Transcript:
yeah steve's got those headphones on you'd think he'd be coming in in stereo or something
quadrophonic there we go
there we go so let's see
is this better can you hear me better now yeah a little bit yeah a little bit better yep okay i know
what to do [Music]
[Music] yeah but i was i really been thinking a lot about the
that uh the phosphine detection in venus that's a big game changer if that turns
out to be
well yeah you know um uh i'm sure libby's gonna get into this
libby you never had a chance to meet or even know about carl sagan while
he was still alive but he was somebody who really believed
intently in in the existence of extraterrestrial life and yet he said at one point
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and i think that applies in this in this
venus detection yes the the you know it's like well we
can't think of anything else that it could be therefore it must be life and i just think that's a stretch
sherlock holmes would disagree with you you realize yeah i know when you eliminate all the
others right yeah uh i'm amused by by that because
uh four or five i've been for for more than a decade i have been
creating a uh space exploration challenge for senior
aerospace engineers uh final projects that they work on as a group for cal
poly pomona and a few years ago i
i said propose design a mission that would collect samples of the
atmosphere of venus in order to search for life in the atmosphere
either um in in in situ you know during the taking or on
the spacecraft or get them back to earth in such a manner that they could be cert
tested there all right so uh and and they did a pretty decent job so
i just uh am amused that that the science actually maybe may be catching up
one of the uh you know i i encourage everyone who's interested in this particular topic
to read the article on national geographic's website by nadia drake
who is the daughter of frank drake by the way okay and one of the things she points
out is that um even though they used both
the james clerk maxwell telescope and alma for this phosphine detection
it's still a sketchy detection and it's not entirely clear that it
really is phosphenol and so um need a lot of follow-up that's
for sure yeah and ironically it didn't take long the the breakthrough initiative has already
funded sarah seeger and a bunch of people to uh intensify the search for
biosignatures in the atmosphere of venus as a result of this result
the pace of science can move quickly
apparently
but if it is real if it turns out that it's confirmed boy then that is big news
oh yeah
well you know the thing is one of the reports i saw we'll have to remember that there have been any number of spacecraft
that have drifted through the atmosphere of venus to get to the surface
pioneer venus had three probes there have been at least like a half a dozen veneers some of them
had mass specs aboard and i honestly i i saw it in one news report
but i cannot remember that there was ever a detection of organic material
in the atmosphere of venus and yet that's what the report said well actually technically speaking
phosphine isn't organic to begin with it's ph3 it's a
phosphorous hydrogen compound so there's no carbon there but yeah that it
matters in the sense that what if it's if you believe the same
thing something's got to be making it well the thing is steve you know all right so
phosphine uh i'm trying to remember what the atomic number of phosphorus is but that's the kind of relatively simple
compound that would have shown up as a peak in a mass spec and it never did
it could be a case of being in the right place at the right time that's why it wasn't detected yeah and
and you know that that's the other thing the the the observations that went into this result are whole disk observations
um so we don't know where on the disk of venus this phosphine signature actually exists
or maybe it's just spread out over the whole disc but like in the case of mars where there are
these methane signatures which seem to be relatively localized uh it would be very interesting to see
if they're localized on venus and and how they would go about getting more
spatial resolution to to make that determination
steve i think you should resurrect that apple atmospheric sample return concept
yeah i'll have to dredge it up it's not too hard to find atomic number
15 so 18 that's
atomic mass 31
amu's and there are there are isotopes
but uh there's yeah phosphorus 30 31 33 2 and 33
and 32 is the is the most abundant no it looks like
31 would be that would be a amu of 34 right uh
no 31. oh oh phosphine oh i see i got it oh yes
yeah oh phosphine yes 34 yes sorry didn't understand oh 35 31 and 3 yeah one and three is
thirty four yes sorry okay so that that's let's see uh nitrogen with nitrogen that which is
not there would be thirty oxygen would be thirty
32 but it's not there either i mean right uh sulfuric acid is
gonna be everything's heavy yeah that's right everything's heavy i i mean that's kind of my point right
so something with a with with uh an amu of 34 would be
sort of all by itself in that spectrum in a mass spectrum yeah
i think somebody is going back through the the pioneer venus data as we speak to see if there was anything in the
in the descent yeah this stuff but this stuff if it
really is there would you expect would be bubbling up uh through the atmosphere
well that's the whole thing we don't know where in the atmosphere it is
we we assume it's in the upper atmosphere in the cloud deck or higher because that's that's where the emissivity would
be greatest but um it's not necessarily in the cloud
deck uh kelly this is chuck allen uh how are you doing chuck pretty good how
have you been great um hasn't phosphine been detected
in jupiter's atmosphere as well yes but in jupiter and saturn um
the the the physics are that it's created at great depth under a very high temperature conditions yeah and then
and then and then gets convicted into the upper atmosphere
we got a number of people watching right now um jeff wise is with us here uh
nicholas rocha hello guys i'm on the roof making photos
hard 72 okay that's cool uh dusty happens is with us uh brett blake
he says i still think phosphine sounds like a brand of toothpaste
or or kitchen cleanser that's right now with phosphine yeah venus now with
phosphine astra beard is of course uh
with us but he's in in our vip group here a guy named kill shot i have a question
all right libby and the stars good evening
thanks for posting in there libby um
dusty ass he's been basically looking forward to
this all week um that's great
aaron thompson i just thought comment by nasa saying that they're going to prioritize a probe
due to the venus data i wonder how that's going brian fanning
hello listening for new jersey love these parties
um question i always thought that the moon phases were due to the earth's shadow casting a
shadow on the moon no it has to do with uh with
uh you know its orbit
there's there's good self shadowing
i'll tell you i thought i taught high school astronomy for six years yeah and teaching the moon's phases
was that was conceptually one of the toughest things to get across as simple as it might seem it's really
the notion you know that the moon goes around the earth and how the sun shines on it changes as it
goes around the earth it just didn't it never sank in you couldn't get the room dark enough
to demonstrate it right yeah hey chuck your microphone sounds a
little bit muffled i don't know why yeah i know um i've got new equipment on the way um
that's cool is the volume low just put on your mask and we'll think
it's that yeah
i had a catastrophic laptop failure so i had to transfer my flag to the desktop and i'm using earbuds if i
have a new cam with the mic and speakers coming you should fix it brett blake says what is phosphena
potassium atoms surrounded by some hydrogen i can't believe that just doesn't occur
yeah well that's that's the million-dollar question right now the
the authors of the paper looked at i don't know something like
several dozen reactions possible reactions and there's just no way to
to create it at the levels that they see it which is you know parts per
million but that's that's a lot yeah and and just to make sure it
phosphor it's phosphorus not potassium
[Music]
europa is one of the largest moons of jupiter and we believe that europa has a subsurface ocean tens to hundreds
of kilometers thick and so this ocean may be one of the best places to search for life
in the solar system there's been three space missions that have provided evidence for
europa harboring liquid water the first one is voyager in the late 70s the second one is the
galileo mission in the late 90s and most recently howell which detected plume-like
emission from hydrogen and oxygen which is closely related to the existence of water beneath
its surface
[Music]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts with explore scientific
and we are uh here with the uh the global star party nine
and uh with me is of course chuck allen libby and the
stars jerry hubble's here astro beard david levy gary palmer
john chris kelly beatty steve edberg cesar brolo steve malia rodriguez
soleda and space65 out there so i'm not sure who this guy
is all right but uh anyhow um and we've we've got a couple other guys
online too but uh we're happy to have you here i'm glad
that you're joining us again for another tuesday night star party um we have uh great talks and
uh we have um we're going to have some space artists join us which is really
cool they'll be joining us later we're going to see people come in and out of this event probably throughout the night
chuck allen is joining us from the astronomical league he'll be asking questions for door prizes
um and we have again a global star party northern and
southern hemisphere also from europe with uh gary palmer um
somebody else who says uk live i think that is still gary palmer because that's he's actually taking images uh live
right now and uh tyler from customer service who's blacked out
with his uh screen so yeah i'm working with tyler scott are you working on the msro now
he's i've got it set up and we just started uh we slewed to vega and took a picture to
make sure we're getting some stars so that's cool so we're gonna have some live views tonight that's very
cool ron delvo's joining us as well here so but as tradition holds we're going to
have uh david levy join uh or he's already yes but he's going to give the opening
talk and remarks and probably some poetry uh you know i really i have to say
that i am i look forward to this uh star party uh every time and uh
i think that um you know uh it brings me a sense of uh
warmth and happiness really just to uh know that uh so many of my friends that i've known
for such a long time are on with me live tonight uh some new new people also that
know better and um so we're we'll get started with david i know that all of you have enjoyed his
talks with each star party and uh he's a real treasure and uh it's great to have him so david
i'm gonna give you the stage thank you so much scotty and uh
welcome to our ninth global star party and i have to tell you at the very beginning that the half hour that we
spent together just as the group of presenters just getting to know each other and talking about
recent news and astronomy and stuff is one of the half hours that i prize
more than anything else during this time because it really gives me an idea to find out
what's really happening we're all now we are all now going through a dreadful
period in our history this is the uh obviously as i'm sure you've heard
the most serious pandemic since the flu in 1918
so it was over a hundred years ago and this is showing absolutely no signs of going away life is rough schools
can't happen normally nobody can work flights are almost empty
those that are flying and it's really sad except except
that the night sky is still here you could say if you want to be negative
that the nice guy doesn't care doesn't give a darn about about what we're doing
about what little problems are happening here on this tiny little pale blue dot as carl sagan said
but on the other hand maybe it does maybe in its lack of caring the night
sky beckons us it beckons us forget about for just a while just 15
minutes half an hour forget about what's happening on the earth for happening in the world go outside
and look at the sky see what's there look at jupiter and saturn so close together
high in the south right now come out again in a couple of hours and you'll see mars better than it's been in a decade
or more just absolutely magnificent come out and take a look through a
telescope at some of these planets watch venus come up in the
early morning sky so beautiful and bright and as libby i think is going to tell us
and others we are having some extraordinary news coming from venus right now to talk
about it the sky is something that's different it's permanent
it offers a sense of peace and a sense of loveliness and i'm hoping that if we get do nothing
else in this star party we will be able to accomplish that to persuade the viewers here
around the world in north america south america europe and other places around the world
to enjoy the night sky and just come out and enjoy it you don't have to know anything to be an
amateur astronomer in fact the word amateur itself means comes from the latin to
love if you're an amateur astronomer you love the night sky by closing tonight with two quotations
both of them are adaptations of poems that other people have written the first one was originally written by
sevilla martin in 1905 it was a religious poem she wrote his eyes on the sparrow
and i changed it around to be something about the night sky whenever i
am tempted whenever clouds arise when songs give place to sighing when
hope within me dies i draw closer to the sky from care it sets me free my
eye is on the sky and i know it watches me my eye is on the sky and i know
it watches me the other one the other one that i have tonight i
wrote in a period of a couple of hours when i was having some insomnia a few days ago
and it is called variations a variation on a theme actually cosmic variations on a theme by
leonard cohen with with a david levy twist to it
good it's time to go outdoors tonight
the sky is dark some stars are bright the milky way shines overhead now see ya
a comet rises in the east with end to strife it brings us peace
and calls us to a cosmic hallelujah
hallelujah hallelujah
back to you scotty thanks wow that is awesome david i want to tell you
i i'm looking at of course at comments coming in here and uh jeff wise had mentioned
uh if i can pull her he said i did not realize just how much
i enjoy mr levy's presentations he is an amazing person and i think that
we're all uh we all feel very special that you're here david so thank you well thank you and especially thank you for
that comment because it does mean a lot to me especially now oh yeah
yes well up next is a person that has a voice that's warm and
familiar to most amateur astronomers um i uh you know i
i've often called him the voice of sky in telescope magazine but to me he's also the voice of astronomy
he is the voice he's the familiar voice that echoes the
the love i have for the universe and uh you know when you meet uh and i'm
speaking of mr kelly beatty and when you meet him in person uh you'll
you'll know how uh smart and amazing and charming the guy is but uh how lucky uh
it is that we have him in this world and um tonight he's giving part four of his
seven part series of uh the state of amateur astronomy
past present and future and so i give the spotlight to kelly beatty oh thank you so much scott
wow i'm uh it brings a tear to my eye uh you say such nice things about me every
week and i i keep trying to live up to them it's all true though so
so for those uh who might not have been with us the the past you know we've we've sort of followed
the arc of the development of amateur astronomy as the passionate pastime that we all share here from the
post-world war two years uh through the the heyday of the space race
and to the um the beginnings of the of the the paul of light pollution that
that envelop almost all of us we're going to take a walk tonight through um
the assertive resurgence that has taken place i would say within the last uh
20 years or so having to do with the availability of amazing equipment for amateur
astronomers not it remains to be said that those of us there was a huge spike
in popularity in amateur astronomy during the during the space race during the late
50s and early 60s and a lot of people got involved uh just
they were swept up by you know the whole notion of astronauts and exploration and so forth those people
are all like 50 years older now me included and uh
david included and a couple of the faces that you're going to see here that i recognize
and and with that time in addition to gain wisdom i guess over time comes a sort of
increasing reluctance to get your tail outside at two or three in the morning to watch an occultation or a meteor
shower and and one of the things that has happened to rekindle interest is the availability
of telescopes and and equipment that hadn't been imagined in during the
space race you know i was looking through old issues of sky and telescope and and in the
60s and 70s there were all kinds of telescopes available from from you know garage operations and
refractors and everyone those of a certain age remember the unitron refractors with the turret
on the end with six eyepieces that you could dial in and boy it wasn't that fancy
but but those telescopes were all rather modest ultimately in terms of
their aperture i mean the the the the refractors were what we call acromats which had simple two
element lenses that had issues with with color fringing and so forth
and today we are the beneficiaries of a cornucopia of like exquisite
astronomical gear some of which you'll have shown to you later this evening
uh a lot of which explore scientific cells other manufacturers sell and and the
i think the the pivot point in all of that came during the mid 1980s uh with the arrival of halley's
comet this is this is sort of where i put a stake down but some of you remember us
a chain of um stores called the nature company which evolved into
discovery channel stores and i used to go down at christmas time and watch people buying telescopes for their kids
you know eight and ten-year-olds who were precocious and interested in astronomy and that that was the beginning of what
i would call the hundred dollar telescope it was the first wave of optics which until that point
had either been developed here in the united states or in japan or maybe a little in taiwan
and generally they were good quality telescopes we got this first wave of telescopes
from china that were incredibly inexpensive under a hundred dollars and so i would
watch these parents buy a hundred dollar telescope and take it home
they knew nothing about telescopes they only knew that their kid liked telescopes and they would take it home
they didn't know anything about telescopes the kid was too young to really know how to make it work
and so um i think in some ways the the manufacturers of that era did
themselves a disservice by rolling out these these really inexpensive telescopes department store scopes we came to call
them uh because it discouraged a lot of people from moving up in the in the food chain to better quality
because they loved what they were seeing to their small scopes and they wanted something bigger i want to show you an example that
remains today this is a telescope that i bought at a cvs right
it's a uh it's a it's a it's an uh a 60 millimeter refractor and i want
you to notice the price 14.99 jeez
right i bought it at a cvs at a drugstore yeah imagine what the
quality of that telescope is and that's sort of one of the holdovers that we have and yet that what i might call this
the second wave of telescopes from china brought a new sort of maturity
of the of the uh of the art and companies like sinta
and uh joc which is the the company that that explore scientific
partnering with in the right hands with the right design
suddenly the the the western market was flooded with really good quality telescopes that were
incredibly affordable compared to old standards and some of you are old enough to remember that a dynascope
rv6 a six-inch reflector with a clock drive sold for 200.
