the 70s when we met on citizens bad radio talking skip around the world being
in h d you know i mean he's hating discontent causing a lot of grief for everybody
power monger whatever you want to call him and uh but he's a pretty darn good uh
astrophotographer he's a buff and he informed me that you know buffs you know
listen to him because he's a buff but you know you know we kind of beat heads you know and the same with
tommy uh you know i i guess i'm hard to learn i'm hard to teach
so you know anytime they told me something i went and tried it and told me not to i did it anyways
and then i had to listen to them you know tell me all about it you know and so anyway so john i said i just made the
mistake i think was saying well i'm gonna tell this get a telescope someday and look at the stars you know it wasn't
even a week and a half later i got this uh the celestron right here this
celestron fourth dot not a celestron uh criterion with bosch and loma optics
highly promoted by carl sagan and as the thing to do and it was just a
time for the hail bop you know and and so he was really you know he was like me you know kind of the
conspiracy theory guy and uh you know art listen to art bill and you know and
and i'm only what uh 20 miles from uh from where uh the hillbop uh uh
collective was you know what were they at the heavens gate they were right down there on my doorstep oh
yeah they were right down there on my doorstep so you know kind of everybody around here was curious
you know i think scott was probably in the area then too correct uh i wasn't there but
i have a story about it as well and i'll tell it sometime but not tonight okay
anyway so this this uh criterion four thousand four inch
sct caused me a lot of grief over 200 hours worth of uh
or maybe maybe almost 200 hours of trying to figure out how to make my canon dslr work on it
didn't happen and so i figured well you know what the heck is the problem here
oh before i go to the next one i had actually gave me a really good beautiful uh view of
saturn in that that little sct where i could see rings yeah so you know i was
hooked on that and uh okay i can see you guys yawning going to sleep let me speed it up
okay so huh don't don't be saying no anyways here's my my first setup i
decided that the the criterion wasn't going to do it i invested money on celestron
uh 127lc with uh the 127 max
mexico in it and uh put my computers and old old monitors and everything to use
and got out there trying to work with that and you know beautiful moon ring
not so good on the planet it's even a 1500 millimeter focal length you know i really i have to put a doubler on it and
then even to get try to try to put in uh
you know the you know i guess take the doubler out i got a nice little doubler it came with a thousand millimeter lens
i bought all kinds of stuff trying to figure out what to do but anyway so uh
doesn't do very well on planets without doing uh uh uh video avi videos and then stacking
and so far you know i haven't really succeeded at stacking okay and uh but great a great uh thing and so
then you know the amount that came with the 127 slt the lz you know not really
good to get me anywhere i wanted to go you know uh everybody john and tommy
were yelling at me oh you got to get you what it was you got to get a uh uh
uh uh you know you got to get a camera so another camera uh so i can trail the
stars and lock in my mind's not thinking about it right now you know you got to get a fight you got to get to find
yourself you know i got to find your scope what is it guys go a guide scope i have to have a guide scope you know and
you can get it real cheap but everything i got that i started buying cheap you know turns right to
rubbish right in front of me all i do is look at it play with it my hands break okay so anyway so
you know so i got the the uh got the this mount dismounted track
and uh and it does pretty good and uh i
somehow i know what happened next is my my hard drive on my computer's crashed when i installed
the ascom uh yes com uh platform you know and it
contradicts some drivers no the ascom drivers were working good
they were working good with what i had and then i had a separate program using backyard eos
for my canon and so you know i was running those separate
i was running uh having good good uh tracking and work with carte ciel which
mostly works with uh uh but i was running yeah but i was running a separate from
backyard and then i and then you know and so i was just wanting to do the video because i can go
up to 10 times uh and look at a planet and take abis
10 times you know uh through through the back you know what do they call it the uh
the video output on the on the camera will enlarge 10 times in the viewfinder you know and uh and so but then
backyard takes that video runs that as an avi directly and so you can have a 10
times enlargement so i could get planetary i got some planetary shots you can kind of see them
up here at uh you know those those planetary shots were taken with backyard not bad
no they're not bad but they're not what i want yeah they're not what i want i i i want to
see rock astronomers want and what they produce often two different things right and then that's become a hard reality
for me okay anyways so after that crap after the computers crashed i went to
observing with binoculars going to the basics and i've actually been enjoying doing
the basics and uh uh you know that's all i can say i just
enjoy doing the basics and i'm learning the skies now i'm going back into the summer summer sky you know
the summer triangles coming back up and so i'll have one full circuit on that
and i haven't learned everything but what i have done you know kent gave me this brought it up using when he gave a
lecture on the universe sampler you know from the astronomical league you know
star hopping or star walking you know using your fingers and you know counting it out and so i'm learning where all the
targets that you guys are teaching me to go i i can now almost pretty much point
my say my scope in that right direction go to my finder scope
and park it right as long as i've got it accurately tuned right park my finder
scope right on the target and there there she'd be you know i might not get it good until i
start doing avis again which means getting my my uh laptop back up and working
you know and so and uh uh so that's where i'm at now uh
here's my latest uh picture of uh uh from my eight from the eight inch
this was the first actual photograph from the eight inch right there in orion's nebula and around there and uh you know not
stacked not not timed a little overexposed but so last night i was out there and i was just playing with
exposures iso and time exposures and i came up you know right around 400 400
iso and uh uh pretty pretty quick you know less
than you know less than three three seconds or less on my exposures
so if i can do that on my video once i get the that going back
uh you know i think that uh 8-inch uh explorer scientific newtonian is going
to do beautiful things you know it's a little smaller field of view than i thought but i think i love
it i already loved that and then i got a little bit better uh wider field of
view i think i'm not sure but i i got this i was looking in the ed80 i got it i thought i broke it
right off the bat i thought i broke it and i was crying and i was looking for
everybody to blame i sent hate mail into service and explore scientific you know
and then you know i got i finally cooled down and i said well harold you know it's really all your fault you know you could
have waited to ask somebody until somebody answered i sent out emails right away nobody got back to me within
10 minutes so i started flying and praying playing with it so folks if you get an ed80 and your lens
cap is on really tight you know don't twist it
i started twisting it one way i kind of moved this way and then it moved back that way oh okay i'd go wow is that the
leg and i wasn't noticing that it wasn't the lens cap turning it was the bezel
that held on the uh double convex lens
right inside you know it didn't take every everything didn't come out it's just that one forward
uh lens lens element yeah the prime is the very first primary uh
so i put it back in and i must have got it just right because when i tested the
uh ed80 a couple nights later when the skies opened up everything looked beautiful i had to rack and stack
different uh elements you know in order to to get the focus i wanted with the one
thing i was doing so that's one thing that i learned with uh the you know the the newer better
higher-ups higher uh grade telescopes is that
you know each and every single one of them telescopes is going to be different and you're going to have to learn
what that telescope wants and needs from you in order to get what you want out of it
that's what i think anyway good advice you know so like i said and that's it that's all i got and i'm not going to go
to the other directories i don't know what's on that other side [Laughter]
in these two years i think you get a huge advance
with your gear with your experience uh every one of us that is introducing
in this particularly a hobby
it turns some kind of oh how what happened if we could do this or what
happened if i did this or why i did this so the experience
gave us a knowledge so uh now you are
starting to preparing for a maybe i don't know if you want to go for a astrophotography
and maybe well that's that's your you are
producing your own path okay so that's
a basically what astronomy does it shows you a lot of cars that you maybe can
pick one you can pick another one then maybe you say no i don't want i don't want to do
any master photography maybe i will do some science research
finding some comments or maybe a asteroids or something like that and you know
you have a huge possibilities here a huge uh
and well i'm i'm honestly i'm glad that you
uh get this advance in the really short time you know
uh seems like forever i i always say this this is the um
the only one way the in astronomy there's only a single way a year ago
you're not going you're backwards uh or this is now this is not for me no when
you are here it's i think it's for life i think so too
i think so too and you know but you know it's my you know mike mike weisner is a big inspiration
you know he's a little bit older than me he went through everything and he did everything right that i did as i passed
through that same same time period and uh uh you know and and i'm kind of you know he
i kind of agree with him i if i can't go out to go out and set up all that computer
stuff and all that stuff if it doesn't if it starts frustrating me i'm not
having fun i'm getting pretty old and grouchy i was a young grouch too
but uh if i can't go out there and have fun
in which observing i always have fun yeah yeah you know
you disconnect from everything else and i talk to the stars i talk to the
creator my creator which is the universe itself you know and it's somewhat magical
david if you're still there nice kid but uh to me it's magical
and uh uh you know so i gotta go with it but
david's gone i don't know hopefully he's not gone but scott i know you were an extreme photographer
did you remember ever using these westin oh yes light meters yes i had actually i
had i used to have the the light meter before that um and i can't remember the name of it but
it was like a long cylindrical pipe and you would turn it until you matched
a uh kind of a half silver dot over the
field of view that you were looking through so it's kind of like the first one of the first spot meters but yes i i
had weston spot light meters when i when i was researching these and looking them up that's a radioactive
element in there so that's what's wrong with me i have no idea
western uh you know but yeah you know i was looking them up looked up the part number mine's a models 337 737
but uh yeah that's why that's why i wanted to bring that up talking about radioactive
elements thank you harold that's great so i'm out of here hey i enjoyed myself
hopefully i didn't talk too fast i got too excited there i think but uh i i understand you so
i'm from the south and i think you you talk very clear and
and you know you generate these sparks that brings to another people to
to get encouraged to to continue with astronomy i hope so yeah because i'm i'm
trying to get any niece or nephew that even says they're interested i send them a pair of binoculars or you know i got a
couple of them out there i send them telescopes other friends that say well you know i kind of like that i i i buy
uh what the galileo scope from explorer scientific i sent that i sent celestron's basic travel scope uh yeah
uh you know whatever whatever you know whatever it's at the market price that my pocketbook will handle at that time
boom i slam them with it and i send them a copy of the universe sampler from the astronomical leaf
so tarek in the uae saying that is the spirit of astro
and and he's right hey so and i'm out of here i'm gonna i'm gonna
hang out on this side for a while but i i gotta go check on mom i thought i heard her say my name so hopefully
everything's fine it's okay thank you thank you thank you carol for enjoying us tonight
okay well continue with the schedule uh tonight we
have another friend of mine that we i think we
know well we've been talking through the pandemic uh period
but we met i think last year when we
started doing some astrophotos to to the
a galaxy for the milky way in a farm area with another friend of us uh i'm talking
a of a s he is an amateur astronomer that
he's starting to i don't know maybe two years so yeah two years
i'd say astrophotographer not astronomer like you guys
i think everybody started like a material astronomer now we are amateur astrophotographers i think
so yeah i think i think i'm much less of an astronomer than an astrophotographer
i'm rather on the photography side i just don't want to get um all sorts of questions
[Laughter] i can't reply answer
thank you thank not that much about astronomy but i love
it of course i love it well uh
it's all yours uh talk of what you want to show us tonight and let's hear it
all right thanks a lot for having me again same mistake twice
um so today i wanted to talk about i wanted to show you around uh
my implementation of onstep so onstep is um
an open source uh automation platform let's say
uh and i used it for automating my neq5
uh mount you can see you can see it right there so i bought it without any motors or
anything it's a plain version and as soon as i bought it
i knew that i wanted it for astrophotography and i was well aware that it's it was
going to be a long trip um so as soon as i put my camera there so i
before before these uh this is the 200 1000 from skype watcher
um and i had a very cheap galileo telescope a very small one but
i got to love it quite a lot but at some point it was clear that i wanted more than
that so i bought this telescope [Music]
and as soon as i put my camera there it was amazing i i just couldn't believe
the pictures of the moon and planets i could get even without any motors
so i started playing around digging a little deeper into it uh try to do some uh some photos of deep
sky objects even without motors uh for which we don't have nico here but
he's great at that with his damn song and telescope [Music]
i i i was not that great for sure so
i decided to go one step forward and motorize my mount
so i started looking for options and i came across this project it's called omstep uh it's run by a guy named
howard dotton i think he's german living in the u.s
i have nothing to do with the project itself but i'm so glad so glad that
that i built it and that it gave me so much pleasure and joy
over these two years more than two years now that uh i feel like it's kind of a
retribution to spread the word so and like and everything you really really
like you want to show it up so show it around so uh let me share my screen i hope yeah
i'm not new anymore so it worked right at first [Laughter]
so this is the home page for the project um it's based on arduino
um and you can control uh
so you can go for from a very very basic implementation like mine
like the one you're seeing right next to me uh which only well only between quotes
it only does tracking and go to um
and you can add whatever you like well not whatever you like but uh you can add
a lot of features you can have do hitters you can you can do guiding
not with the well yeah it has an sd4 uh option
which i didn't build but uh you can create a you can build a
hand control via the sd4 interface
and you can do a you can use an auto guider like scene guider for example
connect connected directly there and send pulse guide pulses to the mount
you can connect the mount to your laptop and use phd2
whatever features any any professional uh high-end
mount would give you right you can have temperature control weather
control in general you can't even control uh your dome like
this guy he built a whole house for his telescope and it's separated from his
house so it's completely fully automated um so it's quite awesome and you can
it's again it's open source uh my implementation so you have
like uh several different um [Music] main boards that you can use
i went with a makerbase gen l b1
when i when i implemented it [Music]
you can do you can use uh stem 32 [Music]
mini pcb max stm there are many different options uh the makerbase gen l
board that's a 3d printer board and he adapted it to control the
telescope and it works amazingly i mean i cannot i
cannot even express the the happiness every time i plug it in
and start controlling it from my phone it's unbelievable so
as i was saying you can build an sd4 hand controller you can add a bluetooth module which is
what i chose um you can add a wi-fi module and control it via
wi-fi and the greatest thing i think the best
thing of this is that the wiki it's it's so comprehensive it has so much great
information and the the forum uh he himself uh
forward he's not a 100 full-time dedicated to this but the
amount of time that he spends on this and the amount of knowledge and experience that he has and and the will
that he has to share all those knowledge with everyone that's amazing
i think it makes this project just unique they even have so
let me start with this so the very first step that i took was building this spreadsheet
with the components that i needed so this is the main board this is the
stepper motors they are nema 17 pre-standard
the stepper motor drivers which i used tmc2208
the bluetooth module these were the brackets for the um for the stepper motors but i ended up
uh having them printed in 3d um i didn't even have a 3d printer back
then but uh the first try i made by buying them
from somebody else it worked perfectly they fit perfectly and the pulleys the belt and this is
pretty much all you need so if anyone is interested in this list
and you have a an eq5 that you might think you want to motorize
uh i'll be happy to share these links with you and it'll save you a lot of time
then you have this spreadsheet you download it from the site you enter your
configuration here this is from the stepper motors uh how many steps for a full revolution
uh this is the microsteps from the drivers this is the gear relation
between the pulleys and this is the amount of teeth of your mount everything is documented if not in
the on step side it will be somewhere else or maybe the your mount manufacturer
and this is the uh slew rate that you want right this is limited by the
software itself so if this is my the fastest slew rate i can go
with with my implementation actually this is the default and i can go up to i think 3.2
uh degrees per second uh so the spreadsheet will calculate
everything that you will need to then go on to this step which is
uh a generator for the configuration so you put in all your information here um
from the spreadsheet all the numbers everything is very well explained and if not you can go
um there's a separate wiki page that explains all this in much
more detail than here you put your drivers here
your features time source if you have
um the boozer if you have one you can do a periodic error correction if you have a
sensor a hall effect center or an optical one you can put it in there and control uh
periodic error on the motors you can use
sensors for home sensors or limit like slew limits
and then you press generate and it downloads the whole configuration file
right which is if you know arduino you're familiar with this interface
uh you just open it here and with time i mean when i first installed it
um this was much more complex you had to tweak a well not much more i mean it was just
two or three files uh right now they upgraded that they rewrote
uh refactored all the configurations to be on this single file the config.page
everything is pretty uh pretty clear uh you just have to adjust
the variables here well first first of all you you only need to copy paste this and it
should work like i can do well sorry i've been doing this first oh yeah i
didn't enter the values here but i have a config file here
this is this is what the configuration computer site uh gives you it's like a it's like
a um script is that right yeah it runs the script and creates the
config.h file you just copy paste all this into the config.h file
and then you verify it like you normally do with the arduino if you're not
familiar with arduino you don't even need to be um because it's just a very few simple
