Global Star Party 96

Transcript:

[Music]
all right you guys hear me now hear you now
all right well i must be in a either construction zone or some other
tenuous networking issue going on so
we'll see
ah there's my good friend david hello adrian hello hello
doing good i came early to um say hi to to all my friends before just listening
in to the uh program tonight great yeah i enjoyed you last night at
the warren meeting yeah we'll uh we'll get you more
involved we finally got our um as you can see we got our audio video problems solved
and we're looking to improve upon them even more so you can be a part of our meeting you guys worked on it and solved
it yeah because you really solved it in a big way
yeah but we we're happy because we want you to we want you to be the part of our meetings whenever you can
well i i want to be too that's good so did you get my email about the book
that i want to buy from you yes i did the book that you're thinking of is not
in print yet you'll probably be able to get it on amazon
okay well that'll be perfect i'll uh i will wait until then
and hopefully you like my picture i think yeah
or you'll be able to get it directly from us and then we can autograph i will do that i did that for the other
book too which i've enjoyed reading and your your poetry last night inspired
me to take another look at that moon picture that i took um
when the alignment one shot that i'm taking is when the alignment on the 23rd
there's going to be a brief period where before civil dawn
i may be able to get all seven well all six of the other
no all seven of the other planets the um
waning crescent moon and if i do a panorama
maybe a part of the um galactic core over there it's gonna be in a it's gonna be a very
tough picture to get with the with us going through um the twilights but i'm gonna see if i can
pull that off
that's a that's kind of a goal of mine to see if i can pull that one off
the 23rd looks like the best time to try it you have to make sure to get a little
bit of uh your ground as well so that you get an extra planet in there
yeah i'm gonna try and get all all of them except pluto the planet pluto would be there too
but um you know whether it's dwarf planet or not it's probably gonna be washed out
by the time mercury rises that's really the key i'm gonna be going where i've
got a low horizon and the goal is to shoot as soon as mercury comes up
all of the planets will be in a line yep
yeah with the moon exactly so imagine that shot moon with earth shine
in all the planets they have to come to a slight composite
because i have to expose for all the planets including uh uranus and neptune
i thought i thought david would be happy i have pluto up beside uh jupiter there uh oh
yeah i decided to keep the two of them close that is great
yeah pluto's a little bit big on scale there but just a touch
hi hello hi carol oh how are you doing oh we're doing fine
that's great we're all here getting ready for the lovely um lovely global star party
yes how's the weather in your part of the world hot [Music]
god it's well over 100 degrees here but it's a dry heat that's what they always say when a
massive star explodes as a supernova its core may be crushed into one of two types of compact remnant a black hole
you will have a great star party starting utah stars are the size of a city it
contains more than our sun they rotate rapidly host powerful magnetic fields and produce beams of
radiation that emit a wide range of energy when we detect pulses as the beams sweep
over earth the object is known as a pulsar they can spin many times per
second on their axes the fastest pulsar spin over 700 times per second and that rapidly spinning massive object
generates extremely strong magnetic fields and accelerates particles to high energies and we see
that those accelerated particles emitting energy in the form of gamma rays x-rays
and radio waves and when that beam sweeps past the line of sight to the earth we see it pulse on and that's why
they're named pulsars the most sensitive tool for observing pulsars in gamma-ray light is nasa's
fermi gamma-ray space telescope fermi scans the entire sky for high-energy sources and has found many
previously undetected gamma-ray emitters scientists have identified many of these
but for some the source of the gamma rays remains unknown
i got interested a couple years ago in trying to find the limits of what fermi can discover how extreme these objects
can be and in order to do that i focused on this set of objects that are relatively
bright and well measured by fermi and found that virtually all of them have now been identified at present when
i started this project there were only six objects which hadn't been we hadn't figured out what they were yet despite
intense searches at radio with radio wavelengths which is the standard way in which people find pulsars and also
looking at the gamma rays themselves no pulsations have been seen so something was unique about these six objects and i
thought hmm that's where the discovery space is going to be if we can track down what those are we have a good
chance of finding something new we took this small set of six objects
and attacked them with a number of wave bands but i think the thing that helped us make the greatest progress was looking in the optical invisible light
now this may seem a little bit unusual for studying the high-energy gamma-ray universe but it turns out that many of
these objects seem to have optical counterparts and if you can figure out what the visible light counterpart of an
object is you've a long ways along the track to understanding what it's all about
it was roger romani's optical observations that discovered a counterpart to the gamma-ray source that
showed a binary period that was indicative of this potentially being a binary millisecond pulsar it brightened
and it dimmed and brightened and so this looked like we were
looking at possibly something which was irradiated by a companion pulsar
and that every time you're looking at the bright face you see a bright optical source and when it rotates away from you
and you see the dark face you don't see anything we managed to get enough observations of the object to piece together its orbital
period and found uh remarkably that it was an incredibly heated object
blue white on one side deep deep red on the other that was orbiting around something invisible with an orbital
period about one and a half hours now that's faster than any spin powered pulsar ever known and indicates that
it's a really really tight system and that the gamma rays are blasting the companion at point-blank range
our colleagues of germany managed to use the orbital period that we measured to search in the gamma rays directly and
with a computational tour to force manage to find the pulse signal of the pulsar directly in the gamma rays
themselves what i'm doing is applying searches for pulsars so
that we try to find pulses that have not been seen before so you don't know how fast the pulse is
spinning where exactly it is sitting in the sky to do that you have basically to try every possible combination of
parameters if they match your data output stream so the problem is that the number of
possible combinations is tremendously high so the straightforward brute force approach isn't possible the
computational power you would need would be in excess of what's available on the whole planet so our work is to invent more efficient
methods to do that the basic method is analogous to zooming
it's similar to changing your objectives of your microscope in favor
of one of high magnification so you look at one interesting point on the slide and then you zoom in on that and then
you further zoom in if it still is interesting find the pulsations in the gamma-ray
data required us about 5000 cpu
days so so if you do it on your laptop you need 5000 days um but if you have 5 000 laptops you
only one day and so that's the path we took because we have a computing cluster that's called atlas
at the albert einstein institute in hanover and that computing facility we used for this analysis and it was
immediately clear this is a detection so it's not it cannot be a noise fluctuation because it's so
so loud in the data a pulsar that was a strong gamma ray source yet showed no radio signature
intrigued researchers among them was paul ray of the naval research laboratory he and his team
thought they might have a solution to the puzzling lack of radio emission when we first discovered the system i
looked back at our archival radio observations and none of them showed detections of this pulsar we think that
nearly all pulsars do emit radio waves the radio beam is emitted from most pulsars from a region above the polar
cap of the star and that means it's a tightly concentrated flashlight type beam in a system like this where there's
wind being blown off the companion star there's a lot of obscuring material along the line of sight it might be that
it is a radio pulsar and we just couldn't see it and the one way to confront that is to use a higher radio
frequency that's more penetrating it's less affected by the scattering in the in the intervening material and so we
went and made an observation with the robert c bird green bank telescope run by the national radio astronomy
observatory in west virginia at a much higher frequency than typical radio observations and it was in one of those
observations that we first saw the signal from the system and it appears that it is most of the
time obscured by the material from its companion a combination of radio optical and
gamma-ray data allowed astronomers to assemble a complete picture of the system it turned out to be a rare black
widow binary where a rejuvenated pulsar is gradually evaporating a low mass companion star they get this name
because they are in very close systems with the companion star being close enough to the neutron star that the
neutron star is irradiating the companion so the neutron stars producing a wind of energetic particles and
magnetic fields and also all the gamma rays that are radiated all this hits the
companion star and heats it up to very high temperatures but only on one side
so the side that's towards the neutron star gets blasted by this pulsar wind
and it has been whittled away over billions of years to where it now is only about eight times the mass of
jupiter this whole system is about the size of the earth moon system so it's very compact
we see the pulsar at the center spinning and emitting beams of radio and gamma rays the radio waves are
represented by the green and the gamma rays are represented by the magenta that radiation that impinges on the star
is blowing off clouds of ionized material that are collecting around the system and that's what obscures the
radio emission so we see that most of the time the radio when represented in green only makes it to that obscuring
material and not through it while the gamma rays which are much more penetrating go right through
it turns out that in as far as it's a pulsar it's not so very unusual what's unusual about it is this binary system
and the binary system seems to have through its history allowed this neutron star pulsar to accrete enormous amounts
of mass the measurements to date suggest that it's very heavy indeed and heavy neutron
stars push the absolute extreme of the densest matter in our visible universe i say this because many people think of
black holes as being exotic in the most extreme objects known but after all a black hole is collapsed to the point
where nothing is visible it's black a neutron star is an object that's on the hairy edge of becoming a black hole
yet is still visible in our universe hence the study of these ultra massive neutron stars gives us the opportunity
to study the most extreme matter in our visible universe if this fellow is as heavy as he seems
he pushes that study to a new horizon to a region of density and pressure which
has never previously been seen
[Music]
hey [Music]
so [Music]
so [Music]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and you're watching the
96th global star party um it's it's great to be back after uh you
know a week off and um we are excited to bring you a
great lineup of speakers of course we have david levy with us uh
you know making uh introductions um carol orig uh joins us once again from
the astronomical league he's the president of the astronomical league so we're happy to have him of course
jay kelly beatty from sky and telescope magazine is with us after a
long hiatus um it's really wonderful to have him back on the program so he's going to be talking about the globe at
night and then we have professor kareem jaffer from the royal
astronomical society of canada the montreal center
and i'm not sure exactly what his talk is tonight but he always has a great one so
i'm looking forward to it as i always do bob fugate is on tonight and his talk is
about laser beacons guide stars to new discoveries in the cosmos
this is something he knows a lot about and so i think you're going to find it fascinating uh young navin central kumar
is coming on tonight with the novak the uh president uh paul severance
so that that that should be interesting as well and then uh we have maxi fellaries who's joining us before he has
to make dinner [Laughter] that will be our first session sec uh
session and then we follow up with the second session including marcelo souza connell uh richards adrian bradley
and cesar brillo so it should be a great one and i hope you enjoy it but we're going to get started with uh
uh our beloved david levy david how are you man well i'm fine thank you
and it's good to see you it's good to see all of you carol it's good to see kelly after a while
absent yes and i saw kelly in person just a couple of weeks ago
we were both at the carolyn shoemaker memorial service and we thought that was going to be a
lot of fun and it turned out you know it was it was it was fun but in a very sad sad way because we missed
carolyn very very much and as soon as i got there and i saw the rows of chairs
and this lump formed in my throat and right at that same moment
i bumped into uh patrick shoemaker and right away i told him this is going to be tougher than we thought
and he started to cry and we embraced and he said i know i feel that way too
and it was very very special in fact patrick gave a very very nice eulogy for his mom
anyway uh we have our global star party tonight we're reaching out
into the cosmos as our theme tonight and i cannot think of a better
person to go back to but alfred lord tennyson i kind of wish i'd known him because he
was an amateur astronomer he had a telescope he would definitely have been on our global star party
if he were still alive today but um
he loved looking through that telescope on the isle of wight but he had the option to use
dawes you know the fame the famous double star observer at a large refractor in london and he had
permission to use that anytime he wanted to and he really did enjoy that i'm going to quote today from his
greatest poem in memoriam he wrote it it kind of evolved
after he lost his closest friend in around 1830
and he didn't realize that he was going to he started writing a few quatrains
uh in memory of his friend and he didn't realize he was going to write an elegy
until he had found he had written so many of them so i have a couple of quotes from in
memoriam to share with you today the first has to do with the discovery of neptune
[Music] a time to sicken and to swoon when science reaches forth her arms
to feel from world to world and charms are secret from the latest moon
referring to referring not to time to uh neptune which had been discovered
only four years earlier and we also have
a lot of what he says about organic evolution in this poem in which he words
um which in which he words the theory of evolution darwin's theory into
this beautiful poetic lines contemplate all this work of time
the giant laboring in his youth nor dream of human love and truth
and dying nature's earth and line trust that those we call the dead
are breathers of an emperor day forever nobler ends they say the solid earth were on we tread
and tracks of fluent heat began and grew to seeming random forms the
seeming prey of cyclic storms till at the last arose the man
who drove thee and branded from time climbed to climb
the herald of a higher race to shape and use arise and fly
the reeling fawn the central feast move upward working out the beast and let the aid
and tiger die as we get to the end of the memorial uh tennyson really starts to think about
cosmology and when she tries to prove that he
certainly would be at this global star party 96 if he had still been alive
he is no longer alive but his great-grandson great-great-grandson jonathan dennison who i do know
is working right now as an astronomer in comets and other areas like that
in london but anyway he was thinking about the expansion of the universe which was
just becoming a big topic at the time and he was wondering
if the universe was going to expand forever or if it was going to stop expanding and
then have a big contraction again with a big crunch right now
the local politics of science is that the universe will expand forever
but i don't believe that will last i think it'll the swing will go back and forth
so i'm now going to finish with a quote from the very end of in memoriam
where he now takes the idea of the universe approaching a final end
and in the end he actually goes back again to the loss of his friend that friend of mine who lives in god
that god whichever lived in love one god
one law one element and one far off divine event
to which the whole creation moves scotty thank you and back to you wow
that was wonderful david thank you thank you very much thank you well that's wonderful
uh you know uh what what i mean
the way that david sets up the gold star party it sets up the stage
is always great um this one is particularly uh
memorable so david thank you very much that's what this is not it is not i that does this i couldn't do it at all if it
weren't for wendy wendy is right here hello wendy's waving at us
yes and we're all waving back at you yeah okay
all right that's wonderful well we've got a we have a nice audience watching us from around the world uh right now um
and uh so we have uh just to name a few people uh pekka how
to lose watching from sweden we as he uh he often tunes in we've got people
watching from california um harold locke is watching
andrew corkill beatrice heinz from belgium uh mike weisner who is saying howdy from
oracle arizona's site of the next david h levy arizona dark sky star party
that's right this september um we uh and we have many more and i'll uh
i'll chat with you as we go along but uh let's get to um the astronomical league
and carol orange the astronomical league is the largest federation of astronomy clubs in the
world with over 300 clubs and
over 20 000 members and they are growing all the time they serve the astronomical
community through you know a fellowship through um their events through
uh their member clubs the regional organizations um they we just had the mid-states regional
astronomical league event that that occurred we had a representative there
um we uh you know recognized the astronomical league for all their observing awards uh all of their
uh observing programs and especially the way that they support
uh youth uh and women in astronomy which um i was
sitting down with uh with a advertiser today and they we were looking at
at demographics of of women involved in astronomy readers of uh
of uh popular astronomy magazines and uh turns out it used the number used to be
the ratio used to be about i don't know 75 to 80 percent men
and then some women you know that was always like not a very well-known number now it's climbing up
to about 35-40 percent women so you know once we get to 50 50 i think
that we'll be at that perfect balance but uh anyways it's so great to see so many
women involved in astronomy and getting all the recognition um that they deserve so
but uh uh carol i'm going to turn this over to you thank you for coming on to the 96th global star party
as always it's so great to be here and david it's hard to follow you with such
inspiration as you always bring to the star party and scott thank you for continuing us as we continue to get uh
more women involved in astronomy and thank you so much for your support of
the league over the years in various shapes and we were honored to have your representative at united states this
weekend we really appreciate it yeah that's our honor so i'm going to share my screen because
we're going to ask some questions or give some answers
everybody see that yes okay anytime we start off our question
answer session we want to make sure that everyone is reminded of the fact if
you get one of the door prizes from either the astronomical league or from explore scientific
that that's particularly one that's involving an eyepiece or something similar that you're looking for an
instrument with that you use the precautions so that's why we have this precautionary statement up here of not
looking directly without some of the proper filtering
the last star party two weeks ago we have the answers from that one the first one from that star party on
the leo triplet of galaxies consisting of messier 66 67 and which of the
following the answer is the hamburger galaxy a hamburger galaxy
number two from that one astronaut karen nyberg became the 50th
woman in space on her first mission to the iss in 2008
while in space she crafted and stitched together a toy dinosaur for her son
which she made from scraps of fabric recycled from what interesting options here discarded lens
cleaning tissues from telescopes worn out socks for the space walks but no
that's not the right answer correct andreas that's the one i thought it was russian cosmonauts food containers very
creative i would say [Laughter]
answer number three to that last star party the hubble space telescope recently discovered the most distant
known star the star is called er era arendelle i think i'm pronouncing
that correctly the name comes from which fantasy writings the answer is that some
summer really the other options were harry potter and the wheel of time
the correct answers from that may 24th meeting and i see
some familiar names on here who are all of us with us we really appreciate they're tuning in almost every week
cameron gillis john williams michael o'reicher adrian bradley andrew corkhill thank you
zondana josh kovac and rich kreiling
and as is the custom we draw door prizes once a month
from the winners from each week and give final winners and so the winners for may
are don mab andrew corkill and adrian bradley
now we get today yeah so i had a few repeat winners there but see we got some smart cookies in this
group uh see some repeating winners they always go to the trivia books or they have it in their
mind ahead of time so that's wonderful the first question for tonight
which unlikely apollo lunar landing was cancelled after an oxygen tank
exploded which unlucky apollo lunar landing was
canceled after an oxygen tank exploded send your answers to secretary
astro league dot org number two
the planet jupiter has a mass that is first option equal to the combined
masses of the earth and mars equal to the combined masses of saturn
