 Welcome to everyone on the YouTube live stream. We're very happy that you're with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the night sky network. We'll put a couple of links to information about the astronomical society, the Pacific and the night sky network in the chat in just a moment here. So before we introduce Robert, here's Vivian with just a couple of announcements. Good evening, everyone. I want to let you know that we just sent out you should have received if you are an active club coordinator so the coordinator for an active club, you should have just received an email from the night sky network, I'm inviting you to request a speaker from NASA we have a new program that we have connected with the universe of learning, and for clubs who are active that's clubs that report on at least two events in the last quarter or five in the last year. And you should be an active club and you can request speakers from NASA so this is one that's open for the next two weeks I believe you should have received an email, if not you can give us. You can send us an email make sure that you are an active club that your club is active. And I'll stick some links in the chat about how to get active if you're not sure about that. What else, oh I want to invite you all to become members of to apply to become as an eclipse ambassador. We are running a new program this year for amateur astronomers who want to partner with undergraduate students and to become eclipse ambassadors to get your communities off the path ready for the eclipses this is before the eclipses happen. It's a really fun program you'll get a lot of swag and glasses and you'll get trained on the best eclipse science and outreach public engagement and we'd love to have you all be a part of it thank you so much Dave for putting all those in the chat and I think that's about it for tonight thanks Brian and Robert I'm looking forward to this evening. For those of you on zoom you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of the zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other in the chat window, making sure that you go down to the bottom and select everyone. And if you don't do that, it only goes to the four of us that you can see here, the panelists. Also, you can let us know if you're having any technical difficulties in the chat, or you can send us an email at night sky info at astro society.org. Please put any questions that you have for Robert into the Q&A window that really helps us keep track of them. And a lot of times people have the same question. And, and that way we know if there's, you know, some questions in common and so those will kind of float to the top or questions that are related and so it helps us to kind of put those together and so remember questions into the Q&A. So let's see, I need to hit this other record button. Welcome to the January webinar of the NASA night sky network. This month we welcome Dr. Dr. Robert number off to our webinar. As I did the last time Robert was with us I'm going to direct you to read his bio in the webinar description on the NSN website and we'll say that he and Jerry Bennell, who gave this talk in December 2021 created a pod in 1995. Many of us visiting the A pod site as a daily occurrence. Maybe we followed on Instagram, but wherever we view it. It is a pilgrimage of sorts to a place filled with beauty and odd this universe we live in. It's one of those places where we can let the cares of this particular world fade from our awareness, as we contemplate our place in the greater cosmos. Similarly does a pod inspire us it also teaches us perhaps most importantly, how we can become better humans. Thank you Robert for all you do and coming here this evening to share with us the work you do that brings joy to all of us so please welcome Dr. Robert number off. Thanks for what a great introduction so I hope this is lives up to that introduction but thank you very much. Okay, so now I will try to share my, I created some slides so I am somewhat prepared here. I'm going to try to side show. Start. And I'm going to share a screen of that one. There. So I'm hopeful that you're seeing my great introductory slide. Okay. So, I might have gotten a brief shock for that but it's okay. Okay, so postcards from the universe 2022. The starting pressure that a pod so this near the two senior editors, and let's get started. Oh, what is this a pot so some people know what it is, but some don't. So here you go. NASA.gov. That takes you to our main site. So we started this in 1995 and we forgot to stop essentially. So we're one of NASA's most popular science websites. We do over a million pages a day. So when we check our log files which we don't every day but every day we do pretty much we find out that pretty much every university, every major university accesses a pod we can see some accesses there. So here are translators so your language probably is translated into, if it's not English. And we also I've learned recently that our British mirror operator says that he does translate some of the American isms into British. So I did not know that. Okay, so we're also available over social media because people volunteer to do it and we say, okay. Let's start out about a year ago of the morning year ago, when there was another comment in the sky that some people might have forgotten and it was comment Leonard. And so comment Leonard had a really long tail. So this tells you the title of the a pod up here I hopefully you can see my, my cursor go back and forth as a big arrow. So if that's not true. Somebody tell me we can see. Okay. And then somewhere on the slide. It should say, how you get this a pod if let's say you missed it and you think, oh no this will never be back yet I've missed it forever. You have not missed it forever. You've missed it once. So you can go to the, the a pod address or you can just search for the title and you can bring up this slide and stare at it for hours until your relatives become concerned. But here we have a really cool comment comment Leonard which was all the rage a year ago, a little more a year ago when they had a really long tail, but you couldn't easily see this tail so if you went out and you know where to look, you wouldn't see this. If you had a big telescope and you went out to look at this, you wouldn't see this why not it's such a big telescope because a big telescope sees only tiny little bit of the sky. So you're best off with a long duration camera exposure. And when you do that, then you can see this really long tail that goes constellations across the sky of comment Leonard and so we got some really great images and so we featured one a year ago January. Okay, it's tell was unusual we have another comment around which I will discuss later, which is like a, another just barely visible comment. But we'll talk about last year's comment, comment Leonard's tail wax this is a video so have a few videos. So don't be too concerned it's fine so what you're seeing here looks like some kind of gray snow. But what it is is actually one image subtracted from the previous image