 So I want to introduce Dr. Dana Bachman. He coordinates the SOFIA's outreach program at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He's also the lead for the NASA Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors Program at the SETI Institute. Some of you may have had an opportunity to fly. It used to be that it was strictly educators, but a couple of years ago, I think, for one of the cohorts, and maybe Dana could mention this, that they had opened it up where some of the amateur astronomers could qualify as the partner for the classroom teacher to be able to fly. And so some of you on this call, on this webinar, may have even been half-long. And so if you were, let us know in the chat window, and so that we can give you a call out as having had that opportunity. Before joining the SOFIA team, he was a professor of physics and astronomy at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He's also the co-author of three college-level astronomy textbooks and a frequent speaker on astronomy in SOFIA. His research specialty is planetary system formation in the history of the solar system. Please welcome Dr. Dana Bachman. I'm muted. I'm hoping everyone can hear me. So I have a couple of meta announcements. One is I'm getting over bronchitis, and so I might have, I hope I don't. Oh, there we go. I might have some coughing fits. I will try to be careful. But that leads me to ask Brian. If you save all the questions to the end, I might not have any voice to answer them with. So could I maybe trust you to sort of field the questions and say, here's one. Maybe it could be answered now. I don't mind being interrupted to answer a question as I go along. It's probably better than saving them for the end. OK. And if you open up your Q&A window, you have access to that as well. And you could perhaps see them and answer them as you see them, or I could monitor it. If I'm blasting along, giving the talk, I might not paying attention to the Q&A window. So if you can. OK. I will prompt you. OK. OK. It might give you a nice break, too, so. Yeah, that's right. OK. The other point is that, well, the slides I'm showing, some of them were at the Sophia Scientific staff showed a brief to their colleagues at the International Astronomical Union with some of these slides. So these are not, excuse me, these are not public level slides. Some of them are full scientific briefing level, which I think a lot of you are fine with. But that might lead to some questions. So now I'm going to dare to try to fire up my slide set here. We had some fun getting this to work beforehand. So hang on just a second. So I should be, you should be, if I go do this, share screen. I hope you are seeing, I'll take it that if Brian is seeing, Brian and David are seeing this slide show that you all are. Yep. It is looking great. OK. So I'm, as Brian said, I'm the lead for the Sophia outreach effort. I'm trained as an astronomer. But my great delight is training high school teachers to go on board Sophia. And unfortunately, Brian had the chronology backwards. We used to bring amateur astronomers and informal educators such as museum docents on with the teachers. And this year, NASA asked us to change our paradigm. And so for a while, we're just doing high school teachers. I'm hoping that that gets reversed in a couple of years. But right now, it's the next two cohorts, the next two years worth of teachers on Sophia will be limited to high school science teachers, which will do what we're told. But it was a lot of fun with the wider sample of people. Anyway, so I sit at NASA Ames, which is my office, which is about 40 miles from where Brian and David's office is. But I am an employee of the City Institute. So we have a pretty complicated work chart. Now you see on Sophia here, this was one of the first open door test flights from a chase plane. You see the 2 and 1 half meter primary mirror in a bag. You can see the secondary support structure and the secondary. The door rolls back. It does not all go all the way to the zenith. So we're always looking out the port side, the left side of the plane, between elevations of between 20 and 60 degrees above the horizon. On the tail, you see NASA's logo, which also see the German space agency's logo, DLR. Sophia is a 20% German, 80% US project. So now I'll go on to the next slide. This is a plot of atmospheric opacity versus wavelength. And as you know, there's a visual window. There's sort of a near-infrared window, but it's partly chopped up. And then the far-infrared, mid- and far-infrared are mostly blocked. And then the radio window opens up at radio wavelengths. So at the short wavelengths, it's ozone that's doing the blocking at the longer wavelengths infrared and mid- and far-infrared. It's mostly water vapor that's doing the blocking. So the cure for this is you can spend a lot of money and send up a space telescope, or you can try a small, modest-sized telescope in an aircraft. This was suggested by Gerard Kuiper, the astronomer who was, for several decades, the only planetary