and pluto i guess technically we can't include bluetooth anymore but some of us are
diehards aren't we the third one equal to the combined masses of saturn neptune and uranus
and the last option greater than the combined masses of all the planets and
again send your answers to secretary astro league dot org you can just
exclude my reference to pluto there sorry about that question number three
a comet's tail points in which direction first option toward the sun
second option toward the earth the third option behind the comet in its
orbit or number four away from the sun and again send your answers to
secretary astro league dot org
the upcoming astronomical league live that's held monthly each month on this channel will happen on friday june 17th
2022 at 7 00 p.m eastern daylight time our featured speaker will be dr caitlin
erins and her topic will be mars geology it promises to be a very interesting
talk uh we don't hear about that aspect of mars very often so i'm looking forward to it and those are logos for alcon 2022 the
national convention the astronomical league the flyer is up there this is a reminder
that there is still time to register for that event which is the last week in july go to astro astrolake.org and click on
alcon 2022 to get registered we still have options open
there's still some rooms at the embassy suites the hotel convention so uh feel
free to do that as well several exciting speakers we're going to have so uh make your plans now if you haven't already
we'd love to have you and i believe that's it uh thank you scott and now back today thank you so
much that's great yeah um uh carol you're you you were so smooth uh
on this this go around so uh thank you very much uh it was a great presentation
thanks um we uh uh uh have up our next speaker which is um
uh j kelly beatty uh as david levy was mentioning um we're running a little
ahead of schedule so uh you know just uh uh so the audience is aware that my our presenters as well
um but i yes i i was at the uh carolyn shoemaker uh
dedication it was it was uh called a gathering in memory of carolyn shoemaker and we
had the privilege to broadcast it live you can watch it
you know by doing a quick search on youtube
to see all the speakers and all the all the memories and everything from
friends and family and colleagues you know i learned so much about carolyn shoemaker uh during that time
um she was uh as everybody said you know she just had this presence about her uh
it made you feel at ease uh but you quickly learned that she was
uh extremely smart and um but uh had a great great sense of humor
and um uh you know uh she she lived a long time but uh again
you know everybody there was missing her there when we stood on mars hill and
and heard the outpourings of all those people i think it was probably the first time many of them have been
able to get together since the pandemic and so it was it was an honor to be there
um it was also an honor for the league uh last year to present her with the
al award for uh that's right florida's to astronomy just a few days before our
convention so we were so honored we were able to uh she knew she was getting it so we were glad that uh
it's wonderful it's wonderful um yes and so um
yeah again if you're looking uh to to uh kind of see what that was all about you know
check it out on youtube um well okay so uh jay kelly beatty was uh
was there as david had mentioned and uh jay jay kelly beatty is
for me for many many years he's been with sky and telescope magazine now for 45 years uh writing about our solar
system uh uh he has books out one of them with the national geographic society about the planets um but uh
for me for many years he was the voice of sky and telescope so back in the day
before the internet you know when i wanted to know what was going to go on in the sky i would call
sky and telescopes hotline they had a information hotline i think you had to
dial their main number and then they hit an option and you would hear kelly beatty's voice come on and he would talk about what's
up in the sky i love that i think he has he has an amazing voice um of course
he's uh uh amazing in his knowledge he's a great friend uh and he's a champion of
dark skies and so it's it's wonderful to have j kelly beatty be on the 96th
global star party ellie hey scott thank you so very much so i need you to talk a little bit about
that about that uh hotline that you were you were referring to uh
we at skying telescope in 1985 were anticipating that we would get
slammed with questions about halley's comet that was coming up for its apparition in
1986 yes just did not have the time nor the number of phone lines to handle
that expected uh crush of of interest so we created a
a uh recorded telephone message we got our very own like individual lying for
it um and i i remember well at one stellar thing
david was speaking david was speaking and it was sort of in the heyday of skyline as we called it
and david said everyone knows skyline what's the number and everyone kind of in the audience do
you know that stealthing there's a thousand people and they kind of yelled out in unison
617-497-4168 you remember that david that was
i remember the number very well yeah and so um
we got to the point where we were getting thousands of calls a week this is pre-internet
and we got a special commercial-grade voice answering machine that would handle two lines at once
and we continued it for many years and it finally died but it it like the
phoenix it has resurrected and now every month not every week but every month
i record a podcast a 12-minute podcast which you can find on the sky telescope website or
various uh podcast services called sky tour and it's a 12 minute walk through
the naked eye usually evening but sometimes morning sky what's up no experience needed no
uh no equipment needed it's just you and me out among the stars
and i point out things and tell you a few things along the way and help you identify some constellations so check
that out that's um it's not supposed to be a commercial plug but that that was the the second generation of of skyline and
i've been doing doing that podcast now for more than 14 years we started it in
2017 15 years we started in 2006. so anyway that's not what i'm here to
talk about yeah that's great and i did post a link
so that our audience can go and find your podcast and bookmark it so there you go yeah so i i i will tell you that
if you what i'm really here to tell you is that if you buy scott roberts his favorite beer he will send you a free
eyepiece [Laughter] no i am here to talk about something
that is not true at all i'm here to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart which is globe at night and
since this is a global star party i figured this was a very appropriate thing to talk about
you know we go out we amateur astronomers go out into the out into the night and we judge how good a night it's
going to be by how faint the stars are that we can pick up by eye if we live in a light polluted
environment like a city or if there's a bright moon out we don't see as many stars we can't see as many uh faint objects as
as we otherwise would and roughly i don't know 15 years ago
[Music] in consultation with um
noao as it was called then the national optical astronomers
organization in tucson connie walker particularly created a citizen science campaign
called globe at night and globe is actually a an acronym for
uh something about studying earth it's broader than just astronomy and it was
originally designed to be an activity for for uh grade school classrooms
and it still is that but it has taken on so much more of
of of a persona and importance and i want to talk about that tonight so the website
first of all is globe at night.org and what it does is ask you
as an observer of the sky to go out and estimate the faintest stars that you can see what
we call the naked eye limiting magnitude of of your night sky no matter where you
are what your circumstances are and so as you can imagine this is very well suited to like a class of fifth
graders you know they all go out and they they check it out and then it's a homework project and they come back in
and in fact i have used this as a homework assignment for my high school
astronomy class when i was teaching some years ago and and it is a great way a fabulous way
to connect people to the night sky because literally what they do is
they go out under a dark moonless night and they um they observe
uh on campaigns that are selected to be uh during the dark of the moon so here
we have the the june campaign coming up is after the moon goes through full it's
in the it's crescent phase now it's in the evening sky and the moon obviously its light keeps us from seeing the
faintest stars that we can see for two reasons one is that the moon scatters light into our atmosphere and it makes the the
night sky bright and also it keeps us our our human eyes from becoming fully dark
adapted so later this month there will be a campaign when the moon will no longer be
in the sky and the idea is that you go to the constellation of hercules
in the night sky which will be uh for us in north america will be well up in the north sky
almost to overhead and the idea is that you you use the charts that are
downloadable uh let's see if i can find the charts here we go
so let's see is this this is hercules right so you can see these charts here
now astronomers for those who aren't savvy about this astronomers use a a scale called magnitude
to determine how bright a star looks and it's counter-intuitive the higher
the number the fainter the star it's kind of like running a race you want to come in first place not sixth place or
twentieth place and so the the higher the number the fainter the star that you can see and these charts that you see here that i'm
showing you show the sky at different levels of
magnitude or the target area which in this case happens to be the constellation hercules
which i showed you was high up in the north so the idea here is you take this chart either as a printout or on your mobile
device whatever that might be um and you go outside and you let your eyes get adapted to the darkness and
when i say adapted i'm not talking about just five minutes your eyes get adapted to darkness two ways one is that the
pupils in your eyes expand and allow more light to enter your eyes little known fact is that as
you get older your eyes don't dilate as much as they used to
after the age of 40 when you're a kid it's like your eyes are eight millimeters across that's
roughly uh roughly a third of an inch when your pupils are wide open and after the age of 40 you you lose
about roughly one millimeter per decade of age so i always told my fifth graders that
there was something they could do that their parents could not and that was see stars that were fainter
than their parents could anyway the idea here is you to go out allow your eye to get first of all to
dilate fully but then over time a reaction takes place in your retina
that gradually builds up a compound called rhodopsin or visual purple it's sometimes called and this kind of puts
your retina on steroids and it allows you to see fainter and fainter and fainter things and that process
of building up the rhodopsin in your eye takes you know the better part of an hour or even
longer than an hour so to do this process right you really need to go out and just sort of sit in
the darkness for a while and let your eyes adjust and then the idea is you look up at this target area whatever it might be for
that particular month in this case it's it's the constellation hercules and you match these charts
to the number of stars you can see in the sky and you can see here that the fainter this the
the higher the magnitude number the more stars you can see the fainter stars you can see okay
so let's say for example a typical suburban sky you're going to see either magnitude 4 or magnitude 5 one of these
two charts here so let's say that you've made that comparison with the nighttime sky and
you and you you you now have a number well then you want to report that
and you go to this website click on report it it knows what the time and and date
are it probably knows where you are for anyone who wants to steal all my telescopes that's where i live um and and then you
you you show all right so i've got let's say a magnitude 5 sky over here i type in the conditions uh no
street lights uh and then here you that you click it was clear and uh
very transparent whatever it might be and then down here you've already told
them what the magnitude is that you saw and then it replicates that chart
and then you submit your data now that is all you need to do and once you
do that your data oops i'm sorry wrong clicked on the wrong way your data where that
dot that you point becomes part of this global
i picked 2022 let me let me see let's see let's let's go to
let's go to where's the current one oh gosh
uh maps and data well sorry about that
here we go so we'll we'll use uh that's data for 2021.
we'll use this one which is 20 20 data just just for kicks and here is a map of the earth and these
every dot that you see here in 2021 ah here i go i have i have the key here
so now these are all the dots that have been submitted since the beginning of this
year and the darker this dot the uh the fainter the object i'm going
to go back to 2021 which was last year the last complete year where more than 21 000
measurements were submitted worldwide wow
and i want to show you this dot right here in the falkland islands
because this dot was submitted by me while i was on a cruise to antarctica
and uh and so and i'm saying well all right so now you should be asking yourself well this is fun but why should
i do that well first of all if you're a fifth grader to go out and make a measurement like this and submit the data and then five
minutes later see your dot on a map of the world along with everybody else's dots that's cool in and of itself
but these data are really important for the following reason most everyone has seen and i won't show
you because they're too common uh global maps well i will show you [Music]
this is a global map of the world showing uh it's color-coded to show you
how i will go that shows you all of the light pollution in the world
as measured by satellites these are satellites that look down at the earth uh they take pictures and and those
pictures are recorded into data it's it's we're too u.s centric here so i'm going to zoom in on africa
and and the middle east here so you can see how the middle east is very lightly brit brightly lit and
africa is pretty much dark um except for certain locations like uh
um this um this is uh i'm trying to think of this which
country is this is that is that cameroon it was nigeria i'm sorry it's niger and then like southern africa down here
south africa you know this shows you all of all of the lights around the world well
these these satellites are measuring light that is going straight up into the sky and
it is but the light that goes straight up causes the least amount of light
pollution believe it or not really the most damaging light rays from
the standpoint of creating light pollution are the ones that go just above horizontal out into the sky
because they have a grazing path through a long path length through the atmosphere and they scatter
photons all along their path until they exit so for example i live about 20 miles from downtown boston when i look
straight overhead i am seeing light pollution over my head that was created in boston
for that reason all right so my point here is that these maps that you see and that we have
all come to recognize are not realistic
because they don't show what the light pollution is that's going on at ground
level that's why we need these measurements from globe at night and and in fact uh i was in conversation just
today by email with a with a a researcher named christopher kaiba who's in germany he's one of the top light
pollution researchers in the world and he routinely uses this globe at
night data to sort of give a ground truth to what the satellites are seeing one of the
problems with the satellites is that they are relatively insensitive to blue light and modern led street lights among
others give off a lot of blue light and the satellites just can't see it but
in in a perverse kind of way blue wavelengths of light create the most
scatter in the atmosphere there's a relationship called rayleigh scattering
which tells you rayleigh scattering is what makes our sky blue during the daytime it's because
rays of photons from the sun are bouncing around in our atmosphere scattering off of air molecules
and blue wavelength photons short wavelength photons scatter
much more readily than red ones do it goes as the inverse fourth power for anyone who cares
and so blue light scatters far more readily than red light and that means that blue light from an led in downtown
boston is going to scatter light far more than a red light bulb okay so chris kaiba and others use this data
to um to to sort of calibrate what they see in their in their images now look
fifth graders going out and doing light pollution measurements it is a fantastic exercise for them in terms of gauging
their you know connecting them with the knight there's not going to be a lot of rigor
necessarily in what they're measuring and so there's another way to do this which maybe saw on that on that uh
uh that that fill in form i showed you and that's using something called a sky
quality meter which is this little gizmo costs 155 dollars you buy it from this
company unihedron.com and every one of us who are caring about
the night sky every astronomy club uh carol i think you ought to give away
these sky quality meters as a um as a uh a prize for like somebody who
gets a herschel award or something like that um these are literally they're the size
of a pack of cigarettes and they measure the brightness of the sky in a calibrated repeatable way
and when you put this number in your globe at night measurement it tells the researcher that this is a
number they can believe in now the number here that's shown 19.66
it's a funny kind of number it's magnitudes per square arc second and i won't even pretend to try to explain
that here but 19.66 is not that great
that's probably about a four and a half or fifth magnitude sky
you can see a fair number of stars i would expect you know scott probably you in arkansas you can
see that david's doing much better than that i'm doing a little better than that
uh what you really want to do is get a 20 something 21 is fabulous anyway you take
this number and you plug that into your globe at night reading and the value of these globe at night
measurements is not that you do it once but that you that you do it over and
over again from as many places as you can uh i will show you one here
from 2022 from the 2022 map we're going to zoom in on flagstaff
arizona uh if if the map will refresh fast enough here's flagstaff
a wonderful flagstaff is the first international dark sky city uh in in
anywhere as recognized by the ida and this little dot right
here at lowell observatory if it if it refreshes and comes back up
uh there it is right there that was my dot with my sky quality meter with six
magnitude taken uh the night before carolyn shoemaker's memorial when i was at
lowell observatory for the stargazing session so you can see i and thousands of other people not just across the
united states but worldwide are participating in this and i think
scott i think we should encourage everyone listening to try this activity it's a
lot of fun for you and your family you don't need a sky quality meter to have fun with it uh it will become
your connection to the night sky every time you do it it forces you to look at
the sky and look deeply at the sky and i think that's uh a lot a worthy
goal for all of us and that's it thank you very much thank you very much um i
am going to post uh the link for globe at night and um
and it's really complicated it's globe at night.org.org
and i have to concur with the pedagogical use of this just to get the students to go out and see how many
stars in a constellation they actually can observe and start to understand the magnitude of the light pollution in
their backyard versus a nearby park versus outside of the campus it's it's
really wonderful because it gets them looking it gets them out yeah
yeah that's awesome thank you very much thanks again for coming on to global star party kelly thank you
well up next is uh professor karim jaffar from
john abbott college and from the royal astronomical society of canada
montreal center karim is one busy guy
he's he's always involved in education whether it's to his own students or to the general
public he does all that he can to encourage youth in astronomy
uh you know he he is just one of the you know a group of amazing people
in canada that's doing incredible outreach activities uh in the best way
possible some of the programs i've seen them put together
you know as i vicariously live these experiences through kareem uh are just
uh top-notch and i really take my hat off to him um hey i sent you my slides i
shared them with you okay if i can't get it to work which i'm
not sure i can on the back i'll never find it we are going to sorry paul we're going to have to mute
you okay and um anyways i am going to
turn this over to you kareem oh thank you so much scott that was beyond kind um
i i'm happy to be back i'm happy to be here for the 96th global starbucks can
you believe it that's it's just fantastic so we're talking tonight about beacons of the cosmos and i was really
happy to see the reference being made to the pulsars by scott and i mean those of us that teach when we're
talking pulsars normally the analogy we give our students is a lighthouse and
the idea that the beam kind of comes back around and around and around again and when we're talking about the beacons
of the cosmos we're talking about markers and lights that we can use and so i am going to come to this but i do
want to point out when i looked for the lighthouse and i you know found this really nice little clip art it just
didn't feel right and so i went and i took adrian's uh wonderful picture of
the white house here in michigan from last august and that feels a little bit better so i
am going to come to this before the end of this segment but i thought i'm going to start with a couple of other things
including a check-in to some of the programs that scott was referring to before i do
in canada june is indigenous history month and you know i typically start a
lot of my public events and even a lot of my gsp segments with a land and sky
acknowledgement and the land and sky acknowledgement in order to try to keep it not just respectful but also contextual i try to
talk a little bit about the moon this month and right now we are at a first quarter moon and this was taken
yesterday evening by roger hyman from space oddities previously for master radio reach out in dutch space
and if you look really closely at this image you can actually see the lunar x and the lunar v but i'm not going to
show you that i'm going to tell you how you can see that for yourselves in another program in a moment what i want
to talk to you about is this actual moon because since it's natural national indigenous history month i thought we'd
look at a couple of the different indigenous cultures that we don't always talk about when i do these land and sky