in a video, and this is best for seeing good not maybe best good for seeing comment tells change. So buried in this gray snow is a comment, and you will see it when I click the video mode because then you will start seeing the tail move so hold on. Ready. Go. Sit. You can see the long tail. Wag. That was so good. Here we go again. So this is over more than a week. Okay. So is comment Leonard. So last year. Images of the center of our galaxy from a radio observatory set of telescopes mirror cat started reporting and we saw the center of our galaxy last year in greater detail than we have ever seen it before. So here is a false cover image of the center of our galaxy Sagittarius a stars here in the center so the center of that is a black hole that's more than a million summer masses which is in the center of our galaxy. And there's all this strange stuff around it. If you looked in optical light toward the center of our galaxy you would see nothing like this you would see a relatively boring part of the constellation Sagittarius. But if you go into the infrared and the radio, then you start to see the cool stuff, including things like this, this, these filaments these gas filaments that are in this unusual arc, and all these other strange arcs. And here's a legend as to what you're seeing. And this is really cool so even now, mirror cat and other telescopes are investigating the center of our galaxy which are learning more and more. And we're hopefully one day going to see a really good image of the central black hole in the center and what it's doing there. All right, so this past year in March jumping ahead. This is our son, and our son is becoming more and more active. A few years ago our son was so boring, it was incredibly boring. And it wasn't predicted how boring it would be. When you would look at the sun, you would have like no blemishes on it. There would be no active regions, no sunspots, no prominences on the edge. No solar coronal mass ejections off on the side. But a year ago, a month or so, a couple months, it threw off one of the largest prominences seen. And through a coronal mass ejection, and here it is, and it's actually roughly the size of the sun, but nowhere near the bass of the sun. So our son, as we just showed on APOT a few days ago, is just incredibly active. It's out producing its activity that was expected and we were expecting a pretty active solar maximum and it's more active than that. So first of all, that's great. It's great because our son should have a good time. Why should the earth only have a good time? Our son should have a good time too. But also, it's a little bit dangerous because it throws off more stuff. Oh, it's good time for earth a little bit too because we can see more aurora typically. The sun is throwing off more particles in the solar system. More of them are coming hitting the Earth's magnetosphere, being funneled into the earth's magnetic field lines onto the earth and hitting the earth's atmosphere and glowing causing aurora. And that's great. The concern is that we might get a big ejection ahead and in that could strongly compress the earth's magnetic field and cause electronics to do strange things. So they would carry, when you change the magnetic field through any electronic loop, you generate a current in that loop and their earth's power structures, power grids, might not be up to speed. And so we're worried that a strong solar event could cause power problems to your own earth. But so far, we're good. And we have some prettier aurora. So here's possibly a really cool thing to see, possibly omen of things that might be in our future. Okay, Mars. So we've got stuff rolling around Mars. This is a golden age of solar system exploration, where we have rovers on Mars. And so there's two U.S. has two big rovers and let's see, I forget which rover did this one. I think it's curiosity. So it rolls around and it sees cool stuff. So this is actually its size with a penny here. Penny would be about as big as this. So this is a really small thing, but it's not your average rock. It's a really strange looking rock. If you didn't know, you might think it was some kind of flower, but it's not a flower, because if it was, it would have eclipsed all the news and you would have heard about nothing else for the next month. What we think it is, is we think that there were gaps between rocks and when Mars had a lot more water, water would flow and concretions would fill in some of the gaps between rocks. So these concretions would be compressed and they would become more dense than the rocks of which the cracks they were in. And then the rocks would have rolled away and then you're left with what was left behind. There are odd shaped concretions. That's our best guess what this is, but it sure is intriguing. And so all both rovers of curiosity and perseverance are rolling around looking for cool things, among them cool rocks and trying to understand what's going on. That was this past year. Okay, maybe one of the most famous pictures of space of modern times is the Pillars of Star Formation in the Eagle Nebula. So this past year through Hubble, here it says on the lower left, this is a Hubble and it was processed by some amateurs. And they took some of the images and they use modern processing techniques and zoomed in on the end of one of these pillars and saw some really cool, we saw them before, but really clearly imaged some what's called eggs where they're not, they're eggs sort of a star formation. So stars are forming in these things. And when these stars, some of them are massive enough so they have winds and that the winds push away the rest of the pillar and erode the pillars. These pillars are only around for, you know, like a million years or so. But looking at the end of this one pillar, we really got some really cool images of these eggs where stars form. And you can see in here some of the stars that are really red, the red areas, are stars or young stars are in there and they appear so red because their light is going through a lot of dust. So a lot like our own sun looks kind of red at sunset, these stars in there, they look really red because they're going through dust. And this was processed by amateurs from Hubble data this past year. Okay, this is a really cool image, that image just was a figure that we sent to us and described the sky in the year before so yes it's 2023. Yes I'm talking about 2022, but in 2022 the talked about 2021. So this one image sums up the night sky or the all sky night and day in all of 2021. I just think it's really cool. So every 15 minutes, this sky camera that saw a lot of the sky in the Netherlands took a picture and then during the day we show mostly blue sky but sometimes white clouds. And at night it would show mostly dark night, but sometimes the moon would go by and light up the night sky and you can see streaks of moonlight. And then at sunrise and sunset you can see it's getting somewhat blue it's called the blue hour, as most of you, many of you would know so that's a good time to take pictures of landscapes so a lot of the