which in modern uh dollars would be something like seventeen hundred dollars i mean no one would pay
seventeen hundred dollars today for a six inch a reflector and and that's sort of
emblematic of how far we have come with our with our technology with the availability of
really good quality optics i have one other i'm going to show you right here many of us have traveling telescopes
this is mine this is an entire 80 millimeter
uh f6 telescope with a with a go-to mount in a carry-on bag that i can take with
me all over the world cool and and uh let's have a few modifications that i've made along the
line but but the thing is not only have the optics become better but the whole technological revolution
the go-to telescope revolution has made it more amazing
and easy than ever for someone who knows nothing about the sky to have a telescope that can literally
uh find its own way in the sky there are more there's more than one
telescope manufacturer now that has a telescope that literally you set it up you plug it in you turn it on and it
finds exactly where it is in the sky by mapping the stars that it sees
against against a database that it carries and it automatically knows where it is
and this this go-to revolution if you want to call it that harks back to the late 1990s with the
introduction by need and scott probably remembers this and scott by the way i think you should chip into this conversation whenever you see fit
because you were certainly on the front lines of all of this sure the me etx 90 ec
it was a 90 millimeter maxitoff telescope right way more focal length than any
beginner ought to have all right but that's beside the point but it had go-to technology
literally if you if you took it outside and you pointed it at two stars in the sky and told the telescope right
this is aldebaran and this is vega it would know where it was and would be
able to guide you to in this case twelve thousand different objects and this is a comment by
uh leif robinson who was the editor of sky and telescope at that time when we reviewed the etx i remember he said
here's a prediction the etx auto star concept will go down as the greatest happening
in amateur astronomy yet indeed i believe it will grow the
hobby on a scale heretofore unimagined wow really profound words and we all
we all kind of scoffed at leap but but the reality is that these go-to telescopes have indeed
revolutionized uh how we go about stargazing and especially
in light polluted settings a go-to telescope can show you things that you would not have
a prayer of finding if you use traditional star hopping methods that's true and so and so it took all of
these all of us 50 and 60 and even 70 somethings who had kind of
felt we were past our prime in terms of observing and suddenly given us a new lease on
life i took account i have 12 telescopes in my
garage wow now most of them are small telescopes that's my thing small telescopes i i
love to do observing with kids which i know some of you do i know david you like doing that as well
uh but but i have surely i don't need 12 telescopes but i keep coming across
these really neat telescopes that say oh that is such a cool idea i need that
yes and so and so um that's what i i think that's what the the the uh
importation of chinese and taiwanese and still japanese telescopes has given us
there really aren't that many us-based uh manufacturers of scopes anymore
teleview and astrophysics come to mind but really for the mass market
these these amazing optics coming out of asia have made it so easy for us to find
really good quality telescopes either in highly corrected refractors uh that shows crisp pinpoint images of
the stars to gigantic newtonians on on simple uh
uh you know mounts that that can be pointed uh things that were never available to
us before are now and it's kind of reawakened in me and i suspect a lot of you as well
the urge to go outside and see that starlight like we used to do when we were young oh
yes yeah and and in a way that many people never imagined
when i first got involved with the go-to telescopes i recall some of the
old guard that we were destroying the hobby of astronomy you know that you know to allow people
to robotically go from object to object uh uh ruined
uh the uh you know the you know our our ability to understand
the sky uh i will admit that there were people that never
quite learned the sky like uh like um uh you know like reverend evans for example who could
you almost robotically move his arm and find hundreds of galaxies to search for supernova and galaxies that kind of
thing um uh people like david who still sweeps the sky you know
at nightly for comets with his uh dobsonian and probably every tiny little asterism
in the sky is very familiar to him um but it did allow
amateur astronomers to enter into pro-am projects that maybe they never
could have quite completed before to do surveys of galaxies to you know
and for people to do astrophotography uh now often from the comfort of their
own living room okay uh and as we'll see demonstrated here later this evening
yeah that's right and so we are uh so uh i will
take uh take a moment here in a couple of minutes to see a live in coming from the uk with
gary palmer's telescope of the pleiades before we move on to libby but you know i think
kelly i think that you touched on some very important uh aspects of of our hobby
and have brought us up to date nearly up to date to where we are now
go-to telescopes are now commonplace but i i sense that amateur astronomers
are taking the next big leap in this golden age of astronomy so yeah and next week we're going to be
discussing the advent of digital imaging and how that has completely transformed
how we see the night sky that's right that's great okay all right so um let's
go back to our gal review here uh gary um you have uh i assume that you
still have some clear skies out that way is that right yeah we have i've changed
the target tonight um just because uh buddies was starting to um
jump out a little bit we've got some high cloud here so i'm just going to bring this up and i
will share the screen with you from the uk looks like of the pleiades
um we're i've moved over to m45 at the moment
[Music]
[Music] let's just take a couple of minutes and then we can go home
that should be sharing with you now oh i'm 42. yep absolutely it is really really low
at the moment so it's literally just come an interview
now these uh describe what the equip the equipment's like a little bit and um 115 mil
refactor on there um no filters on it we're running some tests on the camera tonight so
we've got the new zwo asi 2400 which is the new full-frame camera
oh yeah the giant um and this is in roi so we brought this all the way down
right the way down to roi so if i very quickly
get some control back there we go stop the capture on that and then we
just run this over if i run this into full screen and just bring in a quicker time
somewhere around there you can see how far zoomed in we were then we were really zooming right in on the
center and new uh center and using uh the abilities of the camera so even though the object might look
distant yeah we can now change this and we can uh bring this all the way in come right
away and when you're saving these these safe as they are you know so
one of the beauties of these cameras now is we can play around with this we're not fixed on our size of
the image coming in we can play around so it's starting to come in now
okay beautiful beautiful it's awesome
we will uh we'll come back to this if you still have some uh clear skies um and at this time
uh we're going to go to uh libby and the stars for those of you
that might be new watching this program libby is 10 years old she is intensely
interested in astronomy and space exploration she decided a while ago that she was
going to talk about venus tonight and this was before the recent
announcement of the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of venus which has really sparked a lot of
intrigue about the possible signature of life uh within the atmosphere maybe
microbial life in the atmosphere of venus so a lot lots of conjecture
still not any confirmation but it is tantalizing and um so libby
uh i'm gonna give you the spotlight here how do you feel about uh being with all
of these great astronomers tonight it's pretty amazing yes
yep well it's amazing to have you here tonight too so uh what what what can you tell us
about venus do you have some well back a long time ago before
i started my very first call about two nights before i made a whole list of 56
topics about space i want to talk about while doing the calls and venus was one of them
because i was doing the planet planets in order in our solar system and it news came in just in time
like i was happy because i was like i can't find enough on venus
and i was writing down i couldn't find enough and then i was like hey look at this article
i'm like whoa here's life so apparently there's a chemical in the atmosphere
that could be able for little tiny microscopic
life to live in the atmosphere of venus and one of jupiter's moons may have
oceans and there's oceans on earth if there's oceans
and there's something in the water for a long time it can start to grow moss and i wouldn't say moss is completely
living but maybe it could live in under the water but i was definitely
excited about that news and i was like i wonder about like could the moss live
in the water the microscopic bugs and if
like if there's any way nasa could launch anything into space and i researched more about why nasa
wouldn't let anybody go to venus and it's because it is scorching hot
uh there's lava volcanoes it's hot enough to melt lead and the circuits overheat in
less than a day so they would have to gather as much information in a little bit but
they do send orbiters and they let them travel around and
hopefully they can get enough information from looking at the surface without
putting someone on there and getting melted that would not be pretty it'll be good yeah no
just the whole thing just starts melts yes that's right maybe we'll send someone
to orbit around venus or the moon to be able to have a huge telescope and
look down at venus because also with a telescope you're not only the night sky but if you
see a bird in a tree you can also look at that so it didn't take a huge telescope up
there and they try and look for you through it instead of going on the surface
that would work but you would only see the clouds and the clouds like cover the surface of
venus and it creates a greenhouse effect
so it is extremely hot and the atmosphere is so thick you can't see far
and it just creates a greenhouse effect so on mercury when i did my mercury
presentation i said it's cold at night because there's no atmosphere to retain the heat
so all the heat just stays on venus and it just creates
so much hotness and there's little slates of rocks nasa believes there's little slates of rocks and volcanoes
and just under that it's just like lava and stuff and i was like amazed i was like
back then in the 80s i used to have nasa tv going on in my background
when i was doing school and i had to turn it off because we got a lot of tv bills but
um i was listening to it and they kept on playing the same skit over and over again from the
80s it was basically like an introduction of the solar system from nasa
right right and it was like we believe mars has all life and i was like
oh yeah me too and then i'm like what it's on venus
it's in the completely opposite direction it's on the hottest planet where humans can't even live
but it turns out it's an atmosphere so so libby do you think do you think a
lot of kids think that um that we will find life on other planets maybe moons or you think we're
going to find life out there yeah nasa released the golden record
and i don't think that was the right way to approach it because i think some tiny little microscopic bugs are just going
to turn on the radio and listen to earth i think they're probably not going to
listen to earth and understand us in any language
but they probably will they probably will find life out there
not with the golem record they sent out inspecting inspecting
little tiny microscopic buds to turn on the radium lifting but they will find life out there maybe
with a microscope that uh definitely send the orbiter around and see if you could send the
telescope up there but venus is scorching hot and it covers the surface
so maybe if you went a little bit more down into the atmosphere you would be able to
look through the atmosphere and see stuff because that's where respecting likes to be but uh
right other than that you'll just melt apart just yeah that won't be fun
so lily do you hope that um uh in your adult life you get into
university that you can do research on on a planet like venus would it be venus that you would want to
check out um i've always wanted to see mars a lot um especially nasa's working on it
now so by the time i'm adult they'll be like hey we have a hotel on mars want to come
and visit right you might be right about yeah they're doing that with the
international space station i think so like one million dollar visits to the
space but hopefully mars but after that
i i really want to visit uh neptune one of my friends i was in my
cabin at space camp in love of neptune she's like i want to go but i'm not good enough to be an
astronaut so i was like i'll i'll go and take pictures for you
that's very kind it'll be cold there it will be cool well libby thank you is there anything
else you want to say in closing any any words of uh advice for young
young people interested in space at this
time school is good stay in school stay in school okay all right well that's great well
lovey thank you thank you well um i'm going to take the spotlight off on
you we're going back to gallery view and uh we have uh with us
um kelsey poor from novaspace.com which
is kelsey is uh kim poor the space artist
uh i mentioned that you uh you might have uh grown up in the gallery and and uh
have lived eat eaten and breathed space art for a very very long time i think that
you're also involved in operating or
and it's great to have you on today thank you for having me
yep so what can you tell us about nova space okay so nova space started can you all
hear me okay can hear you fine all right nova space started in 1978 my father kim poor was a space artist
and we started taking other people and putting them in the gallery and it just snowballed into this huge
space art gallery we're still the only people who solely sell space art
so let me show you my screen okay i have
my okay so this is my
company this is michelle rauch she is our artist
and i really wanted to bring her on with me because we're featuring her this is the
first time we've made prints for her and these are all limited edition signed
and numbered and uh they're beautiful and you can get them framed if you want
we have a framer who's been working for us for 20 years and she's really good at picking them out
so i just wanted i i want to um share my love of art space art with
you guys and i'm sure you'll see more of me every week i have lots to talk about
that's cool that's very cool okay so uh do you as uh do we want to bring
michelle on and let her share yes okay all right so we'll do that
and um here we go and let me find you michelle here you
are so michelle i was uh
facebook page today and uh looking at some of your work on nova space and uh i understand that
you're an engineer and an artist so that's that's a i think
that's a little unusual combination you know so that's very very cool that's very cool
so uh how how long have you have you always drawn have you always been interested
hey thank you scott uh do you hear me okay i hear you fine can you hear me okay
you can thank you so i've drawn all my life and i consider artists or engineers and
engineers or artists because we're always drawing the unknown or designing the unknown
so there's a lot of engineers i find out that they have a very uh good creative side and when they are
like chief engineers they are very creative so uh we're finding more and more
engineers that are very artistic right right and uh
so what what is it that you like to specialize in i think i've seen a lot of your work with uh astronauts the space
explorers um spacecraft so um i've been
i've been an engineer working for the aerospace industry for for many decades and i recently
became a um aiaa associate fellow so aiaa is american institute of
aeronautics and astronautics and uh what i try to do is i try to
revolutionize the technical world with a contemporary touch of art so i've
done photorealism style of artwork but i want to capture the emotions of people just like
libby with her wanting to go to mars or even the feeling of what's in uh
what's what's happening in venus so i want to share i don't know if libby can see this this
is my rendition of a hotel on mars so it's a little bit whimsical
we have robert bigelow and uh marilyn monroe so it's so wrong it's right and they're on mars and
this is called viva las mars great i love it
i love it so you are the best at nova space this month and uh so um
how many works do you have uh on exhibit there at this time
right next to me is a um print uh that is being reproduced at
nova space and they're only making 20 of 20 and they're going and i
really like this uh moonscape so my moon right next to me is not gray it's pink
and um and it it does help when you come at the end of the day that you have a little drink
and you just select the um certain colors you like you pull them you're like i feel this
color and you make a certain surface of the moon so this one
has been already debuted at an organization in las vegas um and al warden