steps to get it done you upload it um to your main board which is the mount
actually when connected to the usb port and that's it you got a working uh
implementation of course you need to mount the motors they have the right
pulleys the right belt and so
there let's decide to calculate your belt
um it's it's really really really simple uh
it's really cheap and i'm i'm in love with it
so uh i've been using it for two years now and two weeks ago i would have said
without any single issues at all but then i had some issues with my laptop um
so while trying to fix them i decided to upgrade the on-step version
which was like in version two something and they are in version four now
uh i completely messed it up honestly i learned now how
you learn right exactly exactly i know much more than what i did two years ago so i spent my
last two weeks trying to fix it and i got it working today and not only working
but i got it uh to work much smoother it doesn't make any noise at all
and uh and it's even faster so i have a video but
i'm confident enough to do a live demo um so
let me show you but you're gonna do a live demo okay yeah and actually actually um i found out just today a
couple hours ago that i can connect my laptop through the bluetooth bluetooth
port and using from use it from cars to zero so
that's what i'm doing right now i don't have any actually the this is the usb cable i
just unplugged it um so it's already connected and it's
parked and it's tracking so you can see here i don't know where it's pointing at but
let's say i want to go to orion
telescope slu and
there you go do you hear it no i don't i mean here that's what it's
supposed to sound like it's just like nothing exactly that's the point
so yeah there it goes you know in my mouth in my mount i when i put the go-to it
starts to get like it was a house or something like that when
they change so you know and oh man
i i i remember that i i read in in a forum
that says now don't worry the amount does that kind of sound
okay so when i hear oh man i think no
if i if i don't read that forum i say oh my god this is broken
what happened with the motors no no no
yeah drivers and the motors where where what website do they go to to look at the
software so this is the link
and i can do the old so i think my next move here will be to
implement the periodic error connection correction sorry so
that's the link okay you can find everything there
so i can do exposures of up to like 15 seconds
uh without any trails but if i go up to 20 then i would have to
like throw rubbish half of half of the
uh of the photos so i stick to 15 seconds right now um
i'll park it uh so that's the
it's i think it's it's um due to the motors themselves
uh probably something with the brackets they are 3d printed
um i was trying to to print new ones a couple weeks ago
before going to the fills with dark skies with maxi and the guys
i i spent like three days trying to print something that worked but it didn't
so i stick to the to the old uh bracket uh but uh so in that
um in that weekend and i want to
show you i got my very first amazing
picture of of orion wow this is yeah so this is 15 second
exposures yeah um iso 64 hundreds
and uh it's i mean i just can't believe i took it from the photo honestly and this
is why i'm so glad i mean it has a lot of problems of course you can see coma
here uh there's some overexposure um
on the bright on the bright zones but the fact that i'm able to do this we
with my in-house home build mount it's i mean it's it's just
incredible i just can't believe it and again again it i i get that feeling every time i
plug it in yeah it's like you climb the top of mount everest right yeah exactly exactly
it's awesome so i have this also the tarantula nebula oh wow that's beautiful pretty happy
with it as well yeah yeah i would be more beyond happy with it i would be very very proud of it so
that's great yeah yeah yeah and it was the oh this is the video i got today in
case the live the live demo didn't work um
so yeah this is from that weekend uh wait actually
this is you max right uh yes it's me i think yeah that's it i was
pointing to maybe this was the second night that uh that diego told me that point to m100
you do you remember he said maxi point there then you know yeah i remember yeah
i remember there was a lot of galaxies uh but i have a led light a tiny left
leg it was a bright thing the the the or reflecting some kind of wave the the
camera corrected and now the the pictures they got rushed
that now yes i i think it was that night of course there was some matters wines
chorizo the gastronomy parts
the social part yeah yeah and this is nico yeah i i think he was
drawing drawing yeah he was drawing it right yeah yeah and this was this guy
yeah and and this was this guy with a 300
dobsonian the things we saw with the telescope it was just amazing just amazing the needle
galaxy the hot galaxy it was a man it looked
just like in pictures but through the with your eyes okay yeah
it was amazing all right so that's pretty much where i had um
again uh this the whole step can can be used for many many different
things even for adopts onions even for all testimonies mount
and you can go as small or as big as you like there are observatories using it
so uh if you're interested in it uh i'm here i
i'll answer any questions that i could and if not you can rest assured that these guys
will be able to okay all right
i do have a question for you sebastian are you on the forum uh
like a discussion group for this on step i am there i usually get a lot of emails
that i [Music] might not read because it's i mean it's humanity
it's a large amount of emails um but yeah i'm there but if you want to
reach out to me uh this is my instagram that's the
the best way to go all right let me put that out there
there you go thank you and this is from that night from the listen to the observatory we
remember that we are starting taking pictures and seva says
guys i i went out of the observatory to take pictures
and he went alone in the darkness and with his only flashlight red
and then you start to to hear the pages the
the i don't know what kind of advice was that yeah and so australia
and he was there like nothing taking pictures and what the heck this guy
doing yeah i always love it though it looks like you're
being drawn to the vastness of the southern universe there with the large and small magellanic clouds and yeah
yeah it's cool it's really cool thanks uh i was looking at this image
maybe with maxie um yes i was because we were discussing um how astronomers in
the southern hemisphere do polar alignments you know so oh the hard way [Laughter]
we lit the hardware we're spoiled up here we are yeah that's right yeah
wonderful sebastian thank you all right thank you guys thanks a lot
[Music] all right so i will uh i will talk a little bit about maxie uh
maxie is up next and he has given many presentations on global star party
uh you know we were chatting back and forth on on with tourette and tarek is thinking
about getting up and giving a presentation here and we really hope he does
um but um one of the things that i think all of us that uh give presentations have learned
is that this guy let things kind of loose and let it go and if you make a mistake so what and you know you just
keep on moving through uh the topics because
you know what you're talking about and but i will admit my first presentations back in the 1980s i had a horrible stage
fright and completely forgot what i was going to talk about so um
so that's i i find it hard to imagine that i was that afraid back then
to give talks but the world's greatest presenters uh news people actors
actresses people get paid a lot of money to do this uh all make mistakes so you
know who are we you know so what we are is we're here to
guide the audience and try to help them along uh to understand uh their lifestyle a little bit better or to
inspire them to get involved in outreach um uh because uh you know astronomers as
tarek mentioned uh in the chat you know we are uh
we we understand that uh we're all connected you know through astronomy and through uh really one universe so
um but uh maxie is um a great um uh friend to amateur
astronomers everywhere uh i can't even begin to count how many global star
parties he's been on or how many hours he's actually devoted to the audience uh he he often would be at the end of
global star parties to share in the after parties we would be up until for him as much later than me but i
would be up until sometimes midnight one o'clock in the morning and for him it's like three four o'clock in the morning so um he's really devoted himself to uh
uh helping others in that way and um therefore uh you know we are uh making
maxi an explore alliance ambassador you know and trying to recognize him a little bit for all of his
hard uh outreach work that he does his selfless work and so
so thank you maxie for all you do and i'm turning it over to you
well thank you scott uh i it's it's my it's
it's a pleasure to me uh to be a
an expert scientific ambassador ambassador because i think
with having supporting of this company and this
of course of your support and everyone supports
uh it helps you to uh to spread the word to spread the spark
of astronomy in kind of way and i'm you know i i like i say it's more early
to you i like to talk too much i i i enjoy
uh to to show to another person trying to get more
uh with simple details to explain what astronomy is i don't know
seva if you remember when the uh the neighbor of the observatory came
you know i i realized then everyone's almost has left but i was talking to a
one person and explaining all the sky all of the objects and i remember pointing to with
the laser to m42 and so i say maxi i'm taking pictures
and you know i i didn't realize because i get involved to
of course he wants to to learn and i knew that he was
listening and he was understanding what i was saying and
that kind of feeling is like you are a
giving to another person some kind of a
a knowledge that you transmit across the the time for example
uh in the past we have books uh we have more
more in the past we we have a when the the
the books doesn't exist we have a the lyrics you know uh in the
in in spain for example they have uh to tell stories of about a heroics uh
uh situations of for example the the seed championship of the the silicon pedor
there wasn't a a box about that there was always singing
uh to spread that a kind of uh
in heroic situations and then with the books we
er we start to i think a card saying says that when you
read a book you starting to to to see how that person think in that
time and you starting to re um
real getting alive again that person and maybe that person it doesn't exist
for almost i don't know 200 years or more but you
are still a watch or feeling in in that way uh in
your mind that can that person what we thought what what what he thought what
uh what was his proposed to to re to to write that book or
today we have a lot of technology that help us to
record some video that you can put it in
in the web and that's another kind of world that we have today in
and i don't know what we could in the future but
like i said i i i encourage to to people to
that obviously maybe i think no not too much
they care about astronomy astrophotography they get surprised but
some oh you know again the the the guy star or the planetary guy and
you have a lot of subjects but in kind of way you you
start to get a a costume
you accept that because they see you like a person that
knows that this and i remember uh when something happens or
uh in the sky maybe some kind of friend is saying save me maxi do you see this what
what do you think about this maybe i don't know the starlings for example and
or maybe they saw a major meteor
a across in the sky in in light pollution sky that they saw that bright light
and you you know uh it's it's good to feel that you have this
kind of reference that you can help to another one to evacuate that doubts
in this case of astronomy so i i really i'm i'm really glad to to be
part of the expert scientific ambassador
and of course everyone who wants to to to ask me any question i'm
i didn't grow up knowing everything i don't know and a lot of things in my life i don't
know too much but what i can no what i what i know
is that i can uh brings to you my knowledge of my
experience of and also my uh my my
uh my reads or what i what what i was doing so uh
so well that's my my my little speech for for the kids thank you
to you scott and the audience thank you thank you
let's get to our little presentations uh i was doing
the a couple days ago uh well i have again issues with the collaboration because i don't know how
my secondary mirror goes a little uh
twisted but i was practicing almost three nights continuing
and i say oh oh okay now it's collimating then when i say i started to take pictures
uh it wasn't coordinated but then i started again to another night and then
continue and i i don't uh
get anger this time i i try to be calm but because you don't
like her say you don't um enjoy this a hobby so
i say okay tomorrow will be another day maybe with my with a cold fred a cold mine i will get more
something that i couldn't see this night because i want to see this and everything so
well let me share my screen um [Music]
okay do you see it yes excellent so holders
yeah uh this is from the well i the first night i
they let the the sub frames because i i don't like to see the stars
twisted i i honestly have this toc in me but
that's kind of the astrophotography part of me so basically well let me in
stellarium show you where i was pointing to [Music]
i'm sorry [Music] here this is the app of stellarium
it will get get full windowed but
i didn't open before now i regret okay do you see stellarium
yes great let's put some [Music] deep sky objects
the [Music] yeah here's the south this is the southern
polar that we talked with scott a couple of days ago and do you remember how to point to the
silence uh say suppose got four little stars there
yeah with the solas cross you with your two fingers it starts to four and a half time
to get this place and a little bit down is the the southern and sister pole
so i was starting to do some pictures of some kind of
of galaxies that we have here in this place in centaurus and i start with ngc
for 4945 this is a the
a galaxy that's really awesome to watch it through a telescope and also with light pollution skies you
almost kind of to see it uh let me remember what ah here it is
the the galaxy the galaxy well this is
let me put how is going to get the frame well this is the field of view
of the the square is the the sensor of my camera and
with the field of view of my scope so this is the galaxy but here we have
another one and this brightest star they also in centaurus and
i started this but i i realized that it wasn't good collimating but i let me
show you how how it looks this place taking pictures of three minutes
and with a pollution skies here's
this lenticular galaxy he's here ngc
4976 and also we have the
a the 49 45 galaxy
this is a huge galaxy that has a lot of dust
the clouds of the dust and it has really contrast
and well like i say i don't like the you know here's
the stars they are not rounded so i
i i'm really upset you know the the image if you see it
there in the far in this kind of field of view is it looks really great but
they are in this case they are a more uh
is stretching you know and this this it wasn't a
them [Music] i don't know how to say it
you can see here in the center it's more rounded but when you go to the corner
it's more like a a
stretcher here it's really awful so i was doing almost i don't remember a
lot of pictures of three minutes there was 46
some frames but like i said i didn't like the star so i say no that's not this night
also i went to this place is in i think it's in virgo
because i i really love this kind of er spiral galaxy
and also we have this reticular uh it was in the region of ngc
in a 53 63
region uh and also i love the this this field of view of
that galaxy and i remember there was another one let me see it wasn't the last one
yeah it's above here there's a tiny galaxy
there's another one and there are also too many galaxies little there
but in this case we i have a pollution skies i have to do
a lot of nights and i didn't like it again what what can
the there was the collimated scope so the next day i was preparing again
and i say okay maxi let's do it we have you have time and the moon is
still up you have the live moon and you can do too much pictures but
here's a picture of a leo of a constellation this is
watching to the north you can see it's upside down like you see
in this place is a the triplet of leo in this area
but i think here's the hair and here's the tail and then the
the the foot of the of the lion so
well this is a i remember it was eight seconds exposures uh you can see here's
the brightest moon the neighbor has the lifts lights light
on but what his the orange
light is because i have a mercury light in the streets for now and i think
a couple months we'll be led so this will be a white
and i will [Music] try to get off some kind of way but
i was i was trying to do the collimation and when i get the
collimation i was almost half an hour only i said okay maxi that's it you start to
to practice let's go to again from the same region but
to the global cluster omega centauri so this is the
near from there i have to a lot of time because it's almost
a at the senate when we take pictures
this is only single frame of one minute exposure for example
in this case i have the stars more rounded more
circulary stars so i say okay maxi that's it starts to
take pictures i did only almost one hour and yesterday i finally get the
the the the process in picks inside and he
is here is what i got you know i i get a little more color stars
the orange and blues stars
and you know a watching this and of course
it doesn't compare to watch it through your eyes because this score when you see it through a telescope
and start to see that shiny little stars
feeling your writing is an incredible experience
and it's like you are watching a huge diamond shining
across the space and [Music]
but you can see these amazing global clusters
with small telescopes and also with binoculars and la and um if you have not pollution
skies you can see it uh like a star
but it doesn't start is there are hundreds of thousands stars
so then i i was completely in the area then
and i went to the centaurus a galaxy here
this the field of view that i had with again with the scope and
with my camera and i started to
take pictures uh for three minutes and i did almost four hours
of stacking and this is as a single subframe that i took
to see the the difference and i was processing with flats
and in i didn't like it too much how it it goes
but now right now i'm starting processing again
you can see the stacking yes
i didn't either with the scope but uh
it doesn't matter but i i'm starting to process this again because the the details of the galaxy
there was extremely beautiful you know and
watching this cloud floating in the nowhere and and also the brightest core
and the the bio that's core here and also the the shining place that
illuminates this galaxy is incredible and also here there's a
dust that's this is a lenticular galaxy but we have this kind of
shape of our position you know and that's allowed us to to watch how
how it looks like and right now i'm sucking i i did stuck it
again without flats you know here is the stacking
and now i only did the the dba to get more
a flatter than the the background and this is only a single stretch
so let's see what will in this case i don't have the this that kind of a
scratching in the background like here let me show you the example
this is this scratching to the the left to the right well this is
it looks like this let me turn
i think in this case it looks better that's scratching well this is when you don't get dither
neither is a to help you to not get this because
the hot pixels and the the the noise of the background will not gain in the same
place because the detail was going to do is when you take a picture
when it's finally stop that processing of pictures
move a little to another place the mount trying to not get a seed center the the object
and then starting to take another picture and then to move to another place and doing that kind of way
it helps you to get more a smooth background
but here with the light pollution and well the flats i think
that i didn't go well so i was trying to do it again and you can see
that here in this place there's there's not that scratching so
let's see what can do i don't know maybe today or tomorrow but
it's this is an amazing galaxy and also watching this through a telescope
uh it's you can see the the the core writing and also this bar of gas and
dust floating there you know it's amazing amazing place
um well let's see what more later what i can get i will show you this particular
picture in my facebook page and an instagram page so well this is
a form for tonight i hope that you'll like it and
and i say again scott and everyone in sport scientific
thank you for for giving me the opportunity to be an
embarrassed and an ambassador to to you and i will do my best that i can and
more because you already do your best it's great well thank you
thank you so much maxie okay
thank you up next is um yes that's awesome that's awesome uh we can expect much more for maxie in