images we have that they put that are landscape images that have the night sky in the background. The foreground was taken during the blue hour because you can just about make stuff out, and along duration exposure will pick up details of the foreground, and then soon it will be night. So you can see the thinnest part of this is where there's the summer solstice maximum day because you have the both day part and we just passed the northern part then this is the northern sky, where you see mostly night at the northern, at the winter solstice in the northern sky and when it's in the middle that's when the equinox is on so we're, we've already had our longest night and we're headed toward equinox in the 2023 version of this. So, all right, so yeah there have been some cool auroras we get sent a lot of aurora pictures and some were just really cool. The ones that are the most popular are the ones that create imagery in the mind of the people looking at them. And then people say oh cool I think that looks like this, this looks like that. So this one looks to me and many people like a whale. So here you see the green aurora you can see the corona here and you can see what looks like curtains. And so this is charged particles mostly electrons flowing into the Earth's atmosphere. And this is a forest in Sweden, but it's an opening in the forest. So it looks, you know, it's a very wide angle image and maybe not pretty sure you can see a city here. And you can see a clear aurora of which there's many this, this time of the solar cycle as we head towards solar maximum, and it just looks really cool. And to me it looks like a, and I said well, and we asked people to volunteer what they thought it looked like. And I forgot what they said but there was a whole bunch of a whole bunch of things. So that was this past year. We had the big pilot parade in April and May of last year. So this was a pilot parade from the South sky. So this is the Sydney Opera House in Australia. So these are not stars these are lights on the Sydney Opera House which is a beautiful structure but going up from there you can see a pilot line sometimes called a pilot parade. You can see Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn all lined up. And so these guys have been switching places over the past several past year. And so now in the morning actually I think you see Venus and Saturn very close together and I think they were really close together just a couple days ago. So, then, well I'll show you in a bit maybe it's the next slide. Yes, here it is. So this is from the northern hemisphere when it was more spread out. This is the line of the ecliptic. So I think this was taken from Italy. And so this is Mercury, Venus, the moon was in the lineup Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and then you can see Uranus, you can't really see. They was digitally enhanced. So you can see it on the image. Digitally enhanced is Uranus and Neptune. But you can see that is really where they are. And it makes a big line. This is the line of the ecliptic. So to a rough approximation, all of the planets including the earth orbit the sun in about a plane. It's in the same plane. And when they all line up in a row you can see this plane as a line. So there was a big planet parade this past year that was pretty cool. It was in the morning, which is harder for many people to do. So, you see. Okay, so we still have spacecraft all over the solar system. So this is NASA's big spacecraft at Jupiter. It's called Juno as you might know. So every month or so Juno in its elliptical orbit swoops past Jupiter, did I say Saturn Jupiter. And that's a close up view and there are videos that we put on there on a pod and you're seeing around the web, and you can see videos of these swoop past. And here's just a really cool image that shows the dark, the bands and zones that go around Jupiter and the cloud system so the earth is smaller than this this storm cloud there. What's somewhat unusual here is this this spot here this dark spot, which is not a black hole into the center of Jupiter. But it is the shadow of a of a moon. And if I remembered which moon that was, I can tell you actually I could probably find out. Let me just go here April 27. No, okay. It's certainly a moon. I think it's gonna meet. And just the detail on Jupiter fits clouds is amazing. So Juno is investigating Jupiter's clouds, its magnetic field, its gravitational field, and trying to determine if Jupiter has a solid core and it looks like if there's some solid hydrogen deep in there, but it's still investigating this, and it's still looping around. Okay, this is a really cool image. So, this is many people go out and they see usually just the moon or the sun but if there's, there's a lot of ice, particularly flittering down in the earth atmosphere, not in the moon's atmosphere moon has very little atmosphere or the sun's atmosphere. But then what you do is this starts reflecting sunlight or moonlight in different ways. So here you can see the moon here, and then there's things called moon dogs people might have seen sun dogs off to the side and sound about 22 degrees away. So they're part of the 22 degree halo that goes around the sun or moon, whatever is reflecting and then the ice crystals in the atmosphere, these the long things are clouds. So the ice crystals in the atmosphere show you different reflect in different ways depending on the orientation and the density of the ice crystals. So this circum Zenith arc goes around the Zenith angle which is the Zenith is the highest point over you. And there's many different circles that you are unlikely to see all of these yourself, which is why, when you take them all, people send them into into a pod and then sometimes we will run. And so this was a really cool one taken by Alan dire. Okay. So the man of the moon is something that people always talk about, but not everybody really knows. So everybody can see the moon without telescope or anything like that, but different cultures have different folklore for what it is they see in the moon there's a woman in the moon and the man of the moon is most more of a Western thing. And it sort of depends on what where the moon is in your sky, because as the moon of the night progresses, you can see more different things but one click here, we'll show you that there's a. Typically known as classically the man of the moon, the eyes, the nose and the mouth, but this is only one of two men and moon here because here's a friend of the astrophotographer has his telescope there. You can see, see him there too so this moon has has two men and so we ran this because it was artistic, it was, it shows you, you know, the moon, which is one of the most common icon many times the moon is a very popular makes popular a pods. So we try to people everyone's familiar with the moon. One of my pet peeves is every time I see a movie or TV show there's always a full moon. And so now, whenever I see a TV show or a movie where there is not a full moon, I will try to give a high five to someone here me and then if they know me they know