he was inducted as the distinguished uh winner in 19 2019 excuse me
and uh in honor of his uh lifetime achievements so uh
this one is called moonscape so that's that's one that i can share with you right here
and another one uh we are enjoying the 90th anniversary of pluto
yes we consider it in arizona most of us a planet so um
when i was in las vegas during the time when uh al warden was being inducted um
i created my version of pluto and the inspiration came because of all
the um marilyn monroe movies i watch and how she smooches the top of a forehead of a bald
guy and i thought you know this pluto needs a smooch and the whole celebration is called i
heart pluto so this is also for sale this is a very simple
print that i have but she uh nova space offers a beautiful 12 inch by 12 inch
handsomely framed uh piece so are these and i and i have the others
are these prints all signed do you sign them yes i do oh wow okay excellent
excellent and um i do have another type of uh artwork um that i
i changed a little bit because of inspiration came when al warden had passed away
and as you know art is a very good therapy even if you don't know how to draw
they're like i don't know how to draw but i'm upset put something in your hand and start doodling uh you will be very surprised what you
what your body wants to create and uh there there was no um
tiki astronaut design so i designed my own so this is my astronaut tiki i'm my one
yeah i like tiki and then i went to a textile medium and i
put it on on a wine shirt
awesome well that's great um well it's uh michelle it seems like that you
really celebrate uh all aspects of of space exploration
not only from the work that you do but uh the way you express yourself the vision that you have and the way
that you want to share that vision so that's that's great and i love it and i really appreciate
you being on our our program tonight um anything else that you'd like to share before certainly so of course
um you know what you can't go out without a matching mask ah
if you only go out so a few times you got to go out and style and the last thing um uh before least
um i have a postcard and i'll put my email address i can send you a postcard of al warden
which is the space walk yeah the technical term would be eva of astronaut al warden but i kind of
like this spacewalk and he has the infamous um uh world record of being between the earth
and the moon and holding that record still so libby i know you said you're not sure if you
would be an astronaut and hopefully she's still on there i would encourage you to become
an aerospace engineer we need more engineers i'm an engineer it's a lot of fun yeah kind of is hard
but hard is good and we have an organization a i a a which um people of
all types of disciplines can join um i'm i am not an aerospace
engineer but i am a electrical engineer my first degree in information systems um engineer my masters so
we need them all to do what we need to do to get into space and uh find find those worlds
awesome well thank you so much how about uh how about you kelsey or do you have
any parting words for us um uh while we're uh before we go to a
break yes um you guys come visit our webpage
come take a look novaspace.com i'd like some feedback from you guys uh i'll see you next week we'll talk
more about space art and um i organized an event called space fest with my family
if you would let me talk about that with you absolutely absolutely that's great
that's great well thank you both for uh taking your afternoon or evening to share your love
for um space and space art and to let us know more about
novaspace.com that's very cool very cool and i look forward to seeing you next week thank you
take care take care okay so um well next up here uh
before we go to break we're going to take about a 10 minute break but before we do uh we are going to
um uh talk with uh chuck allen he is the vice president
of the astronomical league chuck are you still online with us all right so i am can you hear me all
right so uh uh the astronomical league is the official sponsor of uh
of our door prizes um and uh they are they so the this is the way this works
they will ask a question you research the answer or find the
answer to that question if you just happen to know it that's great you will email your answer
to kent at i'm going to put right here in chat for you guys explore scientific.com don't don't put
your answer in the chat box here you want to put it in email okay
and the first one to answer that question correctly will become the winner
that is verified by the executive members of the astronomical league they will then
announce to you that you are the winner uh and uh notify us to
send out your door prize to you so the first uh door prize up will be a an explored
scientific eyepiece of your choosing so this is um this is exciting uh
for anyone that loves visual astronomy so so what's your question chuck first
question are we doing the questions or answers to the previous ones well let's do the answer to the previous
one first do whatever you like yeah let's do that one and then ask the question all right i need to share a
screen at this point all right let's see
first of all if i look a little tired i just finished my 58th all-nighter at my remote site in the
last 25 months and so my sleep cycles don't exist my circadian rhythms are
something akin to a very poor junior high school bands okay so here we go uh the questions that
were asked last time uh first of all can you hear me okay yeah i'm
jury rigged here um you're a little bit muted on my end uh
can you hear me at all i can hear you but it's very muffled yeah it's it's just it's just the his
sound system okay yeah i had to transfer uh my laptop failed the other day so i'm
in between systems here it's all right chuck all right first of all um let's go to full screen here hang on
okay ah that's not it hang on
all right sorry
why is it doing this i'm sorry
let me go yeah hold on just one second
i do not understand what's going on here i'm going from current slide and it's showing a different slide altogether
hold on one second see the uh if you just click on that one slide you don't have to go into presentation
mode right okay that's fine all right anyway what important discovery was made by the hill 200 inch telescope team on
september 6 1997. the answer to that of course was the discovery of two new
moons of uranus caliban and sycorax and the winner that we
determined and i don't necessarily know these names it was c lewis phonology.net
oh yeah chuck lewis okay chuck lewis okay okay here's uh one of the discovery
images of sycorax the previous image showed caliban
taliban by the way is about 37 miles in diameter of sycarax about 74.
these are i think the two faintest moons ever detected from ground-based telescopes as well
the next question that we had was what astronomical league observing program is named after a famous french
astronomer that of course charles messier the messier observing program which was the first
league observing program more than 50 years ago we have 74 of them now
he did his observing from a little porch that the museum clooney in paris that's visible
here which i had a chance to visit on the trip there one time i felt like it was a return to mecca it
was so incredible oh yeah beyond that roof i had to talk my way up there because it was under
construction at the time the third quest oh excuse me the winner
of that was john johnson he was the first to answer charles messier
so john johnson won that one question number three uh when does the
next observable total solar eclipse occur in the u.s and at what time universal time is maximum eclipse
that answer is uh of course april 8th 2024 at 1817 universal time
i believe the eclipse will be visible over mexico
before arriving in the continental united states and the winner there is dave and i have a last name of mg
i'm not sure if that's an is that it's david okay he is the winner of that one yeah
good job dave that's great yeah he's been working normally he's on these programs but
he's been very busy recently excellent well
let's let's go on to the questions and we'll do just uh question number one and then
uh have you asked questions as we go along the program okay okay
question number one for tonight i have a milk dipper have an alpha star that is only my 16th
brightest and the greek mythology and poised to avenge the slaying of orion
what constellation am i ah excellent all right so
you're going to want to take your answers and email them as quickly as you can to kent at explorescientific.com
and uh thanks chuck we'll come back to you on the next break so thank you all right
so at this point um we are uh yeah if you want to stop sharing
your screen there and i'll take us back to speaker view or
gallery view it's like hollywood squares astronomical squares
there we go there we go so uh at this point guys we're going to take a 10 minute
break um i hope you're enjoying global star party 9
so far we do have some live views or it did have some live views coming through telescopes
and hopefully we have some more after this short break so i will go to that next
and let's make sure i'm doing this correctly
here we go and we'll be back
and tyler can you hear me
hey jerry i can hear you who's that it's steve oh steve how you doing doing
well how are you good so i've got tyler on the observatory with me on tight vnc
and we've been taking pictures of the dumbbell i'm just showing him some things on the observatory
um i thought so i just got off on the phone from him and uh
i thought he was gonna turn his microphone on
um i don't know what i don't guess i can share my desktop because it'll overwrite what scott's got showing up there maybe
i don't know oh yeah it probably will jerry yeah
yeah i don't want to do that i'm just uh so we got we've got smoky transparent sky i mean
not so transparent skies but we can see a ton of stars and it's and the seeing
is excellent i've got uh typically
when i image bin two my stars are like two and a half pixels
but it's down it was down earlier to 1.7 pixels full width to half maximum
so the seeing is excellent nobody likes a bragger jerry no it's right now it's 2.1 pixels which
is still a little bit undersampled
i haven't seen a star in over a week oh really oh man you should see this i'm i'm on m27 right now can we mute
jerry he's making me sad [Laughter] just shut him down yeah i'm looking at
all these little posters here from the prior star parties and stuff like that and just really amazing how many great
astronomers and people have visited and and uh talked on these star parties
so it's been really cool real privilege uh for me that's for sure oh yeah all of us to have the
interaction we would never have this level of interaction in a couple years in three years of time
probably [Music] yeah i'm getting a message right now
from caitlin aaron's er uh caitlin caitlin lives here now in
arkansas but she is uh she's working with nasa um and uh so she
we're she's asking if she can be on she couldn't come on tonight but she wants to come on some other night
so we'll have her on um but she was uh she's been recognized as one of the uh
fine young young americans in this country i forget exactly which uh organization
had uh given her an award but it was an award that was also given to john f kennedy
so that's amazing pretty amazing yeah she's a she is a uh
extremely knowledgeable very enthusiastic young scientist so um really happy to know her
uh yes yeah somehow i had the uh powerpoint set for playing just slide 14
through 14. i have no idea how that happened sorry about this
i did not i did not put that setting in there
hey i've given so many sales presentations or things blue blew up completely in my face
i've given a thousand of these and i've i've never had that happen before so yeah i'll tell you guys a really
funny story um in the 1980s when i was first giving presentations about astronomy
um the rotary club in southern california north san diego
county had invited me to give a talk about you know astronomy and
exploring you know the current state of exploration in space and stuff so i had all these slides i'd collected slides from
you know you could get them from jpl and from a number of sources and so i'm i'm so excited to talk to
these people and i have that you know that little remote controller in my hand that was tethered
to the slide projector and i was talking about the vastness of the
universe and i throw my hands up in the air which dragged the slide projector off
the podium with all the slides flying all
over [Laughter] the first row
and i said that concludes my talk
it's very hard to recover from oh man it slides back in order or even
in the right way so that was very funny you can imagine how embarrassed i was
well i accidentally i accidentally did that to a guest speaker one time when we had the slide carousels and
uh a couple of the slides flipped out and it was more than a couple and i
put them back in i was certain i'd put them back in in the correct order because of the way they had flopped on
the ground well it turned out during the program that it they were not in the correct order and
the uh there were these these horrible pauses as they reach the slide they weren't
expecting and you know you quickly learn how good your speaker is you know if they can roll
this right that's right that's right how well do they know their subject
it's also hard for me to believe we've done nine of these star parties so far
we're planning on our next european version which will happen i guess it's
going to be on the 25th of september so that'll be a friday
that starts earlier here for us in the states um so that we can capture the night in
europe and that'll be cool how did the one go last friday night scott
it was good it was very good we went all the way from norway from sweden to australia uh
so that was that was excellent um and uh you know we um
uh caesar brello uh uh faced uh fierce winds hurricane force
winds while taking astrophotos down in argentina you know but uh he he was successful i
was really amazed i was amazed he he uh actually captured
some enough frames to get was it 2kma
was it 47 i think globular star cluster and i think it's the second brightest
to omega centauri so um so anyhow
you had holding that is 100 down yeah that's right it was an ixos 100 he
was using
yeah that that particular little mount has really surprised us and how well it works
we're getting down for the last minute or so here um hey scott a question about the exodus
100 if you thought about adding a sort of traditional hand controller to that
well we had long conversations about that before we even started the project
before i had noticed that so many apps and remote applications were going
to tablets and touch pads and stuff like that that i felt that uh
that you know that it was time to move on but uh we did uh we have
tactile buttons that will uh with little tiny silicone suction cups will attach to
your tablet and give you tactile buttons okay you can move it north
south east and west and it costs like i don't know 15 bucks something like that yeah that that that's my knock on on the
the tablet approach because it's it's just i have to keep looking at the tablet it's
just not tactile you'll like the buttons because they have metal tips on them and you can use gloves
you can use and it doesn't cost as much as a hand
controller would so we're coming back now
okay so we are back and we are here with our gallery of astronomers um
and so you know i'd like to take a minute with each of them to uh uh let them
uh say where they are what time it is uh and uh you know what they're gonna share
with us tonight so we've already talked with chuck um up
next uh to my right at least from what i see in my screen is uh richard grace the astro beard
and so richard what are you what are you where are you and what time is it and what are you going to share tonight
it's 11 10 in the evening it's annapolis maryland we're uh getting some some smoke from
the west coast uh haze um in the upper atmosphere um i'm taking two minute exposures at
f10 with a c8 uh trying to find stars uh very soon
another planet will come up over top of the house probably in about an hour so hopefully i will get on that i had
something else planned but uh this guy has other plans it does yes
this guy will often tell you what it's what you're going to do that's for sure sorry about that yeah
the weather said it was going to be clear two nights in a row and i was like yes and for the star party too and like last night i could see vega and
jupiter and mars right and that was it i i couldn't believe i could polar align i couldn't
even see polaris but i could see it through the polar scope so i got it polar aligned and it's out there and we'll uh give it what
uh what it can see but there's nothing worth looking at right yet okay all right we'll come back to you
and then jerry jerry what time is it where are you and what are you doing
so uh we're doing great here at the nsro we do have skies we can we see stars so i'm surprised that
we do have the smoke not probably not as much as you do uh astro beard but uh i'm gonna share my
screen real quick if you to see where i'm on with tyler also he's sharing my desktop with the
msro and i've been walking through some things with him but we're imaging
um the dumbbell m27 right now
i'm gonna share that um oh i see wow wow image coming down huh
yes uh we got a run going right now of uh but you can see this is the size of the
image that's 1.4 by about 0.9 degrees so um the system's working great
and we got really good seeing i think because the high atmos the high clouds stabilize the scene somewhat
