 Okay, welcome to the December webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Robert Nemeroff to our webinar, who will share with us highlights from the astronomy picture of the day for 2019. Dr. Nemeroff is a professor of physics at Michigan Tech. He worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland before going to Michigan Tech. He's perhaps best known scientifically for papers predicting with colleagues micro-lensing phenomena and showing the gamma-ray bursts were consistent with occurring at cosmological distances. He also led a group that developed and deployed the first online fisheye night sky monitor at a variety of major astronomical observatories around the world. His current research interests include trying to limit the attributes of our universe with distant gamma-ray bursts and investigating the use of relativistic illumination fronts to orient astronomical nebulae. I think that there's probably some of you out there that understand that a whole lot more than I do. But what Dr. Nemeroff is best known for is with his co-founder Jerry Bonnell of creating the astronomy picture of the day, which they continue to edit. Please welcome Robert Nemeroff. Thank you. I'm sort of new to this technology. I should share my screen, right? Yes. Okay. Look at all that. Here we go. So now I will play from the start. Okay, here we are. Good. It looks great. All right. Now I'm going to move something so I can see the quest Q&A. I have to be right. Okay. And I went past. Oh no. So. All right. So, still trying. Here we go. Yeah. Dave and I can monitor the Q&A for you. And so that you don't have to pay attention to it, then we can bring something up. Okay. Nice. I see we have a question. But I'll start off. Thanks for having me on the Night Sky Network. This is an honor. So I'll be reviewing this past year of astronomy pictures of the day. So I do this. I'm one of the two people who write and edit the astronomy picture of the day with my colleague Jerry Bonnell, who's at the University of Maryland, but stationed at the Goddard Space Flight Center. I'm in Michigan Technological University, which is in the upper province of Michigan. And so some of you may have heard of APOD, but find it. It's not hard. You just go to apod.nasa.gov and we started this back in 1995, which means that we're coming up on our 25th year anniversary, which makes us one of the older continuously running websites of any category. So what we do is pretty simple. Our name is what we do. We put out a new image every day. Sometimes it's a repeat on weekends, but it's new for a while and usually completely new. And then we describe it in just a paragraph. This paragraph sometimes usually has many hyperlinks that goes deeper into a topic than many people want to go. But if you don't want to go that far, you don't even have to read the text. You can just read the opening lines or go as far as you want. So at this point, we've put on APOD most of the classic images of astronomy of recent years. So if you remember, like, oh, wasn't there this great image? We're pretty sure to have it. So you can just go to apod.nasa.gov, go click on little search, type in something that you might remember, and we probably have it with a really convenient explanation. So let me get to this past year, but I'll be backing up into the year before, into 2018 a bit, into November. So I'll start off with a video. So I have both videos and still pictures. So this is asteroid Bennet, which is still being visited by the Cyrus X and NASA mission. And so it took lots of images. And you can, this video, you can see it, there's no audio here. You can see it, chocolatey move around, and that didn't work, okay. There we go. So this is a, this is a big rock that's to consult my notes. Well, you're seeing it's about 500 meters across, and you're seeing about a four and a quarter hour rotation condensed into a few seconds, seven seconds. So this is an Earth crossing asteroid. So someday in the future, theoretically, this might hit the Earth, won't destroy the Earth. If it hits near a city, it could be a problem. If it hits near some place where it could cause tsunamis, it could be a problem. But we don't know it's complete orbit. We don't think it's on a direct orbit anytime in the near future, but there are several effects. We'll be coming pretty near the Earth soon. And so the effect of the Earth on its orbit in the future isn't all that well-known. So many hundreds or thousands of years from now, this could, well, it could become part of Earth. And so there's a, Osiris Rex is going to be taking a sample of this asteroid and sending it back to Earth, and that will land here on Earth in 2023. So that's something we can look forward to next year in 2020, it going down there. Okay. So in this past, well, one more year ago, there was something unexpected that there was a discovery of the first interstellar asteroid. So pretty much all the comments and all of the asteroids that we've ever seen coming around the sun, they've all been from our solar system so far as we could tell. But suddenly there was one that was called Omaamao, and this is, this was highly hyperbolic, which meant that it was, this orbit was clearly not something that our sun could contain. And it was on a very unusual orbit, and it was coming actually close to the Earth and close to the sun, which was very exciting. Then it did something even more unexpected. It went on, I'll show you the video here, clicking on it, it went on an unusual orbit. Okay. Still having, here we go. So here you see the, in the inner parts of the solar system here, the Earth's going around, here comes the interstellar asteroid that's coming out, and then it does something even more unusual, and that it has a slightly unexpected trajectory. So if it was perfectly round and