why I've done that, because the moon is not always fall. So here we show a lot of full moons is true on a pot as well. And so here we go. Okay. Let's see I can't see the question window. Okay. What is the most viewed or asked for a pod okay, coincidentally this is one of the most viewed a pods of not asked for viewed a pods of this past year. So this is again there's people in there to a lot of people try to include themselves or their friends in there. And so this is one of those. So this is the kind of image that's become quite popular. I'm recently I'm sorry, my cat wants attention here so I'm a little distracted upside, but this is during the blue hour or some other you take an image of the foreground and then you wait, and then you take a long, then you keep that one in your camera or download it, and then you take a long duration image of the background. And then you superimpose those, and you get cool stuff and so we're getting 10 years ago on a pod we almost never saw anything like this but now we get stuff like this submitted, you know, many days a week. We don't show them all first we only show some of them but this one was really cool so you can see m 31 the Andromeda galaxy. It's big on the sky although you can't really tell that much scale other than the scale of the people. And there's a small satellite galaxy of m 31 here and you can see the star field. So it really well captured all of this. It was pretty cool. So this was one of the most popular ones we had actually coming up soon as the most popular one that we judge and popularity not it. We can look at our log files at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center which is our most popular site. So that's the original place that updates with the NASA astronomy picture of the day on a pod dot NASA dot got, but it's because Facebook crunches the numbers and makes them so easily available. It's most easy for us to see the Facebook a pod Facebook mirror to see what numbers those have. So this one we know was very popular on the on the a pod Facebook page. If you go to Facebook you can just type in a starting picture that and you'll find us that you can please follow us. You can also see what images might be coming up, because we try to test for popularity on something called Facebook sky, but they, it's Facebook all the Facebook pod dot SK why and so we run about two or so images a day there and popularity is not the only reason why we post a pod images educational content is a big thing. Publicality something that's happening recently isn't as another big thing educational content, you know things like that are all really important, but popularity is important to us. So one of our things is if it's popular, we want to know that, and then maybe we can reverse it and say okay here's a popular image. Here's some educational aspects of that popular image. So we go backwards we say we take the popular image and say, here's where the coolest here's what the astronomy stuff is about that image, as opposed to trying to find the most educational image, and then trying to explain that. So a lot of these images have a life of their own anyway they're popular they were sent around the internet, and your or, you know, social media and so we feel if something is already popular on social media it does not disqualify me pot in fact it makes it more likely with Riley pot because then, if it's not completely fabricated, it has some real science in it we want to explain that science. Got off on a tangent, but the can't disappear anyway. All right, so I was not to loosen cloud season so we're in summer late summer when was this July. The upper atmosphere lights up polar atmospheric clouds where the sunlight reflects off of high clouds, particularly the ice crystals in the high clouds. And so here, some people, they, we get a lot of pictures of just the clouds and those are good. But of course what we're looking for is we're looking for context. So Paris, right. So what's the most iconic thing in the world, possibly and in Paris for sure. And that's the Eiffel Tower. So here we go. Here we got a good image as good as many submitted of the background clouds but now you can see it in the context of a, you know, a landmark that's world famous. So we like the world famous landmarks. So if you're looking to get your image on a pod. And don't just take an image of what it is you're seeing yet some kind of interesting foreground a pot has different planes. So this one doesn't have a background plane where you can see like the big dipper in the background but that would be cool if you could. Right. So there's the foreground plane, then there's, you know, that maybe the atmospheric plane. And then there's, maybe there's a stellar plane and maybe there's a galaxy plane there. So if you can get as many of them going and having content as possible, then we would maybe look more favorably on those. As long as it's not too blurry because people just can't tolerate the blurry, we will run a blurry image sometimes, but it has to have a tremendous amount of educational content. So, for us to do that. So yeah, it was a it was a notable not not losing console. What causes not losing clouds are satellites that study this isn't always well known. It could have to do with the exhaust of spacecraft. And it could have to do with with cosmic rays or things that create something in the atmosphere that cause nucleation points for ice to form it's still being studied, even though not losing clouds are visible. Are really interesting, you know, we're after sunset and for sunrise. They're still being studied for what they are and what makes them more common. Okay, so this one's a bit of a game. It's kind of different. See if you can find the moon there. So if you know where the moon is in this, if you didn't know before. So if you, you've already done this before. Then maybe you can chat or you and a where you think the moon is. I'll give you a clue it's not in the water. Okay. This thing here. That's not the moon. That's some kind of boy. So this is not a full moon. In fact, this is almost new moon. So we get a lot of these pictures to these are pretty cool. It's part of a bit of a competition, or when you can see a sliver of the moon for a new moon. So then, particularly when it's sunrise or sunset, then you see the moon through a lot of Earth's atmosphere so that makes things more dim. So the moon is not here. So I'm now going to outline the moon with the cursor. So hold on. It's right here. This is the sliver of the new moon right here. Can you see it? I don't raise your hand or something. I can't see the raised hand. So the rest of the moon is here. But you can't see that at all, because that blends in with Earth's atmosphere. So this was kind of cool. It's really simple. And I like simple stuff. You know, you can see it's like two colors. There is like blue water and there's arm sky, but there is something slightly different about this. And that is the sliver of a very new moon. And it's a game. It's out. The moon isn't always full. And it's a game people play. And you can play too. When