acknowledgments and what they see for the june moon so if we look at the cherokee tribes the cherokee tribes they
see the june moon as the green corn moon and the mohawks actually refer to it as
the fruits are small moo and the reason for both of these is because at this point the crops are not at optimal yield
they're so young they're still growing so you don't want to be picking any of these crops so by naming the moon according to this
idea you discourage any youth and any members of your tribe from actually picking the fruit because
it'll be much more useful much more worthwhile to wait just a little bit longer we look at the mikma on the east coast
here in canada they come out right now in june and they see the leaves
just absolutely luscious and so they refer to this as the tree's fully leaked moon
and a lot of the settlers and even the ojibwe from the great lakes region they refer to this as the strawberry moon and
i thought it was really cool this past week where i was at a conference and in the morning as i was driving in just at
the waxing crescent moon it was right after the new moon there was a news report about the fact that the
strawberry crop has started early and it's amazing yields and they're really sweet and so i had to stop and pick up
some strawberries on the way home so this idea of the way in which the indigenous peoples refer to the moons
and its connection to nature is one that i think we can all carry with us now before i get into more of the
check-in i thought i need to give a call out to one of my students i just want to and i'm hoping david is still on because
he's going to enjoy this i've talked to you previously about the fact that when i talk to my students about the galilean
moons of jupiter i give them this activity it's a short little visual lab where they watch the four galilean moons
and they determine the period of orbit they determine the radius of orbit from these little measurements and they use
that to determine the mass of jupiter using kepler's laws and then whenever i get a chance i get
them out on the field and i get them to actually see jupiter and the galilean moons and it's just it's a wonderful eye-opening
experience for them i haven't had as much of an opportunity to do that these past couple of years because of covid
but lo and behold two nights ago one of my students messages me in the middle of the night
olivia ellman she's in italy with her family on a trip and she went past the galileo museum and she made her entire
family go in so that she could see the telescopes galileo used to see the galilean moons so cool and she even sent
me galileo's middle finger i don't know if that was a positive or if that was some sort of a hidden message but i'm
just proud of the fact that that she went out of her way not just to go and look at these things but also to send me
the message to tell me look at these pictures i took i wanted to see this for myself so i
thought that was really special and i wanted to share that with everyone now a couple of weeks ago when we had
gsp 95 i mentioned to you the unfortunate news that astro radio reach out and touch space had
been closed up because we had some trouble with the astro radio site with hackers attacking the system constantly
and it was just reached the point where it was not worthwhile for the volunteer group to keep it going
so i'm happy to say that last monday we moved to an online panel system with
youtube and we now call ourselves the space oddities and you can catch us live every monday at eight o'clock british
summer time which is 3pm eastern daylight time and the very first show i was able to attend
this past monday yesterday i was in meetings the whole day so i didn't get a chance so
like the rest of the audience i was wondering what i missed out on so here's the lineup from yesterday so you get an
idea of what this panel show's all about they talked about what's up in the night sky they talked about the lunar letters
noctilucent clouds the trappist-1 exoplanets and the upcoming images that will start to come out in mid-july from
jwst supermassive black hole mergers martian rocks parker solar probe
galaxies and metallicity measurements through the spectra the chinese rocket launch
and that was just the first half of the program so the space oddities it's a panel of
just a bunch of space enthusiasts space educators and outreach people who just like to share the things that are in the
news and banter with each other about them so it's a lot of fun i encourage
you to join us every monday 3 p.m eastern daylight time this link bit dot least space oddities
all small letters uh we'll take you directly to our youtube channel and you'll see our live
event come up every monday other thing i wanted to mention is a new project that i've started a few years
ago one of my colleagues here at john abbott college was the mcgill shad
counselor he was the one who was organizing and coordinating the entire shad campus now chad is stem students
from grades 10 and 11 from across the country but they have to go to a center
in a city that they don't live in so that they get to experience a little bit of another city another area of canada
and one of the things we decided to do was to actually give these students who mostly live in urban areas a little bit
of a night sky experience so this was the first one that we did back in 2018 we did another one in 2019 in the last
couple of years we haven't been able to but we're now doing it again for the montreal campus this coming summer on
july 13th full moon we're going to do an artemis mission talk and then we're going to take them out and we're going
to show them the full moon and show them a few deep sky objects now when i started talking to the shad
individuals one of the things that came up is we have these campuses all across canada and they would love to replicate
something like this or even offer some sort of virtual programming down the road so our robotic telescope we're
going to hopefully starting next year build in a little bit of a session or some sort of an activity with the shad
campers with our robotic telescope but for this year what i'm doing is i'm helping every single center that's
interested to reach out to local rask members or local centers or other
astronomy clubs nearby to try to get them telescopes on the field for one evening during this
four-week program for these students so it's really a wonderful thing to see
these youth to start to see their eyes open as they're learning a bit of gravity they're learning a little bit of
space in class when they come to this camp they actually get to experience it for themselves
i also wanted to give you an update on the cosmic generation as you know david myself and many others scott carroll
were all part of the mentor circle for the cosmic generation the cosmic generation is currently planning their
next event which will be on sunday june 26th it'll probably be mid afternoon mountain
time and eve early evening eastern time
it's again by youth for youth so stay tuned for details hopefully next week i'll
have a little bit more information for the kids in the audience but the other neat thing is the cosmic
generation is going to be part of a rask general assembly as well as alcon they
will have a table at alcon so if you are going to alcon in albuquerque check out the cosmic generation go and
talk to them give them your support give them a little bit of a of a shout out because this is a group
of youth that have taken it on themselves to really kind of try to inspire the rest of their classmates and
and friends and peers from across the world as you know i do another program here in
canada as part of the education public outreach committee called creation station and we are open for submissions
ages 5 to 17 whether it's stories whether it's poems whether it's drawings
videos sculptures paintings you name it if you want to share your imagination and you're a youth between 5
to 17 please visit rask.ca creation station and share your wonderful imagination
with the entire world now speaking of rask uh the insider's guide to the galaxy today we just had uh
our one our first of our summer segments and the summer schedule is now up on ras.ca insider's guide but this one was
kind of cool because it was all about globular clusters and i don't talk about globular clusters enough
and it was fun the other day hearing lou talk about globular clusters because you know they're just wonderful to sit and
see and i don't know about anybody else in the in the panel here or in the audience i actually love
counting some of the stars i will sit there with m13 and i'll start counting and i'll like you know go as high as i
can to see how many of those individual points of light i just i can't counting
i lost you run out of numbers right yeah oh i i did i did an image uh gathering
for one of my students of uh the of omega centauri and my jaw just hit the ground i could not
believe the number of points of light and i think at one point
i was sitting there with them and we were chatting and we started all counting together and we tried to do it systematically pixel like you know left
to right top to bottom and at some point we were arguing as to whether we were at 700 or 900 and we
were still in like the top quarter and we we gave up that we could not go any further
so in today's program they actually gave out the globe awards and it's the most interesting globular clusters to observe
an image so i highly suggest that you take a look at this but where most of our attention has been
is our general assembly and our general assembly is coming up at the end of this month it's a virtual event one more time
zoom links will be provided if you purchase tickets and tickets are really really reasonable for general public not
members it's 25 and keep in mind this is 25 canadians so that's like the price of
a starbucks coffee i think down south of the border or you know one gallon of gas the rate
things are going so tickets are very reasonable for rask members they're 20 and for youth they're
15 and it gives you an entire four day program which includes not just amazing
speakers panelists youth presenters but also virtual tours on the monday of snow
lab and other locations which is a lot of fun the sudbury neutrino observatory your jaw will draw you will not believe
the setup there underground and that abandoned nickel mine but the the keynote for this entire
general assembly is a public lecture that every year we share hosting with
the professional association of astronomers here in canada it's the helen sawyer hog lecture and this year
it's one of my friends natalie willett who is the coordinator of the institute for
research on exoplanets the outreach scientist for james webb space telescope and herself she's a galaxy evolution
astrophysics researcher so natalie is going to be giving this talk free to the public you go to our rask canada youtube
channel and you will see this talk for free on saturday evening june 25th at 7 00 eastern daylight time and i will be
helping in the chat to moderate and maybe even answer some questions and uh if you have any interest at all in
what's happening with the james webb and what we expect and hope will come of it listening to natalie is the way to go
she has been fantastic we even had her on astro radio last fall and i was really glad we were able to get her on
while the program was still going on one last thing i want to tell you about the general assembly and this is for
every rask member in the audience and i know there's a lot of rask members now listening i know adrian just perked up
in the audience to listen to this as well there is an astrophoto contest for the general assembly you have to be
attending the general assembly to participate but the categories are far and wide
you've got deep sky you've got wide field you've got the moon and other solar system and celestial bodies
sketches and drawings and then this one i love especially after the the this
kelly's uh presentation light pollution abatement any images that feature the
effect of light pollution on the night sky and that you can let your mind go wild as to how you would incorporate
that there's also a youth category and the neat thing about this astrophoto contest is it really is open to anyone
and your perspective so the photos will be judged separately it's not you put 17 photos side by side
and you pick out the one that speaks no each one is judged separately based on the way in which it is presented and so
that's one of the things i really like about this astrophoto contest so i encourage people especially rask members
who are attending the general assembly to please participate in the astrophoto contest and share some of your work
now i want to mention that because my course is now done i can talk to you a little bit about some of the major projects
that my students have done and what's really interesting for this term is we didn't have any class do or
any group do the spectra project and the reason was was because we talked about it so much in class that they felt that
they knew it and so when tom was on a couple of months ago now or a month and
a half ago and i was chatting with him i actually had emailed him separately to talk to him about this a little bit at
the start of the term that i was surprised nobody was choosing it but one of my previous groups offered
their poster for the general assembly and then using the robotic telescope my first group that did an exoplanet
transit way back in 2019 to look at the exoplanet transit for hat p16v
they're going to be presenting their results as well and one of the groups that used the
remote telescopes that i have access to across the world they did
nebula processing and they're going to be showing some of the work that they did with the eagle nebula with uh
processing it all together rgb and then trying to take out as much noise as possible the dumbbell nebula using
different methodologies different workflows and then using the beautiful sky news data from our california
robotic telescope what they were able to do with the helix nebula so if you want to come and take a look
at this it's not a traditional poster session like my students get to do at school it's going to be a gather town
poster session so as part of the general assembly you get to see student work you get to see the astrophotos and you get
to socialize with all of us rascals up here in canada so i highly encourage everyone to attend the general assembly
and join us for this wonderful event end of june june 24th to 27th and again
tickets for the general public if you're not a rask member are 25 canadian for rask members 20 canadian and for youth
15 canadian now i told you i'm going to come back to beacons of the cosmos but i'm going to
tie it into everything i just talked about so just wait and hold hold on to your seats so when we talked about
beacons of the cosmos i pointed out that we talk about it in terms of this lighthouse idea where we've got pulsars
that are rotating around and coming to us and we refer to those as beacons because you're actually seeing
these pointers now what was the lighthouse used for a lighthouse was used to tell us that we're very close to
land that there might be rocks very close by and based on the brightness and the
intensity of the lighthouse signal and in some cases the rotational speed of
the lighthouse we were given different bits of information when navigating how do we determine that idea of how
close we are to something in space and a while back i think this is actually i think last summer i talked to you a bit
about standard candles this idea of the way in which we figure out distance in the universe
within our solar system you just send out radar pulses they bounce off objects they come back and you figure out how
far away the objects are because all those radar posters just travel at the speed of light for nearby stars you use
something called parallax where you take a look at a measurement when you're in one point in earth's orbit around the
sun and six months later when you're in another point with earth's orbit around the sun you look at the same star with
respect to further distant stars and the star will have shifted just a little bit like when you're looking out
in the distance and you close one eye then you close the other eye and you see a shift well that shift the parallax angle
actually tells us the distance to those nearby stars when we go beyond that we tend to use
things called cepheid variable stars there's this beautiful squiggly line sawtooth pattern that you can see here
because cepheid variable stars rr lyrae cepheid type 2 all of those stars
vary in the intensity of light that they give off in a very uniform fashion
depending on how bright they are intrinsically
the period between peaks changes so if you figure out the period between
peaks for a cepheid variable star let's say it's seven days you know how bright it should be if it
was close to you then you look at how bright it actually is and it tells you how far away that star really would be and that was the
system that hubble used to determine the distance to the andromeda galaxy by
looking at cepheid variable stars in the clusters around andromeda
now dr barth just did an amazing talk on understanding the hubble constant and
between the cepheid variable star and using type 1a supernovae to figure out these really really really distant
galaxies and exactly how far away they are and then using the redshifts to figure out how far they're receding we
got this wonderful measurement of the expansion of the universe but one question we always had
was how do we confirm that our theory is interpreting this correctly we need
another way to measure distance so that we can actually compare and see if it matches our expectations from cepheid
variable stars from type 1a even from the tully fischer relation which is the idea that the rotational speed of a
spiral galaxy is related to how bright it is all of these different measurement tools
have to be self-consistent if we're actually interpreting all of these different phenomena correctly
and that brings us back to pulsars because remember we said that pulsars rotate around and whenever that beam of
light crosses us here on earth we measure that beam of light and we figure out okay well that intensity is
the same as the intensity this many my milliseconds later this many milliseconds later therefore it's the
same object sending us signals and it's actually incredibly precise and
incredibly consistent slow period pulsars those rotate and give us pulses
of roughly a second and that's considered slow fast pulsars you're measuring
millisecond periods and because they're so consistent with this spin rate from these pulsars
that's actually the first system we ever detected an extra solar planet was
because it was interrupting the light at a very precise periodic moment
so that's not pegasus 51b pegasus 51b the one that we always talk about as the
first planet is because that one is around a main sequence star so it could maybe actually be like earth or at least
we thought at the time the one that we found around a pulsar it would be totally irradiated there's no
way anything could exist on it because the amount of radiation coming out of these pulsars is so intense like we saw
in that video at the start of today's at the start of today's event so now
when we look for these pulsars we can look in places in galaxies where we can
catch multi-wavelength images so i went out the other night to test out my new ev scope and by the way a shout out to
unistellar i sent them calibration images from the unistellar ev scope that i got during covid times
and they agreed with me there was a problem with the optics within two weeks they sent me a replacement ev scope then
i just had to wait for clear skies so this is the cigar galaxy near the big dipper m82 messi 82 and if we take a
multi-wavelength image of messier 82 we see this pink spot close to the center
of the galaxy and that's a pulsar and when we look at that pulsar it's
moving within m82 so if we capture that pulsar's period
as it's coming at us and six months later we look at it again we have the precision with the very long
baseline telescope to determine the parallax of that pulsar
so even though that pulsar is in a galaxy far far away and we can even do this for pulsars even further away the
precision with which that pulse repeats means the parallax we can do with visual light
to nearby stars we can do with pulsars to really distant
galaxies and that now gives us one more standard candle one more beacon of the cosmos to help us
actually measure distance now i said i was going to bring this back to my students so i was fortunate
enough this past year to make contact with john hoot from mount wilson and john is one of the
instructors at the soar the summer observational astrophysics research camp there
and john mentored a group of my students and gave them access to
cepheid variable curves photometric curves taken from mount wilson
that combined with a pulsar beat meant that i had a group ben and
caroline who you see here and kurt who wasn't able to come to the poster session and they put together
sonification sound a song from these photometric light curves so i
want to share a little bit of that with you
so [Applause]
and now you can heart start to hear multiple periods overlapping
with different frequencies and different tones because they took different curves for different instruments
and added them all together into a complex waveform to create music
that's cool and so that brings us to the end of my
presentation i hope you enjoyed this little bit on beacons of the cosmos and scott back to you thank you very much thank
you uh well we were running ahead and now we're running right on time so it's
perfect i love it so um we are uh
at this moment we're we're going to uh bring on uh bob fugate uh it's been
great to have bob on our program uh he's he's covered things from dark skies oh
he's showing incredible astrophotography but uh he is
i've already listened to some backstage chatter uh i think for major
in bradley who was talking about some of the techniques that he gleaned from bob fugate on improving his own
astrophotography if you guys are into astrophotography or into preserving dark skies
or into just wanting to know more about the technology of telescopes look no further than bob fugate bob thanks for
coming on to global star party again okay thank you scott um
i'm really happy to be here uh karem your talk is amazing um
and uh it would be fun to spend more time with you sometime thanks bob anytime well we'll connect
offline so uh i wanted to talk tonight about
beacons of a little different kind let me see if i can share my screen
and
these are laser beacons let's see if it
shows up and this is a very long story that i'm going
to try to cover in 20 minutes so wish me luck so to speak
this is about adaptive optics and uh seeing through turbulence in the atmosphere with large telescopes
and this all started uh by the was started by the military the idea of using laser beacons
and uh on the on the slide here on the left in the upper left corner
is the very first experiment that demonstrated the concept would work this was an experiment that i was
involved in and directed in 1982 and 1983.