the future i think so yes and i can't wait to get to argentina to
actually uh meet these guys in person so it's gonna be fun uh up next is uh professor kareem jaffer
uh he is um uh he is uh with the royal astronomical society
of canada the montreal center he's a professor of astronomy and
kareem is does an amazing job in outreach he's always bringing on new people which i
love and but you know i've said it many times before this is
the guy that i wish uh had uh if i had an astronomy professor i wish it would have been him
uh he explains uh uh the complicated in a way that almost anybody can understand and he makes
everything sound so inspiring thank you kareem for coming on well thank you so much scott but i'm actually
going to defer to start before i even talk anything about what's happening with the rasc
this past sunday we had a fantastic workshop from the cosmic generation so if nathan can come on and tell us a
little bit about what happened this past sunday sure and thank you so much for having me
again it's uh great to be on here um so this past sunday was the second official workshop of
the cosmic generation uh of course the first one was tara's uh presentation on extremophiles and
extraterrestrial life this one was on the size and scale of the universe and we wanted to do this
because these youth who are clearly interested in astronomy
if they ever look up in the sky they're really only getting half of the view because i mean you see
objects in the sky but you don't really have a great sense of how big they are so i wanted to do this presentation
um to give a better sense of scale um on how how large these objects actually
were and i think it really it went uh really well there was a bit of uh link
difficulties at the beginning but we resolved that and uh the whole thing was probably an hour
and 45 minutes um i think that it went really well and
people were enthusiastic um there were several questions and i realized i missed a lot in the chat
because i was uh sharing my screen i couldn't see the chat so i think it was really dynamic you you
had a lot of the youth asking and like wanting to talk a lot about it and even the discussion afterwards you you really
set them up to some really good perspective on the universe i think so and i think it went uh really
well i think um well i heard from some people that uh
their kids were talking a lot about it afterwards so i'm glad that we managed to inspire them in that way
i would just say for next time that if it's a dual presentation uh someone should be monitoring like the
chats could be reading out the questions um which i think is great to know for
next time uh there were several questions written to me afterwards after the presentation
had ended uh and my personal favorite was do you have a life
[Laughter] this is a birthday reply yes yes i do have a life but
i can see why they'd want to ask that yeah but you know that's one of the things about outreach is people see the effort
we put into our outreach and they're like but wait where do you find the time but when you when you're passionate
about something like you are you find that you even have your your web comic that still goes
yeah it's been pretty fun uh that's fantastic and i i want to
point out that the the things that you're talking about are things that we all go through as growing
pains when we're running events and that's what's wonderful about this cosmic generation is that the youth
executive and the workshop presenters learn the same things that a lot of us learn much much later in life and so you
get to learn them early enough that hopefully this will prove to be a valuable skill for you
yes thank you and uh you'll see on the graphic here on the screen that the cosmic generation is
being supported in part by both the rasc and the astronomical league as well as explore alliance and bella grant one of
the workshop producers for this past sunday she's currently working with explore alliance
to put together a youth newsletter by the cosmic generation and it's four kids by kids
and that's kind of the whole purpose behind this and so nathan on behalf of all the mentor group you did a fantastic
job this past sunday and we're looking forward to seeing what the cosmic generation dreams up next
thank you and i know there was a bit of talk uh one of our newest members uh dalali
she is interested in doing a talk about the james webb space telescope next month so hopefully we can get that set
up and that might be our next uh workshop topic that sounds fantastic especially because it should be coming
online within the next two months so we're looking forward to starting to get some data yeah definitely
if you're interested how do they how do they reach out to you at cosmic generation can you put the email address in the chat and scott will put it in for
uh youth that are watching sure yeah i'll do that right now fantastic fantastic thank you nathan uh
so again as scott was saying um i'm coming to you from the rasc montreal center as well as reach out and touch
space in the university lowbrows but for the university of low brows you're much better off listening to adrian he's got
a lot more uh a lot more pull with those guys um i wanted to talk to you today a little bit about looking beyond i love
the theme that scott and maxie came up with for today but before i do i do want to do a brief check in with our montreal
center and i want to let you know if anybody's interested that we do have our next citizen science series episode
tomorrow we have francois canel who is with us in last week's uh global star
party he's going to be going in-depth into that star tracker that he built for wide field astrophotography
and then i've got a little bit to share on the project experience that my students have done in the past as well
as some of the projects that they're working on this term including a video put together by one of my former students
on the very first exoplanet transit project that we did with the rasc so if
you're interested you can come and take a look and we're also presenting one of our very very exclusive resc montreal center
double star certificates and david levy is one of our certificate holders so i hope he'll be there as well to
congratulate the new certificate member our public event our march public event
we decided to wait a week and rather than do it with the full moon we're going to do it with earth hour earth
hour as a lot of you know is on saturday march 26th starting at 8 30 for one hour
we ask people to turn down the lights and to enjoy a little bit of what the earth actually has to offer for not just
our night view here on earth but the animals that we can listen to the night sky that we can see and so to honor it
in the hour and a half leading up to it we're going to be talking about a couple of aspects of earth hour and we
have tim ducette from halifax center of the rasc he is deepskyeye.com and he's
been leading an initiative there to cap lighting to try to save what are really good dark skies for nova scotia
and lisa ann fanning one of our audience members here and during the sunday night astronomy show with astronomy by the bay
uh lisa ann is also a member of the rafc halifax center and she's going to be talking to us about how animals respond
to different astronomical events so i'm really excited to hear that both of those presentations uh you can join us
for free on march 26th it's a direct link straight into the presentation bit
dot least earth 2022 and that will be posted on our facebook page for the rasc
montreal center in the coming days a little bit behind on those things
as some of the astronomical league members know i led a discussion about a month back just under a month back on
the use of electronically assisted astronomy for outreach and we're going to be having another talk on using
electronically assisted astronomy and co-model meetings for centers to really start to
adapt to what our new reality is going to be i know a lot of centers now
have been going online with their meetings but once we're back in person we don't want to lose that web contact
and scott's been fantastic for the astronomical league you know leading the astronomical league live in the convention and really kind of providing
that platform most of our centers are trying to come up with how they can best do that comodo
type of of offering so that both our local members as well as now our
national and global audience can participate in some of the things that we do
i'm also happy to let you know uh our rasc insider's guide to the galaxy is
still going every other tuesday and now it features the messier minutes because we're in the messier marathon season and
so chris vaughn and samantha jewett talk a lot about just everything the night sky has to offer but specifically
different messier targets that are perfect for that next two week window and right now we're starting to get to
the full moon but afterwards we've got that waning moon coming and that waiting moon is the perfect time to try to get
to some of these dark skies observations last thing with my check-in i just want
to mention to you uh last year we got to see the results of our awesome creation
station that we put together from the education public outreach committee in canada we are expanding it this year instead of
going from ages 5 to 12 we're jumping all the way up to age 17 we're inviting drawings we're inviting stories poems
and this year we're going to have a special category focus on the moon and that's specifically with the artemis
project the artemis mission because artemis 1 should be launching very shortly and artemis ii will feature the
first canadian to visit and orbit the moon not land on the moon but at least orbit the moon and then if all goes well
artemis iii will have the first woman and the first african-american to land directly on the surface of the moon so
we want to talk a lot about that give a focus to that sorry scott go ahead no i said that's awesome
so we we're we're hoping by may that we have enough in-person events that we can
share the moon again with the audience and we can you know lead them in crater sketching and just seeing the moon
seeing the creators understanding what they're seeing up there the phases of the moon and just start to turn the
attention back towards the moon now today you all know i try to do something
related to the topic and when i when i heard looking beyond in my mind i thought there's two ways i can go with
this i can go kind of looking beyond the thing that you see or i can go you know looking beyond is really really really
far away and i decided to go with looking beyond the naked eye and i'm only going to take a few minutes on this i just want to
mention one particular tool but before i do i think i have to mention that with the naked eye we can see a lot and in class
because somehow scott definitely is eavesdropping on my classes i seeded
today the idea of hipparchus looking at the stars and seeing their magnitudes and i'm going to be talking a
lot about that on thursday but what i showed my students was the
the the best version of what he park has tried to do that i've ever seen which is the tuskegee star maps and i talked to
them about how like if you go out to a dark sky you can literally see thousands
of stars this star map in front of us has 5 800 stars plotted out for their
position in the night sky and if you go and zoom in you can actually see the names of the stars the constellation
line that give you a little bit of the idea of where those stars are so even to the naked eye which we tend to
discount to the urban centers because you can't see very much when you go to a dark sky you can see so much
but as the astronomical league warns us every global star party the one thing you don't want to use for your naked eye
is to look at the sun so as astronomers when we go to look at the sun we put a sun filter right and
you take a visual light telescope you put a solar filter on it and only when you put the solar filter on it do you
finally turn it towards the sun and you see a little image like this now if you have a better telescope
still naked eye visible you could actually filter out everything but the hydrogen alpha and then you get to see a
lot more detail and if you take a picture and you process it the way gary palmer has taught us you can see some
incredible detail on the surface of that sun but that's still not looking beyond the
naked eye that's still looking what we can see it's just filtering out all of those
other wavelengths that dominate our view of the sun what if we actually wanted to look
beyond the naked eye beyond hydrogen alpha then all of a sudden we start to
see processes and depths to the sun that we can't normally see
and i always like using this image because it tells a story to me it tells a story
that for every object the tool that you use the wavelength that you use to look at the object
reveals more and more information and it doesn't just have to be optical you can use other tools to view information such
as gravitational waves neutrino detectors even cosmic ray detectors in a nice little cloud chamber you can see a
lot of information about a topic or about an object or target by using different wavelengths so the tool that i
want to talk to you about just at the end of this little segment is the solar dynamics observatory sdo.gsf
when you go into the solar dynamics observatory the very first thing you get to see is what the sun looks like right
now but if you actually go up here to data and to the sun now what you'll see is that you can see pictures of the sun
in many many many different wavelengths and you can click on the little information and it tells you exactly
what wavelength you're looking at what type of behavior this wavelength is
particularly suited from and the characteristic temperatures that will jump out because of this wavelength so
at this point we're looking at 171 angstroms which is extreme ultraviolet ultraviolet is short wavelength shorter
than what the naked eye can see because our visible range is from 400 to 700
nanometers 171 angstroms is 17.1 nanometers so it's
much much much much smaller so much higher energies with the sdo you can see many different
wavelengths many different types of behaviors and you can see combinations of some of
these wavelengths so you can see just like we do with rgb or with narrowband data
multiple colors showing you specific behaviors that jump out
you can even see the magnetogram where they show you what the actual
layering is of where the magnetic field is strongest and weakest within the sun
now the other thing that i love about the sdo is if you go to data they also
have daily movies and for daily movies on any date that you want to look at you can click on that date and browse and
they have movies that are put together at different wavelengths and you yourself can put movies together and
submit them and they'll go up here on the sdo repository and so sometimes you
can actually pull out one of these movies and you can beautifully see how the sun has moved and rotated during
that day as you're watching and you can even see the arcs of plasma around the sunspot there in the center in this
wavelength and so this allows you to look beyond the naked eye with a simple tool that is
publicly accessible using an extremely sensitive space telescope that can view in multiple
different wavelengths in really high energy wavelengths that we
cannot see with our naked eye but that reveal the behavior of the sun to a detail that we normally can't see
so i highly suggest that you visit sdo you can even go backwards in time and
watch sunspots as they grow in size over rotations around the sun you can use
that to determine the rate at which the sun rotates at different points around the equator as well as around the poles
and you can go back to some of the larger events that are coronal mass ejections that cause beautiful aurorae
or even solar storms that can cause things like the carrington event you can go back in time and see some of those
yourself so the sdo is a fantastic resource to look beyond the naked eye
fantastic fantastic i did share the sdo website
and um they have a they also have a page that shows almost real time
views of fun which is is a a great one to check out as well i think it's a good resource for also the
solar astrophotographers because you can see some of the activities some
some astronomers are good at predicting when there's going to be like a massive um you know prominence popping up those
kinds of things so when you see the prominences on the on the side of the sun as the sun
is turning then you know that there's a lot happening there when you look in the in the in the non-visible wavelengths
you can see as that sunspot transforms over time that's right
that's right and it's amazing that we can see a star with all that detail with amateur telescopes you know something
that's well within the reach of of uh you know someone that uh is a hobbyist
you know so exactly yep um uh i did want to mention something
kareem uh the people that want the groups in canada that want to do
um broadcasting or you know the uh um you know
hybrid type of events you know whether they're doing what i'm doing i'd be very happy to to
teach them any aspect of what i know you know that's fantastic
because the equipment uh is not very expensive and the technology is amazing
you know so be very happy to do that i really appreciate that scott i will extend the
offer to the other rac centers uh just like we had that discussion a few weeks ago we're hoping to have another
discussion in the coming weeks specifically about uh co-model events and i mean i i know
for for one the rac montreal centre is really enjoying having a global audience at our clubhouses and so we're going to
keep the zoom clubhouse as our backup for any wednesday that we have poor
observing conditions but what i'd like to do is when we have good observing conditions on a wednesday i'd still like
to start off or at some point in the night just live stream a little bit of what we're doing out at the at the
arboretum so that we can show people what we're getting to to see together so
that if they can't make it out themselves because of health issues because of traffic because they're just too busy that night they can still
participate with us that's right that's right and i i think that's one of the most important aspects of
and reasons to continue on doing this so because there will be a point where uh
we're not doing this because of covet anymore you know yeah we're doing this because it benefits us all
that's right i would never have met harold or you're so you i hope i would have met it neath but
harold i never would have met i would have yes right um but uh
and doing it this way and doing it i mean you're here almost weekly now uh you know it allows you to
uh the the time that you need to become friends and so um so not not that you need a lot of time
to you know you can be friends with someone like that kareem so uh which is great
thank you thank you and uh as i've been doing the last few months i've actually brought a guest with us
tonight okay so uh blake nancarro is our uh our rasc
observing committee chairperson he is a fantastic astronomer i've heard a lot
about him through jenna and through others and i managed to get to liaise with him a little bit just when we were
setting up for our epo this beginner certificate type program that we're trying to do for outreach
and then lo and behold blake came to a couple of our clubhouses and was you know chatting away with us about double
star programs and the things that they're doing at national and so i thought it would be great for blake to share a little bit of the observing
programs that rasc offers so that the global audience can hear and especially our rasc members that are not
directly associated with the center and may miss out on some of these presentations at their local center
blake can tell them a little bit about our observing program so blake we are all yours
uh thank you very much for having me uh appreciate being here i feel really honored
with all these esteemed speakers uh let me share my screen now for you
you being one of them blake so
so hopefully that's working okay you're seeing my uh slide we do yes we are
very good thank you uh so again thanks for having me um let me really briefly talk about
the observing programs that that we offer at the royal astronomical society
of canada uh a bit about the committee though
we um [Music]
visual observing programs uh i say visual because that that's our focus uh programs where we encourage
people to put we
encourage people to look through the telescope and visually observe that's not to say we're not into uh
photography and astro imaging i do lots and lots of astro imaging but i get goosebumps
when i look through a telescope and see something millions of light years away or a few
thousand light years away and i start thinking about that i love visual astronomy as much as i do
photography so i had up a team of people with around 15 people were kind of all across
canada and our team has a good amount of experience
not to to our own horn necessarily but but we've accumulated 25 certificates observing certificates
so we have a good body of knowledge we're very enthusiastic about visual
astronomy when you add up all of our experiences 100 years of experience so again we're
really really excited about um visual astronomy a little bit of