can you see a sliver of the new moon near sunrise or sunset? It was always near sunrise or sunset. Okay, cool. Ah, Earth's recent climate spiral. Okay. So this I heard from the people over in the NASA Science and Visualization Studio was really popular. And so I said, oh, let's have a look. It was really popular. And so this is the year 1880. It's shown differently. So what's going to happen is you're going to see the Earth's temperature as the months go on and as the years go on. So January is at the top while we're at you. July is at the bottom and a year is one circle. And one degree Celsius, like me, it's about two degrees Fahrenheit or so. And one more is this gap here. So we're going to watch the temperature of Earth go between 1880 and 2021. So ready, set, go. So here are the measurements this. Temperatures were kept in certain locations, particularly this location. Probably not exactly sure it might be near Washington DC. So the years go up and we can see, well, the temperatures are pretty much going around. And then suddenly when you get up into the 1940s and the 50s, they start going out a bit. And so as the further out they go, the warmer it gets, and the color is changing. So it's a little bit pinkish, very from blue to pink. So it's the opposite. Well, we'll get into that. So here red is hot and blue is cold. And it's here into the 2000s. And so now you see, ooh, we're outside even the outermost circle. So now it's going to go on its end and you can see that the Earth recently has been warming up. So if you go back a long time, let's see, almost 22, let me just check something here. So if you go back 250 million years, you'll find out that Earth is right now in a cold spell compared to what it was 250 million years ago, but compared to what it was 120 years ago, we're warming up. And the data is showing that it's humans that are doing it. And so this, as you know, is one of the big topics of modern time. How do we cope with this? And it's a problem for humans and people near coastlines in particular of planet Earth. This is something that we have to work on for the people that come after us to try to do the best we can for the people who come after us. Okay, let's go back to Mars, where it's drier. And so this is a popular, this is, I think this is curiosity again. So I don't think I have a perseverance image this year, I'm sorry. But Percy's cool. And Percy has a flying friend called Ingenuity. But still, the curiosity rover, it's about the size of a small car, rolls around and looks for cool stuff, looks for signs of ancient life, looks for signs of ancient water. And it found this really cool perch. So it could, in theory, I don't think it's done this, roll up to the top of this and have a good view. Or if you were on Mars, you could climb to the top of this and look out across a fair amount of Mars. But what's weird about this is that the rocks on top are older than the stuff near the bottom. Here's my cat again. So this is an inversion point, which is sick our point in, I think, Scotland isn't I think is also an inverted point where the upper rocks are older than the lower rocks. So I was surprised by how popular this was. And I was eventually told by somebody. And it's because this looks like a battle cruiser from Star Wars. And I did not know that at the time when I ran this I had no idea and it did really well. And it's like, Oh, yeah, that's kind of look like a battle was from Star Wars. So there's a lot of, as you know, interplay between the science fiction realm and the science fiction realm. And many people who like science tend to like science fiction like myself. I am more of a Star Trek person but I have seen most of the Star Wars movies, particularly the early ones, and the later ones, the ones in the middle, not so much. But I'm a big fan of Star Trek and I like the vision of Star Trek that we go out and we explore and we don't, we don't keep killing each other. Anyway, sick our point on Mars. We learn more about Mars. And hopefully humanity will be going to live on Mars in your lifetimes. Okay, so 2022 was the dawn of the web space telescope images coming in. So this is called the Korean eclipse from the Korean Nebula. And these are dust structures and this image is in the infrared. And so the web space telescope co-orbits the sun with the Earth and is much bigger, several times bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope and sees not so Hubble can see visible into the ultraviolet, but web sees from about the arm so it can see visible but into the infrared. And so a lot of you can see through dust clouds in the infrared. But this I think is near infrared we're not seeing so much the dust clouds. So the web is was launched on Christmas Day in 2021, which was a dramatic I don't know who saw that but that was amazing to watch. So, this is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. And this was processed by people at the Space Telescope Scientific Institute, and it's just amazing the detail that's in this image. So, here we have another one. So, when I heard of web I didn't think it would be doing much in the solar system, but here's a picture of Jupiter like has never been seen before again by the James Webb Space Telescope and this was released last year. So here you can see many things Jupiter doesn't look like it normally does because we're into the infrared here. So you can see some high clouds like the great red spot but here the great red spot is not so red. It is red in the infrared but it's not portrayed as red in this false color image. And here you can see it's portrayed as white, and the white cause are typically higher, and the low clouds are typically darker. And so we're learning a little bit about the 3D depth of Jupiter just from the JWST. We can also see northern and southern Aurora. We can also see rings, the rings of Jupiter, not as amazing as the rings of Saturn, but they're there. And we knew about them before web but this is a really good image of them. And we can see some moons, smaller moons. At Astria actually I see them more than I say them. So many times I mispronounce them. And I think it is in Astria, which I might be mispronouncing. I have heard enough to be able to pronounce correctly. So JWST James Webb has, you know, has supports things that hold the mirrors. And so you can see diffraction of light around those and so you can see things that don't really exist there. And this diffraction line here don't really exist, but they're part of the images and sometimes they're cleaned up and sometimes they're not. But it's like when you see stars have crosses on them, sometimes stars are not crosses. Okay, you're seeing the telescope holder. Many people I guess know from the Night Sky Network. But if you don't know that you're seeing the telescope holder light refract, we know, diffract around that. And this is a really cool image of Jupiter, like we've never seen it before, showing us things that we've never known before. And Webb is just getting started. So here's another one. So here's a tarantula, the RMC Large Magellanic Cobb, which is