so uh and you can see we use cart to seal
to target i just carted seal wasn't running earlier i got it working just a few minutes ago we also have
maxum dl which has a chart program which is kind of cool you got the all sky chart but then you
when you zoom up it'll actually bring the image in okay it's just plate solving another image
right now and it'll it'll actually overlay the image uh
i don't know what right there it was supposed to slew back didn't seem
like it did that that's interesting uh but the image is in the center
well that's great that's exciting so it overlays the image on on the uh on the chart for you
great okay well let's let's move on to our next uh guest here of course kelly beatty who we
heard uh from earlier and dr stephen edberg
formerly of the jet propulsion laboratory was on the galileo mission
cassini mission uh lots of other missions he's a professional astronomer
uh and a great friend to me and to i think everybody here uh in our
group and uh and to amateurs everywhere uh as he uh operated
and uh managed the riverside telescope makers conference for many many years so um great to have you on steve what what
where are you you're in you're in california right and uh
yep i'm in southern california the time is 8 14 here in the evening
and i'm in the foothills of the san gabriel mountains about 1500 feet above sea level and
19 miles road miles from mount wilson observatory and there are a
lot of people in this community who are greatly concerned about it tonight
with uh the approach of the fire the the bobcat fire it's called
uh that is definitely threatening at this at this time and i have not gotten any
more recent reports though i looked to find out what's going on with it
uh yeah you're right i have spread my over the years spread my astronomy
both professionally and as an amateur and now i just get to do whatever i do
for fun i tend to be a little bit more of that old school type that we were talking
about where i think it's very good to learn the sky um because you know sometimes batteries
fail but you can still point the telescope if you know where to look right so
and and and for those who i i just because you get known to be
the the expert on astronomy on your your block and people will come to you
and then uh expect you to be able to point stuff out so it's it's worth doing uh to learn the
sky and i have i was seeing about tonight i'll probably have more i will have more in the future to do but
for tonight i just thought i'd keep something simple and offer a couple of challenges for everybody
just because they're i think of fairly interest they've kept my interest up for the past oh 15 or 20
years one of them is to compare the brightness of polaris everybody ought to be able to
find that and kokob kokab i should say
which is the brightest star in the little dipper so we're just staying there and and my challenge to
you is two things which one of those stars is brighter
and you may think that that's an easy question and i'm going to assure you that it's
not i will also tell you when you and it sounds like you have
uh or at least uh our smoke is you know that of all the west coast is
spreading well across the continent uh i so i'd wait on this especially
uh part of this this part of the question that is can you see differences in color of
those two stars and i think if you i have have literally
spent many years observing them in many of their orientations
you can do it all through the year obviously and you will you will learn a lot by simply paying
attention and maybe making a note or just remembering what what you have seen when you do that
the other challenge i'll give you is to look in the south now
we're actually going to lose it in a couple of months but there's still time and that is to
look at delta scorpio eye the what is supposedly the fourth brightest
star in the constellation scorpius and it's easy to find for
most people most people know where antares is everything is all right in the south now so you shouldn't
have any trouble right after dark uh antares is the brightest star in
scorpius and and one of the top 20 or so bright stars in the sky
a big red giant and to its right and that's dangerous for me to say in
the northern hemisphere leading it i will say are three stars
at the front end of the constellation scorpius and the middle star there is delta and going by the
the uh greek alphabet scheme alpha beta gamma delta it ought to be the fourth
brightest star in the constellation and i'm confident unless things have changed
i haven't had a lot of clear sky lately thanks to the smoke um
you will find that it is more like well i'd like you to find out
how bright it is so compare it to those stars and decide if it really is still the fourth
and keep watching it because it too has been varying over the last decade and more
uh in in its brightness and actually turns out astronomers don't really know exactly
what it's doing and why it's doing it so a little challenge there for
everybody and i can report a second night in a row and i've actually been able to see
planets and stars for the first time in more than a week but jupiter is distinctly colored red
or well reddish turning more red uh instead of the bright white that it usually is and that's
that's thanks to all the smoke we have in southern california so i'm looking forward to doing this
again with you and and thanks for having me scott thank you thank you thank you so much
okay and so up next will be rodrigo zaleda rodrigo why don't you tell people where
you are what time it is and take a minute to tell us
what you're up to tonight escort and chile is midnight
in la serena and now is exploding again
but um last last day i take the some picture for the
for the sky some i share with you my screen
okay okay let's do that let's do that uh in a few minutes okay
let me get through our through our uh our group here uh quickly i just want to touch with you
a little bit uh uh up next will be rhondellaveau ron where are you and what time is it
and where what uh what are you sharing tonight it's 8 21 and currently i have on my
if you can hear me good i'm on my laptop so yeah i hear he's fine okay i have my
lx200 here something you're familiar with uh scott yes very
and i have a old uh dslr stuck onto it and uh be able to show uh jupiter there's
two moons right next to jupiter right now and it seems to be colored normal even though
we are affected by the um you know the smoke and everything we've had a
northerly wind just slight enough to drop it down a little lower so um most of the stars are out tonight
right now plus i want to show uh my two old reflectors okay all right that's great
that's great and up next is steve malia steve uh where are you and what time is it and
what are you sharing tonight thanks scott thanks for having me on um it is uh 11 22 p.m i am just outside of
toronto canada in a small town called bolton where i uh uh have my my warehouse and my shop for
my company on ontario telescope um and tonight um
if everything works out the way i'm hoping it does uh i'll be talking about the uh two handshakes that help make us
see the universe oh good i'll leave it at that yeah that sounds great that sounds great
then up next is someone that's new to our star party is john crisp uh john is somebody i've met a couple of
years ago i got to meet him in person at an airstream event
that i attended and uh so it's great to meet him and his wife uh he's a very enthusiastic uh
astronomer astrophotographer and aviation guy okay so uh john where where
are you and um and what time is it out there yeah thanks scott for having me um it's
11 23 i'm in the west side of toledo ohio area i
jokingly call my observatory cloudy sky observatory for a reason so uh tonight i'll talk a little bit
about just inspiration and passion um you know kind of how those things go hand in hand and just some life
experiences that got me in this hobby and continue to motivate and inspire me
that's awesome that's awesome and then up next is gary palmer who has been at i think
all of our star parties uh what time is it out there gary hi scott it's uh 4 23 a.m
and i am in the mountains in miles in the uk so um it has its challenges
yeah yeah so um yeah it's it's been okay tonight we've had a
bit of mist and bit high cloud and that we've been imaging away and um we've had live stuff up
um i've put uh m45 back on so just
share the screen quickly on that okay
there we go that's coming in live now yeah you can see the uh
was it called the miropi yeah it's um it was spreading out quite a bit
earlier with the high power coming through and then it's gone back again um
and before the show um i did another test shot with the camera
and this was 120 60 second shots the off the imaging rig
so a couple of the styles are a bit out on the image so um this was just a quick
process up while we were on the first part of the show i see it looks good though
looks very good the details there the styles are quite back down once we
uh get some clearer skies excellent and then we've got uh the
guide who has brought us to the clear skies network uh dustin gibson dustin i know where you
are tell us a little bit about yourself to those i don't think there's anybody
watching that doesn't know who you are at this point but but maybe there's a few
oh yeah i doubt that's true it's good to see this scott i mean i i just popped in for a few minutes you know
i don't i don't even know how i end up on camera here i just clicked the button and i was on camera you know i was just trying to watch and see what you were
telling everybody we have a great group tonight it's uh uh you know we have uh
uh you know scientists astronauts for sure uh artists it's a it's a very good group
tonight so this program um it's crazy to think that this didn't exist not that long ago just you know weeks
weeks ago this i mean well i guess months at this point but still you know this wasn't a thing
and i feel like this should have been going on forever look at the group it draws you know the images you know
gary's just flashing images of pleiades that are just completely next level you know
unprocessed and this type of thing didn't exist where it's just a gathering everybody
talking about this stuff and um you know bringing a star party to the global astronomy community i don't know
how it gets any better man so uh yeah i just wanted to you know pop in i i had a few minutes here you know
we're about to do um the biggest product release we've ever ever done and so um there will be no
sleep for me for the next month or so but uh good for you man good for you it's uh
it's fun it's fun and um we're having a great time but yeah man it's uh it's a busy life in california right now
yes it is yeah well let's hope that uh i'm actually looking at um
uh maybe i'll share my screen so you guys can see what i'm staring down right now but this is uh
these are you can see the fog this is mount wilson observatory uh and uh you can see the glow from the
fires out there uh off to the right definitely you can see what looks like flames going above the
trees so you know that bobcat fire out there is really very threatening and
really hoping you know this is refreshing every few seconds uh that was the blink that you saw there
and so i'm really actually quite nervous that uh um
you know that matt wilson is being threatened like this also too i know that steve edberg
doesn't live too far away from here so uh be careful steve
will do no no evacuation warning yet okay well that's great um
stay safe okay uh next up is uh craig bobchen uh craig is an old
friend of mine uh someone who is also a fan of the was well i'm still a fan of the eta and
so craig tell us a little about yourself where you are what time it is and what you might be sharing tonight well
i'm in the same time zone as you scott uh it's 10 28 here i'm in san antonio
texas just recently relocated here from southern california i know steve from many rtmcs out there
uh i know gary from you know way back as well and i don't really have
anything to share tonight i'm still this is my first one here so i'm just going to figure out what it is and i have some
ideas of what i want to share in the future that i'll talk to you about oh very cool very cool that sounds
great well you're welcome to hang out as long as you like so that that's awesome next up is caesar brolo caesar
uh you were you were blowing away in the wind at our last
star party how are you think you're muted caesar
i don't know why don't we can't hear you i don't know
no audio oh wait
not yet nope
i'll tell you a little bit about caesar he's down in uh buenos aires argentina and uh uh he is no we don't hear you
caesar uh he is uh he is with optica sorako uh which is an astronomy
telescope deal down there did i hear you cesar no a little here yes now we hear you
okay okay yes it's a configuration uh some problem of configuration of come on
yeah yes for me is it's a mystery sometimes yes because
it wasn't matted with unmuted but yes i had the the wrong
microphone microphone yeah do you pronounce your name cesar or
caesar caesar is perfect in english yes cesar is
yes many people ask me like jessari in in argentina
yes maybe they have something of italian maybe not i don't know
and uh well here it is at 0 31 in argentina uh
is partially cloudy here i'm trying to to point
um jupiter by the cell phone i'm trying this and
[Music] maybe if in a little time more
we can get the opportunity of uh of have a a mostly clear sky
we can try some picture of the deep sky maybe we can
we can try again with the 47 to kanai or any object
no problem i am i am ready to to make something but in this moment we have a 50
of of clouds 50 okay so uh so this is how we're going to do
this um uh uh folks we're going to uh let the person that is up the latest
go first okay and the winner of that of course is gary palmer because it's her morning there okay
so we want to uh let him uh uh make a little presentation uh spend you know 10 minutes with us and
uh give us an overview of what he'd like to cover so
gary we're going to give you the spotlight here we go thanks scott scott um it's me knocking
everything everywhere as i move then um right if i share my screen up i think
we'd put the image up that we captured earlier and actually run through some of the
processes on that for um five minutes because that would
really tag on from where we were last on the last star party if i
remember rightly um let me just go back a couple of steps and
okay just get myself back in order
okay so what we've done with the image so far is um and it did take quite a long time to do
this with the stack as i showed in the
processor i think on the last style party so that's the image that we've got at
the moment once it comes out of the stack and we've also done a dynamic background extraction
i'm just going to drop that down as well so it's out of the way
the dynamic background extraction uh removes a lot of the casting that you get in the background on the image
well then we're ended up we're ending up with this and when you look at it it is quite uh green
you can see some of the fainter colors on the stars um but you do have to remember that this is a test image we had a lot of clouds
running through earlier we just literally left the camera running to see what we could get
um so we need to color calibrate it one of the uh best ways of color
calibrating this is using the photometric colored calibration system and it's nice
and straightforward just move that second there we go okay so
we need to acquire the data for the image
so if we search the cooldowns we've got it typed in now
when we hit search it'll come up with all of the relevant data of the color of the object
and we've got that that's all in and we're acquiring the time and date of
the image from the actual image itself the main thing then is the
focal length of the telescope and the pixel sizing on the camera so once we've done that we
can apply that to the image
and it doesn't overly take long it's a very accurate way of color calibrating the image because
it's taking it off of data that's already held on record for all of these different objects
the amount of time it takes is always down to the speed of the computer there are a couple of other ways of
color calibrating the images but it really depends on
the type of system that you the type of images and what filters you might have on all of these
different things make a difference this image is taken with no filters on the system
so it is literally the camera straight onto the telescope a couple of seconds
once we've done that we need to look at um some noise control on the image so
there's a couple of different ways i generally use um a wavelet system
to remove any background noise in the image other people go in and do different
other ways around it but my general ways is to do it like this
so i said it would take a couple of seconds and it's taking longer there we go so we're really brightening the image
back up and now you can see we've removed a lot of the green cast in the image
and if we look at the stars you can see the blues around the stars and the yellows so
to do the noise control i'm just going to close some of these up
i generally use yeah morphological uh transformation
and then all we do is we make a mask to go all over this this is to remove this background noise
here and that's quite common certainly when you're not using filters and also
um you might not have got the gain levels correct when you do these tests on the cameras you have to play with
them for a few nights to get them how you want them so can make a nice
simple mask the mask has to be stretched though to use it so what we're going to do is