history i'm a data mining nut i love dashboards and stuff so i i plotted all
of our certificates awarded historically you can see if you can see those small numbers there
it started back in 1981 with the messier observing program
and those are the yellow bars and you can see that carries on in 1995 we introduced the
finest new general catalog objects so that's that's been quite popular over
the years and then in 2002 we introduced the explore the universe
program and i have some special information i'll tell you about that momentarily but it it's
quite popular as well and a great sampler great starter
program you can see when you look at the last few years and i don't take any credit
for this uh but in 2017 numbers are kind of low but it's been
steadily rising and then we had a fantastic year in 2020
where we almost broke our past records and a big chunk of that if you look at
the dark blue bar that's the explore the universe and we think that happened
because of the webinars that jenna hines and chris vaughan and
and john reed and and samantha dewitt and other people were involved with and then in 2021
they changed or began speaking about observing the moon
and it was a really again a fantastic webinar that they did where
jenna and john reed would get together and samantha would do a sketch on the fly of the moon and if you look at the
orange bar in the gray bar in 2021 that is the most number of explore the moon
certificates ever that that we've accomplished and you can see that contributed
a great deal to us smashing completely breaking our
previous records of certificates awarded there's probably a dash of you know covet in there and that people were
bored at home looking for a project so for whatever the reason we were thrilled
it kept us busy in the community and you can see we already have a few certificates coming in for
2022 and this shows the breakdown by center
so lots of locations across the country again and you have to take those numbers with a grain of salt if the center is
big more certificates will probably be accumulated there but you can see
there's activity across the country so we're very proud of that and if you can see it again small
printing that last bar at the end shows public so i'll come back to that
so our goal my my sort of goal is giving people goosebumps and and we
have these visual observing programs to help get our members observing we're trying to encourage
all of our members to observe and and you'll see there's an asterisk there uh there there's one certificate
wherein we encourage every human on planet earth to observe
so so we've got sort of programs for everybody and we've got programs for different levels too if you don't have a
lot of equipment if you've got just binoculars a small telescope you're good
to go with some of our beginner programs we're trying to help people
build a good skill set too so we think that
when you observe and document what you observe if you do a log note if you do a
sketch or if you do both we think that helps you observe better and then when you observe better your
log notes get better it's a nice little feedback loop so we're also encouraging people to
do good record keeping sketching is technically optional but a log note and or a sketch
is what we look for so we're trying to help people establish some sort of good techniques and best practices and things
like that for for me i i kind of need a target if i don't
have a list in front of me of things to look at in an evening i look at the same things again uh
i have some favorite objects that i like to revisit but in general i like to look at new stuff so i really like how our
our programs give people a goal a target
this is not unlike the astronomical league all of their fantastic observing programs
give people a mission a campaign something to work towards
so i i really like that about all of our observing certificate programs
so here's all of our programs for or from rask uh there's eight there if you count the
rows uh there's there's two variants though to the explore the moon so that
that gives rask nine different observing certificates in total and i've grouped them by sort of level
or strata here people just starting out don't have equipment uh won't want to
use the the loaner equipment in their local center if that's open and available
we've got some great starter programs for people we explore the universe again is a good sampler we've got stars
constellations planets some of the moon phases we've got a short list of double stars we we even have an optional or
extra supplement with a couple of variable stars if people are interested in those so it's a
really good sort of taste of everything that's out there and maybe somebody will take an interest in
one particular thing and go a particular path from there eyeballs and binoculars are all that are
needed for the explore the universe uh program so
so great again for people starting out with little little or no gear and these objects in general are bright so
people should be able to do this kind of anywhere if you're not in terrible light pollution you should be
able to see all of these objects we even have some deep sky objects but they're bright like like the pleiades or the
subaru so really good targets for people starting out pretty easy to get to them
explore the moon program again we have two variants of this we have one where
you could use binoculars and there are 40 targets but i forgot to mention
that in the uh explore the universe program
there's a total of 110 targets but only 55 are required at a minimum so
we're trying to make it easy for people to get into that but we recognize that additional effort if people do all
110 back to the explore the moon if you're using binoculars there are 40 targets
to achieve and if you have a small telescope there are 94
targets that you can observe so very very achievable and again now you
don't have to worry about light pollution with the explore the moon you can do that anywhere at any time so that's quite nice
now we move into our intermediate programs messier catalog obviously we didn't invent that but we encourage
our observers to [Music] view all of the objects that charles
messier saw and it should be possible in a small telescope of course you if
you're familiar with the messier catalog a couple of those are faint objects and may not be easy to track down in
city limits or bright light pollution but uh maybe a larger scope or a darker sky
will help people complete that program by the way all of our observing programs
when people complete them submit their log notes and we recognize their efforts
we provide a printed certificate uh nicely done and you can frame it hang
it up on your wall or your observatory and for some of our programs well i'll try to hold it up to my camera
there if you can see it some of our programs have attractive metal pins
uh our next program is the finest ngc
object you would find that list in the rask observer's handbook
this was a list created by alan dyer he uh was interested in helping people
explore a bit deeper with these guys and he selected
110 in deference to the messier program 110 very interesting new general catalog
objects and a lot of these are fantastic they're beautiful objects fantastic simpler again
planetary nebula galaxies and open clusters and so on and it's curious
you know sometimes some of these fights in these objects are like park raping object it makes you wonder how how did
charles messi miss some of these so great program uh very nice our newest program again
this one's very interesting in that it could be done in city limits is the double stars
program it has 110 targets for sets 220 stars to view we have a
supplement where there's additional targets if people want to pursue those of course if you know doubles some of those are
triples and quads or multi-star systems so nice new program again doable in in
light polluted environments or even if the moon is out
now we have a very challenging advanced program on the moon that's the isabel williamson
lunar observing program and there are 271
required targets for that there are 170 plus challenge targets so that what's that
add up to around 400 if people want to do the challenge targets and then there's an upper threshold
of a maximum number of objects 1000 lunar objects in addition to observing
you're learning about the history and the formation of the moon it's a really fantastic program there's
some challenge objects you have to wait for the right moment of liberation
the right tail of the moon for some of those uh targets thanks to
uh david levy and he's channeling the late eel and leo
enright we have the deep sky gems program once again in the
observer's handbook you would find this list there are over 150 targets these were
objects viewed by leo but david has selected his sort of favorite
representative ones um and uh uh shared some of his observing notes
from his log books and i'm really excited actually about this program i've been kind of
feeling a bit wayward wondering what to do the last little while i've completed some
some uh projects and and i was thinking what what i need a challenge now what am i
going to do and then it hits me hello we have our own observing program so i'm very
excited to begin working on the deep sky gems program for myself while i have
viewed already about 40 or 50 of the objects i'm going to start a brand new log book gonna start
fresh so i'm really looking forward to it and our final program is the deep sky challenge and on paper it looks simple
in the observer's handbook you'll see oh there's only 45 targets but these are very very challenging targets where you
will likely need a moderate to a large telescope and or
very dark skies to see some of these objects and and that includes a quasar i love looking at
quasars that's one of those things that that gives me goosebumps visually observing quasars
so lots of great programs for for everybody young old experienced brand
new with or without equipment um in and in outside of the city
and i need to go back to the explore the universe program what's special about the explore the
universe program is that that can be completed by anyone that's the one that
i was talking about before that any human on planet earth can uh complete the program submit their log
note and we recognize all people we view this as a gateway into the hobby we want
to get everyone excited about learning about the universe around them
so we're very proud of this program they explore the universe being available to the general public
if you want more information just head into our website um head to rask.ca
and uh and and then go to the observing menu page
and look for the certificate programs you also see the astro imaging certificate programs and
other information under the observing menu when you get to the observing
certificate page the visual observing you'll see all of our programs there and we briefly explain the programs at
this uh upper level we we explain what we think an observation is again a a
brief log note a brief description and or an annotated sketch
is is what we look for in an observation uh we have tips and tricks for a bit
more detailed information and then when you click on one of those links for a specific page
very detailed information maybe on one hand overwhelming but we're just trying to cover the bases we provide all the
information that we can to help people get started with the programs we also have some great little videos
um that explain the programs and help people get started with them
so i've run a bit long thank you for your patience um merci beaucoup uh mig witch uh i i thank
you for your attention and i hope that i've been able to uh share with you what we do in the rask
observing committee and uh if you have more questions if you want to reach out to me if
you have any questions about the programs or anything like that note my email address is there send me a note at
the observing rask dot ca and i'm happy to help in any way that i can
that's it for me thanks a lot okay that was awesome blake
i think i got all those links and your email address to share in the chat so
um expect your mailbox to fill up i guess
especially with the explorer of the universe i think i think we'll have a lot of takers on that one yeah right bring it on
bring it bring it on yeah and i don't know if you're aware of blake but we have some rask members with
us uh that are members even though they're down in the states adrian is a member of the sarnia center harold is
one of our national and affiliated members um chuck allen is one of our montreal center members but he's not with us
tonight and uh i think we need to get some south american members uh we'll we'll figure something out with maxie
we'll we'll do some uh we'll do some some trading or something like that we we have issued a certificate to an
observer in uganda wow so so we do have a few far a field
uh so yeah more more the merrier and and i if i may um
uh i'm trying to build up my records i i've very spotty
records of who is a rask member who has achieved an astronomical leak
certificate so i've sort of started collating this data i want to build uh
some connections there and understand what's happening blake can i connect to with uh chuck
yeah i do i just feel a bit badly that i don't have good information at this stage and i want to recognize people our
members who have achieved a certificate from anywhere yeah
absolutely yeah we'll connect you with astronomical league that sounds great yeah thanks
good deal good deal all right well thank you so much um i'm going to turn this back over to
maxie and i think we have uh
one more speaker before we go to a 10 minute break that's right take it away maxie yes no problem well
our next speaker is a young man who uh
he's he's preparing right now to to do some his uh presentation he's a i i'm sorry if i
know pronouns right but his navin
it's all yours brings what you have to us okay so firstly i want to introduce you
to a special guest he's one of my friends so his name is sugee
turn on your camera there he is
yourself okay hello guys hello
okay so today so let me just hear my screen
okay so
just give it a sec all right so we're going to be talking
about alien life all right
so the search for alien life by um nevinson
to kumar and my friend sugi
alien life well it's alien life it's a topic that's been going on
for decades now are we have some questions are aliens cute or disastrous that's still being
figured out how do you think of aliens you might see
them on a movie it's just a cute little thing or is it something big and monstrous
who knows you still don't know yet that's this that's still the question astronomers
have been finding out for decades or an alien could be a potato it could be anything
so let's talk about what we know now you know that aliens can live in
exoplanets because their extraterrestrial life and they need to live with resources
so there's some types of planets called goldilocks planets which have liquid water like earth
they have a good temperature for life and one of these and maybe some of them might be suitable like earth
there's there could be possibly trillions who knows they're uncountable
but so far we only know that aliens live in planets what do they look like are they
microscopic or giants will they be most likely that we so far
think they're microorganisms are they sea creatures or something we
never saw before will they be cute like this guy or mean like this guy
how do we measure we use telescopes to see visible planets
we can use probes to see chemical composition of planets or moons in the far future we can we could
possibly send scientists to fly at high speeds and go and be like
astronauts and set up labs at far away planets like neptune jupiter saturn but that's in the years
to come we we could send robots to scan the surfaces and study samples that's what
perseverance is doing curiosity did a little bit um some
nasa's get to launch some other probes to in um satellites and rovers to go to other faraway planets
so what's currently going on scientists they're currently researching if there's
any life before astronomers are looking for planets that could
support life and it's this hunt for exoplanets is still going to go on
biologists are speculating about life forms that could survive on other planets using chemicals
all right now let's talk about a couple projects seti is a non-profit trying to find alien
life it stands for search for extraterrestrial life perseverance has a special capability
and sampling feature to find aliens and it's trying to find microscopic
ancient microscopic organisms that could be alive or dead who knows
even also there's also many prophets such as other than city that are in space
agencies that are trying to find alien life nasa contributed a bit um other space
agencies helped and mostly non-profits are doing the work for
the hard alien stuff
okay so i'm gonna turn it over to my friend sugino
he's gonna talk about the who started the search from aliens
um wait a second
i think you got it uh naveen you have to so either you have to go to the next
slide or i have to share the slide wait i already got it okay so go to the
next slide oh you already have it okay well then go back sorry
they got it okay so ancient people started wondering if there were any alive beings living on
other stars or on the moon telescopes got invented the people were
disappointed as there were no cities on the moon or on mars soon people became
curious again about extraterrestrial life on other distant galaxies
[Music]
a lot of people said that they have seen ufos flying around
but it is very hard to prove that this is true because there haven't really been
images with good quality that have been confirmed by multiple
people it's either been confirmed by only one person or the camera quality is
really grainy so most of these sightings could be narrowed down to hallucination because
of co2 or mirages from the weather funny-shaped clouds or even government
aircraft there are these certain aircraft that the u.s government has
and they have a special coding on them which makes them hard to see
and it makes them sometimes look like a ufo
places where aliens might live aliens might live under rocks like some
type of bug or bacteria they might live in caves
or they might live in buildings if they have a civilization or if they're an
animal that can build something or they might live in the water as
a sea creature or microorganism but they could also live on surfaces
with resources such as nutrients some like
some aliens might even live in space they might even be able to withstand the vacuum of space like the black holes
they might just be able to live in out like in the middle of like nowhere who knows
an alien diet so this one is really hard to find out
because we never actually found any aliens we're speculating that they might be
able to eat anything we eat they might eat nutrients or minerals
they might eat some type of plant or animal that we've probably never seen before
or they might be like plants and get their energy from the sun
so alien technology maybe aliens could travel at the speed
of light or even have lasers and night vision but most likely
they will just be some type of microorganism or
some bug and they won't really be able to do much they'll just live on their planet
for forever but if they are
like us and they've been able to advance and gain knowledge and build stuff
they might have been able to conquer their solar system and go to other solar
systems nearby and live there
they might be technically advanced or not so technically advanced so now there's this thing called um
it's the first known interstellar object detected passing through the solar system so what basically happened
so it's kind of like this chunk of like a rock or like like asteroid kind of thing
we don't really know what it is it's like an unknown object it was like orbiting outside our solar system and
then it got pulled in by some sort of current we don't know what it is so then it came
and then it entered the solar system orbit which pulled it in using the gravity
and then it entered or it kind of nearly entered our earth orbit but
it was it was uh it was the first known interstellar object detected and it was found in 2017
um there are strong some uh amateurs are still trying to track it down to see what it's gonna do
ways you can help to find aliens
you can use your telescope to help spot exoplanets and report them to nasa
or you can be on high alert on ufo sightings if they exist
or you can donate or join non-profits like saudi
in the future you will be able to send humans and probes to distant solar systems to observe them
thank you for listening to this presentation and thank you for having us on
yeah thank you for coming on that's great that's great i love it that you brought your friend
and you guys collaborated on this this um this uh you know particular subject
in fact last night you know i was watching uh you know
about uh ufos and these kinds of things and it's uh it is a big question mark for sure so
but uh you know i think that most astronomers feel uh that if life
happened here on this planet that it may have occurred all over the universe you know so finding it is going to be the
big challenge but congratulations on your presentation
okay all right guys uh we are going to take a um
we are going to take a 10 minute break and so now's the time to stretch your legs
and get a cup of coffee make a sandwich whatever and
we'll be back in 10.