a satellite to our Milky Way galaxy, and it has a star cluster called R136, which is a young star cluster. And there's lots of, you know, bright blue stars. Now this was taken in near infrared. So the blue was kind of made blue for R, for R thing. So we can see here we can see a bright star and you can see the diffraction spikes around it. So that's really bright. Actually, every star here has diffraction spikes. But the center part of the star is much brighter than the diffraction spikes. They usually don't notice them. But for the really bright ones, you can see them. So this is infrared, but then you can go into the far infrared or actually the further into the infrared closer to the radio waves. When I click my clicker, you can see the next one. And this doesn't look like the same image, but it's the same field from the same telescope. It's just at a longer wavelength light. It's more red infrared than the infrared I just showed. So I can go back by hitting a little P button. And here we see the near infrared, far infrared, near infrared, far infrared. Now, how do I know I might just be making this up? This is a completely different image. Well, for one thing, this is more blurry, which happens because the longer wavelength of mid infrared light, the near infrared light. But let's look at this star right here where my cursor is. You see it right there when I go backwards. There it is again, forwards, backwards. So you know it's the same star. Let's try this one over here on the edge. See it? Forward, backwards, forwards, backwards. And this whole star cluster, most of it disappears. But because most stars there don't are not bright in the far infrared, in the mid infrared. So it shows you that when we look at the sky in different ways, we look at it at different wavelengths, we look at it at different colors. We look at it in gravitational waves. We see a different sky than the sky we're used to looking at an optical light. And we learn more about the universe by looking at it in different ways. So James Webb does this for us and is still going. Well, of course, gonna go for many more years. Okay, this was the most popular book, the image according to Facebook of 2022. I would not have guessed this. I was frequently surprised by what's popular or not, not popular. I've done doing this for a while, so not completely surprised. But this is a pilius cloud. So this is a cloud that's becoming a storm cloud. This is over China, but no matter really where it was. These are diffraction colors. So there's ice that is relatively the same amount of droplets of that is diffracting sunlight, the same amount. So it looks very colorful. So you don't get this, unless you have diffraction effects, and unless you have things that are roughly the same size that are that are diffracting light. And it makes it look, you know, really spectacular. So when you see this with your own eyes, it's like, wow, it's like a strange rainbow in the sky. And so we were sent this image and other images similar with pilius clouds. And this was just the kind of, it's called iridescence when you see that kind of effect. Okay, so let's go to out to the next planet. Neptune while a couple planets out from JWST is James Webb Space Telescope. This is again the web. So this is Neptune. And here you can see Neptune's rings. And this is Neptune's biggest moon Triton. So, you know, I didn't really include this image when I created this slide set. But then when I saw the advertisement for my this this webinar for night sky network, it had me in front of this image. I went back and put it in. But it is a really cool image. So this is a web image again from NASA ESA Canadian Space Agency. This is from the near infrared cam. And you can see actually some background galaxies and you can see Neptune with its spots. And Triton is so bright, they really can't tell this stuff you see around it. It's not real. This is not real texture of Triton. This is just telescopic stuff that's been put on there. So much dimmer is a more spread out while brighter by itself but spread out is Neptune and its rings. And so the detail on Neptune's rings was really high and was eliminated for professional research astronomers of Neptune. Okay, so this was the year that we practiced for the first time trying to defend our home planet. As you might know, unfortunately, every 100 million years or so, Earth gets smacked by something that knocks out a lot of life. And you have an elevation event that kills a lot of the species. So we decided this humanity would probably not be happy with that. So what you do is if you know something is going to hit the Earth and you know it early enough, all you have to do is back it a bit and you can change its orbit. So one of the big problems of this game is you have to know its orbit really well or you could knock it into something that wasn't going to hit the Earth or you could knock it into something that was hit the Earth but that's much more unlikely. But the idea is if you have a long enough baseline of watching an asteroid for long enough, you can get its orbit well enough to know if it's going to hit the Earth in the next decade or so. And then if you hit it early enough before that decade is out before a few years, then you can knock it off its slight orbit and then it will miss the Earth. And it will be something to cool fly by the Earth. Now the Earth gets hit by small things all the time. So we're really interested in knocking out the big stuff. So this is asteroid dimorphis, which we did not know what it looked like very much, but you're going to see it in this video. This is its friend, Didymus, which we are now seeing in greater detail. So the idea is to impact this spacecraft. So you're going to be part of this. You're going to see the spacecraft hit this thing right here. And then, well, we'll continue the story of that. So this is a time lapse. So this took, you know, hours to do minutes to do. So here we're coming in and zooming in. We've never seen what this asteroid looked like before. And it's like, oh, look at that. Cool. Oh, all those boulders. Oops. Now we're going to go frame by frame. Hey, there's a lot of boulders. It's what's called a rubble pile and boom. And then Dart died on because it was supposed to. But we can run that again because it was kind of cool. But we kept tracking not only NASA, but people who could see it kept tracking the orbit of this asteroid pair. And we found that the asteroid pair actually did slightly change its orbit, which shows that we can do this. That if we get enough information in the future that something is going to be a danger to Earth, we might be able to protect Earth. Planetary defense, it's called. Okay, so now here's something that was a little bit unexpected. We kind of thought many people kind of thought that, let's go back again, that dimorphus was more of a solid. But it turns out it was a rubble pile. And one of the ways we know is because when you hit it, they put a whole bunch of rubble, a big rubble plume, mostly dust. So, sorry, I didn't do that right. So here we go. So there's a plume