not outgassing, it would have been on the blue trajectory, but it differed from that, which was unexpected, so we don't usually see that. Probably it was outgassing, but there's, it's certainly an unusual object. So as we'll see later, there's actually the second interstellar, this one's clearly a comet came into our solar system that we see. Now these things are coming into our solar system all the time. It's just that with modern computerized telescope technology, we're able to identify them. We're looking at more of the sky, computers are looking at more of the sky more often than ever before, and so we can pick out these unusual things, like interstellar asteroids and interstellar comets. Okay. So here we have a video that's got audio. So this is a video we featured on APOD, as you see at the top, this is when it was featured. So anything I'm saying here, you can just go back and you can read about it, you can watch the video, you can see the image on the day set. It's APOD on November 26, 2018. So this video will run one minute and 36 seconds, and here's who was attributed for us. So what we're seeing here is looking down from the International Space Station, the International Space Station, during this video we'll see something a little bit unusual. You will see a rocket launch that is bound for the space station. So put your seatbelts on, and here we go. You should hear music in the background. So here's the rocket launch, it's a Progress MS-10 launch. You can see lots of city lights, you can see the Earth's atmosphere is a gold band, more city lights, this is a time lapse, you can see the moon from the rocket, you can see clouds, you can see city lights illuminating the clouds, I find this very beautiful. You can see our core stage re-entry here, it'll flare in a second, there it goes, great. Now the rest of it will slowly approach the space station and give needed supplies. Here it's getting darker on the Earth, but you can still see the city lights. So you can go back and keep watching this until the friends and the neighbors complain by going to the November 26, 2018, here you see major cities. And of course we don't make our videos, we usually find out where they came from or we would definitely tell you this was an astronaut, a cast, okay. Oh, okay, spiraling supermassive black holes, this is a big year for spiraling black holes in the universe. So there are black holes around the universe and the LIGO missions, they're not missions, they're ground stations in the US and now one in Europe that are able to see gravitational radiation and what the most common type of thing that is seen is two spiraling supermassive black holes, unusually massive from what we thought they would be. So here's a video replaying that, so here you see the two black holes going around each other, the reason why they're not completely dark is because there's gas around them and so now we go to a top view and if two black holes spiral in with gas around them, there might be a signature that you could see in optical light with maybe the Hubble Space Telescope or maybe in the future with the James Webb Space Telescope or one of the large ground-based telescopes. So there's, you know, let me turn up, follow the mountain can here. So the two black dots are the black holes and the gas is shown. This is not a real video, this is a simulation, computer simulation, because we want to know what happens, because we want to know what to look for. Maybe there'll be a lot of light, the simulation says, when we look at one way, this has a lot of high energy light, but not so much and a lot of these spiraling black holes that we're picking up at LIGO are too far away to see this. So here we see gravitational lens effects where when one black hole moves in front of the other, you don't see it really block it, you see it pull an image around the whole side of it, it comes all sides of it. Now this, this spiraling is well before they come together, when they come together, they go around really fast, many times a second, and then they merge into a flash and you have this formation, so this doesn't go that fast. It's not that stuff. Okay, this is a static picture, you won't see these bubbles move, but the bubbles they are. So what kind of bubbles are they, you might ask? Thanks for almost asking, although I couldn't hear you. Nobody asked on the chat window either, but that's okay. I know you're asking inside. So these are bubbles of methane and they're in Russia, Lake Baikal. So Lake Baikal is unusually clear. It's the largest by volume freshwater lake in the world and it's sitting on top of methane deposits, around it are methane deposits too. So in the winter, the clear ice freezes, much of it is clear and you can see the methane bubbles bubble up, which is really cool to see. It's also a little bit ominous because we're worried now about global warming and although the most talked about global warming guests carbon dioxide methane is even more effective at global warming. So we don't know if there's enough methane below Lake Baikal or in the surrounding area to significantly affect global warming. We don't know, but it's something to think about. Robert, I have a question for you and this kind of relates to one that showed up in the Q&A. So far, and then this one is similar. Most of the, all the videos you have have been credited to NASA. But then you have this one at Lake Baikal, which is has a copyright for a, I guess, a private citizen. So it's not only NASA, even though it's a NASA site, not only NASA can put things on and people can submit their things. And so the person asked where they were wondering, how do you go about submitting photos to APOD this way? Okay, good question. So yes, so we try to get the best astronomy images, whether they're taken by NASA or not. So many times