we then got a system working on a one and a half meter telescope this was
at a place called the starfire optical range in near albuquerque new mexico
at kirtland air force base and in 1991
up until this point about a decade this technology was classified
it was declassified in 1991 and i knew it was going to be a real boon
for astronomy so i was very active in getting uh
everything that we had learned transitioned to the astronomy community made available
and as early as 1995 the keck telescopes had a dye laser that
they got running to for their adaptive optic system at keck and they have been
the most prolific observatory in terms of publications and new research and discovery
made using this technology and we'll talk about that so these other pictures kind of show the
progression over the past 40 years and where we're headed on the right here
are extremely large telescopes and i want to tell you that
it really makes no sense to build these big telescopes without this technology
having a very large seeing limited telescope is a real bummer
and it's hard to justify the spending the money on it so um
but until we can get uh 30 and 40 meter telescopes into space
uh there is a role for these telescopes in synergy with uh with the webb
telescope so let me let me quickly tell you how all of this came about
uh in in the peak of the cold war the us was interested in what the russians were
doing in space they were launching uh the soviet union was launching satellites every two or three
days so so the air force built a 48 inch
telescope at cloudcroft new mexico and it was used by putting a person
on the telescope oh my god and this was a newtonian had a very long
effective focal length and the idea was to use visual observations
to take advantage of the neural network in the brain to try to get some glimpses of what
these satellites looked like this this particular telescope
was on a three axis mount and for any of you interested in tracking satellites
this is a very effective way to do it without putting a lot of stress or or inflection points um
on your on your mount have no no singularities basically so the base of the telescope was one
axis and then it rotated about a vertical axis and a horizontal axis
and so you would rotate the base so it would be in the plane of the satellite's orbit and then if you got that exactly right
the only other axis you would need to rotate during the pass of the satellite was this vertical axis
so that made things uh a lot simpler about uh keeping on to the satellite
and um i've been told i this fellow standing on the floor here i actually worked for
when i started working in the air force jim mayo is his name he's some of you may or may not have
heard of him he's a walking encyclopedia for optics and telescopes and
he owns about 350 eye pieces and knows everything about every one of
them so he's that kind of a guy any rate when observers look through this telescope instead of seeing a
pristine image they saw this and of course this moved around and
it was not very good so why is that well um so here's a quick lesson in
atmospheric turbulence and what it does to your telescope if you have a diffraction limited
telescope in space like is on the left here that we're familiar with from hubble for
instance um diffraction is the only limit
so instead of a pinpoint spot you get a small circle and the and the size of that
image is for you know an unresolved object like a star is proportional to the focal length the
wavelength you're observing and inversely proportional to the diameter so if i want more resolution i can
either shorten the wavelength increase the focal length
or increase the diameter and
and so an example image here from hubble uh gives you a feeling for what you know
a diffraction limited image looks like but if you're on the ground looking
through the atmosphere we have this situation the atmosphere um
the air has a lot of different temperatures pockets of air at different temperatures
and the refractive index of air depends on the temperature you know out in the fifth decimal place
but that's important because as light travels through those regions of different refractive index
if i look at the phase of the wave front coming through that air parts of the wave get behind other parts
they slow down because the refractive index is larger and so the wave front develops a very
complex distorted shape and then when we try to focus that with
the telescope we get a much larger spot back here than we would get if it were diffraction
limited and the size of that spot is characterized by a parameter called are
not this is the freed parameter after david freed who invented it or discovered it
or described it and as a side note for those of you who
knew david and don't haven't heard he recently passed away at 89
a very sad event for me especially since i've worked very closely with him for 40
years um so it's it's a real
a really sad event um any rate um
so now our spot size our resolution is now limited by are not not by the diameter of the telescope
and are not is typically um at the very best sites 15 or 20
centimeters so what that means is if your telescope is bigger than that if
it's bigger than r naught you don't get any more resolution than it would be
than you would get if you had a telescope the size of our knot and
and so what that means is i get the same resolution with an eight meter telescope on the ground
that i get with a 14 inch telescope on the ground and what's quite interesting is
so you know okay i get i get the same blurry image an eight meter telescope i just get it faster
so that's the advantage of the big telescope but it doesn't bring you any more resolution you're limited by
whatever the atmosphere is doing to you and what is amazing is that newton
understood this in 1700 and he wrote about it
long telescopes may cause objects to appear brighter and larger than shorter ones can do but they cannot be so formed
as to take away the confusion of the rays which arises from the tremors of the
atmosphere so we've all heard that isaac newton was
a smart guy he certainly was however
what if we had a magic mirror what if we had some way to instantaneously know
what the wavefront distortion is caused by the atmosphere and what if we could also
instantaneously adjust the surface of a mirror that had exactly the opposite distortion
so that when the wave front interacted with the mirror that distortion is removed
and the reflected wave front is just as it was before it entered the atmosphere
so we call this adaptive optics the catch here is
this wavefront is changing hundreds or even thousands of times per second
and so we have to make a measurement of what that change is and then we have to figure out some way
to move the surface of a mirror now we don't have to move it very far
fractions of a wavelength in most cases but it's it's very important to
to do it exactly and quickly
so the way we would implement this in our telescope is in a normal telescope you would have
you know your your aberrated image at the focal plane um
but in an adaptive optics telescope you would insert this magic mirror the
deformable mirror um in a relay optics train
and you would also insert something to pick off part of a light coming from the object
that you're trying to image and you would use that with an op with with a device called a wavefront sensor
that measures the phase differences across the wavefront accurately and very quickly
and then you would drive this deformable mirror our magic mirror in such a way as
to impart that wave front on the surface of the mirror and of course you want to minimize the
time that it takes to do this because things are changing very very rapidly
so to see here's an animation generated by gemini observatory
that shows you how it works this is down at the focal plane near the focal plane of the telescope
so here comes our distorted wave fronts they bounce off the deformable mirror
they're picked off measured by the wave front sensor we close the loop
on the deformable mirror and now the wave fronts are being straightened out and we see a diffraction limited image
on our camera so what is how does this really look
here is a real picture this is made a long time ago at the starfire optical
range it's actually a binary star and you know it starts out with no
correction what we're seeing here is a sec a separate mirror a tilt mirror
that's used to control the tilt independent of the deformable mirror so the deformable mirror is only
controlling the higher order distortion and when we see the track loop close
that happens there and then the higher order loop closes
and now we see two stars if we open the track loop the flat steering mirror
we see how much tilt there is in the atmosphere so controlling the tilt
is extremely extremely important when you're doing adaptive optics
some of the amateur adaptive optics systems control tilt only which is useful
if the size of your telescope is a few times the size of our knot
but not much bigger so on our three and a half meter telescope
at the starfire optical range this was the first light image in 1998
and it shows you the difference between the loop being open and the loop being closed
and here's a three dimensional representation of the image this is a
binary star that has about a 0.1 arc second separation
of the full width half max of the images is 0.06 arc seconds
and lambda over d sort of the diffraction limit is 0.05
we measured the strain ratio the the height of the brightness of the center part of the
image compared to the diffraction limit to be about a half and its peak intensity was 140 times
greater than when the loop was open so you can see this is quite a boon for astronomy if you can make it work
um here are you know images of jupiter's satellite for instance
the images on the left were done just raw adaptive optics
and on the right after some deconvolution to further correct
uh the image but what if our target is not bright
enough to serve as a beacon for the adaptive optics so this is the problem right
the object's natural objects in the sky only give us less than one percent of
sky coverage what if we want to look at something that's not very bright
well it turns out that you can create an artificial beacon using a laser
this concept was invented by the us military in 19 actually 1981
and experiment first experiments were done in 1982 and the and the objective was to use
this again for imaging faint satellites the technology was classified from for
about a decade from 1981 until 1991 at which time i gave the first
declassified talk at american astronomical society meeting in seattle washington
there's a whole lot to tell in the back story we just don't have time for it so there's two ways to make a laser
beacon one is what we've heard about earlier rayleigh scattering scattering off of
atoms in the air molecules in the air and the other is to use
something called mesospheric sodium this is a layer of sodium that's about
90 90 95 kilometers above the surface of the earth
that's replenished by meteors micro meteors and uh which release sodium on burning
up and which hang out in the upper atmosphere so the problem with uh rayleigh
scattering is the air gets too thin to make the beacon high enough
and for a large aperture telescope the rays coming down at the edge of the
telescope are not nearly parallel to rays coming from infinity
and so you make an error by not measuring all of this part of the turbulence
if you can get the beacon higher at 90 kilometers then this area that you're making the
air on is much less and you can use a much larger telescope
so a rayleigh beacon is good for like a meter and a half telescope a sodium
beacon is good for like a 10 meter telescope so that's kind of what the astronomers
are interested in we see the sodium layer mesospheric sodium
in a lot of iss pictures here's here's one um
you can see that it's kind of concentrated you know a brighter orange here
there's a green band above it which is probably air glow generated from oxygen
and the way this looks in practice is like this um this is a picture of the three and a
half meter telescope just south of albuquerque um
and it's at kirtland air force base as i mentioned before and it's quite visible to see this
yellow beam in the sky from you know a mile or so away it's
quite exciting to see it actually because it's it just looks like it goes forever
but it doesn't it runs out as the air runs out and if we and if we try to look at the upper part
of the beam here i'm gonna this is this image was taken with a 35 millimeter lens
but i'm going to blow it up even at 35 millimeters you can see what's going on here
the rayleigh scattering peters out at about 20 kilometers
and you then see at 95 kilometers the sodium atoms glowing from the
resonant excitation by the laser and then its point in this case it was
pointed at a 5.5 magnitude star and i wanted to i picked that star
because i wanted to show that that the beacon was about as bright as a fifth magnitude star
the fifth magnitude star is is quite adequate for doing the adaptive
optics so you can point this beam this beacon anywhere in the sky
and generate the signal you need for your wavefront sensor and your adaptive optics
here's a a little better picture made with a longer focal length lens
and so once again this is the um sodium guide star you see this gap here
because the air is so thin we we no longer get any rayleigh scattering to
this that's very useful and um the perspective here has just always
amazed me you know 20 kilometers 95 kilometers and 250 light years
equally spaced now if i look at the if i look at the beacon through the telescope i see this
view so this is from a camera looking through the three and a half meter telescope
and all of the stuff you see in the lower part of the image is rayleigh scattering
and this is the sodium guide star we're looking end on at it here or nearly end
on this this laser is projected off the side of the telescope slightly
and so really what we're interested in only is the light coming from this round
bright object which forms the beacon so the in order to not confuse the wave
front sensor we put a field stop just around the laser guide star
blocking all of the rayleigh scattering so let me show you some of the things that this allows you to do well
one of the things is my colleague jack drummond uh used it to
make measurements on moons around asteroids so these are faint enough that there
that we can't use what we call natural guide star adaptive optics to close the loop
um but uh the laser guide star allows us to form an image
of the asteroid and its moon and to make measurements about its orbit
the other thing is um one of the things the air force is interested in is
a very faint nefarious satellites close to big bright satellites
especially in geosynchronous orbit so we can image
binary stars that are widely separated quite easily
in this case i don't know the magnitude of the primary here's here's an example
this is fairly bright 9.6 and the companion is 14.9
in the separation is 1.4 arc seconds but this example over here is what we're
really interested in this is a a magnitude difference of almost 10
and a separation of 0.32 arc seconds and with some post-processing
we can pull out this companion next to that's nearly 10 magnitudes fainter
so this is this is sort of equivalent to exoplanet detection where you're looking for planets next to next to really
bright uh parent stars so this is uh
this is basically revolutionizing ground-based astronomy you don't hear much about it
but it's happening and so these are some of the examples i want
to i want to tell you oh and here is um this is totally out of date but uh
this shows you the number of adaptive optics papers published using
laser guide stars and how that's taken taken an advantage
the great the great benefit of having astronomers work on this technology is
they've advanced it and i just i don't have time to talk about this but let me let me show you
some of the things astronomers are doing what we call what i've been talking about is what we call single conjugate
adaptive optics one laser guide star one deformable mirror
in order to get more field of view you need multiple mirrors and multiple guide stars and
and the other thing that is incredible is to do tomography so if you put up an array an asterism of
laser guide stars you can actually construct a three-dimensional picture of the turbulence above the telescope
in in real time and and watch how it changes very fast
and so you can use that to do um uh individual corrections open loop
i'll show you that in just a second another um another thing going on that does not use
laser guide star is if the if the parent star is bright enough problem probably means it's close enough
you can use it with very very high performance adaptive optics to look for exoplanets
and i'll show you some of that um so if you do laser tomography
it turns out you can insert mem size deformable mirrors into the
focal plane and open loop correct um each one of those deformable mirrors
that may have a thousand actuators each in order to do a survey of for instance
of galaxies and get compensated images through very large telescopes of say 30 or 40 objects at one time
so this is the uh vlt at um
in chile operated by eso it uses uh four laser guide stars wow
uh here is the gemini a multi-conjugate ao system
that uses five laser guide stars and three deformable mirrors and it gives a two arc minute this is a
one arc minute field here it gives a diffraction limited to arc minute field of correction
and the extreme ao gemini planet imager on gemini south
is doing a survey right now of 600 stars looking for exoplanets here's one of the
images and not only are they just imaging the most important thing they're doing is taking spectra of these planets of the
atmospheres in these planets and here's some examples um
from one of these you know we we certainly don't have time to
talk about this but i'm trying to list some references so that later on in the video if people are
interested they can go back and take a look so in the multi-object scenario this is
what keck is implementing right now on their 10 meter telescope
they will have uh arms that move into the field so these
little blue things are targets and each arm picks off light sends it
down the length of the arm to a relay to a very small deformable mirror
and because they're they have an asterism of laser guide stars over the telescope
they have a tomographic reconstruction of the turbulence and depending on what direction they're
looking at each one of these targets they can run the deformable mirror based on that
and so here they have a simulation showing some targets each one of these
squares represents a deformable mirror and they're able to get a
compensated image of each one of those targets incredible one one of the
great successes at cac speaking of cac has been looking at the galactic center
and understanding the black hole there uh andrea gatz at ucla who runs the
galactic center group there i think in 2015
was one of the co-winners of the nobel prize for this work and um
so the idea is here is the location of the black hole at the center
of our galaxy and we've just recently gotten you know a picture of it using radio telescopes
uh which and it's incredibly smaller than what is shown here of course but
the idea to understand the mass of this black hole is to watch the orbits of these nearby stars
and so they've been doing it that at keck now since 1995 so for
27 years they've had a program to monitor this and
here's an animation of the orbits of those stars over that 20 25 year period
you can see the date up here in the upper right corner and what's interesting is
one of the one of these stars called so2 has actually gone around twice in this period
so this is the location of the black hole right in the center and
by mapping out these orbits uh you know you learn a lot about what's
going on i'd like to point out this is a quarter of an arc second and
um so here is a in the background here is a real image and here are those orbits with all of
their yearly measured positions superimposed on that image
uh over this 25-year period so
what what is important for astronomers is sensitivity in order to
look further back in time and the webb telescope of course is
going to be a huge boon for that but astronomers still want bigger telescopes
there's i have to tell you a quick anecdote when the webb telescope model was on
display at one of the big conferences sbie conferences held every other year on telescopes and
instrumentation this was down in florida it was out in the parking lot i went out to take a picture of it and
there were two uh european astronomers looking at it and of course they were
involved in building at the time they were trying to build a 100 meter
telescope which eventually collapsed down to only 39 meters
but they were looking at it and reading the placards and they were kind
of quiet i was kind of waiting not to get them in the picture although it would have been good for scale
and finally one said to the other as he looked up at it but it's so small
because you know these guys are working on a 100 meter telescope and
they see a six and a half meter telescope and they say but it's so small so why do astronomers want these big
telescopes well it has to do with sensitivity and
by sensitivity we mean how long does it take to get an image
that has a certain signal to noise for a faint object and
that sensitivity if it's if the telescope is seeing limited it goes as d squared
if it's the fraction limit it goes as d to the fourth so the relative sensitivity with respect
to an eight meter telescope of a 30 meter telescope if you can get to the diffraction limit
it's 200 times more sensitive a 39 meter telescope is 564 times more sensitive wow so that
just means you get the result you're looking for 564 times faster than if you had an
8-meter telescope much more productive well yeah and and you can and you can
get to the to you know the edge of the universe quicker
if you have more sensitivity basically so that's that's what's driving these large
telescopes and in particular there are three that are
under construction now the giant magellan telescope which will probably come online first
this is seven 8.4 meter mirrors that are spun cast at the university of
arizona under the football stadium and a very very difficult uh off-axis
mirror to make especially at 8.4 meters but um
so that's the giant magellan and then of course there's of the 30 meter telescope which is being
delayed in hawaii uh because of the native hawaiians objectives
objections to uh you know building a telescope there and and then
there's the 39 meter telescope or the european extremely large telescope which
is being built in in south america
if you would all like to read more about some of the history associated with this
there's a book called the jason's which talks about some of the
genesis of the laser guide star ideas especially with sodium will happen at princeton was the one who
actually suggested that during a review that i was called to brief on
um back in 1981 and
so that's that's an interesting historical story there's a book written by an air force
historian called the adaptive optics revolution and then there's neil
degrasse tyson's book accessory to war in which he
actually gives credit to the military for producing this technology for astronomy
so um bob bob could you go back to the books
uh yes sorry who who's who's the kid in the cover
in the middle who's that oh yeah that's that's me
who is that who is that talking is that the cover with a with a looks like a four inch newtonian
yeah it is i bought it at a garage sale for five dollars and i had to re-polish the mirror what i
like are the cuffs on my pants check those out i was 13 years old in this picture and
this was two months before sputnik
okay so uh so this uh
this whole idea is you know generated because of a need and
and i think it's needs that you know as i say here are the genesis of innovation
and um that's um that's what drives us all forward and upward uh in this business
so uh that's what i had to offer tonight in the way of in the way of beacons
that is really cool i but there's a lot more to the story