going out there. So here you mostly see video most but then you see the plume coming up of dimorphos. So, yeah, also later, these things develop tales that you could see if you had, if you could see deep enough, you could see just like comets, these aspirates develop tales because of the impact of NASA's dark spacecraft on it. Okay, cool. So let's now go back to stars now. So this is a wolf riot star 140 as seen by James Webb Space Telescope sometimes abbreviated by web, and this came out this past year so the theme is the year in astronomy images. So this doesn't look like your average star. Well, first of all, you can see the, you can see the diffraction spikes, but one of these things. It turns out this wolf riot star is part of a binary system. Many stars, in fact, most stars are part of systems where there's more than one star. Our sun is a bit unusual, not crazy unusual, but a little bit unusual in that it's all by itself. But what happens is these two stars are in elliptical orbits. And so when they come in close to each other, they emit a burst of x-rays for one thing, they do things we don't yet know, but they also throw off a dust shell. And so here you see these dust shells, and this has been going on for quite a long time because you see a whole bunch of dust shells. So Webb was able to get a really good image of this system and more dust shells than never been seen before, which are particularly evident in the infrared. And so this is just like a surreal object. And you can see in the background, there's galaxies back there and there's stars. So you can see the normal Webb stuff, but you can see this unusual dust shell structure from Webb. Okay, this was an unexpected thing that happened in 2022. One of the brightest gamma reverse ever seen occurred last year. And it was really bright. It was brighter than many satellites have ever seen before. Now, in the past, there are speculation that there have been mass extinction events not only caused by asteroids and in Europe, but possibly because of gamma reverse were were aimed toward Earth and were relatively nearby. And so the tremendous amount of gamma and x-rays that hit the earth and UV light that hit the earth was devastating, not to all life, but to a lot of life. But this wasn't that bright. This was still like the brightest one we've seen. So it looks like a cartoon. So what's going on. So what happened is, along with the gamma rays was called a gamma reverse. So these things are usually seen in gamma rays, because the gamma ray sky is very quiet. So when you see a flash of gamma rays, you're seeing it against the dark background. But if you were to look for this thing in the optical light, or infrared light, the optical infrared sky is so busy, that there's like so many things brown you wouldn't know. Whoa, there's a little flyer there wouldn't know. But in the gamma ray sky it's far and away broader than anything. But it also emits a lot of x-rays. So these x-rays pass through dust clouds in our Milky Way, gas clouds, and they bounce off them, and they create rings around the center. So these are x-ray rings around the center of where the gamma reverse was. And we knew it was bright enough so that we knew to look in this direction. So this was seen with a Swift observatory, another NASA observatory, and processed by several people, but I like this one because it looked cool. And people that are colorized versions of this. And it looks like a cartoon, but this is real data. So these generally the longer the time is from the burst, the longer the x-ray reflection shell is. And so we're still studying, even though the gamma ray burst is pretty much over and over, some star exploded and died, and in a great burst of gamma rays. But we're still, we've got a lot of data and we're still using this to better understand gamma rays and the x-rays they emit. And this happened just this past year. Okay, so a lot of amateurs do a lot of really cool stuff. Amateurs are processing images, not only images they take themselves, but images that come out from Hubble Space Telescope and professional telescopes all over the world, including James Webb Space Telescope now. But this was images of Jupiter taken from the ground by an amateur over several days, but then using modern software, because as you know, we're undergoing a software revolution even again, and created what it looks like to see images of Jupiter's moons, Europa, Io and Ganymede, I think, and Europa orbit Jupiter based on real images. So it's both real images and a reconstruction at the same time. So here we go. So, this is I think Europa and you're going to see, these are the bands on Jupiter. And you can see three Galilean moons, but they can see the shadow of Europa as it goes across. It's a great red spot and you can see dark bands. So here it's changing because the Earth is Jupiter. As Earth rotates, Jupiter's orientation in the sky changes. And so I thought this was really cool to take what's being able to be seen with telescopes that amateurs have on the sky and combine them with modern, you know, processing technology creates something that's real. It's a combination of real and artificial intelligence, creating something that could be seen, but wasn't some of it was seen, but some of it wasn't. But that's a 24 hour image of Jupiter rotating that could not have been taken because the sun comes up, but it's been recreated. I just want to let you know it's almost the top of the hour we can go to the very end but we won't have time for questions. Okay, I want to go more quickly. Okay, this is. Sorry, I sometimes take longer than I think I always think I'm going to take shorts. This is for Halloween. This is the bat nebula. There's stars forming in there. They cause the orange. This is the lunar eclipse that seemed in the South Pole. There's Aurora. And here you can see the moon does not rise and set. At this time it just goes across the sky at the South Pole. This is Artemis one, which is NASA's its own spacecraft that went around the moon and you can see looking back for the Earth and moon. You can see both the Earth and the moon had the backwards moon in there. And you can see NASA with its new, its old worm logo again. So Artemis too will take place I think next year and actually land people on the moon. Okay, so this is one of the great foreground background images. This foreground was taken mostly during the blue hour and there's so much going on here. The The big dipper where the stars were enhanced Aurora, Aloft and islands Norway, which is northern Norway. And the newest thing that you can see over the next week or two. If you have dark skies you can see comet. So we keep transitive facility ZTF is just nearing the Earth in the next few days. And here you can see the green coma and two ion tails and a dust tail over here. And if you go out it's just at the edge of naked eye visibility but if you have binoculars you can see it. So please take a start chart out and look for it in the next few days because after a couple weeks it'll just fade rapidly and you won't have a chance. And this is an