people are in the right place at the right time. They capture meteor showers. A lot of people may be involved with the night sky network. I've taken some really great images and we've run images from that. That just that NASA doesn't have or no one has. So if we see a really great image, we'll ask permission to use it. And once we grant permission, we'll run it. We do, however, reject many more than we get. So when we're able to run. So we get, I used to saying we get 10 for every one. We get submitted 10 images for every one we're able to run. But for some reason in the past year, that's gone up to close to 20, maybe even more than 20 now. So for some reason, the submissions have increased. I think because lots of people are getting fancier equipment and able to take better images, which is good for us, because we're able to feature better images. But it makes it more competitive because more people have the better equipment. So that's a really good question. So yeah, if you have a great image, we can't guarantee you we're going to put it on, but please send it to us because we want to see it. It doesn't always have to be just great in terms of visual. It can also be very educational. We're interested in effects that haven't been seen before or something that can really help demonstrate some point. Because APR is not only just about popularity, although popularity is important to us. One idea is to show a really cool image and a really cool image is a fuck. And people say, wow, what's going on there? And that curiosity that people have is the hook that they can read into our explanation and learn more about stuff. So a good image is also an entryway to more information. But sometimes, as we'll see in some of these images I'm showing, they're not all super clear. But they're all chosen for usually a pretty good reason. One of the things that we go by is that if we see an image, we think, well, if we had to pick just one astronomy image that characterized this day in astronomy, would it be this one? And there's rarely just one answer. But sometimes we say, yeah, this one sort of is the best one. So we'll go with that. And sometimes there's a few days delay. So anyway, thank you. Really cool question. So here's another video that was submitted well before. Actually, I was born already, but before APOD got started in 1995. So this is a reconstruction of Earthrise. So in, let's see, 50 years ago, December. So that's actually 51 years ago, almost now. Apollo 8 circled the moon with people on it, the first people pod circled the moon. And they surprisingly saw the moon rise. And so this has now been digitally reconstructed. There's three good images taken. And it's been reconstructed into a video of what it would look like to see that first Earthrise from orbiting around the moon. So at the bottom, you see the moon. And here we go. This is a C major preview by Gilman Sebastian Pauk. Wait for it, it looks like the moon. What's that? At this point, one of the astronauts said, oh my God, look at that picture over there. Here's the Earth coming up. And this is what he saw. And it is one of the most iconic images of all time. But this is the video he saw. I mean, you need to see video. This is what he saw. This is real time. He's seeing this in real time out of the module, the Apollo 8 window. The moon is not really colorful, but the Earth is, which adds to the amazement of this. Everyone you know is on that big blue moon. The rise of the Earth is caused by Apollo 8 going around the moon. The moon's been called a magnificent desolation because it's sort of brownish gray, which I think is well-captured by the colors here. Earthless, many colors, including bright blue. So we paired the music to the video. The video didn't come with this music. So we had A-pod play different musical things and see which one works the best. And this one worked the best for that. So the next picture is that- We actually had Ernie Wright, who did the animation on that. He actually did a webinar for us. I think it was last spring. And so we'll see if we can scare up the link so that people can go find out. Okay, well, if you go to that A-pod, that should have links to it too, pretty sure. Okay, so this is one of the first time that Delander saw the Earth coming up over the lunar limb. Now, the first image was actually in black and white. Later, the image was in color. So this has been digitally remastered to have all the high resolution of the Hasselblad and the color of the color image together. And this was produced by Jim Weigat, right? Photos taken by Bill Anders from Apollo 8. Time Magazine had this image, similar one as the image of the century for last century. Okay, so this is the famous Orion Nebula. So this is something familiar, seen a little bit differently. This is an infrared from the WISE mission. Okay, rather than go on, we can gawk at that. You can go back and read more about it. I'll jump to the next one. So here's a meteor shower and a comet here. That comet is, for Tannin, I think. Yes, comet for Tannin. And this is the famous Pleiades. As people from the Netsky Network would know, here's the Hades and here's a meteor shower. And here's the red of the Nebula altogether, taken by J.C. Cassata, just a beautiful image that showed a lot. So we were very happy to run this image. It's taken over the past year. Okay, so the moon gets struck with stuff. It's hard to notice because the moon's usually pretty bright and people don't usually look at it all that often. I mean, you look at it, you don't really see it in high resolution, but with modern video techniques and with being able to look at the moon during total lunar eclipses and taking videos of the part of the moon when it's dark, there's more and more meteoroids found hitting the moon. Now this one was caught by many