and i've glossed over a bunch of stuff so well maybe at another time uh we can
get another chapter that would be great um i think it's really important to understand uh how
technology like this is really just making um uh you know the the kinds of
discoveries that we're making today possible so yeah yeah
my small telescopes so yeah well you know what i what i should do is tell you when it makes sense to
put like just a steering mirror on your telescope as opposed to a higher order adaptive optics
deformable mirror right right so maybe that would make a good a good presentation for somebody i think
it i think it would i think it would thank you so much bob that's great so we heard john briggs's voice out
there uh he's he's backstage with us so uh john thanks for thanks for uh
checking in as always man as always [Laughter]
it's great um we uh are now going to go to young nevin
santel kumar and he is bringing on the uh
the novak president paul severance and um so you two want to come on
sure hi firstly thanks for having us again um
firstly um i'd like to introduce you to my firstly to my club club president who's gonna be talking first
so um paul can you even talk now okay cool thank you uh dave and let me see i've
got scott thanks for the opportunity i just have a kind of a walk on here i realized
that but uh i've got a couple slides here i want to show okay i think uh
naveen has some other some some topics too so let me share
it's awesome i like to have club presidents on so i'm not sure if i'm gonna share or not
can you see we see it okay see it's kind of like your whole desktop but okay i don't know
if it's that okay uh now we're just looking at your email so you might want to go back out
and then just focus on the app or bring the app in so yeah there you go that's perfect okay
cool we usually use a google me so i know zoom is super common but not as
much for me so anyway yeah thanks for the opportunity i just wanted to uh you know come on and
share a couple things about our astronomy club um tell you a little bit about some of the outreach that we've done recently
um and some of you probably familiar we're we're a very large astronomy club um as you can see here we're principally
low located in the kind of washington dc area northern virginia maryland
but we do have members from about 20 different states a lot of those you know lived here once you know and
maybe had the government jobs and whatnot moved away we've got some international members as
well so we we draw from a lot of regions but do an awful lot of outreach right
here in the dc area and i wanted to just share a little bit about that just in the past couple of
weeks what we've done uh but one of the things and it's a good kind of uh follow-on to what uh
what bob was talking about here is the uh we have monthly meetings and we have one coming up sunday
you can see it there june 12th at 7 30 eastern time and we're going to be talking about the black holes both the
one that was recently imaged in our milky way sagittarius a and also m87 kind of the original one
from the event horizon telescope and we've got uh dr razia ememy from the
center for astrophysics up in boston at harvard and she's done a lot of work
in this area and i think it's going to be a crazy interesting talk
on a topic that is super cool so anybody can join it's it's a google me
and you can get the link to that at novak.com so invite you to if you've
got some time sunday night and want to join it'd be great to have you again their monthly meetings usually the
second sunday of the month and we post we post all of our videos on
our youtube channel so you can always go there last month we had the
chief engineer for the perseverance rover mission the guidance control
officer gave us a talk which was just totally fascinating so real some really cool discussions we
had about that last month so that's out there too so uh
welcome everybody if you want to join with us on sunday that'd be great okay so just a couple slides i've got
pictures not many of them are like astronomy pictures but uh nevertheless i wanted to share a few things just about
some of the outreach that we did we're super fortunate here in our club that we have access to a lot of
great observing sites um we are in an urban area but most of
these sites are about an hour's drive out outside of washington and really good relationships with the park
and recreation [Music] organizations here in the d.c area one
of those is with crockett park this is south of manassas if you're familiar with the area and this was just last
saturday we finally caught a break with some clear weather and we had a good group of about 40
members who brought telescopes out and in about that many public that came as well so it
was really cool really cool night likewise meadow kirk is actually a
christian retreat center it's about an hour's drive out of dc and
we have a good relationship with them this is kind of interesting because they bring in you know people that just go on retreats
for a wheel they'll stay there for a week um this particular time this was a week and
a half ago we had a group of college kids that were making their way through some of the
civil war sites and they were they were basically following the potomac river and it took them to kind of near this
location and so they spent a few nights at this location and at meadow kirk and we had
the opportunity to share astronomy with them so uh another really cool and fun uh
opportunity they happen to have an observatory there as well which is fortunate for us because
they rely on us to operate it which is cool and we get access to the field here which you can see is
just a beautiful setting so that was out of meadow kirk um
here's one from if you guys have ever been out to the air and space museum you
know there's two museums the one downtown most people are uh familiar with but we also have one out near
dulles airport called the udvar hausey center and we have a nice relationship with
them where they'll allow us to have star parties on the basically at the end of the parking lot
for the museum and this is a great way to bring the public in um you know they spend the day at the
museum grab a bite to eat and they can look at look at stars i mean it's terrific terrific saturday night if you
ask me and we hold these during the summer our next one is uh later in june
all of these are obviously open to the public and uh if you're ever if any of you are ever in the dc area there's
always something going on on most weekends so get in touch with us and we'll we'd
love to meet you and and uh you know hook up with you uh the last one and then i know uh
uh naveen has some some additional um slides on this this is basically a
city fair as we've all been to city fairs where the you know kind of the cheap carnival rides and the cotton candy and snow
cones and whatnot well this was one we had in vienna virginia a couple of weekends ago
thousands of people and we decided hey why not let's put astronomy out there as a booth
next to all the arts and crafts and so we set up a table there and uh you know locating we had probably
a thousand people through through the two-day memorial day weekend uh
sunday and monday of that weekend walk by uh take some literature
a lot of a lot of material about dark skies we're big on supporting ida
uh preserving our night skies and uh so really great opportunity to hit hit up a
lot of folks that um probably don't think much about astronomy especially when they're going to go go to a county
fair type of thing but so that was a really good idea a good good idea i think that we
that club members had and we were able to pull it off here's a picture of of uh naveen and aj and sin till
um and they showed views of the sun so another really good way to to do outreach
uh oh last one scott i i'm excited i'm gonna go to this uh thank you part
it's gonna be awesome um i'm really looking forward to that have you there that would be great oh yeah i'm looking
forward to that i've i've been to that area of arizona i know the skies are absolutely terrific so
um i wanted to throw in a little plug for it for that oh thank you thank you very much that's awesome i i would
suggest that if if anybody hasn't signed up this would be a great this is going to be a really good one i think
so looking forward to that wonderful that's wonderful yeah thanks yeah uh so my last one then i'll hand it over to
naveen is really you know we live in a very congested area probably a lot of folks can say
that um that's our picture of our light pollution map that uh you know kelly
kind of alluded to in his talk earlier uh we're in bortle class six to nine but
you can still do really great things with astronomy and um it doesn't take it takes a it takes a
little bit effort some equipment a lot of patience uh but it's certainly achievable even from
you know urban environments so thank you so much for
the time to kind of showcase our club and welcome anybody that wants to participate in our meetings to
to check us out at novak.com and uh love to meet you so naveen thank you and i'm gonna hand
it back to you all right thanks paul so i'm gonna talk about viva vienna right
now
so northern virginia astronomy club and outreach
so this is the first picture basically so this is this was basically our tent on mediva vienna
for the two days we were there you can see um a ton of magazines some club
members sitting right here and then you could see some banners right there saying northern virginia strong
and then back here were the telescopes we had to view the sun
and then right here was in my was my telescope so
um this was so this one had the explore scientific mount and this one also had this for
scientific optical tube and then we set it up um behind the booth
so then this is the other telescope um so this was like a solar telescope
with where i'm heat where you where you couldn't look at a lot of prominences
and stuff like that and then this was the sun spotter it was kind of like a dobsonian base and then like you could
you could use that to track the sun and at the bottom of the mirror you could see like a picture of the sun and then
you could see the back of the tent there and other tents like there
so the this is a small line of people waiting to look through my telescope
at the sun through white light cool so then this is an interesting thing so
like for solar alignment like there's this thing called shadow alignment which instead of using like any like stars or
anything you use the shadow of your telescope mount and it's supposed to point like this so
you align it to make sure the optical tube is pointing like that so that you know what's aligned with the sun
so then this is my little brother and my mom just
calling people to look at look through the telescope and
then all the club members it's the same kind of thing
and then you could see another small crowd of people me i'm pretty much
i'm i'm pretty much tom talking to people saying like describing what's going on and then
[Music] you could see people listening
and then this was the same name this is like a similar picture of the same crowd
listening and looking so you got a closer look at this oh
you got a closer look at the sun spotter so improve that so technically through th the sun
gap kind of thing you could see like there was like a mirror or like paper kind of thing that like reflect like a
mirror down here and then you see you see the sun on a piece of paper so technically that that like reflects
the sunlight and you can kick it's pretty easy to take a picture of the sun through that and then
you see it on the box
there are someone looking through the solar telescope pretty much it was pretty hot outside so
most people i don't use like rain umbrellas to keep shade
which is pretty interesting to see
and then these are some these are some boots on the
left wing and then you could see a ton of people walking
through and then you can see our club president right there paul and then
the next one and then here is an
here's a man looking through looking through the telescope with the crowd right there
and then this is pretty much the whole group
right here me my dad my mom my brother paul
um i forgot their names but you can see all the equipment right here the telescope
the explore scientific telescope the sunspotter and the coronado telescope
so yeah that's it pretty much yep great
i mean thank you so much that's great thank you yeah yeah i would just say you know naveen is like
every club should have like four or five navins he's like he volunteers for everything
and uh he's he's he's early to set up and he stays throughout and that's like
you know it's just incredible he's just a real gift to our club and uh i wish we could have four or five of him actually
right yeah that's great i i i think about uh you doing all that
work naveen and and i think that this is probably something that you will uh carry on and to you know well into
your adult life so uh if you do uh you're gonna have
you're already having some good adventures now but just wait i mean it's gonna be it just gets better and better
i think you would absolutely all right thank you thank you too and uh
thanks thanks to both of you and um uh you know i i i put the link to uh
novak in the chat um you did mention that you have international members members in other
states this is a great group and definitely worth checking into
you know astronomy clubs need support like any other organization but it's the
astronomy clubs often that are trying to to get out there and protect dark skies
uh and to preserve our our interests and lifestyle and so you
know definitely uh do what you can so thanks thanks guys and uh we are going
to go to um south america to argentina uh to maxi
fellaries and um maxie you want to come on
yeah hello guys how are you have you been it's good to see you it's good to see
you folks yeah so what's up guys uh how's it going up there
it's it's i think it's all going good we're all sitting here with wait uh you know
with what they say is baited breath beta breath is means you just can't wait [Laughter]
to uh see your new astrophotography okay okay thank you
thanks for inviting me good night everyone good night to the audience and well what i want to show you tonight is
what i've been doing uh now this weekend
it was the last the another one um i went with some friends to
nearby from a city to do some landscape of pictures of the nature birds you know
some kind of you know it's not like a wild place but you can see some animals
and and then we want to do some kind of astrophotography
uh practically well we we are going to the winter season so
that night what that afternoon was really really cold you were going to you were going to see
me uh practically freezing so
basically i want to show you where i've been you know this is my city this is
where i am and we traveled well i traveled because my folks my
friends came from a great buenos aires from moreno
and they went we went to this place uh going to the farm area
to the salty river you can see the river here and nearby what passing henry bear and
ramon bios we have this a bridge
that we we sat in here but then we realized that we can go to this
place and you know this are a huge area because the
i think the government is they drag the the the the river and recover some field
so they put the soil of the river here and you know this is like a real beach
without of course sea and we there was practically nobody
we are just us and you know we was searching
this a kind of sky you can see here is the river
and here's the bridge so we've been i think
in a portrait plus three so we had a really good sky to to to do some
a dark pictures so first of all
here's me doing a selfie this is ariel rodriguez
and this is her friend that came we've been doing some like like i say
landing a nature pictures i was doing
well i i don't have too much lens a length but
you know he's a real he was going through the the the edge of the river
and i uh we have some airplanes uh
from the nearby cities flying above us but also
well i don't know where it is the picture i think this is one
no sorry well some birds that i could try to to picture to take pictures
and of course we have airplanes and [Music] uh well you can see the cars
that we you you can see the the fields that we have we don't have a grass it's on
only soil of the river and it's a dry so we can
step in there and of course we have the really good
sound down i took this picture
you know with the wind in two of the of this farm the trees
some birds flying by and of course the the sun
and well of course i in that time i i saw this airplane from
uh eidolinas argentinas this was going to santa rosa
we track this airplane with flightredder.com and
well when the nice uh start go goes down
i grab my equipment that i well this is a selfie of me that but
another picture that took a idea from me with the car and
i don't remember what i put this picture uh no i think this is one
[Music] sorry i can't find it uh
[Music]
ah i i did it from here here this is where it's more like a zoom image
you can see here this is my my little equipment this is a a light a
mount a sky watcher star adventurer and here is a
ascar lens a putting with a set of duo azure plus
and where he find the scope that i put it also to to track some
to find some places and whether the chairs and
this little table and when the time when the night comes
i pointed this equipment to the carina
and what i get is it was practically
some kind of these pictures i only did one minutes
per frame you can see there's some satellites going by this is only a
single picture of one minute at iso 100 and f8
the diaphragm was you can see the spikes of the stars but there's a
lot of information here and i was taking pictures of almost
uh two hours i think and the the results was
this of that night
let me put it 100 you can see the the the stars in the
buddha city and all the field of view of the of the carinae
and also we have a gabriela mistral and this this
star cluster nearby and you know if you do this with a
a monochrome camera and the
h alpha filters and a this the in he this region is
huge of hydrogen is is covered by that but i only can do
this because i have this a color camera and then
i say okay that's that i think two hours is good so i pointed
the the this lens to to the mh a place of lagoon nebula
because it's raising up and this is what's the result i just
processed this i think it was last week weekend
and you can see the the lagoon nebula and the tree for nebula
and of course here's another place you know it's this is a beautiful area to also
take pictures so and of course there's a lot of stars
uh in this place because it's almost in the core of the milky way oh yeah yeah so
this field of view that that was i was searching uh to
you know to do some landscape and travel lighting lights
without too much gear and i put this grub for almost a half hour
i think and that's all and i leave it to there without tracking without guiding sorry i was tracking but
without a guiding because i don't have this a a polar apple sorry a
telescope to to guide this gear so
one of those images i saw i think i saw uh at ocarina uh posted on facebook
today yeah is that the one this is one yeah because this was the
this lens and if you want to see [Music]
i have here one image thank you uh it was sorry um
[Music] becca pekka and sweden is uh he's saying if i ever accidentally end up in
argentina will you show me some good photography places yes of course that we
have a lot we have to take permissions to go there but
maybe sometimes not but what well here for example this is like the
carina nebula that i took with my scope wow at the beginning of the year
and let me compare it with [Music]
with what i took here you can see the the field of view
change it oh sure so if let me
go in here
there's a lot of difference of course i have much much more diameter much more focal
length and but here to do with a
200 millimeter lens it's really really good you know
i i want you know you can see here there's the
i don't remember the name of this place uh in carina nebula as nicolas to to
take pictures and watch but uh you know this is a little comparation to
of of this place and let me show you a final picture that i didn't took because these pictures
took from aria rodriguez from
this guy his ariel he was preparing his camera this is another picture of him
he was concerned trading to try to take pictures of the sun and
he took this one
you know with his sony alpha pointing to the south
yeah and you can see here here's carina nebula
he has the um [Music] oh hey the running chica nebula
we have here the southern cross you can see here and the
sack of the the charcoal suck i don't remember you're making all
this in the northern hemisphere jealous and of course the large magenta cloud
you know right and and here are us here's me
juliana i think it was her name and this is idiot you can see here there is this is the
city of benticino or 25 may that is in here
ah okay because we were we we we've been here
and this is to the south west almost and here's saladicio another city
that is in there so
basically we have some a light pollution area
and uh but anyway to watch it this
above of our heads it's amazing because important three is
unbelievable and of course we have the the milky way and
real really at the center and you know he took a picture of our cars pointing to
the north because it was beside behind of us
for example let me
you know we went to this place to take pictures uh to the
to the cast this is pointed to the south you know this is you know this the sun is pointing to the west
the east and the south is where are the those trees so we've been
more to the south and she took a picture of the two cars and the sky but at
the northeast is the light pollution of buenos aires you know i can i i thought i was i
always thought that the that that light pollution was from chile when i was in alberti
but you know this huge light pollution i can see it from here
it's disgusting but well it's what we got i hope
but if we do some i don't know 100 miles again in into the the province
we will have a fourth class two
and maybe we'll gather better to the west
so well this is my little presentation thank you for for inviting me i hope that you like it
thank you that's great and um yeah we look forward to seeing more
information and not not so much just information but also your
inspiration for all these beautiful southern hemisphere treasures thank you so much man
thank you to you guys yeah yeah okay so we will take
um we will take a ten minute break and it's time to stretch and get
a cup of coffee or get a sandwich and uh um we'll be back uh
i also you'll also see a little feature about mars uh you know there's
the the theme of the program was uh beacons you
know in the cosmos but there's many different meanings to that i mean there's you know the beacons of uh
of the knowledge and and the minds and the passion and inspiration that's given off by like the presenters that you see
here of course it's a unit of measure um you know for some they think of it as
a you know a uh lighthouse to uh to a place they might call home but uh
you know we're all as astronomers trying to understand our place in the universe
whether you're doing that on a personal level or a professional level but that's that's what it's all about
here on global star party so we'll be back in about 10 minutes thanks
up kareem he forced me to go find some lighthouse pictures to add to my
presentation now yeah i already took care of that for you i gave you the night off i i showed your
lighthouse picture and uh now you can play you can show bowling and birds
yeah bowling is a beacon to nowhere we won't show that but
you could actually title your talk bowling birds and beacons by bradley
you told me that earlier i would have definitely done that
i would have absolutely done that but uh i will uh
actually um and does that i have some of the images there's a lot that um
i could go over because there's um since the last global star party there's been a lot that uh
we've done um you've gotten out there and i want to try and get to most of it