image of an exoplanet that was confirmed by Jim Zepis telescope. It's my last image. And so this image was not this is not an image it's an illustration but it's illustration was created by artificial intelligence, something called deep AI. And it's really cool because there are space artists that do this but now you can type in some search terms into an artificial intelligence agent engine and it can tell you what it might look like from the surface of the planet orbiting a red dwarf star. Very close in. So here we have lava flows and something like that. So this I hope opens up a new era of visualizing the exoplanets that are being discovered. So thank you please if you don't know please check out the night sky network at night sky.jpl.nasa.gov. APOD celebrated just 20th 27th anniversary in June. I have a book asked me about it send me an email if you want to know that's coming out soon. And then APOD was fortunate this is self promotion slide. Sorry. So patting myself on the back there we go. APOD on the back. So APOD received the outreach prize of the International Astronomical Union in 2022 in South Korea and for people following American television on November 4 you found out that the clue for $1,600 on one of the eight Jeopardy clues was the NASA strong picture today revealed that this largest moon of Mars may eventually disintegrate scary indeed please answer in the form of a question. So with that I will stop sharing and here I am again and be happy to answer questions. So thank you for attending. We're all clapping even though you can't hear all of us. Thank you so much Robert. Thank you. It's always great to do this. I'm always happy to review it's a great project and gives me a chance to go through these. And some of which I've forgotten sometimes like oh yeah that was this year and proud about that. But now I can relive it again. Well, I should also say that that, you know, the ASP, we give a number of awards every year, and you and Jerry one. What was it 2013 or 14 or something like that. Yes. Which one was that was that the clump key Roberts or something like that. Yeah, so I think it was yeah yeah the clump key Roberts for yeah that was a yeah we were very grateful to receive that so Jerry and I went out to San Francisco and and got that one and that was that was maybe our first big award. So, so we said wow, people are noticing. So thank you ASP for that. I'm very fortunate that both of you came out and we're able to basically give this talk in person. It was, it was really great in the planetarium, or not the planetarium but in the theater at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland. Yes, I hadn't been there. That's a really cool place. Yeah. Okay, let me look at the questions here. We didn't have very many because you're so succinct and with, you know, very detailed there are a couple of James has got a question you know I'll just go ahead and answer this one that can you look at this webinar again yes indeed this webinar will was recorded it will be on the night sky network YouTube channel, and it will also be on the night sky network web page in the outreach resource section and so it should be there by tomorrow and so definitely you can go back and look at this again. Another time. Okay, we had a good question from Dana, who asks, can you tell the age of by counting the shells around the wolf ray at star. And, well, the problem is you can count how many times they've been around recently, but the shells as they go out the shells moving out they become fainter and fainter. And so, eventually we lose count of those. And I think there are only a small fraction of the age of the entire system. So it's a clever idea and truly tree rings work for trees. But my guess is that unless we can track these shells out much further that we don't get a good age for the system but we get a good age for how long they've been interacting that strongly. Dave, Dave has a question and that reminds us that this is a good one to ask he he says, how many images are submitted for consideration each day what percentage are actually reviewed. And is it annoying when people resubmit the same image. We reject about 20 images for everyone we're able to run, which is why I'm happy that we post some of the good submissions on Facebook, so a pod dot sky account. So, so that gives, you know, exposure to images that we can't run some I feel bad that we get so many good images that we can't run them all, and even all we can't even post many of them to Facebook side we just get so many good. The accomplishments of astrophotographers have just gone through the roof, and we can, we don't even run necessarily the best ones we run some of the best ones but we run the most topical one sometimes and the ones that have the most educational content, sometimes but we get a lot that we can't keep going. We can't we can't post. So yeah, we're always. How many I've gotten during this talk, I've gotten one on a Ryan and one on a rocket launch so I've gotten to during this talk. I know I've got a couple of friends who their goal in life, I think is to have their photo show up or their image show up on a pod hasn't happened yet but they're they continue to have high hopes. Well, so I'm flattered by that but in my, what I believe is that people should try to do their own personal best. So when people run, let's say a marathon like the Boston marathon I'll just pick one out. I don't run marathons but I don't try to win the Boston marathon, try to do better than you've done before and try to talk about it with your friends. So we get so many images so you have a one in 20 chance of getting yours on a pot if you're an accomplished astrophotographer. So your goal in my view should be toward keeping getting better and better at your craft. And the reason why we choose images might have nothing to do with how good your image image was it might have something to do with other things completely. So, although I'm flattered by that I think people should be more self motivated. So sorry that might be a little so that's that's what I think about it though. Well, that does good advice for most of life I think to so thank you. And I think that on that note, that's going to be it for tonight and so thank you very much Robert for joining this evening. And thank you everyone for tuning in. And as we noted this webinar along with many others will be are on the night sky network website in the outreach resources section, as well as on the night sky network YouTube channel. And our next webinar on Thursday, February 23 when Dr. Ralph Robert Zellum from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory returns to share with us how you can get involved in NASA's search for exoplanets. So keep looking up and we will see you next month. Thanks Robert. You never disappoint I got to say it. Okay, so I don't know if I'm still on the recording stop but I still live on. We're still here. What is the audience still here so we're just having the other store here they can, you know, we are so good so if they have questions or something like that I can hang out.