astronomer working, and was Carl Sagan's PhD advisor at the University of Chicago. So we had a 10-inch telescope in a Learjet, which did some famous work, actually. It was the 10-inch infrared telescope on the Learjet that discovered that Jupiter is emitting more heat than it's receiving from the sun. It was good work. The Kuiper Airborne Observatory was its successor. It operated from 1975 to 1995 with a 0.9-meter telescope and a C-141 cargo jet. And it was based here at NASA Ames. And then Sophia is the successor, of course, to the Kuiper. There was a longer gap. Why is anybody surprised? Then the astronaut of a community wanted between the Kuiper being decommissioned and Sophia being commissioned. There was almost a 15-year gap, which was supposed to have been only five years. And now Sophia is operating. And by getting above 40,000 feet, we're above 99.9% of the water vapor. And we have 80% of the reception of mid- and far-infrared that a space telescope would have. And it comes home every morning. So as I said, it's a 2.5-meter telescope in a Boeing 747SP. That's a special model of the 747 that Boeing made, only 40 of them, which had a short fuselage, low passenger load, and long distance capacity for, like, New York to Tokyo non-stops. Now it turned out that that wasn't the right price for the right passenger load that the airlines wanted. And so they did stop making them. But it was perfect for us. So we bought this used from United Airlines and chopped it, and then installed the 17-ton telescope. 17 tons is the moving piece behind a bulkhead at the tail of the plane. And it's based at NASA's facility in Southern California. It used to be called NASA Dryden. It was renamed after Neil Armstrong a couple years ago. But the mission science center is at NASA Ames in Northern California on the principle that you should put these things in as many congressional districts as you possibly can. So this has 20% share with the German Space Agency. They supply 20% of the funding. They bought the high-performance engines. They built the telescope. And 20% of the staff are German. And 20% of the observing time roughly goes to German astronomers. So oops, sorry. First science flight was in 2010. Excuse me. We're ramping up to 120 science flights per year. We've got to, I think, 70 last year. So we're most of the way up to full capacity, not all the way. And we spend two to five weeks, actually, in the Southern Hemisphere based at Christchurch, New Zealand, in the Southern Hemisphere winter for Southern Hemisphere observations. Here's a cross-section of SOFIA. And those of you who've been on it will recognize this fondly. There's a bulkhead here separating the cabin, which is a short-sleeve environment from the telescope. So we don't send anybody back here except grad students. I'm kidding. The telescope here, shown as a liquid nitrogen system to chill the telescope framework, which we've decided is not worth it. So this is actually not being installed. It doesn't save the time that we thought it was going to save for getting the telescope to thermal equilibrium with the stratosphere. So here are our workstation, telescope operators, science workstations, and educators that I take up along with two of my colleagues in rotation here at this station, pilot crew, and so on. The instrument is mounted here, camera or spectrograph, where it can be accessed from inside the cabin. So it's a Nesmith-focused telescope, primary to secondary to tertiary, down the tube through the bulkhead, down this tube, and then to the instrument, whatever it is, that's mounted there. We leave one instrument on for a campaign of one to three weeks worth the flight, because it's a full-day operation to take one of these things. They're usually in the range of 300 to 500 kilogram instruments. So they're non-trivial to take off and put on. So we leave one on for several week campaigns at a time. Here's a view on board. And the illusion is that you're looking forward, but we're looking backward to the stern of the plane. This happens to be the Cornell, excuse me, mid-infrared camera, this red cryostat, and its electronics. The telescope is behind the bulkhead. Here is a counterweight. Sorry. Anyway, so this is the science team here and telescope operators, and this was taken from the educator console. I was peering over this to take this picture of everybody happily at work at middle of the night. So that'd be 20 to 25 people on board at night, including the pilot crew. Here are four of the instruments. There's a high-speed photometer built by Lowell Observatory that's shown mounted on Sophia. Here is the near-infrared camera, which has spectroscopic capabilities built at UCLA. It's shown here at Lick Observatory near San Jose. This is that forecast, the Cornell mid-IR camera, which also has spectroscopic imaging capability. And here's the great German far-infrared spectrometer built by the Max Plunk Institute. And this one, it can't be used from the ground. It's the wavelengths. It works out or completely blocked from the ground. So