yeah that's by the way we should shout out that won the race today
came in second yeah i see tarik we uh
yes we're always yep and even maxie um joined in also
with the uh the youtube uh stream i thought of doing that but um
yeah i have to i'm too busy talking
let's see there's well there's a this is a
not often yeah looking for a couple
i think this is an image that i used in global star party 52 i'm just
going to leave it there just one image that i'm gonna look that i i'm looking
for and [Music] i think i know where to find it
um but yeah i i haven't been back to that lighthouse lately i actually
would like to go back sometime soon um since it's summer month people are
camping there so it's uh it's a busy
it's a busier place during the summer i just haven't been there yet i think what we have to do is you have
to kind of uh go there in the evening before the sun sets i'll come across to the other side of
the great lakes we'll take out our zoom lenses and we'll see if we manage to do it see if we can see
yeah it's not a bad idea so it's a little further north um
up here usually i'm shooting here when i'm looking back at
across the huron river this away um
and i figure i have a better chance of seeing you from here yeah if i if i went to sault ste marie
it's probably easiest to just yeah then it would be up here i think somewhere i'm
those of us from michigan we we always have a map with us it's our hand because it looks exactly just like
uh state of michigan you know uh one of my students was in france uh just
what uh well i think she's actually flying back today or tomorrow but she messaged that she had access to a
telescope but they were further north so the sun wasn't setting and it was still
bright at it like 10 10 30 so just didn't end up taking the telescope out to do anything because it was just
too bright yeah so we're lucky that you know we keep saying the 49th but we're actually lower than that
yeah it gets low enough to get dark but we don't have as much total darkness we've basically we've
basically got astronomical twilight on either side and there's this two to three hour
period of time where you got to do all of your stuff and um
cynthia says waiting for amazing pictures well i appreciate that and um
yeah there are a few that i have quite a few to go through not all of them are of the milky way
although i did a whole lot of milky way photography um
some are we actually had a chance to do some outreach too so i'll be looking forward to sharing some
uh info about that um not at peach mountain but a few of us
went to an elementary school okay nice nice so i've got a few pictures i i've got a
couple pictures i took um of the students that
we were able to share you know part of the uh
you know just astronomy with and it went really well cool
i'm gonna watch the rest from youtube i'm gonna sign off and i the mars video is about to start and i'll let you
finish making your presentation thanks everyone for joining and i can't wait for part two
yep same here we'll see you see you next time kareem i'll still be all still be chatting away
on uh healthy looking email with you uh or on facebook
yeah i uh i'll probably jump on the youtube feed and just
hide it so i can do what maxie's doing so that might be
[Music] touchdown
insight has been fantastically successful we've gotten more science than we had ever dreamed that we would
get during the course of this mission insight's primary goal was to better understand how the terrestrial planets
the rocky planets uh formed and evolved first we landed an incredibly sensitive
seismometer on the surface of mars and with that we are able to record over 1300 marsquakes and these range all the
way from tiny little tumblers that just barely go over the noise background to a
handful of quakes that were larger than magnitude 4. and feeling those vibrations the scientists can actually
take that information and use that to reconstruct all the material that those mars quakes traveled through and thereby
see the interior of the planet we looked at its core which is
big and not very dense we looked at its mantle which is not so hot and we looked at its crust
which is not too thick and not too dense compared to some of our pre-mission expectations
by measuring the detailed structure of the inside of mars
it gives us a snapshot of what the planet looked like four and a half billion years ago
the other thing that we've been able to do is make a very detailed record of the weather at mars
we have a really good weather station which has allowed meteorologists to study the weather at the at the insight
landing site and relate that to the climate changes on mars what we didn't do unfortunately was make
the heat flow measurement we wanted to make our heat flow probe was supposed to get three to five meters down and we
were unable to reach that depth but we were able to get some of those measurements such as the heat transfer
amongst the soil insight is a solar powered mission we have solar panels and they were designed
to give us enough power to easily get through the first two years but there's a lot of dust in mars atmosphere and
that's falling down on top of our solar arrays and slowly blocking the sun as the panels are getting dustier we
started racking our brains with whether there's anything we can do to try to clean off those panels ourselves when
the idea of using dirt to clean the solar arrays was first proposed it seemed counter-intuitive we were
actually able to use the arm and the scoop to scoop up some soil from the ground and dump it over the lander
having some of that heavier sand blow onto the arrays and knock some of the dust off so we essentially used it as an
array cleaning tool cleaning with dirt actually worked it allowed us to
actually keep the instruments going during the low power season where the the mars is farthest from the sun during
the winter unfortunately later this summer we think that the power is going to be dropping so quickly due to
the atmosphere getting dustier due to the alignment of mars in the sun we're going to be at a point where we can no
longer have all of our instruments on which means we'll be turning off the seismometer and other instruments on
board the last day is going to be bittersweet obviously we're preparing for it we know it's coming
but that first moment where we don't hear from the lander when we expect to
that's going to be tough it's left a permanent mark on me i literally tattooed insight onto my arm i'll never
let it go we've really rewritten sort of the the chapter of the encyclopedia on the
interior of mars that was our last big hole in our understanding of the planet
there's a lot of data that people are going to be looking at for decades to come we accomplished so many of our
science goals and we're going to have something to look back on and be proud
[Music]
scott i believe you're on mute
oh still no scott still muted if you can hear me then
either that or i'm just not hearing anything i can't hear either
i am there you go i'm sorry loud and clear i just wanted to say that uh welcome back
and i wanted to introduce marcelo souza from down in brazil and
it is uh you know it is my uh you know my pleasure and honor
to introduce yet another fantastic educator uh to uh young students but also to the
general public about physics and astronomy he does a lot down in brazil and um
it's if you get the chance to attend one of the events down there you'll i mean your
mind will be blown the kids down there are incredibly enthusiastic and uh
marcelo knows how to put on uh you know outreach events big time so marcelo
thanks for coming out to a global star party thank you very much for the invitation
ever it's a great pleasure to be here [Music] it is a very special period for us here
in brazil because after two years we have the winter celebrations here in
brazil we don't have the celebration as you have in europe in the united states
but we have here a traditional celebration where people ghosts and the
dancing here a big fire because it's that's fine
foreign but i believe that for most of the people from united states in europe
it's not good because for us here 15 degrees everybody stay at home
nobody wants to walk in the streets and it is very cold for us here in hindi
it's cold huh 15. it's very cold here it's very good nobody wants to walk in the streets but
from 18 to 80 people begins to use the jacket really
yes now it's 20 degrees here yeah and you're in there
yeah yes forever but in the spirit also
we have someone here in our seats that you we
are organizing now a memory
for his contribution i will share my screen to show his history
that is a personality few people know about him
and let me see if you work here yes i i want to remember what
we live here the place where where we are from here here's the state of here
and the is one of the smallest states in brazil
where we live here and probably is one of the most famous states well the city of hijanue that's
very famous but we live in the north region of the state
far from the capitals of the the famous states here in brazil
here is our state and our places here the city of campus great archives in the
north region of this state here is the famous city of hyde january
the distance between us is almost 270 kilometers
here is our seats i'm saying this again because you can imagine the past
uh i'm talking about the beginning of the 20th century
then we have a few people living here and it was not uh
so important seats in your account but lived here a person in the spirit that
his name is jean-baptiste he
stood in january he left to the city to
to study high school in the city of de janeiro and then he turned to our
to the city of campus and in june third
she begins to be a member he was accepted as a member of the
astronomical society of france differential astronomical society
in 1980 who accepted he was camille fla mario
that was one of the most famous astronomers in the beginning of the 20th
century and he was friends of camille marion
that was very famous in the spirit hebrew in june
in 1874 and this is the reason that for us the
spirit is important because what he did living here in campus frat from the big
centers he sent him partners reports to the
tsunami society of france from 1980 to 19 19.
a make observations from campus with a small telescope that he had here
and the uh one of the reports was the last time
that we you have in the rush publishers the observation by naked
eye of the harley comets he was the last person that made a
report of the observation of the harlequin in 1910 from the city of computers gretakas he
died in september 1969. here are the
i have some i have audi oh sorry audi reports that he sent to the
astronom the astrology societal first and here was his exception yeah
and here say that camille flo marion that indicated him to be a member of the astronomical
society of france uh and his importance here because in the
period in this period the nation observatory and the almost
i think that almost all the astronomers in brazil lives in here de janeiro
because you have the nation observatory and the second seat in brazil with
members in the astronomical society of france was here
in hills our city campus beta cards our members or as indicated by him
right you have 18 members in just a long south side of france who are the second city in brazil
with remembers because of the motivation of this person that
jean-baptiste this session oh sorry i did something wrong here okay
here was a report that he sent to jesus a song society of friends in the spirit
about the observation of the conjunction between mars
saturn and in
sixth i believe october in the night of
11 to 12 october the conjunction between venus and
jupiter also we have here other
reports he was his reports about the holy comets
from his he sent reports about the observation of the
holy comets from uh 17 april april 17
until june 13th and
also you have here our information about this report that he sent
and his son who wrote said that he received a letter from
camille marion saying that in the spirit in the period he was the sixth
most important amateur astronomer in the world i don't know if it is something that
because i never saw the letter but you have a book that was written by his son
that he says that he he received this letter from camille from mario
ah here is something that is fantastic house during the period of the world
he sent the supplies and the support
to the members of the astronomic society of france and here is
uh he published this for the excellency idea of sending us a
supplement to their contribution for 1917 third to fourth year of the first two
words they have recognized him as a friend
of the arsenal societal friends and he he lived here you know he lived
here in our city he incomes you have another recognition i believe that he after
in 1919 again for his support to
astronomic society of france and he was the only
only king from brazil that who are supporting them in this period
of you do what you then for us he is a very important person here because he
just saw them here and nobody knew about him here in our seat
and we found these reports and i had the opportunity
to talk with members of his family and there's something that for us
he was the beginning and to show that he was the last one that he said he brought about you have an article published
in the holy astronomic society of canada journal of the whole islamic society in canada in 1979
and in this article that was written by brothel here you have here whoa junior 11 was
the last date unleash the commentary sing without instruments at the ex into i seen until june 13 in brazil oh wow by
the section loop 19 then
he was the last person you had that sent reports about the observation of the highly comments by the naked eye
and they are recognizing these article that just published by the astronomical society of canada
here is your i only found this picture of him well
and then what's he is important for us because he he gave contributions for science
from the city of the campus that in this spirit was
a city that see we don't we didn't have any kind of university here
we don't have a famous schools here and he
he was probably isolated here because and the
outs contact that he has refreshed by mayu even with his limitations with a small
telescope he made the importance of salvation from our seats and motivated many people from
here to participate and something that is very curious for me
is that i didn't find any mention about him in us in the city of in our city
here in this period how do you pay newspapers that's what we
have here when they have the observation of the highly quality they have news
that's coming from that came from hideo on the city of eugene here but
i didn't find any uh mention in this period about his observations in the city of
campus i only found in the arsenal society of first the bullet bulleting of
the slow societal first well any uh something that
is hard to believe but is what happened he has international recognition
in the spirit but here in our city few people knew about him knows about him there
should be some sort of uh astronomers hall of fame in um
in brazil you know uh and uh of course he should be included
so that's it's uh it's important not to to forget the people who did such hard work you know
yes this is the reason that we are trying to uh ever talk about him
and the make activities in honor of him and we hope that when we have a big
observatory here one day we are going to honor him in this observatory here
that would be great and uh this is the first uh
chapter i don't episodes i absolutely say in english i don't know because in portuguese episode at the
first one of the series now in the last version this is
the version that will be transmitted by tv here i'll show a small part
here we have to do five five additions
sorry because it is in portuguese but we are going to make a version in
english
mythology
oh
the second character is in honor of cathedral
the other that is that astronomer
that is the name of our solemn club
i watched all the good
and the the last one is jessie the name because it is in name of a
goddess of the moon brazilian english
please
and then this is the first one that you are producing it is
is a little long i'm trying to and
this they have five minutes and they are producing five we have we already
finished three one three uh animated cartoons like this with this
group that is the stars of tomorrow the name of oh wow okay so are these are these uh these
animations being broadcast in brazil yes yes
they transmitted five uh episodes uh episodes that you say in
english is correct yes from the last week
of june until the end of july we'll be broadcasting brazilian local tv
here oh that's great and do i have the first experience that's producing as a result
of the project that we are developing here support of the united states consulate here in general
and we are we will also make a version in english
and the students that produce the animations here
i'll try to change here the page but it's not too working
i was i i think that now here is the team
and now we have another result from our activities in schools
on this project young star of tomorrow that's now we reached the farthest
what yeah it's growing more and more fantastic
more than 1 200 students participated that's great
yeah i believe that until the end of the project that's finishing october we are planning
to visit almost 65 55 to 60 schools
then is our goal now to to develop activities here as the last visa
most of the schools are in urdu oceans here right first time that they
saw images of the astronauts on the moon something that
motivated us to develop this project here they are looking to this song
so this is what we are doing and thank you scott for the invitation
thank you so much thank you happy birthday to you oh thank you
it's tomorrow it's tomorrow it's almost these i got a phone call
during the break and and uh that kind of threw me off as well that i was
talking up a storm and was muted brazil he's almost here he's almost to
june 8th here yeah thank you very much for all your support
and help thank you very much thank you so much that's great yep um
soon marcelo uh uh you your students will starting to work on cubesats as well
yes i would like to thank you your support we are doing what's possible to have
time to to send the the experiments right and i hope that
see tomorrow having news about this i hope so yeah we are doing our best thank you for your
smile okay that's wonderful okay all right so uh up next um
uh we should have uh connell richards uh with us connell um
how's it going we always like to have you on our programs uh
and uh what's going on in your astronomy adventures
well i've been keeping pretty busy lately um got some double star observing in some lunar observing earlier this
week for some astronomical league programs and uh i was looking forward to this
global star party quite a lot when i heard the theme was beacons and tonight for you i have to share a topic that's
more of an artificial beacon and something i've had the privilege of working on since i came to penn state as a freshman
i'll share my screen here um let me know if you can see this all right
a moment do you see the uh image in front of you yeah you see it feel most of the screen
all right well i'll i'll put you in a similar position to uh where i was at the beginning of my freshman year of
college i came into penn state as an aerospace major and i knew i wanted to work on some of the technology that brought
our various satellites our observatories our planetary science missions out in orbit and out beyond the sphere of
influence of the earth i'd always been fascinated by rocketry and while i've typically given uh talks on this program
about astronomy and the more natural side of things i wanted to tonight delve into a little bit of how those things
get there and how students can work on that and engage in stem in a little bit of a different way than i usually talk
about which would be through astronomy clubs so in october of last year i joined penn
state's seds chapter which is the students for exploration and development of space
and this is a national organization there's a variety of chapters at various universities across the country
and each chapter works on uh basically student built rockets they could be solid rockets liquid rockets uh small
almost pretty much in-house built spacecraft you could almost call them
that students are working on and they're learning and they're learning all these techniques to work on them and then they bring these rockets to different
competitions now in the case of our club we have three different divisions there is first the usli division which is a
competition at marshall space flight center and they hold a solid rocket competition the students will build a
rocket and they have to reach a certain altitude or a certain thrust level and they're sharpening their skills in
aerospace engineering by working on those technologies and then the other two divisions of our club focus on a competition called
spaceport america which is hosted by virgin galactic and white sands and the reason we have two divisions is
traditionally we've also created solid rockets for that program but currently
uh we're working on a liquid field rocket to bring to that competition and while the performance may be similar
to a lot of the solid rockets we've used before it's a much more challenging endeavor to build a liquid fueled rocket
especially for a university team so when i heard i had the opportunity to work on something like this i was very excited
and i went to the first meeting and i was presented with the image in front of you and what we have here is a test stand
for a rocket engine we call ignis rex you see it over to the right here it's this big cylindrical structure sticking out of
this sheet here and i'll explain how some of this works in a little bit and the reason we have this mounted on a
trailer we've never built this rocket before or tested a liquid field system at least that was the case in october
so the idea was we would get a trailer we would have these fluid panels mounted on the back to control all of our fuels
and all of our pressure and then we would mount the engine on the back and test it and the goal was to do this by
the end of the spring semester which just finished and i have an exciting video of that which we finished very
early last month in may and of course i'm looking at this cad model we had never actually gotten the
trailer yet that the fluid panels were still aluminum sheets wrapped up in in foil and we hadn't even gotten this
stuff out yet and the big challenge even though it was already designed was how do we put this all together it seems
like eight months was not so much time and it was really exciting to work out a lot
of these challenges along the way so of course spaceport is coming up and we intend to fly this liquid fueled rocket
next year in 2023 at their competition in august and to give you some details on the engine uh this engine and again it's
called ignis rex it has a an output of 800 pounds of thrust it runs on ethanol
oxidized by nitrous oxide and it's also a pressure fed engine with nitrogen so the nitrogen forces the fuel through the
lines up to an igniter the igniter sparks the fuels together and they combust and we have our nozzle and our
engine and that's what creates our thrust and when this is when this is finally integrated into our completed
rocket we're going to fly to about 10 000 feet with a maximum velocity of
about 600 miles an hour and even though some of these other student rocket teams are already going supersonic uh usc's
team even got to space already past 100 kilometers it's very exciting for us to work on something like this
i mentioned earlier that seds is an organization that spans many college campuses across the u.s
and only 20 of those organizations are actually working on liquid field systems out of what i believe is hundreds of
total teams that are mostly working on solids so again it's a real privilege to work on something like this and see what
you have here which is a cad model become a reality which i'll show you in a little bit now i mentioned i joined the liquids