select that mask in the histogram reset the histogram and then we're going to brighten this
image i'm going to copy that into the histogram so we're going to use that
and then transfer from the histogram back over to it and that now is a permanently stretched mask
which we can use to apply the mask drop it on the edge underneath the name
and then we're going to invert it yeah so that it's working on the back
i might just go linear transform now i've already got these preset in here i generally go three two one
and point five but i'll always do the percentages the amount of fifty percent and then we
drop that onto the image
people are liking your uh your image processing gary they love it yeah they love this i hope
it helps some people out it does it it's not an easy program this and i always say with every single
process here there's probably 300 ways of doing something so everybody's got a slightly different
weight i always look at mine for ease i've got to come up with things quite quickly quite often
so if we go backwards and forwards on that we can see the noise in in there we need to remove the mask
now just to stop that okay and then we can remove that
and then we need to um stretch the image there's a few different ways of doing
this um i again will make a little preview
box somewhere in the darker area somewhere over here that's out of the way of the stars and you can use the when
to do a quick preview just a tiny little box in there
and then we're going to use mask stretch on this and one of the reasons for that is we don't want to over stretch the
image we can always adjust it later so a new smile stretch
and then just check we've got the correct preview
and apply it to the image this will give you a good balance to work with so
[Music] if you were a little bit high on the game with the camera
um or your iso if it's a dslr then we can um control the styles a little bit better
that's the key thing i mean a couple of these styles here look a little bit like crosses um when you look at them and that's just
the higher clouds going through on the image
and then what we'll do is once we've done this we'll write some color into it and that'll probably
be it for this particular star party i'm going to continue this on with one of the next star policies
gary i have a question for you a lot of people here have tried to use
pix insight uh tim myers is saying i tried it and it kicked my butt
i shifted to uh app but i'm really thinking that
decision you show people how to use pix insight right with your
with your classes your astro courses dot co dot uk right
yeah i'm gonna put the link in here yeah
all um software so it's not just pix inside but as we've said before
with um okay so that's the image stretch there
so it might look a bit dull now but we've actually got the stars a lot tighter and the image is looking a lot
nicer um one of the things is is quite often people don't want to pay for software
um they want to use free software like deep sky stacker and some of the other things that are around
we we teach really whatever somebody wants to learn so um earlier i was doing some testing i
was using astra art or you can use that velocity there's lots and lots of different software out there astro pixel processor
but a lot of people don't um [Music] that their phone picks inside quite hard
um but you have to understand the power of the program and really what i come across with is if you spend over a
thousand dollars or a thousand pounds on the equipment then you really want to start looking at a good piece of
software to process your pictures otherwise you you you're hitting your head on the brick wall
what what would you say uh from all the people that that uh you know i imagine you could a
lot of people are arranging from beginner to advanced but what are what are the top three questions that people ask they're
i i put out there you know feel free to ask questions and people are just going gosh i got a zillion questions you know
i don't know where to start but what do you see what what are the top three questions that
is running things through the batch processor um at the beginning or the weighted batch processor as
they're now asking you to do and to give you some idea i've got a real big
uh processing computer that we're doing this on okay i i ran this set through the new
weighted batch system and the the problem with that is is where it's
reading and measuring now um it took an hour and a half for it to put these
together um not this particular set now um but one of the sets that i did uh a
couple of nights back was an hour and a half so it does seem that as we advance along
a little bit that we're taking more and more time but we're
getting a more more precise image that's coming out the other end of it and you're needing to do less work in
other programs so the batch processor um there's always
arguments over whether you need bias frames or not i tend to use them although this particular set hasn't got
them on because i haven't taken them into the new camera flat but there are a lot of arguments
over whether we should be using um bias i generally find the software works better with them
um the the others are really just really a workflow
as to how to get moving along in it and as i said with each process so some
people um some people will go the simple route some people go really really complicated routes in
it and you can go right into your maths with this and you can do the pixel maths and you can
add percentages of images together and all sorts of things it's how much time you want to put into
these yes right so the last thing we're going to do on this um all i've done with this is now is i'm
just darkening this a little bit so that we're going to use it as a mask and then we're going to use that to add
color in so we just darken the background and do exactly the same process again
yeah i've had in the mask on and then we're going to use curves transformation
and reset that click on the image so it's
active when you click on it the surround goes blue yeah so you know it's active and also
if your mask is on there the main bar turns orange so we're just going to stick up a live view there then we're going to adjust
the saturation side so normally when we first if i reset that and put that back so here it comes on like this
um what we would need to do is select the saturation and then we're just going to bring in an
amount of color into the object
somebody just asked are you using uh uh wait you know weighted batch
processing and i think you just went through i didn't on this this i didn't have enough time with the show
we'd still be here um now waiting for it to run through this so this was just done on the normal batch processor
right okay all right so once that's done um we've still got a little bit of green
in the image just because it's image with a color camera yeah so use the scanner
beautiful beautiful image of m31 very nice you can just take this now and this is
about halfway through the processing now yeah so it's not
sharpened it's we would deepen the color some more in the stars and actually remove some stars now at
this point so anyway that will do it for now we'll continue this on the next star policy okay sounds good
sounds real good all right so um we will uh take this back to um
uh grid view here and um i believe that probably
uh cesar is uh uh the next one up here because i think it's latest
for you at this point so we're going to give you uh let's take 10 minutes and and learn
more about what's going down in argentina yes okay well
we now i trying to a point who bitter but every time that
i have in the screen well i have a a cloud moving but
a few minutes later but i here i have i have the preparing
the the cell phone attached uh with the with
the eyepiece with adapter okay using the exos 100 it
is possible it's possible to to point maybe in five minutes more to have
something of jupiter something that we can do it is i i'm calling the game uh when i have the
the image of jupiter in my cell phone i connect to the zoom uh with the cell phone i change the
or i use in the again the the the code but i always you by chad of
course okay but this is not easy today um because i i need to change the in
another another moment it changed i started using this setup
this the same setup that used the last friday in the european edition of the
of the our party is safari uh you remember yes the the the
embarrassing uh adapter with wood that they use it is real okay
i like it you can see that this is real yes yes in this type of moan that i've seen
have i i found that um have a slide now and i change
the setup to the this camera to make something for for deep sky of course that this kind in
the city is something that more imaginary but okay possible
and here and will we have uh jupiter when the cloud's moving a
little bit but because it is it's going to be clear the night sure we'll go to someone else and
then come back to you and see if it's cleared off for you okay sure no problem yes typically
yes yeah it's a star party that's right okay thanks thank you okay
so who's up next who's on the east coast here um uh i know that
uh jerry hubble is out there john crisp um uh john what what have you got for us
all right well thanks scott again i appreciate you uh letting me participate in this event and
for me i hope to be able to do some more of this and trying to get to be involved in the community a little bit more it's a
little bit yeah a little bit of background on me i'm a vice president of digital technology and
you know my goal and i talked about it a lot and scott and i were talking earlier today for the group
that what i do is try to inspire whether it's my aviation or whether it's my astronomy or
photography and so i'm going to share my screen just take you guys through a little bit of
um some of the things that i think kind of lead down that path of inspiration so for photography and
aviation and astrophotography as i mentioned if i can inspire one person to look at nature
or the world in a different way then i've accomplished something important and then if that person picks
up that passion to create or experience something then that's even better and a little humor here um you know being
outside of toledo and certainly not as far north into canada um but you know buy a telescope try
long exposure astrophotography it'll be fun they said this was i think a zero degree night where i was outside with my fool
so you can get a little idea there of the commitment it takes sometimes um
here's my setup so i have a sky shed pod in my backyard and a fortunately a understanding wife and
understanding neighbors every one of my neighbors were all in on this project i
include them that's about the extent of the outreach that i've been able to do i have a very busy job and career and
that excuse kind of keeps me from traveling as much as i want but it's nice to include the neighbors and they
certainly appreciate the pictures i take and i really like the shot of the orion nebula coming up
over my dome there and as scott mentioned you know one of the other things about me
that that takes a lot of my time and energy is certainly a mistress uh in my life and a
passion is aviation this is a folk or triplane that i built over a 10-year period of time while i
had a career so it took a lot of effort but i i always called this shot because the
ultimate selfie but this airplane is unique in that there
aren't many of them in the world anyway very few flying and to be able to really
document the journey of flying this airplane building it
documenting what it's like to fly it how hard it is to fly and land and then the kind of little side story
talking about the passion this airplane just about killed me on the second flight
power failure on takeoff went down landed upside down in a ditch um fatal event 95
of the time and that really i already had passion but that kind of takes it up a notch but
aviation along with astrophotography is a passion and so we've we've talked a lot about
what gets you down that road in our lives i think amongst each other and the world but it
takes little things little things that can really kind of drive you down that road
and then the big things like a crash can really sit back and you know take you down the road of what's really important and what are
your priorities um and astrophotography has been one of those and that's kind of wanted me to do
more of the outreach like we've talked about and uh inspiration these are some of my early images
looking back it was kind of a fun journey for coming on tonight of looking back through my feed of what my
pictures have looked like over the years and this was kind of the start uh here's where i am today those same images
come along that path it's funny i've already learned something tonight i can apply to my m31 shot there uh but
posting pictures like this for me and really getting people to understand um how fragile life is which i can mix
you know talk from first-hand experience uh to the beauty of the world and what what's available to us kelly mentioned
it earlier there's so much technology in our hands today it's very affordable you don't need a
lot of money to get started united 80 millimeter tasco refractor from service merchandise
that i saw the rings of saturn through and down the journey you know the path you go right right
you know it doesn't take a lot and you know for me again to show pictures like this
to people that you know my neighbors or whoever it might be it's it's always inspiring uh so just a few
more shots and i won't spend a lot of time on these because you know down the road certainly
like to talk a little bit more about what my um my processing and things like that are
sure but you know it it's beautiful and so not only do i do the astrophotography
but aviation photography and landscape photography is another passion and i spend a lot of
time um in that world as well so you know
talking to the group that was on earlier they're not on now i guess but kelsey
being in the aerospace industry you know that was certainly for me early life experience as well i got to
fly an airplane on my eighth birthday bob hoover took me for my first airplane
ride my dad built the b2 bomber he was the lead manufacturing technology engineer
on that project yeah scott you and i talked a little bit
about that but yeah this airplane um i got to see it before it was
official as it were i was in the air force in rotc at the time
this airplane put me through college my dad was out in california yeah an
amazing aircraft that's amazing it is and to see it you know to see it fly it's just
talk about futuristic and then i saw today the air force has been testing a next generation fighter that they released some pictures
of which is pretty cool and again just uh traveling to try to get up to uh dark
sky areas up we fortunately live not too far from the upper peninsula of michigan where we do
get some beautiful skies and again be able to go up and do
long exposure or night photography is one of those things that i love to do
there's a quote from winston churchill i'll paraphrase it so i don't misquote it but basically somebody asked
him why he only did landscapes and he when he painted and he said you know trees never
complained about how he rendered it that's why i don't do portrait
photography i like to shoot in you know in in inanimate objects
a couple of shots um that i put up here rosette and eagle what's interesting scott on
the eagle i think i've mentioned this before as well um that's shot through my uh david levy
commentator oh right right i love that that's a cropped in
shot a little bit but uh hydrogen alpha but i love that scope so it's one of one of the scopes in my
collection again just a little bit through what pictures i like to post and share that
try to inspire people to put their phones down and um look at the beauty of the world for
me the airplane the joke with my wife is she says every time i open the hangar doors i hear
angels singing i i always say no it's the theme to top gun but
um a little star trail shot over the observatory there on the bottom left and again just a few
random shots of uh just different locations and things that interest me um neowise was a
a frustrating adventure for me we we had it out it was visible several
times it was visible from my observatory however you can see the clouds
we we got really no clear nights to really get some good shots of it and
with work and with covet and everything i've been very busy and didn't get to travel i would have
loved to have gotten into a better clear sky shot area for that but still was able to get
a few images on it as well and again just some of my aviation photography
people ask me frequently if i would you know sell pictures uh or you know put put a gallery out
there um i don't i anybody who wants a picture that i take i provide it i give them the raw file if
they want it yes file if they want it um i i'm still learning
you know i i'm not a professional by any means i just you know like to take the pictures and
so i'll give anybody any of my pictures that i take if they want them
because again i try to get that inspiration and those passions and it sparked in other people and then i'm
wearing my devil's tower shirt tonight that was another one of those moments in my life seeing the movie uh
close encounters i just watched it last night i watched it twice last night
i love it i watched it just about two weeks ago i was able to get i didn't put them on
here because i didn't have time today um i got interrupted at work but i was processing i did some great
um long exposure night shots out at the monument we were only there for one evening
and it rained for the first hour it's about two o'clock in the morning and i got up from the hotel room and i told my wife