all right sounds good harold good to see you in person friend
thank you for supporting all the crazy images that i post and
sharing their space they're awesome images dude yep and blake i do have one
um certification it's the wide field astro imager certificate
um i fought my way through to get it and um
so now i'm the i think i'm the latest uh set of images on the rask site
oh yeah the astro imaging the wide field astro imaging page in the zenfolio good
yep is in folio yeah so that was
and i was intrigued by the uh visual
um i have a small i have a larger telescope with a big lowspin d mount that stuff's
heavy don't like carry it all the time i have a small explore scientific uh
ixos pcma pmc8 i have binoculars and i have a small
telescope so i will likely go somewhere that's decent decently dark
and go to work on a uh the binoculars and small telescope
objects uh that those certifications sound intriguing enough to me
that that's awesome you're you're multi-disciplinary it again i love i love the eye to the
eyepiece but if i get a good image and and i can figure out the processing i love that
too yeah yeah i i started out visual
um of course like everybody else i wanted to know how do i make the great beautiful
images that people can make and then i saw a hubble image of m51
and decided okay i'm not sure who's gonna beat that to all the detail that's in it and then
somewhere along the way i got interested in doing the nightscapes um because they became logs of places
that i've been so that's that's kind of where where that uh
that passion grew but i always held uh i always like
looking at the night sky directly i just pulled up your gallery and it's
it's amazing work i love the aurora um photo
the the uh the one with the lighthouse and the milky way that's amazing
um that's really good work is is that zodiacal light in
yes one of those is the diet light
yeah you got it it's really really bright that was uh i think that's the one where
you're seeing a ryan next to it yeah yeah
well the orion into the but uh yes that was a border one zone oh okay it was
it was as bright as the mil they were equally as bright the milky way and there's a diamond
i saw that in you know i i had to use the bathroom
but you know for a while i was stunned yeah and even even even having these the
bathroom stopped it was just uh um everything just stopped when i saw
that and i said i have to take an image and uh next you know i i did what i
could it the moon started rising through the zodiac light
oh that made it even cooler because it was a uh yeah it was a waning crescent
okay so but you know i don't have that in the picture but it was um
it was a beautiful sight and i just tried to give it justice by capturing what i could
of it and um just uh you know you see most of
everything there and i use that modified camera so you're seeing barnard's loop and lambda orionis some of the other
you're seeing the rosette yeah you know kind of filling some of that in but you know take away those h alpha regions
and you're essentially seeing what i saw with my eyes yeah and that was incredible that's really
good too because it reminds people that orion is right in front of the milky way but
normally people don't think of that they don't think of that the milky way is out
in that direction yeah it's really good you really capture the outer arms of the galaxy here
yes i i enjoy doing that we hear about milky way season for most photographers
um because the core becomes visible yeah but um to me the milky way is visible
year-round and yeah depending on where you can go so i you know i'd be landscape
astrophotography groups and some of the other facebook groups you see i see some
amazing images but a lot of them have that slanted growing core
of the milky way coming rising up i've got some of those too it's beautiful um
you know but it becomes a challenge to catch the other regions
of the milky way well very nice oh james dugan wants to
see the pic james i'll cue up that uh image and uh tariq wants to keep his name
longer on the screen i see it's still on the screen tariq uh james i'll cue up that image and share it as a part of my
uh presentation um it's uh there are a couple of images
that are among my favorite um
look in here to make see if uh see if it actually shows yeah some of these images will show up in my
presentation so you'll you'll see him as a part of the slideshow
i don't know if uh oh yeah the uh yeah i don't want to share screen while um you all out there
in facebook or on the explorer scientific live page
um you know you all get your chance to uh post and we can see it there are a lot
of amazing rosette nebulas out there um the rosette
there's so much there's so much going on the star cluster in the middle of it
it's a wide field object but if you take a wide field view
of orion and the milky way the rose appears as this little bitty thing
that looks like it's superimposed in the milky way and it's actually huge um of
course everything in space news but uh yeah a lot of people
the rosette has been shown in a bunch of different colors a lot of people love it and there's good then it's for
good reason
and thank you i should thank you blake for uh your kind comments on my uh gallery there
oh you're welcome oh it's it's a great body of work keep it up will do
um the the astro imaging uh is managed by
stuart peggy you you probably talked to him yeah great guy yeah he's really helpful yeah he
held my hand throughout the whole process there were a couple of composites that didn't make the cut
because they were composites um he uh he helped me
get 12 i think it's 12 or 14 15 good images that um
that i was able to use to um you know get my put toward my
certificate yeah he's uh a great guy um
maybe uh i should um reach out to him
he's my counterpart and uh maybe he could um
come out to one of these uh gsp events as well
i think that'd be a great idea yeah have him busy
i think he's got his home observatory like most of the real deep uh astro
imagers they build that home observatory they'll point at a target get thousands of hours and produce fabulous images
when they take it through their workflow um
believe it or not my wife says that's where she wants me to head because then i don't have to drive everywhere to go
i am i am just switching to these in the backyard because at least the
future build an observatory and stay home that's what she wants me to do there you
go good plan yeah and and stuart's like us right he also loves looking through the eyepiece too
he's as much a visual astronomer too absolutely
i think he i think that helps
go ahead scott we see you again but we can't hear you because you're on mute scott
no okay here i am anyways yeah um we're back after our ten minute
break here uh and um uh coming up next is uh marcelo souza
from brazil i'm not sure if he's quite logged in yet but i know he's logging in
and um so we'll give him a minute um but uh maxie uh
uh your uh your uh your selection of having um
uh harold lock on and sebastian uh jeremiah's is that correct am i spell
pronouncing his last name correctly yeah yeah uh was excellent uh i think he's
called it okay that means okay all right so then
yeah j is like h and h sound to us yeah very good um
so uh but yes i i also invited to another another people that well also alan
getting he couldn't be here because he has some family he
works and a nice and i also ask him to another
friends that they are well they are doing extraordinary
extraordinary work uh doing astrophoto doing a of the
observation outreach i i invited to marcos
santa rosa from the alberti luis perez from mexico he's a friend of
mine that i a show him about astrophotography and now he's
beyond me he he's cross over me
doing his work and with his equipment and
and that's the the good fact in this and
well i invite uh them but they can't
speak english so they they say no maxi i i really grateful for
inviting me but i i will not giving a good presentation for
well a given a in speech in in english so
but you know maxi i i gave a presentation one time to an astronomy club down in chile
and uh they had a translator for me so i just spoke in english they had a good
translator they could translate it into spanish i i i tell them that
it works just fine i mean it's it's very easy to find someone that would
help us do that so uh the next time you have somebody that wants to do that and there's a language
barrier let me know and i will i will prepare in advance to get someone on
that can that can help us out okay okay yeah i will i will do i would do yeah
well i think i think marcelo is online i i don't know if he is asking
yes i can yes hi hey hey marcelo hello mattel marcelo
hi nice to meet you all of you how's it going i'm fine aren't you
i'm fine i'm fine so well i think you're our next speaker
well it's i i don't know if you are prepared but it's all yours okay i have here representation because
today i was talking with some friends
about the some uh we were discussing about the
the flat earth and something like associated with
people that don't believe in science and they will talk about the
the the form of the earth and i i
after this we begin to talk about the differences between a flat
region and they call the division and i
have here a short presentation that i use is about city general relativity
under some some remarks about general relativity i'm sorry that
parts they are in portuguese because uh
later i couldn't translate to english sorry okay if it's not problem
it's no problem okay here's not true let me change
why is not changing on a moment i'll try to change outside here
here here is the facsimile of the original
work written by eistein about general achieved that was in 1916
published in an allende physique that says
germany magazine famous german magazine and
i i we will only talk about two uh
associated questions one of them is the equivalence principle
that's something that is very important because one of the problems is that see we
began the what has thing did now is to develop
a gravitational theory that is according with the relativity a
special relativity that he
was responsible to develop in 1995
and the one the question is what happens when you are in accelerate
differential right if you are in a place where you have a acceleration
and the if you are in the surface of a planet if you are on
the surface of a planet in are inside
uh home and the windows are dark and you can't see outside
and the another person if it is in a spaceship
that's also disclosed the windows are closed and he is moving with the same
acceleration of the gravity of the planet that the
where the other person they can't say if they are in this in
on the surface of a planet or if he is traveling
accelerated is the equivalence principle both the effects
that you you feel in both different situations are the same
if you have something in your hands until their legs fall
they will fall with the same acceleration then you can't say if you are an
accelerated system on the surface of a planet this happens locally only because it
if you have if you have a big region uh
the gravitational fields it's not parallel it's only locally that you have parallel
degradation of it parallel in a surface of a planet
you call in portuguese the principle of valencia that is the equivalence principle and the something that i think that's
fantastic is that you need to change our idea
about here the distance of the two regions the shortest
distance because in a flat surface the distance between two two points two
regions is only you you only need to draw a line
it's a line between the two regions and this is the shortest distance
but this didn't work don't work right in the surface of a
region like our planet the moon in our planet the shortest distance
between two points it's almighty a line
as we imagine a straight line it is a covered line
that's a respect
of the region then the shortest
distance between two points in the surface of the earth it's not a straight line
a straight line is a tangent in the surface of a sphere
and here and to work with this we need to change our i don't
know how it's correct where to say things it's paradigm in portuguese i don't know how to say these rings you
need to to change the base of a geometry that you use
these are i mean looking here the correction words in english
sorry oh
i i didn't find it at resolution but easy base i use this as a base
okay this is english that you say
paradigm paradigm that's something that he uses are based
for our thoughts and the what he used when we had a flat region
is the elements from eclids that is that is the base
of geometry 13 books and having many definitions in
this book like what is a point what is a straight line
what how that we can define as a face
then i'm not talking about this sorry they are in portuguese and but you have people that begin to
work begins to work when we don't have a flat vision a
covered region we need a different geometry like i saw
if you have you want to measure the distance between two different points
in a covered region you can't use the geometry of your cleats you need to develop a new geometry
and these big guns with they quit size
the geometry of eclipse and then this began with john wallis
and you have many people that try to analyze the questions and they have a
famous one that is gauss that's a very famous
mathematic mathematician and who developed
new models are ionos volleyite a very young person
nikolai lobashevsky that's knowing geometry and the famous one that's the
riemann right that he one of the
the the two that is used in the
einstein equations has the name of a human then i this is the difference you have a
distance between two points in a flat region
and this distance is only you have you need to see square hoods
of the square of the three directions
x y and z but if you are in the surface of your
region these changes then these these mathematics these new
geometry allow us to know how to measure the distance between two points
in a region where your heavy curvature it's multiple a flat
like this any ice use this with the equivalent principle
and to show what happens when gravity then for eyes and now
gravity is not a force you can explain what
we feel and throughout the movement of the planets considering that see
we are not in a region where where the space time include time for dimensions
is not flat they live in a region that's not french i have a culvert caused by
the mass and they will follow this culverture i will show an example here
this is something that i don't know if you work here i try to move to the next slide here
we have two scientists here have an apple and two scientists
here and they have a challenge they want to walk
parallel between each until
the top of the diaper when they do this what happens this
they begin to be near
er if they don't know that they are in a covered region
they can imagine that a force that to make
them to be near is likely the same thing that happened with yours
if you imagine in four dimensions that you don't know the curvature of the space
time space time for dimensions then this is like the eighth equations
that he associates the mass and energy refugee geometry
then the mass and the energy is responsible
to change the geometry of the space time then this is something that happens
it's not like what what i'm showing here because this kind
of changes happens in all directions but is an example you have here elastic
as i i don't know decorative words in english but it's like it's elastic
region elastic elastic region where you put here a mess
and then what happens this huge change the region the elastic you change
and then you have to line is here you you see that the straight lines
change for a woven line and this curve here
is the small distance between two points and this is what
uh and the light ever moves
into you need
less time to go from a part to another part right
say the shortest distance between two points
and in the as it is called the shortest distance
the lighting needs to follow the culverture of the space time [Music]
then what he predicted also changed he also using these he tied to the
movements of the planet's jobs of the planet but this is the most important
because here you have the sun here is the earth and here nesta
the stars near the sun the light of the star follow the curvature of the space time
and when we look from the earth this star is a different position
when we compare when our star the sun
is not near the position of the delights that
we pass it's not possible to see this when
it is they have the the sun and we can't see any star near the sun
and how that's possible to measure this only during a solar eclipse
and this what is fantastic because you actually predicted this from
his theory and in 1919 we had the first test of the theory
that happened here in brazil in the city of sobralge in brazil and there's in the also in the brisbane
iceland in africa and the results was according to
einstein theory they proved when you compare the position of the stars when the sun is not in front of
them and the position when the sun is almost in front of them
changes this made this is the original
uh image cooking here in sobral in brazil and this was fantastic because this is a
change in the way that
we see the universe and we don't have a bestiary until today this is what how
we see the universe uh
and the the result was presented in the holy austronesite
in may 29 19 19.