people because it occurred during a total lunar eclipse last year. So I actually had a grad student become very interested in this and APOD was actually of use to the science of this because we had a lot of images sent to us at APOD of the impact, the meteor impact of the moon from many different places. So it can be, well, the moon can be triangulated against the background and things can be done a little bit more scientifically with all of these things together. So this all happened in the past year. Happy to be part of that. Okay, so, whoo, let's go and pass that. So this is a spiral galaxy D100 and it's seen in an unusual way because there's a big red tail from it. So in clusters of galaxies and groups of galaxies, there is an intergalactic medium and this intergalactic medium can cause gas to be stripped out of galaxies. So here's a spiral galaxy that a lot of gas stripped out of it as it went. So D99 is down here and this already has had a lot of the gas stripped out of it. So this was taken by Hubble and just one of the interesting images that shows something that hadn't really been seen well before this past year, so this past January this came in. Okay, so in the very first of 2019, which we're wrapping up now, the New Horizons satellite went past something else besides Pluto, which it did several years before. It went past what was then called Ultimatuli that now has a new name and actually I'm blanking on the name. Does anybody know the name? So please type it in your question and answer because I'm blanking on the name right now. So this was a very unusual asteroid. First of all, because it's far out in the solar system and the asteroids far in the solar system are different or thought to be different than near and by in the solar system and indeed it was. It seems to be there are these two loads that would just happen to spiral in and connect. And so this is a cruelly two-lobed asteroid and a lot of this material is thought to be from the early solar system. Okay, so during this past year, Juno continues to, in its elliptical orbits around Jupiter. And so every time it takes many images. So this is the 16th time past Jupiter in its 53 day orbit. And so it took 21 images and it was made by amateurs, very sophisticated amateurs who work hard on this into a video of what it looks like to go past Jupiter. And so we paired this with Holst, the planets and you'll never guess which planet repaired it with, Jupiter, Jupiter. So here we go. Music played by the United States Air Force heritage of America banned in the Wikipedia. It only runs 54 seconds. So the clouds of Jupiter are complex, a lot of storm systems. So we're coming up on something called the Dauphin cloud. It looks like a dolphin right here. Got a lot of notoriety. And so Juno has zipped past Jupiter again, trying to determine what the interior of Jupiter is like, how solid, how liquid it is, determine the magnetic fields of Jupiter, the gravitational field of Jupiter, the interior of Jupiter and the cloud patterns of Jupiter. And it's doing very well. Okay, cool. Okay, so we had two rovers rolling around Mars. And then in 2018, one of them died but we didn't give up on it until 2019. So this is one of the last shots from the Opportunity Rover at Perseverance Valley. So the Opportunity Rover actually went for 15 years and it was supposed to go for 90 days. So it covered a lot. It helped uncover some of the unknown wet past of Mars. And so here you can see a Martian landscape and a Martian sky. And you can see part of the rover at the bottom. So we said goodbye to Opportunity but curiosity is still rolling around. And this next year we're gonna get another one. We're gonna Mars 2020 rover on Mars. That'll be sort of like curiosity which is like a small car. Okay, we continue to learn about our universe. So one of the ways we learn about a universe is by running computer simulations again. So here's a computer simulation starting with your early universe and you're going to see with a simulation a cost of galaxies four. And so this one, although I thought it was corny at first I think it works. Tell me if you think it works. This is mated with Beethoven's fifth. It has just the kind of violence that occurs in the time lapse. I won't talk over it that much. Okay, a little bit. You're seeing the colors are the fast moving gas. The brighter is the faster moving gases. On the upper left it says 200 kiloparsecs which is like 600 light-years. This is the redshift. How far it is, Z equals 0.31. We're getting closer and closer to the current time which is Z equals zero. Look at these gas clouds crashing into each other. Okay, my eyes usually drawn to the big gas kind of the bottom but there's another one now coming in the top. And then, snap my fingers and we're gonna go into optical light as simulated. You're gonna see the galaxies and the streams of stars from these galaxies. These two groups of galaxies are gonna come together and form a huge cluster which is very similar to what we see out in the universe. A lot of this is dark matter that dominates the gravity of these clusters. Yeah, it says Aroca, thank you. That's the name. So it says, talk to you, actually I know who he is. Tell me the name of what. Okay, so we try to figure out what the universe was like what the universe is made out of even. We're not even 100% sure what the universe is made out of. It's made out of this weird stuff. We think some of it is dark energy some of it is dark matter but we start the universe off with simulations with these dark matter and dark energy and we see if we get something that comes out to what we look like. We see it in the universe now and that looks a lot like the universe now which is one of the reasons why we think the universe is mostly dark energy, a lot of dark matter and relatively little of