if if i can see jupiter that i'm going and we were about to staying about 10 miles from the monument
and i it cleared up enough to go get some shots maybe on another show i'll share that
but that's so that's a little bit of my story and a few of my images and i really appreciate the company that i'm
in tonight with the group on the call and the people watching and certainly love to be able to do more and
get to know you guys a little bit better and kind of go down this journey together because it's always more fun
when you've got people to share your life with and create those memories because that's what really matters at the end of the day
uh i couldn't agree with you more john thank you so much man that's great well we are next we're going to go to uh
rodrigo zaleda he's down in la serena chile and uh he's got some images that that
he was that he was able to make and um we'll uh there we go
okay so rodrigo um we're going to put the spotlight on you
and then we're going to take about a 10 minute break after rodrigo um
but before we go we'll have chuck ask the second question of our three
question series for people who want to win door prizes so here we go
here you go rodrigo it's good good time and i share with you
in my last photo for the show and then the nebula
in the in the little galaxy in marijuana clock
there is a ssm galaxy and
okay did you see my stream uh not yet it says double
uh oh now we do yes yes okay now this is this is the the sky
in chile now in the show and here is the magazine club
um in this galaxy in there
for the milky way i take the picture for the
the principal nebula in yeah this is
uh a stimulation which is oh wow okay okay yes
and now my my picture
okay i changed the view
okay did you see my screen now
yes yes this is my picture for the
the little marianne nebula it's a galaxy and this is a
small nebula in is a extra galactic nebula you know in magnetic flow
this is a nhsa
346 wonderful this time
this object this picture i'm talking with the
expert scientific fsa cn telescope with a focal reduction
or a more y5 the the object is very
very big in the sky this sector is the the
the galaxy and this is a cluster and a nebula in the in the galaxy
this this is uh this galaxy in the show any phrase like
like chile or in the song i see the
algier here i see the galaxy to run around to the the
salt pollen and this big another galaxy i
think picture is a very famous galaxy the wow
galaxy of er constellation is a
5 3 yes now rodrigo
how do you process these images are you using to process or no you know gym is only for a
for so the this images i process with pics inside oh these are processed with
pics inside okay yes i i show is more easy for me
is showing gym but yeah my practicing inside
this this photo is with a reset telescope and um
three hours of position this is my picture tonight scott
we hope to like them awesome beautiful work man beautiful yeah congratulations
so thanks thank you um that's great um and so
uh let's uh let's look back uh towards um uh cesar
have you got uh did you get clear skies out that way yeah uh yes um we can try
if if we can turn the the the camera um we can try uh
you know another connection and to our son or soon sorry okay yeah
okay so let me uh see i i have a club now but it's a small cloud i i hope that
it's moving all right yes and this is okay i see you on the
other one here okay another camera
let me check work isn't it amazing what we can do with uh
with these assumptions
well first of all yes and let me check if uh okay the first problem that we
have is that i it's unable to uh it is very
interesting we never use zoom to show computer from the cell phone but the first
problem that we have is that it's unable to use the zoom or change the highlight
right yeah but i can see that you're getting the data okay yeah
so i can show back again here so this this is um i see a little bit of haze around it
is this some of the high clouds that uh that uh you were yes you have you have two satellites
uh here i don't know which is and i see some moons i see some moons around jupiter
let me check which ones because one of these are are near
of of a transit or a occultation
let me check i think that the closest is eo
iu or i don't remember in english how you say and another one
is europe
something that is interesting is that i make at all and i
i don't i don't uh i couldn't make a
go to a lineage alienation only i put the mode and the tracking is is
acceptable it's good but i i could by the clouds i couldn't
make a a go to alignment with two stars okay but if you
i i lost where is the computer now
but he's in the center
yeah and if i'm looking at your screen yes okay
okay well i'm sorry no the problem is that normally i i make with the fingers it's very easy
to make the zoom that is perfectly to to watch everything sure
i i'm i am record a little video i am putting the computer
and i'll show you a few minutes no problem sounds good okay
the only thing that i can do it now okay no problem no problem all right
uh so uh we i uh richard grace i know that you've
got some images of mars there uh steve malia you're in canada uh what time is it getting to
be out there it's just after midnight it's about 10
uh 12 after 10. so that long day ahead of you tomorrow so
why don't you share what uh what you're going to uh
okay uh do you want me to go through it now is that what you're asking yeah okay all right i can do that keep
you up too late okay trying to be sensitive here to people i appreciate that
um i'm probably sharing the wrong screen on a second
all right can you see my screen okay yep okay great so i like to call this the uh
the uh two handshakes that allowed us to see uh this was inspired by a podcast that i
i listened to from uh mike rowe um if anyone's watched uh dirty jobs on
the discovery network um uh mike rowe was a host and he has a
podcast called the way i hear it the way i heard it so i thought it was pretty cool and and uh i did a
a breakdown of it um and i presented this to my club um about a year ago uh when we were
allowed to uh all i'll get together and meet so um this is uh the two handshakes allows you
to see it so before i get into that um this you know there's something called a butterfly effect
a very small event that can create a much larger event butterfly flaps its wings in uh in
brazil we get a hurricane in florida type thing um here's an example uh you know
do we know who this guy is if you know don't say right so this guy
who would have hired him right and uh ends up being the great steve jobs who uh i
i've always admired um here another another great example anyone know who this guy is
and we get this handsome fellow here
wow so this is the hubble space telescope that as um
uh most of us know and and people at home that are that are watching this on the various uh social media networks uh probably
know as well uh it's been up there for oh quite some time we've seen some amazing things with it
and it has actually a a pretty cool history that dates way way back before there was even the
space program the idea of having a space telescope um a telescope that is above the atmosphere
to get the best images we can get but you know technology didn't allow for the time but they still worked on it
quite early so you know with with hubble we've seen some amazing things
with it um some fantastic images right i i love these these these are are
really good probably one most famous out there is is this the uh
colors of creation and i think this is what kind of saved uh hubble um uh the hubble program
um when they introduced this as it's coming back afterwards fixed and get to that in a moment but this is
probably one of the the most famous images uh that that exists the deep space
field and i i saw um
neil degrasse tyson uh speak he came up to toronto uh the dunlop institute uh had him up
and he showed this and he said if you take a good look at this picture there's only three stars in the entire
image and everything else every little speck that you see there is a galaxy and uh there's only three stars in this
field there's only three stars in this field there's one directly under the peak and telescope there's another one
about halfway down under the h in the and then under the the first ian telescope if you
go down about um three quarters of the way there's another star there and you can see that
has the the spikes on them all those four stars sorry there's another one so four four five stars six okay
it doesn't matter there's only a few stars in this whole whole field and everything else is just just
galaxies so you know maybe um the uh
uh there's life out there somewhere so from our earlier conversation we had before the show started um you know it who knows what
what could be out there and what's looking back at us so so one had to help them enough this
is what we got initially and and we before those great images is
what we got and it wasn't really all that no exciting right and uh
but that the that the cameras were working right and that yeah well absolutely
absolutely so then they found out what the problem was and uh um you know a flaw in the mirror
and how how it was created and i've heard a few different reasons why it had happened but it you know it
happened so so i'm gonna i'm gonna take us back to uh uh back in time a little bit but this
is one of my favorite cities in the world san francisco i have a lot of history there um i my wife and i were engaged in san
francisco we went back uh shortly afterwards we've taken our kids there absolutely love the city uh a lot of fun
great place to be excellent food uh san francisco so you know you know the painted ladies this is the
bay bridge right right there's the transamerica
tower the famous golden gate california street
right um i can picture that mustang racing up and down right now
right and then then coit tower picturesque all postcards beautiful city i love san francisco
but just over 100 years ago it looked a lot different um and actually when pictures are coming
out today it looks a lot different too so the great fire of san francisco in 1906
uh a lot of devastation and this is where our story kind of begins um
that helped us see so a lot of devastation the city was was just flattened uh the percentage i
can't remember what it was was very very high amount of city that burned down interesting fact um
they wanted to build the place up so quickly that they actually took the code book and they threw it away
and they said just build because they wanted things to go go up fast so some of those buildings still exist so
if anyone's looking to buy real estate in san francisco get a good home inspector so
while all this was going on um there was a gentleman that had a bank called the bank of italy
and uh um you know there was there was people in the streets there there was a
pandemonium people were scared uh running around and uh we have this gentleman amato giannani
and he founded the bank of italy in 1904 but he had a problem he had two million dollars
in that in his vault that he had to get out because he was afraid that uh he was going to be be looted and
he didn't want to lose that money so he's out on the streets and he made some arrangements with uh with a gentleman who um
actually came into town he had a farm and he would pick up people's garbage their food
scraps their waste and stuff like that he'd take it to his into his uh cart and he'd take it and bury it into his farm somewhere
natural fertilizer um so he made arrangements he said hey come here i need some help um can we can he help
me get this money out he just said no problem they took the two million dollars and they buried it under the trash
and nobody would suspect a thing they got on the buggy and they just carried out of town
two million dollars buried under a guard all right so and what was really what
was really good is that um mr gianna giannani was able to go back
to san francisco shortly after that and he set up as you can see here instead of a kirk cartoon but
he set up two barrels and a plank of wood down at the wharf and he gave out loans for people to
rebuild and for businesses to get going again and this was really important because no other bank was able to do this at the time and he so he was
able to give out these loans for people to rebuild um now
mr gianni was so uh so indebted to this gentleman and so
grateful that he said name your price what do you want right he said i don't want anything
right but my when my son is older can you please help him out with a job and he said when your son is of age to work
he will always have a job that'll never be an issue right um mr g
gianni uh his bank of italy actually became the
bank of america and that gentleman was the grandfather
of this gentleman frank sepi sepulina okay and sepi
in 1984 developed systems right and pressed his bosses to repair
not walk away from disabled spacecraft and he went as far to tell the press
that the solar maximum satellite back in 84 could uh would be repaired even though
he didn't get approval he said we're going to repair it so he developed satellite servicing
techniques and influence uh and actually influenced spacesuit designs
starting from gemini 9. so because of that one handshake that took place in
in uh san francisco mr g uh uh mr sepulina's father
was gainfully employed from it and was able to provide a life to to uh to frank uh so that he can be
go on to do what he wanted to do become an engineer and he went on to work for nasa this is actually a pretty
fascinating story and you can google it or use bing whichever search engine you want and you can read up on mr uh
cepalina it's actually quite interesting um so there's an image of a solar maximum
and he developed that second handshake right to uh to capture hubble when it
needed to be repaired and scott your good friend uh mr story musgrave
uh was the uh astronaut in charge of time that went up in in and did that repair
[Music] and now things are much better they are way better
yep so thank you very much scott for giving me the opportunity i like that i love that that's cool um
i thought it was a pretty interesting story something that happened long ago and the influence that it had on a couple of individuals life and then
the impact they had uh for us to be able to to see i'm sure they would have fixed it eventually but
i think that the way that it was known was pretty cool and uh the small event that happened over 100 years ago that
that came came out now um it's just uh to me it's it it's one of those things
like wow that was close um so anyways scott thanks this is the presentation i wanted to give last week
on how to scour a few different computers to find it i love it well thanks very much steve
thank you thank you all right have a good night you too scott have a good night everybody
thanks for having me on thanks okay all right so uh let's um
let's go to uh chuck allen uh for our second question of the night um
and uh and then we'll take a ten minute break and then we'll be back after that and
you've got the spotlight chuck all right this time i think it'll work
there we go scott i'd like to start if i may before giving the second question with
uh just one minute comment back in 1993
i came up with the idea of a national young astronomer who worked for the astronomical league
and we lost our sponsor after about two years and scott uh jumped in and has sponsored
this award now for i think the better part of three decades and it has been
uh an award that has really uh rejuvenated the youth participation in
the league and we're very thankful for scott's support i had the privilege to
judge seven international science and engineering fairs in earth and space science and i can
tell you that the projects that we're seeing submitted today for the national and astronomy
award are every bit as good as the ones that i saw at isaf and scott just publicly i wanted
to say thank you for everything you've done for us over the years uh chuck your vision and inspiration
is uh something that uh you know i constantly think about and i it's been an honor uh to be part of this
so thank you for allowing us to be part of this thank you for your hard work and uh
vision that it happened at all and uh you know and wow what what it's what it's created over the years and and
the effect it's had on these young people's lives so big you know my hat's off to you
so thank you oh thank you and question number two for tonight who
was the first person known to have sketched and noted the movement of the planet neptune
okay
all right so you're going to send your questions to kent at explorescientific.com
don't answer them here in chat
but who is the first person known to have sketched and noted the movement of the planet neptune
that's cool is that the original notes for it too you know chuck you've uh i love that
you're into this history of astronomy um and uh you know i was looking at that
porch where charles messier photographed and i was just trying to imagine what it was like to
be an astronomer uh back at that time so and stand on that porch i had to beg
my way up there because that porch was off limits at the time because as i mentioned earlier
construction so i'm trying to persuade this lady in french to let me up there and it took a while
to they finally relented so that's so cool very cool okay well we are going to go
to a 10-minute break um and we'll be back for the wrap-up of
the global star party number nine and uh we'll we're uh we'll talk a little bit about
global star party 10 uh that will be coming up as well so um
uh we will uh let me just share my screen here
a little bit or maybe i don't even need to do that we'll just jump to this and we'll be
back in 10.