here at the prediction made by einstein of the angle
jango and he has the two reasons
he ain't so proud that who came here the leader of the international expedition here as
andrew cromley and the leader of the expedition in the prince p iceland was
sir edington and in the city of sobrow we have we
have these monuments to celebrate the results of the eclipse
and you had a big celebration in 2019
the 100 years of the eclipse
is the um is the location of where they were set up to observe this eclipse is that
marked in um in the museum or is that um
yes yes yes where the local where the expedition the expedition yes the
objectives in the seats in this period i i i don't have any maze but
you know of the city the city was very small very very small
and here as you're having in our city in brazil you have the church here
to cut the drawer for the city here and everything happens near the cathedral
very cool now having many proofs like it is the cross of your eyes staying many proofs
and now the gravitational lanes have many proofs of the theory ice and cavalry of grabs
here i made sofia i staying here in brazil when he visited brazil
here you can see here uh a hawk here this is the biggest brazilian meteorites
that's the meteorite of bendengo that now is exposed
museum that you have in here the channel out in newspaper
he give made presentations for a lot of people here
here they made the art here these are the astronomers of the
national observatory they changed the damage here but something that is
important here because you see here many people that are here are the driver
are the people that you work with the reception of the astronomy observatory
everybody joined this picture with einstein
yeah last thing in the end of his life i'm amazed of him he died in april 18 19
55. this is a short presentation about the theory of
general theory of gravity thank you so much i have many things
different about this but i try to to only discuss some parts of them in a
simple way right it's um you know uh einstein's theories that
they are they are still putting them to the test all the time you know uh is some
scientists it seems they would really like to prove that einstein was wrong but almost every
time they prove einstein was right and what it for me it is important very
important and fantastic is that he made a theoretical prediction
yes and then they proof the theoretical prediction nobody
expected that the light will prove when he passed near the sun
if something new they that they appeared from
the model viewed by iceland there's um
i shared a article um as you were discussing that
and einstein wrote a letter in 1936 and he predicted that the gravity from
one star would warp the light of a star directly behind it into a ring
that's what we see in these einstein rings he said of but einstein said of course there is no
hope of observing this phenomenon directly
but it goes on to say little did he know that one day we would have telescopes powerful enough to image distant
galaxies and you showed uh many examples in your presentation so yes the
gravitational lens is now is a reality you have the cross of your eyes then you
have the ring of ice things wingy everything you've found in the universe
and what you see that he is the mage of a galaxy or a star
that is behind the what you see that it has
changed the direction july change your x in our directions around this time something fantastic
it is fantastic yeah thank you that was a very interesting subject and uh
very timely as well so thank you my pleasure all right marcelo take care
thank you okay um it's always wonderful to have marcelo
come on our program and i'll remind you too that marcelo is uh
the senior editor of sky's up magazine so you can get your
free copy if you go to explore scientific dot com forward slash skies up
uh i'm also happy to say that we will our app will soon be available on the apple
store so where you can view that magazine on your iphone or
tablet your ipad up next is
adrian bradley adrian has been faithfully coming on the global star party uh to share his nightscapes uh
and um you know he is a uh he is a gifted photographer uh i i'm
often amazed at uh his um ability to capture the right moment of light and uh
and to pull off uh you know the compositions that he does and so in using both starlight and natural
uh you know uh sunlight and just clouds the
landscape environment and all the rest of it it really makes magic appear on the screen so thank you adrian for
coming on again uh no problem my bandwidth may not be the best but uh
i will uh for tonight my plan is to do a
presentation of how the milky way looks at different portal zones um i'll go ahead and share the screen
here and um this is presentation in a nutshell
uh how the milky way appears in different portal zones there's portal one when the sun hasn't
set portal three portal three slash four portal four
order four slash five so i would say that that's the end of the presentation but i'm going to elaborate
just a little bit let me go through some of the slides
go ahead no i said that would be very short if you made that the end of the
presentation information for those that's yeah depending on uh having to get up
tomorrow morning early so i'll uh i'll go through this if this is something that i think is uh important those that
are into the what we are calling landscape astrophotography these days or we're calling it nightscapes i like the
nightscapes uh word myself these are some things that i've found
um the two cameras that i use and there's a there's a third one out a sony
alpha uh seven three um but using a wide angle f28 lens i have a
four i have a couple 14 millimeter lenses i was i took some with a 17 that i once had
um these isos are high and that's because exposing the night sky requires your camera to be able to pull in
light you don't have sunlight to help you so you've got to pull in the light and the
with the newer cameras especially the mirrorless ones the better your exposure
the less annoying noise that a lot of enthusiasts worry about you get a better picture and
there are tools to take away the noise um astrophotography
lance doing landscapes with the night sky
it's very difficult to get in out of camera shot and say yep this is what i want mo
our process long exposure and the darker the sky the less work
you do in processing to um produce your image so let's go through what you get
i dare you all to try this
[Music] one is a the cities just get bigger
um i don't know that the milky way is visible at all when you get to borderland but portal 7
this is the best you can do now you can always take multiple images until you start
getting more detail but this is what your rising milky way looks like when you've got so much light pollution
in the area and understanding this is a uh it's a large city so there's a lot of light
near the city ann arbor michigan is a college town home of the uh michigan wolverines and the stadium is
one of many things that lights up the night sky there but on the outskirts of ann arbor
the portal zone this as the lower the border rating the more things you can see in the night
sky and the more that you image so this is this is a these are all
longer exposure images as i showed that other slide um you've got color in the clouds here
um you do see some milky way detail and um you uh you can get some of it out
it the milky way get the darker the bordeal side the more impressive
the milky way will look with a short exposure now if you process
um you can get some more detail in your nightscapes a little meteor that showed
up at the last second and uh photobombed my image here so you do you do see a little bit of um we'll call it color
noise but overall you know it's a um
you can produce pretty good nightscapes here and you can you can
have something to show for it this was taken excuse me um i want to say this is taking late fall
um as the milky way this is the uh northern part of the bulge starting to
go down um below the horizon so now if you go to a
a good a dark enough park to be called a dark sky preserve
the skies are off in border fort their best and now you're beginning to see in addition to catching meteors satellites
and more stars you're starting to see some more detail here you've got um
m5 the lagoon nebula shows up down here
the uh the cat's pawn the lobster nebula get washed out
by the uh light from distant towns we we call
light pollution we know that those lights you know the towns use those lights there's a ongoing
fight to change the nature of the light so that it's enough for the
town but it points downward or uses different lighting technologies to prevent the
light from escaping into the sky where it produces this effect on our images so
that's part of the uh part of the reason and we can do a whole nother presentation
on effects of light pollution but at the very least your images have this bit of
a glow at the bottom on a portal 4 site the sagittarius star
cloud is here i believe these are some these are well i don't believe i know these are more messier objects
jupiter and saturn so this was taken in 2020 and now let's
take a look at [Music] in the winter of border force sky you
can get the milky way and you can get some detail in orion um
but it does have to be a a fairly clear night to get this detail
and anywhere 30 second exposure the longer exposures
are usually a little better 60 second exposures but then you're doing a composite
image in order to get your foreground and your sky to match single image
i think this this is a single image and processed using uh some tools in photoshop and
lightroom the zodiacal light becomes visible and of course my
zodiacal light um image doesn't show up but never fear
i will uh i'll show you [Music] the image
that i meant to show in that slide for the zodiacal light let's uh
quickly find it for you um here we go
i think here we go what i do with that uh image okay
so you'll see more zodiacal light images as i go through the slide deck
but it is apparent that i renamed it that's why i don't see it here we go
it's faint at a border foresight but you see this conical light
as you get to the spring equinox and then the fall equinox
we align ourselves along the uh plane in the galaxy we begin seeing dust
latest uh information about this dust is that it's from mars um
and it's it's orbiting our solar system and we see it
for visual observers it can be quite a pain if it's bright enough to
wash out some of these objects that you may be looking for in this part of the winter
hexagon orion is always near the uh
zodiacal light let's fire up
the presentation again
let's see where we're at right to slide nine
now we're in now we're in portal three more milky way detail the images you might have seen of the ro
fiyuki complex you start to do you start to image it just doing a nightscape
and pulling in you pull in enough detail that little things like up
here the code hanger and there's a dark nebula called the uh
i think the barnard e because it's a dark nebula that shapes like an e you
begin to see these little things in your image when you take an image and
when you look naked eye you see some of this structure it doesn't have the color
but you start to see some of the structure you may not see this little uh dust lane here but you'll see
this dust lane and you'll see this shape in the sky it'll be it's kind of it'll
this comes across like a cloud and this comes across like a
darker cloud so other things that you see
more detail on the orion side when you shoot winter in bortle three
and your zodiacal light is a little bit brighter here's orion again when you think zodiacal light um around this time
if you've got a dark knight and you're at least the portal 4 or portal 3 zone start looking towards orion and then in
the spring look to the right in the uh fall look to the left
and you should see this is after sunset
it's before sunrise in the fall where you look to the left there are other things that you can capture the
darker you go um phenomena called gig and shine which i didn't happen to catch when i was at a
portal one site and that's coming up here's a different location
that gets down to a portal 3 this is while the twilight is still yet in the
air the zodiacal light was that bright there's ryan again there's the pleiades smack in the middle of it so you know
that this was a springtime shot here's the andromeda galaxy shining through
astronomical twilight the last vest vestiges of uh
of um night are still among us and we can still see these things there's a double cluster
um cassiopeia is somewhere right
down here so portal 3 is often dark enough to reel
out to see a difference in how your night sky looks
and astronomical dawn you can see the milky way as it fades
as it's rising similar to what we just saw with that other slide
it takes about five minutes and the milky way vanishes from your site
and um and that's the sun still has an hour to an hour and
a half before the actual disk of the sun cracks the horizon
so it's uh definitely two and you
can see even more detail this part
of the um we call it the summer milky way in the norm we should just call it the core
because as they see a different view of the milky way and for them
the milky way flies high overhead and both sides of the bulge are very much visible um
we call it summer milky way because we from the northern hemisphere are used to seeing it look like this this is what it
looks like right now around 5 30 somewhere between 3 5 30
before sunrise if you get up early enough this is what it will be oriented like in the sky now
again a lot of the details i'll circle the coat hanger the barnard's e
and this is heading toward this is altair so the um
there's many more things here if you if you know the plane of the galaxy you're probably
seeing some of the detail that's portal 2 where i live mortal too it doesn't get much
darker than that for those of you that have not seen the milky way in a truly dark sky like this
this is what it appears naked eye this is the color is there the structure
this is as exact as i can get it it's what you see if you were standing where i was
looking out at this night sky on in the band
um well early in the morning heading my destination was to get a shot like this
near a waterfall but i didn't make it because i spent too much time looking at this um it's a beautiful sight it's even
better to see it naked eye it looks something like this
and just this one so this is what happened at astronomical dawn
because i stayed too long i got here wanted to have the milky way going
across and the sun started the light changed in an instant
and when you're dark adapted you notice the very first vestiges of astronomical
twilight in the sky it happens very quickly there's a part of the milky way that was still visible that's the
sagittarius cloud and it was dissipa it disappears very fast
so a couple more slides we're important one now
and in a 30 that last exposure i showed you was actually a 60-second some of the
same detail and there are the lobster and cat's paw nebula
visible from this region of the south southwest
look how much data is in the orion region you saw some in the border
for portal 3 i didn't show you any in portal 2 zones it would have begun to take this shape
four to one and this is 30 seconds and then some processing
air glow and a lot of data there's the california the
pleiades with some of the void that's around it a lot of data shows up when
you're in portal one and
this zodiacal light image is worth um that's what you see i think i have a
couple i'm gonna go back to that zodiacal light image and i'm gonna put it before
ending the ending the uh presentation here astronomical twilight and the milky way
has this much the uh detail in it it comes that it almost it looks like it's coming at you out of the
sky it's uh it is a beautiful sight and there's this much detail
to the point where an image taken in only eight seconds we'll show you that one too
and let's see if and then bright enough to shine through clouds so let's see those three images um
the image taken in eight seconds
let's go get it um i'll see if i i thought i made a uh
folder where i kept them all
here so shining through clouds
there you go it was cloudy there's some milky way there's the light
coming from the milky way um it's that bright that you can see if
you take an image you can see parts of it as it shines through the clouds here
lighting up lighting up the clouds absolutely
um this is that zodiacal light image
with the so this is heading down towards the
southern part of the milky way that we can't see in the northern hemisphere in the zodiacal
light in the fall and it's angled the other way this is that image for that there was
one more that um i wanted to show let's see if it uh
yeah there there are a couple of images here and i'm going to quickly find them and
then i'll be done um all these images over time
that i've taken [Music] and here okay here
this is an even better you got the milky way lighting up the clouds and there's there's m5 shining through
the clouds it is it is that bright
um this is the image this was an eight second image eight seconds high iso eight thousand
with a uh lens that had a very wide aperture of f14
and we pulled this shot off in eight seconds without a without a tracker some chromatic aberration here
a small price to pay for what we have in the middle all this milky way detail in only eight
seconds at a portal one site it does not take long to get the type of image that takes you
30 seconds in a border foresight and you may
because it's dark it's a little darker there's a little more noise to contend
with and so i think those are the images that did not show up that um
i wanted to share so that is the end of my presentation um
one more view if you can get to a portal one site it's very imp it's a very impressive
thing to see darker clouds because there's no light pollution lighting up the clouds
different from the um portal 5 portal four zones where
the light from cities and towns will still light up clouds as they're coming across
so as of course any questions um i can you know i can be reached i do
have an instagram account atv sigma713 um i am on facebook just by name
it's htb sigma713 is my instagram account and what i'll do
is stop sharing here and i'll put it in
the chat yeah there we go yep so in the chat um
so that's my instagram page where i post um not only astro images but the occasional
bird image um i am beholden to uh
because i know scott loves the uh you know bird photography
yeah there you go scott great heading somewhere detail with a lot of
detail same camera that i that you use to shoot
this great blue heron with some detail the same cameras that i use to um
get night sky images and i do love both so so with that scott i'm going to turn it
back over to you okay all right that sounds great thank you for making that presentation
adrian we always love having your beautiful images grace ours
our program well up next are a couple of fellows from astroworld tv uh
daniel higgins and peter uh peter let me make sure i'm getting the last
name right help me out here daniel
yes okay great so let's get you guys on
um thanks for coming on daniel uh and peter
myers all right there we go there he goes so here we go
guys it's all yours okay um and uh where yeah i know uh people love
to watch astro world tv and they love what you guys do uh and they especially love all the
stuff that you're teaching them you know so uh tell us more about um
about the program and um you know what what uh what you got coming up well
first of all let me say uh adrian those shots are ridiculous
thank you i i said something the other night the last uh star party and i had to say it
again because i'm just fascinated by those landscape i can't i i i've never
done the landscape photography part of it i've always been the deep sky kind of yeah
but let me tell you something the composition of those photographs to me just like
totally blow my mind i'm telling you that they're awesome so nice job i appreciate it it's what i look for um i'll have to
jump on the aster world and uh join you guys one of these days i gotta make a point to do that you know you never know
what you're going to get you know i look for i look forward to it
all right let me give you guys this give you guys a fly yeah but uh and also um um sugi and um
and uh what was the other gentleman's name um uh oh you mean
yeah yeah now it's the enthusiasm
of stuff like that um i mean they can't be more than 10 12
years old and they're out here doing um doing a presentation on on
the search for extraterrestrial life and it's stuff like that that made me want to try and
get something together with that because it's that type of enthusiasm that we want we want to foster uh especially
when it comes to astrophotography it's just it's it's it's i don't even like to call it a hobby it's actually a lifestyle to me that's right
it's it's like one of these things where once you get in you're in you're not getting out you're
doing that again yeah yeah that's worse than the mind i could attest to that yeah your match
goes so far you may have one less person in the household but um that being said
um uh pete why and you know we want you to talk a little bit about what i what you do and how you do and how you got
how you got stuck with me i mean what's kind of funny is it's for my journey it's been a long journey i was
born and raised in toronto canada and i can remember getting that initial i think all of us got that initial tasco
telescope and and i mean it was the middle of winter time and i mean it's three in the morning and when you're young you don't
care about the cold right you can get out there you can just brave it i can remember my old man looking at me going look it look at what the hell is a kid
doing out there man is he crazy and i tell you what it's been a long journey that you know as you get into your your
teens you still kind of look up at the skies but then as you get a little bit older you know real life takes over but
when you kind of hit 40 or 50s you kind of look back on this hobby and you think hey you know what i've always been
fascinated by it but let's just see exactly now what the technology is and my god the technology has just grown
like light years amazing that's true yeah but let's let's talk about
real world for just a second okay what is the real world is it uh us bashing our heads in uh
uh making the the best living that we can or is it realizing our place in the cosmos
well you know what i guess it depends upon where you're at right now i mean we could look at what's going on in ukraine
and what their real world is here on unfortunately we're not into that kind of position so
i guess it really depends upon what your environment is that's very true that's very true
but uh you know thankfully i think astronomers are a community a worldwide community of
people that that understand the bigger picture and it's funny it doesn't matter what
continent you're on there's a common denominator that if you're into doing astronomy whether it
be visual or astrophotography it's kind of like how dan and i got hooked up i mean it was really through
scott scott cole that reached out to me when i put together his system and he said
pete i'd really like to introduce you to dan because i think it'd be a real asset on the show and so i reached out to dan
and we kind of struck up a an email conversation and then it kind of warranted into a telephone conversation
and next thing i know i got hooked on the show but it's it's a great show great format and and it is just a a
great learning curve for people because as you said it the hobby is going to grow and it's going to be depend upon
the young people coming in so that's what we have to reach out to yeah absolutely and that's and that's
again what we were talking about at the beginning where uh where uh sugi and adam were that that's the type of of of
people that we need to we need to take that and we need to foster that because you know we need new people i mean none
of us are getting any younger i hate to say it you know some of us are a little older than others but uh pete
but uh you know it's it's amazing when you when you see people that are eight or ten years old
and i remember on the last show that we were talking about um you know scott asked me
how i started on that started i was like seven i was like their age maybe a little younger looking at saturn and on
my back and i see in a straight through telescope and you know and and that's what it was and that's what got me
hooked and uh and and you know what i really saw a lot you know i
with the astrophotography at the most i know that there are other other parts of um astronomy the visual
astronomy and all that um eaa uh astrophotography in general and uh you
know there are so many bumps and and in the road that you could smack into and you
could hit against a wall and sometimes people don't get up from those hits um but uh but um you know and
that's one of the things you know what else better to have than i know there's a ton of
a ton of like there's a ton of resources the school of youtube you know books you know you know
lovely authors chris woodhouse charles bracken amongst a multitude of others um
that have put themselves out there and i said well you know what let's put ourselves out there because we know how to do this stuff why can't we help
other people from not stepping on the land mines that we stepped on and
and i'll be honest with you uh you know we do we do the show twice a week uh five hours a week we all donate to kind
of do this and you know we probably learned just as much as everybody else from doing this
and you know so many people in the chat like like uh cento was on he's always on the show
jim's astro amongst plenty of other people um and and they come on the show and they they really
like teach us as well and it's really interesting i think for me what i like about it is
that you know like dan i i'm in the profession where i literally put systems
together and i mean it's a treat to be able to look at a system talk to a customer you
know say what's your budget what is it you're looking for what are you trying to achieve and and putting the system together and
then when he starts to come back he starts asking you questions and you give them some recommendations and it's it's
the idea that you kind of get pleasure to helping people because as dan said we've all made these mistakes and as i
said it's been my model from day one you buy once cry once i've seen too many people cry multiple times i'm sure scott
you've seen it happen as well no absolutely absolutely yeah you see people that would start out
with systems that are pretty inexpensive but really marginal
and very you know an expert can take a marginal system and do great work with
it okay but a beginner needs much better equipment to get there to to to
accomplish the same kind of thing and so a lot of times people come in you know i
i i worked i i developed the story opt and uh back in the 1980s and
i quickly learned that for a beginner the easiest telescope for anyone to use
was the biggest most expensive telescope there is okay not only did it gather more light so you
could see things easier you know the faint fuzzies and stuff but the drives the mount everything was better okay uh
so focus mistakes are are not as easy to make and and tracking is much better and
this is 1980s with film okay so we were shooting 90-minute exposures you know this kind
of thing so um astrophotography was a daunting task and
um so it was uh it was tough in those days and we did not have periodic error
correction and we did not have auto guiders and we did not have instantaneous results that you that you
get today in electronic imaging so you gotta drop the film at the photo map
wait a week yeah come on or or you spent the money and you bought a dark room uh so i had a
dart right so that there was that um and then the tough techniques of
hyper-sensitizing film or using a cold camera these kind of things so there were many
more layers of techniques that you had to have with no instantaneous gratification that you
even got a sharply focused image so it was definitely going from the
precambrian period to where we are now with fast optics absolutely i'm telling you so we're we're in the
golden gate scott you didn't mention auto guiding back then
no auto guiding yeah you are the auto guider
oh yeah yeah i would be down at the ip in fact i have my
my guiding eyepiece that i would use and i would be on this thing with the hand controller yeah you're crying i mean
tears are coming out of your eye after 60 minutes of staring at a star and you
know 17 degree weather you know so it's it's funny pete when you were
talking about uh you know braving the cold weather as you're younger and all that kind of stuff and and you know my
father was the same way um and what he would do is he always said you got to say he got a saying when he he had a saying
and he would sit there and i still hear it to this day to this day whenever i'm doing something stupid like but i'm not
doing something very smart standing outside 17 degree right they're walking outside trying to i'm trying to
i'm trying to tweak my polar alignment in negative eight degrees and you know i'm trying oh man all this kind of stuff
and i care i mean i could hear from the upstairs window saying i raised idiots i raised idiots
and that's what he was doing he's like you're dumb what are you doing
but we were stuck we had crossed over to become astronomers you know
so there was no getting out you know there you know so no there wasn't there wasn't it was when
the backyard astronomy right yeah absolutely i can remember that i mean
that that same task once i kept that until when i moved down i looked at that thing it was kind of the back of the
garage and i remember it had the ra handle it had the deck handle and you look through the eyepiece and you know
you're kind of moving it to get the tracking and you know it was just incredible how you
just get hooked on it but it was just a hobby that was always just a um you know what's out there you know
what's what's greater than me i mean it was always like remember going up to georgian bay which is up into the uh the
lake huron area and is like our last presenter there i mean you're looking at the milky way i mean my god we're at
bortle one skies i mean you could see thousands of stars lying on a in the middle of summertime when it's 75
degrees and you're lying on your back on a deck or on the the dog boat and just kind of looking at
the stars that's kind of how i think we all got into it right i don't know what it means
long island border one sky what are you talking about
there is that observatory at the very tip of long island that i i visited 405.