matter like we, like us and the Earth. Okay, this past year we've been in a pretty deep solar minimum. So you'll see this several times in the slide show. This was taken in 2012, the image of the sun on the left and you can see during solar maximum there's a lot of activity on the sun. There's these are essentially sunspot active regions. There's a but over here last year, not so much and there's been months of gone by. In fact, February, February went by without a recorded sunspot which is unusual and 2019 I think has the fewest sunspots on record. Okay, we kept peering into the distant universe. I think this is a Hubble again. So this is a Bell 370, one of the first known galaxy cluster gravitational lenses. So if you remember that video that was the cluster of galaxies. So that cluster of galaxies can be in front of something behind it. Galaxies in the universe behind it. And those galaxies in the distant universe they are gravitationally lens. They're not affected. They don't know what's happening between us and them but their images are stretched into these arcs. And look at this galaxy, it's just totally stretched out. And so from looking at these stretched out distant galaxies, we can learn a lot. We can learn a lot about how the mass is distributed in the foreground cluster of galaxies which is one of the reasons why we're pretty sure clusters of galaxies have so much dark matter. Because if it was all the mass is concentrated in just the galaxies you see, you wouldn't get smooth arcs like this. Oops, went backwards, didn't mean to. Okay, if I can go forwards here. Okay, we need more forwards. Oh, a Zor. Okay, I didn't even know this was in the offing until I saw the images and I couldn't believe the images. So this is a Zor. This was some sounding rockets launched by NASA in northern Norway. And the idea is to study the upper atmosphere. So these sounding rockets released gas. So there's other kinds of gas. And I'll look at my notes. It's tri-methyl aluminum. I'm sure you probably guessed that already. And barium strontium mixtures. So you see different parts of it and they look to see how these sound and what happens to the gas after they drop it because the currents of wind in the upper atmosphere are harder to track than the wind here on earth. So we got pictures sent to us, fortunately, we're very lucky. And here we see the astrophotographer looking off at some of these unusual, very unusual sky sites. If I saw that I was like, what is that? And they had NASA and Norway and Europe had many people watching this to see what would happen to the gas canisters, how they would float. And that helps tell us how the solar wind transfers energy to the earth, among other things. So it was more than just a pretty show. Okay, I said there was another rover on Mars. There is, and it is curiosity. And curiosity usually looks across Mars and sees things like we saw. It's looking for the ancient history of Mars to see if Mars could have ever supported life, but sometimes it looks back at the sun. And sometimes it looks back at the sun to see something like this. Okay, that was so cool, I'm gonna do that again. That was an eclipse, but not of the whole sun. That was one of the moons of Mars, Deimos, crossing the sun. So it was an eclipse as seen from the surface of Mars, Phobos, I'm sorry it was Phobos, across the sun. Okay, this is a fuzzy image, but it is a spectacular image. This is the first horizon scale image of a vehicle. So this is, the dark part here is called the black hole shadow. It is not necessarily the event horizon. The event horizon, well, there's gas around the black hole and so some of the gas is in front, but because you can't see the gas behind, there's a pretty much a dark spot where most of the event horizon is. But this is the first event horizon scale image where we can see down the event horizon. And so this was not center of, this was the center of M87. And they're currently also doing this event horizon scale. People are doing this for the center of our own galaxy and others in the future. So this way we can learn a lot more about black holes and what happens with them. Okay, I've gotten a question. Have you ever had problems with authenticity in any of the submissions? Great question, and the answer is yes. On some occasions we've run images that turned out not to be what they thought. Our policy is that so long as you describe exactly what it is that's being submitted, even if it's an image concomitant, we're good with it. We won't disqualify it. However, if you imply, if you lie about your image, if you imply something that's not true, even strongly or don't describe, then we'll sort of disqualify it and think, well, it's not reliable. We do have a team, so we have a discussion board called the asterisk and sometimes we will post an image there and astrophotographers will tell us what they think. I have a former graduate student who specializes in astrophotography and is really good at telling fakes. Also, Jerry and I have been around, I mean, APOT's coming on 25 years, so we've seen a few images, so we usually know the fakes pretty quick, but if we don't, then some of the pros, so a graduate student might know, some of the pros on our board will know, but even so every now and then we are fooled. Relatively rarely. Okay, in recent years there is a mystery as to why there are detections of methane on Mars. So recently, this past year, the mystery deepened, I mean, you can start on the notes again, sorry, because the ISA's Roscosmos ExoMars Tracegrass Gas Orbiter unexpectedly did not detect methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Well, before, both curiosity rolling on Mars and ISA's Mars Express did within a day of each other. Now, who cares if there's methane on Mars and some kind of gas? We know there's methane