team and the reason that was so exciting for me is that there were all these specific
units of the team that i can choose to work with we have structures we have uh propulsion and fluids there's an engine
specific team at least there was until the end of spring semester uh now they're merged with propulsion we also
had avionics we had design we had people working with various regulations and the
test track we would be working with to fire this engine for the first time and all of this work was coming to an
exciting end at the end of the spring semester to get our first test fire in and even then our work isn't complete
yet and there's a lot of exciting things ahead of us so as i was working on this it was very exciting i got to work with mostly the
structures and the fluids teams i'll talk about some of the parts here we have here which is a blast shield this
was a half inch of steel that we had to cut in fact this panel here weighed something like 130 pounds when we were
finished with it the piece we ordered was a little bit taller than this so we had to cut this off and again it was a half inch of
steel so this took some very heavy machinery to cut through and
finally refine all of the components we needed and i can't talk in in detail as much about some of them
sometimes the regulations aren't always as specific or they do prohibit certain things from being
shared but i can share the general details of the engine which are of course very exciting we have our engine
here the blast shield to protect all of these components behind here where our fuel is and then we have a thrust takeout here
to basically control all of that force and hold it down to the trailer which you'll see in a little bit was strapped
down to concrete pads and and kept very firmly in place when we did our test fire now the test fire we recently
completed in may was half a second in duration and soon we'll be completing tests of a longer duration in a series
so maybe a second maybe three seconds and ultimately our goal is to get to seven seconds which will be the official
burn time for the final rocket that we fly in 2023. i'll show you the most exciting parts
here if i can go out of this image i'll go back to my folder and here we were on uh actually show it
to you in this shop first this was our trailer as it was coming together and again this was all in the span of a
couple of months you see our fluid panels here controlling all of our various fuels and the nitrogen that pushes everything through
we had both analog and digital gauges to monitor everything that was going on and make sure we
were staying safe and that the system was functioning as it should and you can see there's also all kinds of supports
here to make sure things were going right eventually the back of that trailer would be folded down the ramp and the engine would be sticking out of
there here it was on test day uh with our our seds logo right there
and you can see we have our our engine finally mounted on the back all of our wiring fuel tanks insulated fuel tanks
in place and it was really beautiful to see that all come together finally at the end of the semester it was very satisfying and then you can see there's
these steel cables here keeping everything down in place uh we had to keep the trailer firmly down
because of that 800 pounds of thrust coming out of that engine and i'll cut to uh the most exciting
part here this is a video i'll play for you i'll bring it up to full screen this is a four second video of our test i
think there's a slow-motion version out there somewhere that we put on our social media but i'll play this for you now it's very exciting
so there we have our nice flame coming out we got all the thrust we wanted to we're still going over some of the data right now but it appears that everything
functioned just as it should and we have no significant damage which for our first test is uh quite a lot to ask for
and we're very grateful for how everything worked out and i had the pleasure of working with some really great people on this project
and this brings me back to some of my previous talks like i said normally i talk about astronomy and things that we
see in the natural world or the night sky and uh you might be wondering what potential a device like this would have
for outreach of course it's very exciting for engineering students to work on this and sharpen their skills
but for the public as well it can be very educational about how we learn some of what we did about the
night sky and the galaxies that lie beyond our own and the solar system we live in uh you have to wonder how did
this all come to be now of course in the 50s and 60s even in the 70s the space age was really in its
heyday and this inspired a lot of the amateur astronomers uh in our hobby today a lot of the space enthusiasts
lots of engineers professional astronomers uh even those in other stem fields it served as a great inspiration
to many of us uh who were able to witness this and these initial missions to the
planets are planetary science missions like voyager pioneer the mariner series of missions and even some of the later
missions today you see like perseverance and new horizons those great flagship missions would not have been possible without rocket technology that started
small like this and personally i find it very inspiring to work on something like this uh almost 100 years ago
robert goddard was working on things like this and his systems were not nearly as complex as some of the things
that college groups are working on today so it's very exciting to see how far things have come and how much we can do
with the technology that we have today and again like i said uh it was rocket
technology that powered the space age and enabled us to put observatories up to great heights the hubble space
telescope james webb very recently and then of course our planetary science missions so as as an engineering student
and an amateur astronomer i find it a great opportunity to bring my favorite subjects together and look at both the
technology side of the outreach and the natural science side of the outreach and see how they come together and can
inspire people of various backgrounds so i was happy to share that with you today that's cool i i hope you enjoy uh i mean
that is very serious uh uh hobby and rocketry right there thank you it's um it's one of those
things that definitely takes a solid team and like i said i was very inspired to work with people i did they taught me a lot
there was a learning curve to some of the different things but uh you know that's the same with everything else and you know global star party
traditionally like i said we talk about the more natural side of things but i think it's very exciting to see how the
technology that we create today enables us to explore things that are so far out there and things that were beyond our
imagination in the not too distant past so thank you very much for having me on and i hope this inspires you as much as
it does me sure absolutely absolutely as a kid uh you know i i built model
rockets too but uh man if i was involved in anything like what you're involved with it would have
been a whole different dimension so um but um
you know i think that uh um the you know whether you're flying uh high-altitude
balloons or any of these things where you can um uh maybe take measurements in the upper
atmosphere in fact i've seen some images and videos from amateurs
where it looks like they actually reach the edge of space with uh with the model rockets
you know it's it's really quite spectacular uh i would imagine that uh i have two 12-inch
rockets 12-inch diameter rockets in my showroom uh we built them they are
flying models but we've never flown them you know and they would use uh solid um
rocket engines uh we have threatened several times to create a contest
uh of some sort and then take those rockets out to nevada where
uh we would meet up with a team of you know the the guys that actually have
the permits to fly large rockets and uh and let a kid launch them you know
whoever wins so we may do that at one point but uh
anyways that's very impressive uh thank you very much yeah connell thanks man
okay so up next is uh the guy that always brings us beautiful nightscapes
uh and shows us some beaut beautiful landscapes as well and that's adrian
bradley adrian you want to come on yep i'm ready to go um
i um a lot of the images that i picked i picked them earlier
but having been inspired by some of the uh topics in today's um
global star party i picked a few more so time to share those
um first i'm gonna share i noticed that i have a picture up in my
light on my lightroom screen and i'll share that one
um let me bring that over so this is a rare moment i got a chance
to spend sunday with my kids so there there i am with my kids my
daughter sakai and my son tj um usually i'm just taking pictures of the
sky but i went and visited family over the weekend as you know father's day father's day is coming up in a couple
weeks here in the states and uh i got it in early um
so i also wanted to um i'll share some of the images here
we went through a number of um topics and where to begin
um is with uh i'll start out with the
panorama that um i was finally able to take a decent panorama of one of the places that i do
night sky imaging and this is lake hudson it's a uh it's a spot in michigan about 30 minutes
from the border of ohio um a bordeaux force guy but um it's
basically like a beginner's type of park where people will go
to do some visual imaging while i was there
um inspired by uh bob bob i um
playing with my imager another friend of mine took this picture while i was
trying to do some imaging and um she caught me
doing my own version of laser um there you go creating a uh creating
my own uh star there so um unfortunately i'm missing the huge
telescope that i could have used that for but um we did i did shock a few people
that were there to watch meteors as you recall there was the there were the tau
uh the tau herculids that were supposed to be a huge event and um
somewhere in my list of pictures this is the only meteor right from that
tau hercules shower that i was able to capture
and it was among the last shots that i took um
so that's that was my old to the tau hercules prior let's see i think prior to that
there was an event but it wasn't talked about as much and that's this conjunction between mars and jupiter
i happened to be there as morning was breaking i saw this and said that's got to be
kind of important so i took the picture as it turns out it was uh the closest in
the sky that at least for this month that mars and jupiter were to get and this is the
resulting image now i did play around with the twilights
um as we may know later in this month there's going to be an align there's
going to be a lining up of planets and it's going to be during um
twilight that those planets if we're lucky it would be astronomical twilight but i believe
mercury is going to rise around the time at least where i am mercury is going to rise around the time
where we're going into nautical twilight and what that looks like um
so this is this is when you're transitioning from astronomical twilight to nautical
twilight and the sky begins to get a little bit bluer a little bit
brighter um and as you
this is in civil you're getting from nautical to civil twilight and the milky
way begins to disappear and you can see this was the same area but you can see how much easier it was
for the camera to take a shot of the park i was at because sunrise was happening and that's where that other
image if you if when i turned around this was the other image that i took around the same time
so this was um so i played around with those um
different lighting and ended up getting also played around with
doing some panoramas to get a little more detail on the milky way
this one okay i think this is fully loaded in yeah and that
what i like to see is if i zoom in and the stars remain pinpoints now not all
of my shots were clean but
along the along the galactic curve things like seeing
the shape of the omega or the swan nebula come out and the eagle nebula with a 50
millimeter lens it's something and then seeing the shape of the dust lanes something that i'm playing around with a
little more these are either plane satellites or lucky meteor strikes while
i was out there um but this is something that
i've begun looking at um dude in large part to
what uh bob what you've been sharing about dealing with sensors
iso sensitivity levels i went and did some more research and started getting better data
from my canon from my camera knowing that it has a pretty high you
can go up to about iso 3200 and still get a good signal to noise ratio
with that particular camera so it allows me to play around with values
um also with my sony camera it's got a
pretty decent high value and of course inspired by kareem i had to go
find another picture a little cleaner picture of that lighthouse that i like to go to now
there wasn't much aurora going on at the time in fact there was really none but um
ultimately i'd love to modify this camera and have it take over
for doing my um nightscapes because i think it's a
really the camera does a really good job of helping me helping me create
pretty clear images out there so then this is another sometimes the moon
is out you just play around this was a about a year ago in the winter and i decided to try
and then i figured this part out this is when dust is on your lens you can create this interesting uh
artifact um it i thought that this was some sort
because it was really cold i thought this was some sort of uh pillar and it just turned out to be dust on my uh
camera lens when i wiped the i took a microfiber cloth and wiped it away this
that went away with the other shots that i took so as always i never stop with just doing
milky way photography or things like that if it's something that i think i can create a decent image i
may not always shoot for science i may just shoot for pleasure and this was one of those where i was
trying to be creative a year or so ago now recently i had the opportunity to shoot at the um
i was able to get a good earth shine picture um i played around with that
and turned out to get this is a single shot or shine picture so
of course this limb of the moon is blown out yeah but i like those kinds of shots you
know i love seeing the earth shine on the moon um you know and uh
also that glow that's coming out there as well as um
absolutely i just watched um uh you know some recent uh not recent but just the
the apollo films again and they were describing the surface and how much it looked like
asphalt you know it's really actually quite dark you know so right
yeah and that's um like here's here's an example of that glow
used in a scene and the surrounding stars it's um
i really liked how this picture came out um also
let's see here i did try to do a composite
where there's actually some detail here with a couple of shots but it um
i didn't get the terminator quite well so it looks like there's a huge crack in the moon so that's a a challenge for
another day is to make this a lot cleaner and make it look more natural
although i think it was close i think there's how i take the photos and what i select
um is gonna i'm gonna have to play around with that and
play around some more so at our we're talking about big telescopes we have a site where we have
a radio dish at the university of michigan and the radio dish is
not in use but the university is looking to
would look to raise money to get this dish used again
um there's this bright light this is our observing field and we have that bright
light there so unfortunately as i'll show you another
neat picture of the dish in the earth shine moon i played around with some images there
but unfortunately the dish just sort of sits there dormant and it was it was the topic of van
vandalism that the university had to do what it needed to do to keep people from trying to climb this
dish and that's why that bright light is there but at night
it produces this huge glow and uh that keeps the dish any safer
you know it just lets people see what they can go and climb on yeah and it ruins night vision at this part
of the park as well so you can still the camera can still get stuff but the
look at the lens flare coming off of that and um
and if i turn around i can still get
what amounts to a reasonable milky way shot but then you see the light
um i believe i've taken some shots this was with the uh stock camera let's see if this one is
yeah these are some shots with the modified camera so i was still able to get some detail here
but it did i believe this was a single no this was either single shot or composite
i forget it may have been um this may have been 30 seconds let's look
yeah this was a 30 second shot tracking and what what happens is i sacrifice a
little bit of detail at this mirror you can see that it's a little blurry i find that in
30 seconds i can get sky detail if i use full
tracking and it blurs my uh foreground just a little bit
um so if if my focus is on what's in the sky then i'll just go 30 seconds full
uh sidereal tracking and so that's something that i began doing
um i took this shot
with a filter in it just to see what would happen as the milky way is rising
you know you can see some of the um nebula here as it's sort of height it looks like it's hiding behind
that tree i thought that was an interesting composition so so a few more
shots this was with the explorer scientific uh
mount that i have i took some uh frames now not nearly enough this was me
experimenting with um you know classic astrophotography
pointing at the north american and the pelican nebulas the seder region that's a little crescent nebula right there
and this is something else that i haven't gotten the name of it's just a start there's some
processing now we worry about darks and flats and things like that
different from what i'm usually doing but something within the milky way so there's
there's room there's always room for improvement and it's something if i'm at a site that i've already captured
a wide field view of i'll try for a wide field you know wide field classic
astrophoto shot this is with an 85 millimeter lens so
it um it started out pretty good and there's some more tracking and you can
see some of the detail of the pelican right here which is part of what i was hoping to go
for now you can also see that there's a little bit of star trailing the stars aren't perfectly round but that's
guided guiding would help me with that and that's something i would have to get into
so we'll take a quick detour we did some outreach these
aren't going to be the biggest pictures but there's a fellow friend of mine we got it we got the call
to do some outreach so our one of my astronomy clubs came out
from we're still wearing masks here but we at least got to do the outreach these are a
couple of the club members sharing how telescopes work and
because it was cloudy out we didn't have solar scopes we pointed at distant objects pretty sure they pointed at this
basketball goal back here and this is
this is the photo again of we both did some presentations here i
did my uh slideshow with some of the images
and this was probably the biggest hit as far as images goes
that when i had a section in my slideshow it's shooting at the sun and this picture which i know i've shown
here before um was the biggest hit among the students when
they saw that one so so that one may have to go on scale at
some point but um that was when there was smoke in the atmosphere
so couple more before i turn it over to cesar
um in an effort to
get a pretty detailed milky way starting with a two minute exposure
and then i believe this one may actually be stacked with a couple of one minute exposures
and then composite would lay down a there was somebody observing so
there's movement here and tried to lay down
a composite there's more for composite shots there's a little more work to do
but as far as milky way i was surprised to get
the cat's paw here part of the lobster claw and part of the prawn nebula
as well as other these other features here that are being that are poking out of the haze it was a hazy
sky but i was really happy with with a 35 millimeter lens i was happy with some
of the detail i was getting here again as the omega and whenever i can see
a bit of the shape of the nebula and it gets exciting yeah yeah there you
have the um let's that's i don't know what ngc object that is but we know that over here you have
the butterfly and you have ptolemy's cluster and [Music]
much more going on you know the didn't don't quite have like the row of
fiyuki complex plus it was hidden in haze but of course m4 shows up rather clearly
over here and i think there's another other globular cluster that doesn't quite show up because of the glare
so even in haze i found any hazy portal for skies
i was still able to get some decent uh a decent image of the milky way here 35
millimeter so um so doing some more work in 35 millimeter
and not always just for the uh
and just for the sake of um just imaging or a beautiful image but
something that's got some detail to it something i can learn something from i can look up what nebula that i've shot and
then see and you know see what i've got from it so
continuing to learn there and then to finally and it should be around here
somewhere here we go two shots one um
an initial shot this is this is by no means would be considered
you know as far as landscape you've got lines you've got things that a photography from a photography
standpoint might you know draw internet criticism but from
just what i saw um from this zone that
um clusters down here were visible and i could see some structure
in this area and i knew that if i took a good image i could
i'd very likely get a decent milky way shot out of it
and this was at so this was at iso 1600 which
again i'm learning that i don't need to shoot at a that incredibly high iso to
get things that are really there like this this this h.a emission that's coming
from this part of the bulge i've learned is really there um but when i shoot a little bit to the
right at 3200 then milky way becomes more colorful so
does the light pollution from the nearby town and in this case i opted to leave it in
but it also meant that some of the based on the way that i processed it
processed it some of this data is still there you don't see the nebula as much that's where the lobster
claw should be and it's you can barely make some of it out it isn't as clear as it was
at the other site which is a slightly aborted zone slightly darker
but still getting some decent detail here and and i was happy with that so
so that's where i'll leave my presentation i know i've gone for a bit
it's uh each shot leads to the next one and um
those were there were a lot of transitional shots and because i want to try and get all the planets in a line
on june 23rd i'm hoping that some of those shots that i took in twilight help
help me get the planets and that includes getting uranus and neptune
somewhere in the shot where they're visible that's going to be the challenge because it's going to be getting
brighter as i keep trying and eventually those would wash out along with
you know other fainter stars so that's my presentation okay thank you so
much all right thank you so much okay uh so up next uh is uh cesar brolo and
cesar has been uh um making images from his balcony down in
buenos aires uh and uh i think he's got some new work to show us
yes hi hi everyone hi scott hi adrian hi bob
uh adrian you you made uh every time that you show your pictures
are amazing and you work very very uh good in especially in conditions
where you have no easy situations or a
low horizon image and you have a really great details and
really really i hope that one time you came to
south hemisphere and of course that we can go with maxi and other
guys to to make pictures that would be awesome and you know
because you need yes you know all these science because you need the the middle
part of the center of the galaxy or higher in the in the horizon and yes
all this yes yeah i have to come during winter yeah
that's what you see it all in winter so yeah i'll be doing the opposite of what most people do go to where it's warmer