it was pretty dark out there you know i was i was impressed you know i mean especially after hanging out in
new york city you know for a while uh yeah no i i'll i'll go north i have a
house up in windham that's a portal three and that's that's fine for me i'm okay with that okay sure
but you know it's kind of funny dan this is the kind of the informal show that we do you know
who laughs it's just a free-form kind of a setup and i think that really is what kind of
attracts a lot of viewer membership is that people just like the informal format of it and scott you've been on
there for money i understand so you've kind of seen what it's like oh yeah yeah i i
uh you know we don't do a lot of prep work for the show except to stage the
speakers and try to create a basic schedule um but uh
you know i think that our best the best presentations just really come from
people speaking from the heart or you know whatever you know and sharing their knowledge sharing their passion
um and uh and that really that that connects with a lot of people you know so
uh i also like to have um uh people who watch our show and listen to
our show actually come on to the show you know because it's uh uh
you know they they have a lot to say and so really a lot of amazing stories and
great images to share yeah yeah it's funny i know dan's heard this story for me many times but i don't know
if there's really much help for this poor guy but this one guy when i was at opp had bought this lost mandy gemini
yeah and i mean for the life of me man he calls me here about six months later and i mean i thought he'd already you
know had got it up and he was running it he goes i can't get this thing balanced i just don't know what i'm doing here
and i'm i'm trying to talk to him and he's just he's just getting more it's just fighting it huh yeah and you know what
it's like because you talked to a lot of these clients so finally i just said sir do me a favor just send me a photograph
of your setup so i can take a look at it well i'll be i'll be dan when i got the setup the counterweight shaft and his
counterweights he had threaded into the front where you're looking through the polaroscope
like this and i'm going to be dead how did he get the threads in there because the threads don't even and how is he going to get it
out so i'm thinking i don't think there's hope for those kind of people but for
everybody else there is right literally at the telescope like this and the counterweight just going
parallel like this i wish i kept that photograph because i would have had a little shame but i mean
we've all got those walls of shame in episodes oh yeah oh yeah you know i i
gotta take talk out there this is uh oops i did it again and then a whole bunch of whole bunch of stuff out there
that's uh that's just funny my my dog is saying that's that's the the
the the session of the donuts of astrophotography oh yeah
absolutely you know we keep on telling everybody it's like it's like you know you got that nice big red button that
says do not push this it's going to get pushed you know you're going to push that button
i'm just hoping that it's not attached to anything bad right
joe schmuckatelli who's watching on youtube he says i know a guy who hand tightened a part and it took him a year
to get it apart again oh man yeah i saw that i saw this one guy that had a
i'm not going to mention what type of focus it was a box focuser and you know he he attached it to you
know attach it to the rod and the course side of the focus and he attached it with somehow
i don't know how he did it but you know it's got that little bushing on some of them it has a little bushing right he
untwisted the entire bushing and it was it was totally unthreaded the
bushing was unthreaded and it was it was it looked like a giant screw that was like this big that looks right i was
like i'm looking at this picture i'm like oh my god what happened to this thing he's like oh i don't know i just
tried to unscrew it i said it's not a screw yeah right now
[Laughter] yeah occasionally okay and you guys
probably have run into this too and and working with customers that are really still learning the craft and skill of
using their gear where uh some some people like to completely
and i mean completely disassemble their equipment oh yeah all the way you know eyepieces all the
lenses out all the everything apart you know yeah and uh and then they come back and they want
they want an assembly manual you gotta get it back together
it's just like this guy calls me one time he says hey i'm looking through my power mate and i just can't see anything
so sir let me photograph if i can see what it is well he's got his telescope he's got the diagonal and then on the
eyepiece the diagonal he's got a power made he's got a five by power mate he's got another two by power mate so now
it's vertically coming up about a foot and then he's got his he's got a 6.5
though 6.5 okay it's like going through minus negative thousand pounds
the vertical length coming off the eye piece of diagonal it had to be fifty sixteen inches
like one photon an hour is actually getting through right it's a photon count the parties of
jupiter [Laughter] yes you could actually see the bottom coming right you can see it coming you
can hear you can hear it coming so funny i mean you know the stuff that
you know i i know i do retail pete does retail obviously scott you do retail we
all do retail with telescopes and some of this you can't make some of this stuff uh it's it is funny it's funny i i
don't like to tease customers but no but [Laughter]
these customers are the best because they are trying what we are not going to do so maybe in
the future they say oh look at where i figure out and oh that works but
of course it's one in a billion but i i i one more sorry i know
we're the last ones to close the show so i guess you could just like kind of hang out here but uh but um
i had a customer that that literally like you could same thing couldn't get in focus could get focused
and it was it was a new and he unscrewed the spider of the nude
oh i've seen that many times well here we go he unscrewed it you know the secondary is flying and all the nuts
are all over the place you know and he's like i'm going to send it back to you because i can't figure
this thing out okay sends it back i get the box and
i i lift up the box and i lift it up and also here ring and i'm like what what was that
and i opened up the box he took the spider the eye pieces the screws everything and threw it in the tube
no that wrap wasn't wrapped up it was called from california i look at the mirror the mirror is
scratched the second droid broke out totally destroyed so so what do we do there's nothing else you could do what
we did we made a maraca out of it and we're going around the store like this
you give me ghostbusters [Music] it was a cheaper new tony and it wasn't
like a quattro or anything but you know it didn't open but it was just it was just so it was so
bad when we heard that it was a total loss it was a total loss or or it's kind of like you're at a star
party and i've seen this happen twice i always tell people if you're going to buy a saddle make sure it's one that's
got at least two knobs because you always want to back up
because i can remember los amanda used to sell just that one saddle with the one knob it's sure no right at the start
party and this guy literally had thought they'd be tighten it up and then he slews the scope and it was a tech 140.
the 140 slides off man and hits the ground and it just breaks oh man yeah
yeah yeah you will never forget that's a party
and i've seen i've seen other things happen we did a star party one time at opt
uh in the parking lot and it was a hot day and we set up a
it was like a big schmidt casa grain you know heavy schmidt castle grain and so
we get out the tripod legs and stuff and we're all setting it up and we run back in the store to make coffee or something
and get you know goody cookies ready for the customers and what happens is the heat from the
sun kind of softened the asphalt and the leg punch through the asphalt and then
the whole telescope hits the ground
and i know that parking lot that's the one the manufacturer was not going to cover
that one okay oh my god no no no no no so the store bought this schmidt castle
and it was just ruined okay oh no yes there is somebody who we could go on all
night and talk about yes we could go online about that i mean i i i haven't been into the telescope retail business
as long as you two have but i mean uh you know i i i i got some stories i
actually i got some on video i got i had i had a i got some video oh yeah i got i got one one it was a beautiful telescope
it was like a circa 1980 celestron with the buyer's gear you know orange juice remember that
wonderful beautiful scope i mean there was like one little chip of paint that was gone off the side but other than
that the the like mint it was it was awesome yeah i take off the lens
cover and glass just comes off in my hand and the whole the whole lens is just shattered
it just shattered it was horrible i got yeah i had to put that on tick tock i said you know that's unticked
what not to do with your your your 1980 telescope [Laughter]
the dangers of selling telescopes yes ups and fedex have been horrible
recently i've had some really i mean shipping telescopes has always been a problem and yeah you know so
in the manufacturers you know uh you could make packaging where you know a ups
driver could pick it up and throw it okay yeah but i am for it to survive
because they do pick it up and throw it anyways i know sometimes i you know i remember when i
first started working at meat instruments uh we did not put fragile
on the boxes because as soon as a ups or you know a shipper would see
fragile they would pick it up and throw it you know so this was just an open invitation you
know so but yeah so anyhow yeah so these things these things
that's that's the way the astronomy uh telescope industry world you know so
i i you know i tripped the c11 to to tyler
and that got smashed that was packed by fedex
i was packed by them they had the package right now it was packed by them
i said i don't want to worry about the packaging i want you to package it so if anything breaks
it's not my problem okay i took a picture of the packaging
there was like one like pillow case on there one pillow pack on oh you mean
the bubble wrap no it was it was it was like that it was like those pressure phone thing that yeah okay yeah one
piece on the bottom one piece on the top now protected and a big in a big box
with so much room in it i could have probably slept in it it looked like somebody took the box and like kicked it
and it was just it was so bad i was like tyler i don't know what to tell you it was like a thousand dollar telescope
it's like the pet detective uh delivery man you know so right yeah oh it's horrible it's horrible but
hey you know yeah no so these are these are things that happen one i will tell you one
story i i went to the uh the first time i went to the winter star party this is
down the florida keys it's a fabulous star party uh when they have it next time you gotta go it's just really
incredible uh it happens usually in february and it's perfect weather down there where it's freezing everywhere
else in the country um but i i i used to build my own
telescopes when i was at mead you know just to make sure that all the everything was done exactly the way i
wanted it you know and um so i had built my telescope i packaged
it okay i put the seal of tapes on everything on it and i shipped it to marathon
where i went to go pick it up from the fedex office there when i arrived i saw the box it was perfect it had my tape on
it everything was fine okay it had not been opened
when i get to the start party field i ripped off the tape pulled out the telescope and every bolt
the motor mount bolts the fork arm bolts the retaining ring for the corrector
plate bolts all of them had i guess from vibration
had wiggled them themselves out some of them were completely out
it was the strangest thing i ever saw and i would not believe it okay so up
until that time sometimes i would hear stories from customers saying yeah there was no uh damage to the box and uh but
the telescope's got damage okay i used to like be very skeptical of that
after that star party i wouldn't believe anything oh man i wouldn't believe anything so
yeah that's crazy oh i tell you that's that's what i said there's so many great stories in here and i tell you what
who's got a great wall of shame is if you ever get a chance to talk to george at ap ask george say hey george i hear you got
a good wall of shame you should hear some of the stuff that he's had to see oh yeah
oh yeah i think i think the saddest thing is uh uh for people at work
uh you know handling product in the industry is especially if you're like an amateur astronomer also working in the
industry like i was uh you know i would receive telescopes that
were poorly packaged like daniel was talking about okay where is just
horribly packaged and and we're talking like schmidt castle grains or other nice telescope gear that would arrive totally
destroyed and this is stuff that came from a showroom okay so you know that the telescope
never saw starlight it never did what it was born to do okay it's just a ride
back to you as trash you know so um you know scott you mentioned that you
worked at opt one thing i liked about when when craig was there was that do you remember when
you walked into that showroom floor do you remember that tile compass that he had on the floor
now this was after this is long after i i had left i left opt
1986 so i worked there from 1975 until about 1986 in october and i
started working at meat instruments and i worked at meade for 21 years and then i started this business at explore
scientific so uh but craig and i are like father and son you know i mean we think
was such a great i knew craig i knew craig when he had long hair that's it but he did he had you know
craig he's yeah ball you won't believe what he looks like now i mean it's a shame what has happened to
him i mean he's down to like 90 pounds right now and it's just so sad to see this parkinson's disease yeah yeah
because i mean he used to be the life of the need remember he'd get dressed up in the costumes superman and tape and he'd
run down and then oh sure yeah you should have seen him at real parties not neath okay
i i think that's a story for another channel it is a story for another one
yeah i know craig craig is a is an amazing guy uh always lived life to the
fullest gusto and he's even still doing that now even with parkinson's okay so
uh you know he nothing if he wants to go somewhere do something he's doing it
he's traveling he's you know i uh yeah i mean i i i too feel that way but i've known
craig since i was about 13 years old yeah 63 now so that was the one thing
that opt was before it was bought out by dustin i mean it had that showroom floor
where literally if you're driving safe from la down to san diego and you're watching my god you can walk in there and spend
an hour just looking at everything and you know the people you know were were knowledgeable they were talking but that
was kind of the old brick and mortar stores that really could yeah and it was very very expensive to do it was it was
very expensive to do because the manufacturers don't they they might have some
allowance for a showroom model but not much and most manufacturers don't okay
so you would put okay maybe at a minimum ten thousand dollars worth on the showroom floor uh opt could have upwards
of several hundred thousand dollars on the floor i mean as as demonstrator
models okay and they had to pay for that so that that was a an expensive proposition they
would have two or three meat 16s they would have the celestial clients less runs on those highest amounts i mean it
was just amazing what they had there oh yeah that's true that's true um
but uh you know uh the dot-com world has changed the face of retail you know and
uh um you know few people will even even if they know there's a showroom somewhere
will make a long drive to go see it you know we get people here we have we probably now have the largest showroom
in the country uh right here in springdale arkansas so uh one day i'm gonna come by and hang
out with you guys yeah because i mean it's a little bit concepts has a great showroom they
really do so yeah yeah and it's even better now that we moved to uh you know moved to stony brook about four or five
years ago i mean it's right the place in there yeah i know i know that's where i met you yeah
right but uh you know i mean that the place in patrick that was just like a that was a that was a mess
but um i mean i mean but it was a mess it was like it was like it was like it was like a photoshop photo mark turned
into a telescope store it was like it was like it was a bit it was a big mess but i mean you know but it was it was
one of the few ones on long island i mean it was us and burger brothers other than that there was no other
telescope distributors all around and you had to go to high point or further west yeah but um right but now we got a
decent showroom we got plenty of scopes and not as big as explorer obviously but it's it's big enough and it's nice and
yeah we do we do you know we got a lot of people that come in a lot of foot traffic so daniel and peter we got a couple of
big eclipses coming into the united states we got the 2023 annular
and we got the 2024 total eclipse of the sun and
uh daniel i know that you were in the business when during the 2017 eclipse so
uh and i know and so all of us that we're in the business know how insane it was yeah this 2024 eclipse is supposed
to be double that yeah it will be they're calling it the biggest
the biggest science event in human history that's what they were calling the 2017 eclipse okay
right at the time it was at the time now this is double because it's going to go over so much
more uh population uh and uh you know i was kind of curious uh
how close uh uh you know how far you'll have to drive
from long island to uh to get to the center line well to go to go in total the
the easiest place to go to for me would be the buffalo area okay um so that's about six it's not far
it's about seven or seven hours it's further than chubby springs uh but um i you know i was told by a friend of a
friend of mine in in texas it's literally going right over his house
awesome yeah so i'm thinking about going to texas for that um he said i i i have
a place and it's free and uh so so if it's free i might just take that
and my wife jen she has uh she has uh you know she's got friends in texas she's from texas so we may just you know
kill a couple birds with one stone and uh go down there so but i mean it's literally going right from like buffalo
to like mexico it's like a weird art going through the united states that's true maxie you'll have to come to the
2024 total eclipse so i'm gonna be in texas uh we're running a
star party actually we're in a spot in hill country where
both eclipses will pass in one spot okay so we're calling the crossroads of the
eclipse's star party and uh we're getting uh we're getting close to announcing pricing and all of that um
but it's out in the middle of nowhere in hill country texas so what you would do is probably fly into san antonio and
make the uh hour and a half two hour drive without say uh do you know we have the flights
from assassin to houston right maybe yes yeah you could fly into here
and make it it's funny you're going to be real close because i'm going to be in uvalde which is the hill country
right that's right yep we're going to be north of uh a small