on Earth, it's bubbling out of flakes, but on Mars is an indication on any planet it would be an indication of life, but it's not the only way. Making methane is not specifically saying there must be life, but it's an indication there might be. So it could be there are microbes under Mars making life, but there might not be. We're not sure. It's one of the big mysteries of our time and it only deepened this past year. Okay, so this is the Casai Nebula again from Hubble. So this was taken not only by Hubble, but Chandra and X-ray light. And this is a planetary Nebula. So our sun will do something like this when it's finished fusing hydrogen and helium in its core. And it's absolutely spectacularly beautiful in my opinion. Look at the detail on that. We don't know what all the detail means. There's a lot we see, we take pictures of and professional astronomers, we don't know everything. NASA doesn't know everything, but that's what partly drives all this. Try and understand. We know a lot of the gross features of this. We can explain some of the gross features. Some of the details, probably not. Okay, so this past year we listened to Mars. Seiss, part of the Mars In-Sight Lander was deployed from Mars In-Sight Lander is right here and started listening to Mars because we don't really know what's inside Mars either. We don't know whether Mars has a liquid core or not. We can tell a lot about what's inside the Earth because they're earthquakes and it bounces around and bounces off liquid cores of the Earth that it would if it was solid. So we figured, well, let's give Mars a shot because we don't really know what's under Mars. So far we haven't had that deep of Mars quake, so we can tell for sure, but there have been some quakes that we've seen, that we've heard. And we've heard a lot of wind blowing past the spacecraft and whenever the spacecraft does something, when the arm moves or something like that, then you can sort of hear it. It's so sensitive, the seismometer, you can hear it. So we're still listening. We're hoping for deep Mars quakes and hoping to decipher the interior of Mars this way. This happened this past year. Okay, there's places you can go on Earth that are really cool, as you know. And if you have been there, this one is in southern Mexico. This is a Mayan pyramid called the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent. And so you can go there near in Equinox and you can see, if you know exactly what to look for, a Feathered Serpent go down. Now it's not really a Feathered Serpent. It's well known what's happened. It's a bunch of shadows, the shadows of the blocks on the side that's visible just to Equinox, but it sure looks like there is a serpent of some kind going down the pyramid and it is really cool. And now there's big crowds there. So get there early. And that is one of the cool things. It's sort of astrotourism that's popular now. It's an astrotourism thing you can do, okay. So exoplanets, this past year, we've discovered a lot nor exoplanets. So Kepler is shut down by a new satellite test is measuring that. And so someone put these to music. So the data came from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, but an astronomer who was not directly involved in the Exoplanet Archive put it to music and here it is. So this is the band of a Milky Way galaxy here. This is the night sky. So there's different ways of finding exoplanets, planets outside our solar system. So it started in the early 90s. Recently, a Nobel Prize was given for the first planets. And these are the different methods by the color. How fast the planet goes around, the faster it goes around the higher the pitch. There's distortions, visual distortions near the edges. And as time goes on, as years go on, we discover more and more of these. And with tests, we're discovering even more. We're looking around sunlight stars. So we're trying to find other Earths and how they're alive. This is a step in that direction. This big block was Kepler. It's one of our 4,000 in 2019, a good year for exoplanets. Okay, again, here's a spotless sun and here is a space station. We get a lot of these images. These have to be really carefully timed as many of you will know. So this one was really popular. We thought it would be. We have our focus groups and they really responded to this one. So it's usually you see other sunspots. You're not sure what this sunspot is, but this sunspot, which I guess looks like a high fighter from Star Wars is really just a space station. Okay, so Apollo 11 launched to the moon this past year. And so here is a launch. Actually running low on time and I want to get to the next one. So why don't we jump over that one rocket launch and go right to descent to the moon, which was 50th anniversary of one of the biggest milestones in humanity. And I'm going to jump to 46th about. So at this point, Apollo 11 is headed down and they've just been cleared for landing, go for landing, which is amazing. No spacecraft has ever been allowed, been down, go for landing before. Apollo 10 got close, but it wasn't supposed to go down. So they're going down now. Michael Collins is circling the moon, but he's not in the eagle, which is headed toward the surface. That's Aldrin and Armstrong, as I'm sure all of you know. So this whole display was put together by someone from Great Britain. There's a lot of different feeds. This is the picture out the window. Here's an altitude meter. Here's the picture of the spacecraft. Here's what people are saying in captioned. So they were headed down to the moon. 100 feet, 21 down, 33 degrees. Aldrin's calling out numbers. Here in program 66, Armstrong takes control of the lunar module. So he's landing it himself now. There is a computer that was supposed to do more of it, but Armstrong saw there was a boulder field