so
what
hmm
oh
um
so
oh
uh
so
can you hear me tyler
yeah i can hear you okay i can hear you now i don't know if this is going over the
air it might be yeah it's open okay okay so tyler's been with me on the
msro this whole time we've been working together you guys getting images yeah oh yeah cool okay all right
so uh let's see so we need to get a process in life on
the show the images yeah not that good yet no we need to get to richard grace and then
guys we didn't have this we didn't have the
sky problems that richard said that he was having with the with the
smoke yeah richard how's your sky doing so far
a little better than earlier um the the flow of everything is uh just north of you jerry
but uh yeah i was wondering about that i got a pretty good-looking mars uh occasionally when it stops
moving around too much you can see a polar ice cap and uh kind of tell where olympus mons is
that's very cool it's awesome that's hard to do well i've been looking at it for like an
hour so it doesn't mean everybody else will see that for anybody listening to this uh you
guys in the audience out there if you want to participate on the global star party
and join in you can either get a no you know no charge ticket if you go to
explorescientific.com forward slash events or you can contact us directly and and
we can talk about what you'd like to share with the audience and have you join us so it's always fun to have
people come in
caesar are you getting some sky out there
can't hear you i don't know why
no audio yeah hand in the mic richard
hmm that image those images of the galaxies
are beautiful from rodrigo
space time with robert he says heck yeah i'd love to join this all right
i'll have to have you come in so um
robert all you got to do is uh you can email me at s at
explorescientific.com or you can go to um you know we do these every tuesday nights um
every tuesday night at the same time so although when it gets closer to
winter we'll probably scale it back so it happens a little bit earlier for everybody that would be nice
but yeah you can go to explore scientific dot com forward slash events and buy a no charge
ticket and we'll let you in
jeff says with any luck i'll be able to start imaging next month
book davey says off to work i'll see you all next time wherever you are davies
i think you're in europe somewhere guy dude says anyone know if explore
scientific is coming to the eldorado star party this year uh i don't think so i don't think that
we'll be traveling uh due to covid and the pandemic um to any of these star parties this
year it's uh it's really uh you know i have a responsibility to keep
the company uh running here and i can't uh
try not to be putting myself at risk
here okay so we're back um and uh let's uh uh
let's see i think i might still be spotlighted here so i think that we're
back with uh with our group and we have uh rondelleville richard grace still
with us cesar brollo tyler bowman and jerry hubbell still
working away and um so um richard you had
i think you had mars uh in your in your telescope live so let's check that out yeah man
it's a screen sharing here oh goodness that's a nice view look at
that the polar caps up here yeah and olympus mon should be
right there oh wow this is excellent so everyone's also the
only thing in the sky that i seem to be able to get right now i know it's good it's good beautiful i like to see
you know it's not uh in complete full phase right now you can see kind of a gibbous view of mars
i don't know if that is an orographic cloud out there but over on to the kind of the what one o'clock position it
looks like i see a white patch pop in and out every once in a while
yeah i'm definitely seeing this white patch right here cap
yeah uh oh you're talking about over here yeah you see that i am also over sampling like way
over sampling i'm using 2.4 micron pixels on 2000 millimeters of focal length which
is a no no as far as the calculator says but uh
it's it's what i got for the moment so beautiful so what are you doing are you capturing
a bunch of images right now is that uh yeah we got a 100 millisecond
um exposures uh i got the game just you know a fifth the way up just so i
can kind of move it around because uh as it gets a little higher it gets a little brighter
a little less uh atmosphere to look through and uh so i've just been tweaking it a
little bit and i figured after uh we did the live thing i'll i'll get a few more captures on it i got a few already
um i'll try and make up some video because i've been looking forward to uh getting mars here with the
uh the coming opposition um and i'm also looking forward to the
uh the halloween uranus uh uh opposition because uh that was one of the first
things that i ever tried and now i have a little more power even though the uh c8 can be a little uh
a little testy sometimes uh with the long focal length and stuff plus it's used so
um it's probably 25 years old or so but uh it does an amazing job and uh that's
doing a great it was uh a good used purchase for me it's uh one of my cheapest telescopes
awesome though yeah put put a legitimate dd plate on it just to make sure it's you know getting locked down and uh
we're using a ir uh uv blocking filter to try and eliminate some of the fuzz around the uh
the planet there a little bit um and uh i'm using a uh a crayford style
focuser uh screwed onto the rear cell of the c8 because when i focus with the
primary mirror i mean it'll it'll shift a planet clean out a frame almost sometimes so i have to
um i usually put the crayford about halfway in the middle of its focuser and then i focus normally and then columnate and then
only move the crayford at that point that way i'm not um having the primary mirror
move the image shift and all that stuff right there's a beautiful image though it's
nice to see some live images tonight from different parts of the world you know so
we've been uh at times it seems like everywhere in the world we went we were clouded out
so this is really this is great and that's how it's been for the last couple weeks for me and
when i saw it was gonna be clear for two days in a row and last night it was it was clear but it wasn't clear
so i'm just glad that uh i can show something because uh i was getting a little backed up with no
clear skies so hopefully it clears out for everybody here soon hopefully all the fires uh
get put out burned out hopefully everyone um does okay with it that's right that's
right yeah i hope for the best you know yeah yeah yeah i uh am still kind of watching the fires
on uh mount wilson i don't see the flames leaping up above the treetops anymore but there is
definitely a red glow still beyond the tree line so that's uh
you know it's something that's got a lot of people on pins and needles but um hopefully get some rain
yeah we need some rain that's right uh astro beard thank you very much for
showing this beautiful image of mars uh maybe later you can show a processed image
so we'd like that on the see if the computer can hack that and everything else we'll try we'll give her a try okay all right now
all right thanks that's great okay so um we will go back to our
grid view here and we have not yet talked to um spend any time with
ron delvo ron you wanted to show what you got through your telescope and um in a couple of your uh reflectors
sure um let me bring it up uh
i love that sequoia cactus behind you that's i am a fan of cactus i love cactus
okay let's see they require very little maintenance
very little you don't do anything yeah okay let's see what do i want to do here i want to
share the screen let's see if this comes up
okay oh there it is
yep well that's a nice view of jupiter yes it is now um i'm using a program called eos
movie record it's a russian made program it makes uh the live view
on a old camera like my uh 40d um can be used you know to take video
oh wow i had a dirty lens on there but you can see the details of jupiter
popping in and out yeah i don't usually take a video that was it
this big but just for now um and this camera is um
modded so it's normally um it shows it
red or um sometimes purple but i think we see the red spot
off to the left there okay i'm not sure if it's coming around
or not
i keep it on tungsten anyway so this program if i just hit right here
it a bar comes up across the bottom and it shows that i'm recording but i can't
can't see it right now i don't think i usually uh do about 500 to 1000 frames
um let's see there's really no other function other
than this 5x sure you know
hear an airplane you hear it there's an airplane going alright so
[Music] enough of that let's see
um at alex 200 here good that's great
i'm sure um [Music]
well
let's see
i took uh i was up at three in the morning yesterday and took pictures of uh
um can you are you looking at my uh uh we just see a yellow line running
across the screen about now not yet all right well maybe i have to
stop share and start it again yeah you have to pick the right window
there we go okay elbow observatory yeah here's my picture of uh
mars wow nice very nice
the cap is nice and clear right okay yeah so in richard's uh view we were
seeing that um yep flipped upside down or right side up look at that image
beautiful yeah yeah isn't that so satisfying to
see that that's great yeah and um i got the moon this morning before it
uh went away it's now it's uh new moon i guess a lot of earth shine
beautiful and then um some pictures of the moon uh i i do have
um a picture of uh this is a video of all the smoke going by
a couple days ago this is my picture of um that's what's up
oh geez i get a call um that's my picture of uh andromeda galaxy
with a 200 millimeter lens just very little processing just threw it up
i'm i'm i'm not very good at processing i only use um deep sky stacker and uh
a few other things let's see what else have i done
if you go back in time i have some uh pictures i've taken of um
oh here's uh neo wise i might have shown that before
there's my two old uh oh yeah yeah those are the first one here is uh
it's in uh university optics that they in ann arbor michigan they um they made
this scope they usually make uh sell eyepieces that they make themselves or they
rebrand i'm not sure exactly how they did it and they used to sell
mirrors and and mirror mirror cells and but they never really
made a scope and so at one time they um
made this one scope they made a couple of others but this one survived i bought it from a guy
in michigan when i lived in toledo ohio the other scope is a cave a stroller
eight inch f5 both are f5 the stroller is a f 5.3
and um they're great for visual observing and i do a lot of
it i've done it for years and um this is a golf green we got and um
i put this was a ramada i put four sides on it and i store myself in there when the weather's bad
but um that's about it guys i i i have the scopes here i don't know if
you can see them i have a big
i don't know if you can yeah a little bit of glare but we can
definitely see that the other one's back
i needed a light so i just got one real quick
right yeah point the light the other way and
there we go we can see the scope now yep yeah there's the
cave back there in the uh
yeah an interesting story about cave and mead instruments uh there's a connection there when when
tom cave decided to start to uh close down his business and retire
most of the uh engineers and manufacturing staff went to meet instruments uh during that
oh yeah yeah uh one of the guys one of the optician guys went from coulter optical that was up in
idlewild and uh he eventually uh that was steve myrdock event eventually steve murdoch went on you
know he quickly became vice president of uh optics and then he went on to be uh
uh you know president of the company and then he went on to be ceo of the company
so it's neat both of those scopes i showed you were
made in 1975 yep the mirrors are still in great shape
they've never been redone or anything and they are beautiful
i the drive on for work still and
it has a declination type motor i didn't put it on i came with it when i
got it the um larger scope the tendon
[Music]
a whole lot of money and yeah my wife
anyway um i've uh for my uh lx two high traded two
doesn't have a you know a wedge so
this one here i have taken a lot of um you know everything that i can see
issues at this point um
i'm not sure on
yep okay ron we're going to jump over to um
uh we're going to jump over to
be mine because i'm about
all right yeah sorry ron we're losing you
okay all right so um uh let's uh let's jump over to uh
jerry hubble here we uh we lost uh tyler he had to head off to bed but i
did want to show what you're what you got going on at the msro
yeah we've been we've been having a successful night um here
i don't think um can you see my screen absolutely
so i want to show just a quick webcam view of the observatory inside the
observatory probably a lot of the viewers have seen this from previous episodes but it'll come up here in a
second there it is so these lights look much brighter than they actually are you can see the
night sky up through the slit here it's very dark but uh this camera
is very sensitive this is a zw camera that we're using so it's highly sensitive camera
this is a four second exposure so um that's that what i want to show
is what we were doing earlier we were doing m27 the dumbbell nebula and this is a single
frame from we took eight we took uh 36 minutes of data
two two minutes each frame 18 frames and uh this is a single frame from that
run we've got very tight stars our our are seeing was very good yeah it
looks like uh it looks like salt sprinkled on top of the you know very so this is the actual
finished stack it's a you know 36 minutes you know so you can see this is a full
frame it's one and a half it's 1.4 by 0.9 degrees
so when you zoom up you can see um how nice is so this our skies are very
good super we didn't we weren't impacted too much by the
uh dust stuff yeah and all that
yeah right yeah right now i wanted to show where
we're at right now we're just pointing
um tyler before he left we we decided to point to this open cluster
tr-37 okay and this is what it looks like um
really a very wide open i think that's where we're at now maybe i move the scope i'm trying to
think let's see i'm going to position see where the scope's actually pointed at i think it's still there
yeah it's there so this is an image the two-minute or 60-second image i just took with it
so this is a live image and then just to give you an example what we've been
doing with these images we've been doing plate saws which we use i'm using maxim dl to control the
observatory okay and we have pinpoint which is a bob denney program that's a
plug-in to the maxim dl and so i'm going to process this
uh show you how quick it is and there it is and the measure just to give you an
example this is a an explore scientific uh fpl 53
165 uh scope it's got a native focal length of i think it's 1151 millimeter
and i've got the 0.7 field flattener uh uh focal reducer on it which
yields a focal length of 850 millimeter which i find is a a thousand millimeters
i always consider the sweet spot for imaging because of what the skies will give you in terms of uh you know
full width at half maximum and uh but and you can see an example of that
here so once i did that one of the things i demonstrated to tyler
was that you could um first of all when you do that plate
solve you go to the head fits header file which is a header of all the detailed information about the image
including the location and everything but it calculates the uh
the pixel scale or the full width at half maximum and right now we're just a slightly
uh under sample that's 2.05 pixels
which is very tight on the pixel scale the other thing
is that you can bring up the information window
and go to astrometric and i can i can actually zoom up a little bit
let me get over here and once you do the plate solve you can click on a star and it'll give you the
actual you'll calculate the position and right ascension and declination down to
highly you know down to 0.1 arc seconds basically 0.1 0.1 arc
seconds is the calculation yeah the precision oh yeah
so you can see this is the image star this is the coordinates for the image star right here
and this is the catalog information so you can see in ra it's our position
uh measurement is 0.41 seconds and it's 0.40 and declination is
is 0.1.1 arc seconds off it's
zero zero 29.00 seven twenty nine zero zero point eight is the actual catalog value so you can
see this is what's this is what we do when we measure asteroid positions
yeah uh that's how precise you can be with our images you know jerry um
years ago i went i had to go repair a telescope for meat instruments it was in jordan i
think i've told you the story before but the uh the
one of the professors of astronomy wanted the telescope to point like with the arc seconds
accuracy uh from one star that was a you know in a double star set that was really
only separated by one or two arc seconds he wanted to go this one to that one
okay to know which one he was aiming at yeah and i i had to explain to this guy
you know that there's i don't think there's a telescope in the world that that would uh that would point that
accurately you know i mean just due to fletcher and stuff like that of the you know the tube and mount bending and
that kind of thing uh really took quite convincing but had he had had a program like this where he
could do plate solving okay and certainly he wasn't doing that um it would have helped quite a bit so well
you can see in this image of m27 you can see how precisely we could center the object yeah
um that's super that's actually within an arc minute easily within a few arc
you know half an arc minute probably sure uh and it's just
it's a pleasure to work with a wide field now this is a pretty wide field but we're again we're gathering we're
critically sampling the sky so we're not getting if we even had a you know a higher resolution camera it wouldn't give us
any more information at all i think we're squeezing all the information out of the sky that we can get
with this camera and this focal length in terms of uh the full width at half max now if we
were up on a mountain we'd be grossly under sampled but we're in the backyard
yeah so you know if you're doing deep sky with a with a 2
000 millimeter focal length scope you're going to be really limiting your field of view that you should be able to take
advantage of with the with the camera
so that's what we've been working on tonight and the system's working great that new focuser i installed it a couple weeks ago
actually a a few days ago i installed a new filter wheel in a couple weeks ago and hadn't had a chance to try it out
until just the night before last when the skies cleared up for us
so it's good to get the scope up and running and everything working running you guys were down for what
three or four for three three weeks probably three weeks okay it's great to have it all another the
other station was down also because we had a computer failure yeah we had to resolve and then we had
our lx 200 mount failed on us and it's down we don't have our 12 inch lx 200 right
now i might know a guy that uh can get you some electronics
so if that's what you guys thought oh that would be nice yeah yep there's still
some of that out there um the guy would be uh bought uh bill voris with telescope
warehouse oh yeah i don't recognize his name we used to go we went to a guy
that did a lot of work on the mean electronics what was his name i can't remember now but he's he does a
lot and he does upgrades now to the autostar system which is expensive
um we're a non-profit organization and we take donations but we we actually
uh kind of self-funding right now we get we get some outside donations but not a whole lot um
and the observatory is the mark slade remote observatory it's it's run operated by the marks msro
science incorporated which is a non-profit that we have
and we have people all over the world using the telescopes
that's true that's good and they're they're they're seeing it all over the world right now so it's awesome
that's great thank you jerry thank you thanks all right uh so uh let's go back to
uh caesar let's see what's happening out there
and no audio caesar no audio
yep not sure what happened
not yet this one ah that one yes i don't know why i have
three options and change every time because it's but change automatically
not me but i don't know let me share the the two things they should jupiter
now okay
where i have
just moved these two videos i'm preparing to preparing this
for for processing i think that this
the last one maybe is the best that have more possibilities to a good
processing results
because i had a local scene
uh maybe product of this here ah you do have jupiter i see it
yes yes it's acceptable i think that is acceptable it's great
yes maybe maybe i i'll take some information of of the structure in
the wavelets um have some possibilities