i'll be going to where it's colder yes absolutely i i can show you
i'll show you tonight a little presentation from my my history in using the balcony
and some details the last pictures that i took from the balcony
last weekend because i i tonight is i unable to to watch the
sky because it's foggy cloudy mist uh
we are going from the fall to the mist you know right are similar but are not
the same um but i can show you my little presentation
let me let me know if you can see
yes we can southern sky balcony yes very nice
yes today i was more yes i worked a little more yes
presentation it's nice and yes it's it's about about the possibilities uh for aggression the
people to use their telescopes from anywhere i am in a
nine portal scale uh 9.5 maybe
and of course that is a it's a pleasure for me encourage the
people to use their telescope or cameras from the city and
make all that the sky can bring us
as possibilities unfortunately we have a very very high
light pollution here but of course that we can use uh
with the technology actual technology maybe we can't see many things because watching
uh in light pollution like polluted areas is more difficult that
make some type of photography um of course that
um the possibilities uh are today are very very um
very wide very open uh we can make a solar pictures lunar of
course planetary we can choose right nebulas uh
with a very i took uh black nebulas from are not in this presentation the
pictures but i showed many times uh that are
that we can make me and my son magustin we can make
acceptables or pictures that say okay are okay from the city
uh of course planetary nebulas are more easy from the city it's an excellent
place to use um high large focal telescopes
in middle of the city and used for planetary nebulas and the brightest
galaxies of course that we can do it the same as for example
centaurus a galaxy is very easy to to make a picture from from here
or you know maybe sculptor galaxy or many many galaxies are totally possible to to make
a picture from in the middle of the city well this is for example my my winter
config from configuration for my ex 100 that i use in the balcony
it's very easy because today i don't have for example from the exodus
balcony i use only a slave a notebook that is going outside in the
balcony to the to the cold weather without problem this is the balcony very small
and here uh i i drive the computer with a very
very easy uh application that is from google google
i don't remember the name exactly the name but it's the application from google to drive a computer from uh the
screen oh wow okay yeah like a team viewer or
yes but and it is like a team weaver but something that you can use is that
you can uh how do you say you can use your cell phone like a pad and you can
see your computer if you if you like because we have a i have a
window between the the living room and the balcony and it's very you know very
cozy very easy to to use last year i use it i love this configuration it's very very
easy to take pictures and enjoy the the sky without have a problem
um and suffer quality weather i don't have problem with the cold weather but
sometimes it's better don't suffer yeah it's nice it's nice why not yes that's right
of course because it rings cold music it's very important cool music yeah
absolutely well this is the the
the is the the west side uh southwest side of my balcony here
you can see this part of this apartment in the past i don't uh this will this world is
newest uh maybe it's uh from five years old only
and i i lost a little part of the sky but it's not horrible it's not terrible
but the situation is terrible for me because i i have really problems of my horizons really is really high
but you know i can make something from from my house yeah
that's important absolutely working right if you here
i have the part where i can see the moon
and i can show you here in the same part of the building
for example this was a conclusion between jupiter and the moon
something for the people that live in apartments in in in the city they can use applications to see
um what they can watch watching the
the high of of the the buildings the angular height of the
buildings and the angular heights of the events that they can
watch or take a picture is the same that i made every time because i need to know
the highest position for an event every time if a
building come come me cover
this planet you know many times i um scott know that sometimes i write
a message and say oh scott i i loosened the moon oh yeah i mean
yeah there's many times we and you use uh switch to me
to show the moon yes yes uh before is go into the going upside
[Music] in the backside of the building yes well this is a a picture of of the moon
from the balcony uh without uh yes
uh the turbulence between buildings is very high but i i was
very fortunate this this night last year
uh using the the first line explore scientific uh maxotop telescope
over on exos 100 and the optics work very very well um
as we i don't have the the lasers and the adaptative optics of
that both uh show us of course uh
i was only really lucky and of course that that that um
something that we use the amateurs use um we use uh
the lucky match is like a very how do you say it's a very
uh easy lucky image is zero or one option when the turbulence
is too high is the picture that we left and
really not as if not the software um
it's the the only tool that we that we count uh
to take uh um a good picture of a lunar surface or you
know or planets um it's but it's an option
without a composing nothing if not these
good good frames are inside and bad frames and are
totally outside for the final composition for the stacking image you can you can have uh
pictures like this um [Music] because you have the best frames
of of the of uh a video and this were this is something that is
very helpful for amateur astronomy that we can get uh
the the system of of not adaptative optics but uh but
it can lift out the bad frames you can get a very
good of course and very good image with combo
convolution because it's it's very important the convolution for for the image
this is jupiter maybe in the same night wow that i can do
i can learn yes it's a it's a picture with the same telescope
it feels like 170 27 sorry
um this is something new
the last moon eclipse from the balcony a little second sequence that but was
very complicated because it was a cloudy night here but i can took some pictures
some uh sorry stars in in the in the field of view
but we here it was really cloudy in buenos aires
you got the eclipse yeah yeah it's good this is another picture from here
it's uh only with a with a very mylar
polymer mylar uh filter the same filter that we use
for to to [Music] manufacturing the the solar googles
yeah i i never suspect that that have a great um
optic uh quality for uh for uh for
not only to watch this the sun if not to use uh
more magnification and have a great shape and details
from uh of the sun this is another another thing that i made from from the balcony
here actually here i have different configuration here is a very very old
mount that i have to my side it's it's um
a month from from the 90s maybe from the the first
time of the 90s i have one of this one i have from the 1992
it's the more commercial moans um
probably this one is from japan not from china it's very old and i have i this
one is is because uh this is with blurry ball but this is because i
we made the a new uh tripod in very finest wood
um as the customer never came to re to to to bring the
the tripod i found this in our warehouse from maybe 20 years and i
only put to work this month to take pictures of the sky in in
my home and it's it's a it's a beautiful piece and very very
um historical but historically right but you know it's it's the astronomy
from the 90s it's very nice for me it is this is the configuration from the eclipse the
knight of the eclipse i'm outside of the balcony i am near to the pool of the
of my tower and here is the balcony
with the exos 100 making pictures of the moon and here
i was taking pictures of some nebula maybe eta carinae and guiding
with the [Music] with the uh starting to guide with the exos
100 caesar uh how much weight how much weight do you have on on the ixos 100 in
that configuration um uh i use it with um
the limit uh that i used was eight kilos eight kilos yes yes if you but i i use
you can see that i use um a tripod uh bigger
yeah and the yes i i have the two tripods for traveling i use the the
smaller ones supplied the small one the supply tripod but it's amount that when you change the
tripod work like a like a bigger mount i use it
for example i used the um [Music] a six inches schmidt calcium with a
problem for for the smooth casserole you don't need to change the the tripod
for the rich creature six inches
is is much better if you change the tripod to another one a little bigger
uh because the the richie greater are more v are more
heaviest because yes um i and i tried for visual use and schmidt
cassette and eight inches without problems too without problems yes
i don't try to to and smith casiran telescope in eight
inches is i think that is around seven or eight kilos
i think maybe you remember for me or celestron do you have maybe
uh 12 maybe maybe 15 pounds i think maybe
that's about right maybe yes yes a 10 inch i weighed many times it's about yes
22 pounds absolutely that sounds right yes yes i know that
but it's important that change the tripod over the
pounds yeah and good balance yes it's very important i remember that i show i
show um a show
with a very very outside the the low capacitivity
um i show i show very many times
right this is scary we kept putting more weight and more weight no yes of course but it's
important the the the of course that is important the the
for the payload is important the the counterweight balance you know yes of course absolutely sure
well my nice setup you have that yes yes here with the camera and here
uh with a refractor and and this very very nice
setup i i use i'm changing every time you know uh because
my my balcony is not my observatory balcony it's not only a
a place to to to watch or take pictures if not to try
equipment and then many people give me to to try or repair you know
and i'm lucky to use a lot of different things for us
you know but yes the configurations are much more than the pictures that
tonight i mean show but well here is the configuration of
the camera only it's excellent for for for me very easy to to
make a setup but i use many many many times i use the setup for the giving the guiding
work it's the same for me i use big mounts and small ones and for me the
excess 100 is a moan that don't
break my back right it's very important
it's very important yes and i have the capacity capacity's
as for uh for vigorous modes yes with a maybe a quarter of the part of of
the way that's good you know uh cesar i i know
so many people that um uh you know they well i have a friend i'm not gonna
say his name uh but uh he uh he's now about 77 years old and
he always had big telescopes when he was young but now you know he's he's being very
careful about his gear and what size telescopes he's using and that kind of thing because you
know he doesn't want to trip and fall or have any kind of uh accident you know
with uh but yeah like that absolutely it's difficult he still goes out to where it's dark and
and he's still setting up and uh um but um absolute assistance can become very
important absolutely scott is sometimes many many
uh people return again to make a astronomy
i have i have um for example
85 years old customer that he abandoned the astronomy because
for him was the time to say hello to the to the heavy moans or heavy telescopes yeah um
he was thinking in only see pictures in internet
of astronomy and never return to make something of observation
or photography and he actually is a nice guy because it's it's a pilot
uh commercial pilot and and you know he loves
astronomy the stars the sky i'm i happy because he
found in in this mountain small telescope returned again
uh in in at times that it's great for him uh really enjoy again the sky and he
don't have he don't need put a lot carry a lot of weight if not it's very easy
for him the the using this total
here this is my my home my tower i am yeah third floor and here you have i i
took a picture of many many stars in buenos aires look that here do you have for example
above the first thing that you can see is the tower is really illuminated this is
terrible in the another neighbor's towers do you have a lot of life
unnecessary to to to illuminate the sky it's ridiculous
here in our tower we don't have this kind of light um but it's it's a place where mercedes
if you have low humid time weather sorry um
you can see stars or in a picture of 30 seconds you you can
you can get some stars it's not impossible to make some some
astrophotography here is a picture that took a agustin it's a milky way inside yes yes
do you remember maybe this because i i told him i remember that maybe he told these
pictures i don't know maybe 60 sorry six or seven years ago
they was when he started to to understand the uh
how to process image um he he took this impressive uh picture
of milky way and here you you can see the cold sac yeah here this is southern cruise here's
peta carinae uh and it's impressive because i never seen
a picture of a milky way middle of the city believe me that i never took again
the same picture i don't know how because i remember saying okay how many
pictures i need to to to take okay 30 seconds well maybe you need i don't
remember maybe 100. um the only thing that he changed is that
he uh put a mask and put one of the pictures here
of of the of the buildings of course that that if not this do you have
this one totally uh try lev no
and this was a very very uh
interesting to to start to work here in my skies in the city
well here you have a picture this is the top of the of the wheel
of the welding in front of me here do you have the southern crust
fully of uh this one is not it's only a reflex of of
in the lenses of my camera but here do you have perfectly with only with the
the tail absolutely 300 millimeters the southern cross here you have part of the cold sack
but this is impressive because it's the city and you can watch a lot of stars in
the picture the many here yeah the restaurant
this is a yes this is from the balcony with the only with the camera and the
exos 100 tracking the stars imagine this one in in a very dark sky
here is a detail of a big rocks vehicles b cruises and here this is a
companion stars we call it the ruby it's very interesting yeah
here is the historical picture of 100 miles per hour cesar brolo
do you remember this was impossible it was incredible yes here do you have a question to kind of
cluster here because this one is the small magellanic cloud and here where
you can you can see the nebula tarantula nebula
well this one is a new work from this this last friday
and this one uh here you have here the same building it's
only i put the mask to to done so over exposure and have a
white part of the welding and here do you have eta carinae nebula
here the the cluster uh i i can show you the names because
i i used a plate solve here
oh there you go the best part is that plate solved yeah recognizing i said yes in the
middle of the city recognize that the the objects and with the with the wielding inside
maybe i i i thought maybe played so say here leave karen you know
no and well here at acarina ngc 3503
well it's a very rich part of the sky and it's very interesting having a reconnaissance recognizable of these uh
objects in in in the sky of a city and this one is
another another tool that is very easy and very affordable for the people
um i'm trying serial again to
to process pictures series is a free software all the time i took to the people
about this about you know how you can recognize and learn about
astronomy with the actual applications that you can afford without
paid money if you if you are more time and more time more specific
working okay you can pay uh px inside uh software but
first i talk to the people i tell to the people all the time that first
learn with the free software uh because
they need a long way to understand and learn how process pictures are used
the tool that are more learning tool because split solve that is is an excellent
uh um excellent application that i come on i dreamed with this in the 90s
short how many was so complicated for us oh yeah right yeah
yes i am completely i am completely um thankful for
by the the printed maps especially i have the wilted
actually yeah the maps are beautiful but uh beautiful this is so much information
you know that um look at something that we shot and you go wow i got this object and that object
and this object i mean how many objects are on the field right there absolutely sure you know so but this
yes you can first of all you need to compare and understand
and this is the is the times where do you have more tools to learn
that times for the people watching the sky or making picture
well here is my picture of eta carina the same night yes
it was uh sorry that is a little um sometimes i prefer i like augustine or b
don't don't put you know a highly contrasted picture because the
reality is that when you make a picture in very polite uh
skies uh it's prefer is i prefer make the picture more natural more clear
i know that sometimes the people say no i love the the dark sky there but it's
it's much better for me don't uh get all noise if not
um don't uh lose don't lose information don't lose
information yes absolutely i agree with that it's uh it's a balance
between uh yes yes because i know that along with that noise in that light polluted area there might be
some important data that gets just wiped out right along with it so
yeah with you on just figuring out each each um
astrophotographer kind of figures out the balance that they like absolutely yeah
yes you you make the same in your pictures you you show the glow you show
all and you you can you can have more details to to show to
the people because you are not losing um information
and this one is something that i made this saturday um is omega centauri
um cloud sorry cloud cluster
and omega centauri it's um i it's a very particular
object of the south hemisphere uh i used this this telescope not in the balcony if not
in the roof of that is my another observatory the roof um
when it's not windy and when it's not you know it's too much
cold weather i go to the to the roof of the rooftop of of the
the tower and it's very very nice and i made this picture of mega centauri
cluster and omega centauri cluster is very very interesting because you know it's um
something that in the last years we know about omega centauri cluster is that
have um black hole
small or medium-sized black hole in inside um
[Music] omega centauri was a galaxy
today we only we watch uh the the the core of the galaxy
because it's you know it's like a seed of a fruit it's only
the core because the the arms of the galaxy all
the material uh you know was absorbed by the milky way this is something that is very
interesting theory and the two things because first of all it's amazing that they have
uh you think that this is only a cluster but the cluster is so big because you have a millions of stars
um it's uh only only well you know 17
000 light years and
to know that have a medium-sized uh
black hole um that was a galaxy it's very interesting and it's a it's a cluster
that you can see in south hemifer uh to naked eyes
um it's very interesting that when you make a picture and you balance the colors you have you look that is two
different kinds of colors of stars inside inside because you have
two two different uh age of stars
and well this is was my my little presentation very nice very nice there's
a couple of questions cesar um yes tell me uh tarek wants to know
uh he's got a couple of questions what is the bortle rating of the sky
for that particular target that you were and 9.5
actually very bright very bright very bright and uh he was
asking was that an rc telescope that that uh or was that a schmidt casagrain that we
saw in that last image uh no richie gretier i use it
okay yes yes i actually using a reaching right here
because something that i actually i'm making a small astronomy
club in my for my uh for friends or customers really cool but you know
i'm friends with my customer my customers yeah yeah i cannot
absolutely absolutely and you know that um
many many of them for example alejandro vareli is a customers a friend
that actually told me okay i can't afford the weight of my equipment i need
first of all it's a celestial amount that he needed that i
made you know new software uh
the the mountains of keepemann and he told me okay please
i can give i can i can give you this for your home and say okay
i can i can give that but sure we can make because this is not only him
uh i have fifth five seven actually seven
guys that live at no more that's that three thirty thirty
uh blocks not kilometers three three kilometers nothing
and i thinking in make a small you know small astronomy club for people
that say okay i don't have time or my tip and i i have my keeper well okay
came from my my rooftop and we can celebrate together astronomy
and i'm preparing for this year this uh because um
the the proof that is that i'm making astronomy very well and i don't understand why the people make take the
telescopes all year uh you know uh and they don't use them
don't use them no no they don't use them right right and the first thing i i thought
was okay i i need to start to invite the people to my to my rooftop uh of my tower it's not
really and and i have we have uh many amenities in the in the
in the in the building in our building we have we we have a very nice place to to make
a barbecue address for you too yeah and yes
it's nice you know the people say okay come on bring your take your telescope i took my
home our group has already named your club it's called caesar's rooftop astro club
yeah yeah no problem yes we can think yes or 100 miles per hour
that's right absolutely so i thank you thank you so much pleasure it's a visual
return return again yes yep and it's uh it's nice we we still
have a few people still on bob is still with us and adrian so and i can see a couple other people
hanging on back there but it was wonderful um we had a great audience uh loved uh
all the questions and um you know uh it's uh
we went a little bit longer than than we thought but hey we had some great information come across
um and uh really uh bob everybody everybody really enjoyed
the technical talk that you gave and gave us insight into uh you really what's the bleeding edge
of uh of uh you know professional astronomy and uh um
so and uh i you know the uh adrian's uh nightscapes and caesar's
inspiration to do astronomy from wherever you are you know yes absolutely
no excuse you know that one right absolutely one more one month amo ago
i went to our star party mendoza and san rafael and this guy is amazing
but my idea is why you can continuing make astronomy in your home because
right most of us we live in cities um we don't have
all day the the capacity to go uh
to the open areas with with dark skies and of course that i go because i love
gold of course and we love you guys but yeah if last saturday if i don't
i i i don't want uh to to my roof i i
forget the i missed the this uh beautiful image of of uh
centaurus sorry omega centauri class omega century
yeah yeah absolutely that's wonderful okay well i think that is a wrap uh we
want to thank everybody you know certainly all of our presenters that are still uh in our zoom room here but uh all the
people that are watching out there uh on youtube and facebook and twitch and twitter thank you very much
and uh we'll be back next tuesday with the 97th global star party so until then you guys are going to the
100 yeah that's right hello everybody thanks scott
thank you so much thank you bob thank you thank you
100 mile per hour astronomy yes yes guys nothing stops us
thanks so much take care [Music]
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