down there and he wanted to take control of himself. And he's very experienced at this. It started to get exciting though. So P66 here says Armstrong's in control. Aldrin's calling out numbers to help Armstrong out. This is what they're seeing. Well, there's two different windows. This is one of the windows. Armstrong's looking for a place to put down the lunar module. It wasn't supposed to be this exciting. Now the problem with landing near West Crater is you can't put the lunar module on too much of a tilt or else it can't take off or it might fall over. So you have to find a flat area that doesn't have boulders. And that's what Armstrong was looking for. He's looking. We're going forward. Okay. They put up something called the bingo call. When the bingo call gets towards zero, you have to decide you're going back because you're not gonna land on the moon or you're landing right then because you're running out of fuel. You have almost no fuel left. So you can't let the bingo call get to zero. And Armstrong is trying to land it with a minute, 14 seconds left on the bingo call. Time to bingo call. All just calling out numbers. 75 feet. There's nothing down to half. 60, 60 seconds. 60 seconds to bingo call. Mission control was just watching forward. A little bit worse. People on Earth could hear the audio feed. Do an half turn. Forward. Forward. Just under the right. 30 seconds to bingo call. 37 and a half. 30 seconds. 30 seconds to bingo call. 20 seconds. On back right. You can stop. If you have a deep end. How did you do that? Auto control. Auto control. You've heard all of them a lot. Here comes Armstrong. And then I'm off. 413 is in. And shut down. We copy you down. Here you go. Say everybody stand by. Stand by. You want. Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed. And they made it. Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot. And humans are on the moon. And this is the panorama that they could see. Out the window. You're looking good here. So I'm going to skip over this. Okay, we're going to be busy first. We're going to late. Okay, so this past year, by measuring where galaxies are in the universe, we confirmed that we're on the edge of a, Milky Way galaxies on the edge of a huge local void. So there's the Virgo cluster, cluster galaxies, the Coma cluster galaxies, something called the Great Attractor. These are all contours where there's lots of galaxies, but near us, there's relatively little. We're just on the edge of a local void. That became more clear this past year. So Pluto was taking a lot of pictures from New Horizons, but Pluto is actually multicolored. And to get the colors just right, took a lot of processing. So over this past year, a version of Pluto and true color came out. Okay, I have a question. Will we find an Earthlight? I just find it before we destroy ours. I sure hope so. I think so. So here's another attempt to find an Earthlight planet. This is a planet that was exoplanet seen out in the universe that actually had water vapor on it. So the way we can talented water vapor is because it went in front of its parent star and the parent starlight went through the atmosphere of the exoplanet and we can see what light is absorbed. And some of the light that's absorbed was, must have been absorbed by water vapor. And so we know now for sure, we've always guessed there was, there are planets out there that orbit sunlight stars and have water vapor in their atmospheres. So we know we have a lot of water vapor in our atmosphere we see in this clouds. Actually Mars does too, but we don't know if there's life on Mars. So it's an indicator there could be life out there, but it's not a sure thing. Okay, here's a really cool image of a sprite lightning, a different kind of lightning that wasn't all that well known before. It's above thunderstorms. It goes up, not down. Extremely detailed images. Let's skip over that a bit. So we're coming to an era where there's lots of satellites going in front of stuff. So a lot of astrophotographers of which many might be listening now are getting planes and satellites going in front of them. And so this is a picture of the Andromeda galaxy before any photoshopping was done. And so you can see lots of the plane and satellite lines, but then if I click once, they can go away. So it wasn't actually Photoshop itself the specific software took it away. It was image processing techniques on different images of Andromeda and minimizing the lines that took them away. So we can still do astronomy, it's just harder. And with the new Starlink satellites and others coming up with the future communication satellite constellations, this will get even harder it seems to do, but it won't be impossible. So here's an image of the second interstellar object that we know of that came into our solar system. This is a comet. And it looks like a pretty normal comet and it's comet Borisov. And it's just right now, the nearest it will be to the sun. It was discovered last year. Last year was the first all-female spacewalk. We had Jessica Meyer and Christina Koch on the space station on duty when they needed to go out and swap out a component. And so they did. And of course it went fine and here we see them both working hard to swap out that component. So the next one will be the, oh no, Mercury Cross the Suns. We had a Mercury crossing, so I'll run this. Actually, I don't like the sound on this one. So we'll just run it quietly, I'll talk over it. So it's hard to see and it's not jumpy as it seems, but right here is the planet Mercury, which just within the month crossed the sun and actually crossed the center of the sun. So Mercury does that more often than Venus. But again, there's no sunspots on the sun. So it's a very quiet sun. And so it was unusual to see and Mercury stood out. So this is by some