sure here you can see the one of the satellites here another one
well and this was my hand of course
right yeah with a small telescope you know that
that is not easy i i'm i'm really i need to to regret
here here is another one that i like it
are other from from tonight
this is very nice too oh yeah absolutely sometimes
that have been completely that you know the the characters of the color i think that
the the the great storm is here
the red the the i don't remember in english
well yes tomorrow not today not tonight
tomorrow i'll process this i'll share we maybe we need to have something where we
can share the image that we make in the third parties well we have
something new uh you know that which is the magazine that we're coming out with and
uh so marcel do you know marcelo souza caesar uh i i know marcelo sosa marzello sosa
from brazil right oh yes brazil is the senior editor
now of uh sky's up magazine and this was a magazine that we used to publish
we're relaunching it and so there is um you know if you go to the
facebook page for sky's up magazine you will see the uh
um i'll lead you to it and uh yeah it would be a great place it's a
great place to to share not my image because you know my
my images are more experiments to encourage the people yeah you telescope in the city are not
high quality much that's only you know if you if you'd like to
uh i'm in the in the end of of the in the end of the last friday and
then of the uh global separate european edition yeah with you
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you're very kind with me uh super me say okay you can try and uh was
was fun because after that we unconnected the mission the zoom
i say okay it's it's ruining to be clear okay i need to be to make this and uh
well i you know the the image is is incredible because the difference between each single
single picture and the final result was very interesting and i
don't use i didn't use fixing size because i said the
more challenging was to say okay i use free software like
i i make all completely in deep sky stacker the image that
yes because uh the challenge was make with something
with the free software you know this insight is amazing but in this type
of image maybe show to the people that it's possible to make something easy i don't know if you like to share
this compare with one single image it's only
one minute if you like yeah please okay
let me go to the here
well as you can see you can see you gary jerry h
this is the single image of single thief tfi or cr2
is the name of the raw image the raw image okay yeah yeah i don't know with
with which program okay photoshop yeah yes because i i
i remember that i had this like like uh the the
program that opened this automatically
sorry this is it is it it's a lot of time i'm
waiting there watching the mermaid gear that is
probably outside girl yeah okay
right oh my god yeah okay
well this is that when this is it will open
this is there okay a still a single shot but was of course that was better
that you know the the first shots that we take together
sure we are all it's the same that we we i feel like we was
around the telescope we suffering all together
sometimes yes right that's right and uh i started to to last
i don't have i don't have a great focus because as i i talked with uh
to gary that they say and this is all objective assume from canon and
was very very difficult to me to to make a great focus um but you know
the sometimes uh it's uh um this program deep sky stacker is very
very kind with the people and support any any but
some type of of uh mistakes in the picture are okay for for the
program if you if you put these pictures in to the stack in
programs like peaks inside the program say no no yes return tomorrow with a picture
a good but this is for this guy stacker is nice
they say this is the program that this is why to talk with the people that people want
not us that we have a lot of years trying things in astronomy but
um for the people for the kids especially or teenagers that come into the to
astronomy show them type of of uh of tools a very
friendly and it's very important and all the time i'm finding a free
you know free software to these people to start say for example another one that i
found is out out stacker but it's not a survey for planets but okay i don't remember the name but
another one is is very good for it and it's free for stack pictures and well the i show you of course the
the final the final picture
also canceller let's go to consult
and what's this what's a surprise for me because i have no more that 18 minutes
of of information of uh so so the the group is now calling
you 100 mile per hour cesar because
the group is now calling you 100 miles per hour cesar because they they think 100 miles
per hour oh my god
yes well this is the best option to have a story yeah for cesar
yeah uh dusty wants to know hey scott one way uh we could share pics from the star
parties with everyone would be to set up a discord server for for the twitch page
too uh we could we could but uh where we're going to um uh where we'd
like to share them dusty is on the sky's up magazine and so let me give you
let me give you a link that you can get to that magazine
page
well this is the
this is the final result
oh yeah check it out
what is this object below into the left of 47 where your mouse is running
right there yes this is this is it's the
minor cloud it's very really difficult to see from the city is
it possible to see and in the picture it's really what was for me very suppressive suppressive because do
you have here two ends to ngc um
nebulas and this is the all-entire cloud and this is of course quarantined
the cloud that is that only we can see and few stars but
really if we could make this in the in in this city that
if i show you now is that we we can account count
no more than 10 stars wow right and really really is it's
impressive how with a small equipment i'm very and and of course that that
exposed properly really because do you remember
that we don't have a a great focus and and i put and make only a two stars alignment
and a roley approximately right for an alignment because here in the south now i have i have a
building i i don't have any reference no more than a compass and a latitude yeah and that's it
yes yes the system work very good the system when that that the
computing maybe sherry can explain more about how how work but the relationship between
the motors of the clinician and and wreck well i don't remember now at this
hour the name in english ascension regress in spain
and make this that we really really we can get a near to round
stars really properly is is it is that really
yes his program does take into account misalignments and polar alignment uh so
it is driving both in declination and right ascension if you
if you're off of polar alignment so all right so the mount model basically yeah it drives both motors and
uh it's in point mode what it's doing so it's continually pointing to the
coordinates the modeled coordinates for that object so at five times a second it points to
that object uh so that's how it works right right yeah uh what's really probably
it's so so helping to take this because uh really i i
feel a help by the moment this is this was real that's great
a great ritual really i think honestly talking this cesar you did a great job
uh we are getting uh towards uh you know the end of our schedule here
but uh we're still going to have some time for
going on further but i do want to give chuck the opportunity to ask the last door prize question for
the night and so he can get some rest
okay those executive officers at the astronomical league
never sleep so it's not that it's all these all-nighters i've been spending at the toca lake
oh that's true on top of the zoom meetings so yeah okay we'll do the last question now
yep let me share a screen okay i appreciate you're doing that because
um we have a global audience and sometimes people uh uh don't understand
our american accents so well you know
he just joined the astronomical league today so fantastic yeah all right so we will go
this is a slightly adjusted question since i accidentally displayed it earlier uh
i adjusted this question this is the third one who first proposed the method used by jerome
lalonde to determine the distance to the sun in 1769
this is an interesting question okay now it was lalonde who determined the distance in 1769 but someone earlier
proposed it first and i'm looking for that name okay very interesting
very interesting okay who first proposed the method used by jerome lalonde
to determine the distance to the sun in 1769.
now there's a dangly modifier there the 1769 is not when the proposal was made
it was made far earlier far earlier way before 1769.
yep that's right that's right jeff the questions do get tougher as we go along
here and we have chuck allen posing the questions so you know you didn't think he was going
to make it easy did you so there you go well they complained about my questions being hard
i know i know that's awesome chuck thank you so much
thanks for thank you scott for the invitation tonight and and mentioning the national young astronomers award
uh you know i know that you were the person that uh that launched that um when i first
met you uh i met you with bob gent uh and you guys gave me the history of the
of the national young astronomers award but uh it's just one of the many awards that
the astronomical league does and to recognize uh special individuals and people for all their achievements
and you guys have been doing this for a very long time so that's that's great that's great you're changing
people's lives thank you again so are you thank you all right chuckle take care and uh we
will we will go back to the rest of our astronomers here that that are remaining the the
the astro vikings of uh of the the global star party because they're
still here and i i think gary palmer uh is at the top of the pack here so
gary you got anything to uh to add uh before we uh call it a night
no i think it's been a really good night again it's got very interesting people on tonight yes
yes so um it's now just coming up to 6 30 a.m so i'm about to uh
finish up and get a few hours sleep before we start solar imaging probably this
afternoon oh my goodness okay we have some good rest gary and uh we'll see you uh our next global star
party uh so you guys know is uh next tuesday um so that is going to be
um the 22nd and then we will have a friday european uh uh edition
of the global star party which will be the 25th so we'll put out announcements for that
as soon as possible and uh that should be a lot of fun so we'll try this one's number 10.
yeah it's going to be cool how about you richard do you have uh do
you have more to share with us before we go i do okay i'm gonna give you the
spotlight yep
that is not the process image one second here let's see
i love your radio announcer's voice richard you've got uh it's partially the microphone i guess is it
yeah it's not all the microphone no
i've been talking on the radio for a while long time yeah that's cool this is
what we ended up getting with a real quick edit and we did manage to pull out a couple
things that might be artifacts but there's a couple things that look kind of ugly around down in that area it's a
little darker and i don't know if one of those craters might be real or not but
you want to do you want to share your screen richard would you see your screen camera
it is late excellent oh look at that nice
yeah uh i just uh let it stack up and uh through the the first thing that i got
into pixin's take tonight right i'm sorry this is from tonight
yeah it was from like an hour ago oh wow i just took the the first stack that i got i guess it was a thousand images in
a video uh 8-bit you know uh avi file throw it into auto stacker
and let it do its thing and it said that the quality was uh about that good which isn't very good
but you know whatever excellent that's good and uh you know we'll take
it and uh i'm happy because honestly other than taking a picture of mars next
to the moon this is really my first uh half decent image on mars yeah i love it it's great man thank you
it's great i appreciate it and uh yeah it's been a good time it's always a
good party and uh you know to everybody out there watching you know uh follow
like subscribe you know all the people who uh that's right participate subscribe uh ring the bell
um share with your friends yep
like us share us thank you thanks richard
no problem that's awesome okay and um let's see
uh you're the last yeah yeah so how about you how about you
caesar yes it's the same okay with the guy that we are the last the
lastest yeah you guys are always the last one yes normally when i say if you go to the
surprise it's csar with three or four guys more yeah that's right yeah yeah i i except i
don't have my hot cocoa with the marshmallows in it you know yes something
like this yeah how about you jerry is there anything else yeah i
moved over i went ahead and moved to uh m31 andromeda galaxy all right give you a
few images these are the raw images so let me share my screen all right um
all right you can see that whoa these are coming in uh pretty good so if
you look oh yeah you can see the dust see let's see you know this is a
two-minute image so once i stack these and get this get the stretching correctly and the processing right so that it's not blown
out you'll be able to see quite a bit i think in here oh yeah but again our seeing i haven't had to
touch the focus tonight really at all the uh it's pretty amazing how the
seeing has been really stable the temperature has been fairly stable so
i just let it rip sure and uh i don't know that i've ever really
imaged and dropped m31 before a whole lot to tell you the truth really
why not yeah i don't know i just i'm not a deep sky guy so
if i'm just goofing off this is what i do when i'm goofing off you know it's like
well you're real serious about what i'm imaging i'm just going around the star chart looking for
stuff yeah so this is what it looks like in card to seal
hey there's a question uh before i forget it here um jeff weiss wanted to know what kind
of camera you're using to image tonight so i'm using the qhy 163 color camera
that we have a filter wheel on so when we do science imaging with that color camera yeah and we have an open position so we
can do color one shot color but we also we've bent it by two to do science imaging along with the filters that we
use i also do we also have a spectral grading that we do spectra with also on the
filter wheel so we can do all kinds of work with this system the way we've got it set up and i've and i've uh validated that you
can bend the color image the color pixels into one monochrome
pixel and it's very linear it's uh so i i basically took some test images
of m67 yeah and did a measurement across that frame
uh with the photometry yes astrometrica does a great job of creating an image
catalog of the star positions and the uh and the measured brightness
and so i bounce that against the uh so you compare the image brightness against
the catalog brightness and you draw and you fit the line to that and it's very linear
so i've got a so i validated that i could do v-band imaging with the color one-shot color
camera well that's cool so that works although it's not as you know with the with the bare
filter array on there you don't you don't get quite the transmission that you do with a monochrome camera but
it does pretty well so it's almost like you got two cameras in one monochrome and a color camera right
exactly do you think most of the color cameras out there could do this pretty well or i imagine so special
we set the gain and the offset the gain is set to the highest dynamic range for the camera
it's a pretty low gain value but it's uh it gives us the most dynamic range and it's the cleanest image that we can
get also and this is uncalibrated that one i showed earlier let me show you the dumbbell
okay this is uncalibrated there's no flat supply there's no bias or darks
it's very nice and there's no you can see there's no gradient there's no i think there's one one donut that's on
it's not a donut it's actually a circle because it's a refractor but there's only one spot that's got
dust there's only one dust spot on this side since i cleaned it at last week or week four last when i had it all apart
so these cmos cameras are amazing yeah it's true they're very clean yeah but
better than they used to be that's for sure yeah they really i think they really uh compete very nicely to science ccd
cameras uh the past
yeah well they're getting there
still there yep still okay it got quiet no just read i'm reading the chats you
weren't moving around i thought maybe my mic in the chat so anyways um
brett blake says color cameras can't figure out what rgb rgb pixel they're dealing with
when binning uh so it doesn't matter all you care
about is the total number of photons on each of those four uh great uh those four pixels you don't
you just sum the pixels you don't care what color they are yeah just you just bring them in and uh
the filter takes care of filtering the colors uh celtic raven wants to know what's
your virtual background that's not a virtual background he's actually back in 1969
at the apollo mission control so don't you know i'm in black and white this is an old-fashioned black and white
camera that i'm using here is it really [Laughter]
no yeah no it looks looks pretty authentic i love it you just more static and stuff you know so yep
right it kind of goes in and out every once a while as i adjust the rabbit ears you know so for
all you that were born not too long ago you won't know what rabbit ears are but you know
you know you know what they are so you type in rabbit ears and tv on the google
and you'll find out that's right that's right very funny um i am going to show i'm going to share
my screen here because i want to show what's going on at mount wilson uh right now um so let's uh
this is the hp ren camera um at mount wilson this is a pretty fresh
view you can see there's uh there's some lights turned on at the 100 inch dome just outside
and looks like the flames have hopefully died down a bit down below the mountain
so you know i again i don't know if these guys are out of the weeds yet
but so far they're dodging the bullet so let's uh let's keep our fingers crossed
from mount wilson observatory and um i think
zoom just gave me the function to cancel the spotlight off of me it came up with a little button over top of my image
that was pretty cool get it that's nice so
well gentlemen i think that we're wrapped up here caesar did you make any
more pizzas last friday was was amazing
badly no not delivery was yes but tonight no no no tonight was
all right so anybody anyone order a pizza from from uh the reals these are pizzas
okay uh you will i will send you i tell you to make italian pasta or pizzas
it's real and for only five hundred dollars he will produce a pizza for you and have it shipped anywhere overnight
yeah he said he said it wasn't delivery delivery maybe i don't know he doesn't
know that and when it is over for only five thousand dollars he'll deliver to you in
person okay he'll come to your house and make a pizza for you
no it's most easy it's most easy that one one time in the future we can enjoy
together something like this yeah i'm sure i'm sure
yeah that's right every household will have one well it was great gentlemen i i really
thank you for being with me um being with us um
and uh let's see if we have any more questions from the group here uh
celtic raven says uh cesar i'll take the cook challenge when i get down there one day
that's right that's right and kelly uh
look latorren later now says true heroes working on those fires that's true
uh it is uh it's dangerous work um unfortunately some of these guys lose
their lives fighting fires like that and uh it is uh it's pretty crazy so um you
know i've got family in california and they've of course are all safe but you know none of them
have seen smoke and fires like this in their lives down there so it's uh it's some of the worst fires in recent
history so for sure well uh you guys have a good night thank you
very much um i'm going to put the spotlight on me
and we are going to close out and we'll be back tomorrow
at uh four o'clock for the open go to community live
with explore alliance and we'll be talking more about sky's up
magazine and how you can participate in that and i and we hope you do if you're a writer or an
astrophotographer or someone that makes visualizations science visualizations
for astronomy or cosmology we we are very interested right now
we have a quick timeline on this next issue which is going the deadline is
september 30th so it's coming up really quick and we hope to get some submissions from you
out there in the public um until then as jack corkheimer always
said keep looking up and and we will see you
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you