town called lakey texas what i did is i helped one of my clients build a roll off roof and he's got three scopes in
there so it's right now wow totality and we're only like perfect yeah so we're just like a half hour just
north of mcdonald's uh in the hill country there yeah so it's gonna be real close half hour away from mcdonald's
no no it's it's called mcdonald's yeah i know i know we're gonna have the eclipse mac okay is
what they're gonna do the eclipse double eclipse mac of eclipse yeah yeah that's
right that's awesome this is real funny this is a customer of mine
he's got like 5 000 acres and what it is it's one of these high-end
gaming farms where they'll bring these exotic animals and all these there's a lot of it in hill country i saw all this
is the why like african animals and stuff you know that right they charge five thousand dollars for a
safari so these guys come up there with their guns and they shoot whatever they want it's a shame because you're getting
you get in this area and you see these beautiful animals i mean there's wildebeest and there's giraffes and god
knows what else but but on the real exotic stuff that these hunters paid big big money i mean he's got guys coming in
from dallas to houston that spend a ton of money but right tiger king
show yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's just it's sad because i mean he
he he wanted to be able to have this roll-off roof so that when people it's they stay in the bed and breakfast uh
cabins and he thought that he could build this roll-off roof where at night if people want to come in and they could
do their astrophotography he's got the warm room and they could do all their imaging but but anyway that's gonna be right in the path of totality there but
you're right it's gonna be the big one i thought the great american in 2017 was going to be the big one
uh it was a big one it wasn't it was something like uh almost 300 million
people saw it this time it's going to be double that so it's incredible yeah vertically it's
coming right up to as you said the population area yep yeah so if you guys are watching out there if you guys have
not seen a total eclipse of the sun don't cheat yourself out of this one okay because
it is miraculous it is unbelievable it's life-changing you know
when you see we see a total eclipse it totally is and and please
don't do what my wife did [Laughter]
oh no oh no here's the story dan's going to be in trouble here okay i have to
close the door so
you know i was there with my 127 explore scientific on my okay my atlas
now i have okay and i'm sitting there we went to we went to this place right in greenville south
carolina it's right in the that area and um a friend of mine found this farm somewhere and went there and they got
live music and bar it's a huge place it's like a winery but it's not winery it's just like a field but it's called
huge that's really cool and and i see this nice big circle of like you know it had like
a a collage like a stone collage of the universe on the ground big circle and there's nobody there no i see scopes all
over the place enough like i said can i set up here right here
and she's like yeah i said well why isn't anybody sitting up here like nobody asked me ah i said well i'm gonna put it
right in the middle so i put my telescope right in the middle of this nice area wonderful i was interviewed by
about four or five different national television and radio stations nice and that's right
and i go jenny whatever you do whatever you do the only time
the only time you can point your your camera towards the sun is when it's totally
eclipsed so when i say go take the video camera and point it up to the eclipse
and when i say stop bring it back down okay no problem so i'm at the telescope
and i'm sitting on i'm like getting everything ready i'm getting all my brackets going i'm getting all this stuff going on and
you know it was only like a minute and seven or a minute and 10 seconds if i remember right total software eclipse uh
probably from south carolina and so total comes i i whip off the uh you know
i whip off the the solar filter that i had on and i go and i start taking pictures of the total sort of eclipse
i'm getting ready for bailey speeds and getting ready for all this kind of the diamond ring and all this guy though so i'm saying and i'm i'm watching the
camera i'm not watching the telescope but i'm watching it and then it stops so i could just let it i said good let me
see it let me see the camera let me see it so i go and i press play and i'm watching it
and all i see is tops of treetops i'm like oh no i'm like wait where's
where's the eclipse what is it i was afraid it was going to burn out
the camera
she never pointed it out oh man i i i was i was like so i was so
mad that's the only time
that's the only time you could put the camera up there because it's kind of a once once-in-a-lifetime experience
doesn't mean that you have to get angry oh god oh man and on top of that of
course you know i was so excited my my pictures were just the tiniest bit out of focus
but yeah what do you get my first solar eclipse i'm planning to get better you know well there's two ways to do a solar
eclipse one is you're the astrophotographer and you're busy with your camera gear and making sure all the
settings are right you're doing the filter pulls and all the rest of it and then there's just watching it
exactly okay and watch a lot of astrophotographers completely
miss the eclipse experience you know they don't see the shadow bands so
they don't really get time to dwell in it and absorb what's going on you know so
uh i kind of recommend uh seeing a few eclipses okay for sure i mean once
you see one you want to see another one yeah absolutely uh you know on at least one
not taking a camera and actually watching it because that's that's amazing
you gotta have a gotta have a camera like you know what you know what shot sorry you know you know what shocked me the
real real most about going through the total solar eclipse in 2010 you know what shocked me the most
was the drop in temperature yes yep the drop in temperature was i mean
it just shocked it really shocked the hell out of me i'm like all right well you know i get it you know you know
the moon's in front of the sun is flying but i didn't expect it to be so drastic yeah and it got it got cold it was it
was what it was april 17th i think or april 27th something like that in 2017
and so it was in the middle of april in south carolina you know it was 75 80 degrees
and it was like it went down to like low 60s
and it was pretty it was pretty drastic it was pretty drastic yeah that was only
just over a minute or two you know depending on where you were this eclipse when you go to see it in
texas it's going to be like four minutes yeah i i started three up and then in the buffalo yeah it's gonna be the
longest people come down so you can get more more you will feel a big drastic
change and uh and then you also see how wildlife changes you know they think
it's nighttime it's different it's weird you get like the crickets start coming and and all these things are going
around you start it's it's very it's surreal man it really is it's weird because yeah so
like you're like wait a minute it's like one o'clock it's nighttime you know but we
we have in the 2020 eclipse in in balcheta
uh where we are positioned here we have a huge wall of stone
and there there was parrots when we arrived there was
saying singing singing the paris that was really loud when
the sun goes up they completely shut up
you know yeah you it's like right now you're shutting up now
but yes and also the the temperature changed a lot i remember
feel like it was um a view like it was you are in in mars
because we the ground that we had there it was a almost
orange for oxide in the the stones and
the the contrast that generates the the shadows it was
so surreal it was amazing yeah that's the real is the word
yeah yeah you have a clear sky exactly yeah yeah we were in a deserted
place it was december here in argentina it's plain summer and it was hot really hot
and suddenly we were with our with our uh shirt
and pullovers because it was freezing i mean in a couple minutes it's just amazing and the wind
is i mean it's in under struggle i'll describe it's yeah it's a real that's a
word surreal that's right i think my first my first time to see an eclipse um
i had stayed up now i'll give you a little bit of background
story i've never seen an eclipse before i've never been to one i'm working at meade instruments and i get asked by
wgbh boston who does the science program nova to go with their film crew to film
the eclipse in 1991 for mama kaya okay so i'm nervous
i'm really nervous and i'm setting up all the gear and everything and because we're up at 14 000 feet
there's no oxygen okay so you can't you can't sleep okay
so all night long i'm drift aligning these mounts okay
and i'm using a 22 pound 10 inch casa grain telescope to do this
polar alignment and then we're taking it off and we're putting an 80 pound
35 millimeter motion picture camera on there and when you change weight like that
the mount flexes it bends just ever so slightly okay you can't look at it see
it bending but it's bending okay so my polar alignment was off every time
so we're up there three days getting ready to do this and i'm up all
night doing this no sleep i'm nervous as hell okay because i don't want to blow
it for these guys finally i get the the day before or the
night of okay for the eclipse that that is coming
i get the last mount dialed in because i have to over compensate the polar alignment so when
you put the heavier equipment on there it bends the mount to perfect polar alignment okay
and i do this and
i tell the director i say okay i'm done polar lining bring the photographer in
and they said what are you talking about you're the photographer so now i'm really okay
i'm really nervous he said don't worry you know we got guys that'll take care of the cameras and stuff you just make
sure everything's going okay all right so we filmed this thing and uh
i will tell you that when i saw the eclipse with four days and three nights of no sleep
okay oxygen deprivated i am almost hallucinating okay
when the eclipse happens it is like it gave me a feeling of
impending doom like something really bad was about to happen okay
like something was horribly wrong and the only thing i could equal or
related to is when i was a child watching the wizard of oz and you know the the fiery
apparition of the wizard and stuff is coming out and i just had this real so i i can relate how
people in early times that they saw an eclipse that they would be scared
witless i mean it was just you know right so
member um i saw a pocket that's one of my favorite movies actually oh god
yeah yeah yeah yeah so they're all freaking out of the eclipse so
i posted a picture that i took from the eclipse and i i
almost quoted you because i wrote the exact same words i
really yes you have the same feeling yeah i can copy paste it i you can get
the feeling that i mean not knowing everything we know about the universe right now what
do you think if you see a scene like that it's out of this world
it's amazing it's amazing you know what's interesting though is is that you know scott you kind of brought up a
point earlier in this conversation is is that is it the vine providence or is it just
the stroke of luck that we happen to be at the right place where the diameter of the sun
is perfectly suitable with the position and the size of the moon to be able to give you an annular or that's true
that's true i mean how many other worlds that are out there but then again think about it let's say we had two sons right
or we had you make all that geometry happen now let's throw life on the planet but let's
let that life percolate until you get to the monkeys
[Laughter] oh yeah and then we have guys to fall back on like einstein and you know his
prediction of light bending around the sun and and the uh the the
uh the talk that martello gave about the uh uh the eclipse that they uh you know
they did to test einstein's theory uh back in the early 1900s
and and they proved it you know they proved it and so it's just it's it is amazing uh the path that
humanity's been able to take in a pretty short time to start to understand the universe in
the way that we do so you know and we've we've just scratched the surface we really we don't know what dark energy is
we don't know what dark matter is you know we there's so much we don't know but you know this kind of brings up is
it a philosophical is religion is it god i mean you can definitely name it
whatever you want but i really can't separate any of it because it's it is uh you start to you know what i think it is
it just comes down to being evolution right i mean think about it if
what's the word if man had the same intelligence as he does now as he did when he was born it's there's a certain
term for it but i think that you know what yeah we would appear as omniscient is
maybe one of the words for this because we we would seem to be so knowledgeable well that's the point
though is is that you know we have to it's it's evolution is frankly what i say is everybody says well there's a god
i go yeah evolution is god it's evolution because what happens is that we evolve we get smarter we we test
theories we prove theories so really is there god creating all this or is it just the fact that it's just evolution
that's creating it all and we're just getting smarter because we know now what the understanding is and the physics of
it yeah but we still there's still basic stuff we don't understand we can end i
mean we can we can give you you know we can play back the big bang to the moment almost to the almost to
the moment of the big bang but what happened before that well that's that's fuzzy you know that's uh let's let's not
look at that side of it you know let's think about that not right now anyway it's because i don't have an answer
let's think about that very first image that came through on the hubble telescope and let's see what that first image is going to be with the james webb
telescope that's going to be incredible yeah you got about another month or two to figure that out so i can't wait to
see yeah well that's almost done with that collimation so uh
that's a feat of marvel engineering right there to me that's got to be the the ninth engineering marvel to get that
telescope to do what it's doing and to unfold it and have it shot up there where it's at that l6
i mean that's just an amazing feat of engineering unbelievable
it's unbelievable josh mcatelli says the grand question will always securely couch discoveries
science cannot and is not trying to answer that question you know uh
one of the things that if you ever do the science you know it's good to do amateur science because you can get
involved these pro-am projects and stuff and you start to learn that you know science is just a process it
doesn't answer every question you know you have a hypothesis if the hypothesis
rises to the level of being a theory you know where it's peer-reviewed and you
know every scientist has thrown a stone at it you know uh trying to break it down
uh the theories that survive that you know they're still theories you know they
you know so getting putting your finger on something that we would call scientific fact okay scientific fact has
been blown away so many times by a new theory that proves that that scientific fact is wrong okay really
wrong and so you know and it's just kind of a deepening of understanding of the
processes of things and i think that's fascinating you know uh trying to answer the god question is
uh much harder you know so you know and that and that that is uh that's a tough
one you know so um i think that most astronomers when they're out under a
beautiful dark sky you know with a milky way stretching overhead
at least i do i get this feeling of sacredness it feels sacred to me especially if i
see a big bowl i go around you know and break up over the sky and i just go wow okay
and um and then you look in the eyepiece or you take an image and you're seeing
galaxies that are tens or hundreds of millions of light years away you know and you start
thinking about look back time and you know i mean well
how is this as a thought though i mean let's just say that there's religious people out there that believe there's a god believe me i'm not saying there is
there isn't but i'm kind of on the fence post because i keep thinking is is that okay if there is an omnipotent god he created the
universe black holes gamma ray bursts you name it right everything
he had the foresight i mean if that's if there is yes he had the foresight to say
okay i'm going to put my son on a planet that's very insignificant planet and i'm going to teach love when it's only 12
million people on the whole planet now we got seven billion and the doomsday clock is three minutes to midnight
yeah yes well it is i think i i i put out a question
into the chat earlier today and i said uh i asked the audience you know why they thought that astronomy
was good for people you know i was just asking them to email me back their answer but
i think that astronomy lets people see the big picture uh i don't see
astronomers rising up at star parties you know like groups of them fighting with each other or you know and what i
see with astronomers and we see it on global star party all the time is that uh we all kind of think about
the same things uh you know i think that it is uh i think it's healthy i think it's good
um you know and uh you know as far as a community of people
uh mostly you'll find a very honest forthright you know
type of group you know that you go to a star party with you know maybe a million dollars worth
of equipment out on a star party field it's rare really rare that you would hear about anything being stolen
you know and it'll be out all night you know out out in the open you know even
even that you do is a give to another friend or colleague hey
yeah yeah we have people that send their cameras to other countries okay
uh you know try this out see what you think you know how giving is that that's amazing you know
so there's there's uh there's some lessons here you know
there's some lessons you know um uh i think it was david levy that said
that every every leader of every country should be an astronomer or a physicist you know so
you know some a person of science uh so that they can understand
more than just uh you know trying to set up boundaries and the haves and the have-nots you know so
is it too late can we get putin into that group or is it
oh maybe converted into an amateur astronomer i guess i don't know i don't know
all right but i think that's where we are right now um
guys thank you so much for coming on to global star party uh we will be doing
this again next tuesday um and um uh you know we really love the audience
that uh has watched and posed so many great questions and made so many
wonderful comments and um uh you know it's great to have astroworld tv on with us right now it's
you guys put on a great program and we recommend the show you so i put i put the link for for your youtube channel in
the chat definitely subscribe to it watch it um and uh we'll be back uh with many more
global star parties so any last closing remarks you guys want to make
i'd like to use my powerpoint did you want to use your powerpoint oh it's too late let's go back too late
okay all right well come on next tuesday uh dan and you can run your powerpoint okay
is that a deal all right okay all right so you guys have a great night uh clear skies to all of you and
uh keep looking up so
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thank you
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wow