measures, the most popular image that we ran on APOP this past year. It was an aurora that looked like a dragon. So the astrophotographer told his mom and his mom ran outside and just looked up and said, wow. And so we post it because it really does look like a dragon. And it was really popular. So many times when there are nebula or aurora that look like common things, it's a mixture of the real and the surreal. And when you get that together, it's very popular, people like that. Because there's something they can understand and something that they can't understand all mixed together. So it becomes like a logical thing to gawk at and a stepping stone to a greater understanding. So with that, I will say that's the end of my formal presentation. Please join the Night Sky Network if you're not already. So you can find an astronomy cover and a vent near you. And here is an address. And we do have a milestone for APOP. We've got our 25th anniversary coming up in June, 2020. So if there's more time, I will take some questions. If you have to go right on the hour, thanks for attending. And so leave you with that. But I will actually, there is a backup one. There's one more. So that was the whole show. But here's like a bonus, like an encore. Someone did this for us. They now record, so this is the APOP Red Allowed by Artificial Intelligence. Picture of the day of two to 14, 2019. So you can just run this in the background. So this is the image I already showed you. So this artificial intelligence will automatically read this aloud. And as it says here, no humans were involved in making this. So now we have home months that are just completely automated and you can see one play after the next. And you can have that running in a science center, in your community center, in your university, at home. You can just have one play after the next and you can just stand and watch for a bit and then go away and come back. And they'll just keep playing. So someone did that for us and we're proud of it. So I thought I'd point that out. So thanks again. And I'm happy to take your questions. All right. Well, we've got one more question that came in and they said, is it best to submit images by email or some other method? And I think that Dave put up the link for the submission page there. So, you know, how does that work? Is it purely online? Well, yeah. So the best is on the submission page to send email that goes to both APOD people, Jerry, Vinal and me. And that's the best way. But there are other ways. We have our discussion board, the asterisk, and you can post your image in the image section of the asterisk. And we also have a Flickr page that we look at. And people can upload their images to the Flickr page. But the best way, and I look at all the image submissions, I know there's more than 20 a day now, but I look at them all. And so if you wanna make sure that we both see it, both Jerry and I send it to both email addresses and you'll get our consideration. Okay, so Dave, I'm gonna give a file for printing a 2020 calendar. Yes, so someone is working on that. There's a preliminary version already. And in the next few days, we will be making that link to the 2020 calendar PDF available. So thank you. I know, David and Grim, thanks for asking. I know that's been a really popular thing with a lot of people to be able to have that. Yes, we got a lot of downloads for our calendar. Well, we are at the very top of the hour. And so maybe you should stop sharing your screen now. And so let's call this the last question. We have it from Aura. Any plans to fix the APOD website on Chrome? And I don't know of any difficulties, but maybe you do. Wow, okay. So we have a bunch of people who are really well informed. Okay, so to our surprise, there's a page called the ArchivePix page that lists every single Australian picture of the day going back to 1995. So there's several thousand, more than 5,000 images linked there. So I find that myself, you spoke, because I remember a title or something like that. I go search on that. However, the most recent Chrome browser does something that we didn't expect. It does something called pre-fetching. So what pre-fetching is, is it goes and takes all those links because there's a link to every single APOD there. And it fetches them all, pre-fetches them. So if you want to see one, they're already fetched for you and it just brings it up really fast. So that's great. But the problem is, since we have so many links, it saturates a lot of browsers and the browser can't handle it. It doesn't have that much memory. So we've already have a fix-in that we tried to run it for a few days where we only have the Archive page go back to 2015 and have all the images since 2015. So that will be coming more, then we noticed it was never in that page. So we're fixing that. But it will be fixed. So yes, thanks for the question. It will be fixed. It's already being fixed. We're aware of the issue and we're doing the best we can. We did not expect that there would be, Chrome browsers is the only one I think that shows this. We're also, I was holding out. I was one that's holding out saying, look, Chrome's gonna fix their browser. We're gonna go to a lot of trouble and then they're just gonna fix it and it's gonna go away. But so far that hasn't been done. Good question. Of course, my answer would be use Firefox and Sten. So it's... Yes. I'm working on it. I'm sorry he doesn't have the problem. Nice part. All right. Well, thank you so much, Robert. This is absolutely wonderful. Thank you for joining us this evening. And thank you everyone for tuning in. You'll be able to find this webinar along with many others on the NASA Nights Guide Network YouTube page, as well as the Nights Guide Network website. And so you'll be able to find that within the next couple of days.