its first operational test, other than in the lab, was when it was put on Sophia for the first time. So here's a plot. Might be illuminating. It's a little squished so I could get both of the plots on the same page. But this is wavelength of observation versus spectral resolution, how finely divided the spectrum is. And of course, the spectrum, the imagers, the cameras do not have much spectral resolution. They're broadband. But the great instrument goes up to 10 to the 8th. I see question and answer. Can an amateur astronomer like an NSN member submit a proposal for time on Sophia? Should spell that with an F, S-O-F-I-A, 99. How would this be done? And who decides who gets time on Sophia? Any limitations on what would qualify? Any astronomer, credentialed astronomer, so a PhD astronomer, you would need to be to apply, but you could find one to help you submit a proposal. So you could collaborate with an astronomer. Any astronomer in the world can apply for time on Sophia. But only if you're German or US do you get government dollars to execute your observing program, let's say. So it's a yearly call for proposals like the Hubble Space Telescope or other space telescopes. And then they're judged by a peer review panel. So being a member of the Night Sky Network would not disqualify you, but you should team up with an academic astronomer, either US or German, to collaborate on the proposal. And that would ensure the consideration of it. But there's no exclusion principle. Anybody can apply, and then they're peer reviewed. Yeah. Dana, I'm going to give you just a moment to break here and mention that I was looking for something else today and came across a PACA program, P-A-C-A, Professional Amateur Collaborate of Astronomy. And there is this organization that I'm not sure where it's sourced out of. But I found it because I was looking for an eclipse project that was funded by NASA. And they're actually doing some science things with collaborations between professional and amateur astronomers. OK. So I'll just spend another minute, less than a minute, more on this slide. But I guess in some sort of ideal, the footprints of all of our instruments would cover this diagram. But the instruments that have been chosen for construction for Sophia cover different spectral resolutions and different wavelength ranges so as to be able to study very different astrophysical phenomena. And the great instrument, look, it has a maximum spectral resolution of 10 to the eighth, which means that it would be capable of distinguishing three meter per second Doppler shifts, which is pretty amazing. Anyway, our wavelength range then is from the hippo instrument, which is UV just into the near UV all the way to the mid-infrared at 300 or so microns wavelength. Now, if you'll see a plot of how opaque the Earth's atmosphere is, from Monacaia, which where I did my graduate work and is considered a fine observing site, as you all know, nevertheless, the infrared is chopped up by a carbon dioxide ozone and water vapor. This is mostly lost to water vapor from 30 microns to 300 microns wavelength. But at Sophia's altitude of 12 to 14 kilometers, you're only seeing the ozone line, which you can't. No, let's see, that's carbon dioxide. This is ozone. Can't get rid of that because we're below the ozone layer. The water vapor lines go almost completely away. So that 80% number I gave you is sort of the average just drawing a line across here. We're getting 80% of the radiation reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere across this range that even high mountain tops on Earth can't reach. OK, so what was I going to do here? I might have shown. I was going to show a movie. Let me do this, all right? So I'm going to dare to unshare my screen. Uh-oh. Let's see. Hang on. OK, a new share. No. Let's see. Hang on. We break new share. So I don't know if everybody's seeing a grainy video from a chase. Yeah, I'll see you good. Where's the door opening? We open at altitude. We don't open until we're at altitude. And we don't open it if the sun's above the horizon in general. Although for the first time last week, for the first time last week, we observed with the sun still above the horizon looking at Venus. And that was the first time we had violated that policy constraint. OK, let me see. OK, so now are we looking at Jupiter? Thumbs up from David. So in fact, this is the very first astronomical image made by Sophia on May 2010. This is a nearly contemporary, a few weeks earlier, but the same longitudes, roughly, of Jupiter. This is the infrared image combining 5.424 and 37 microns wavelength. Now, I expect everyone's familiar with the idea that Jupiter gives off more heat than it receives from the sun as what discovered by the Learjet, an experiment on the Learjet. But this image shows for sure that it's not isotropic, that the heat upwelling is limited, excuse me, to certain latitude bands. This latitude band here that's showing outpouring of heat from the interior is the same band that's showing the organic reddish brown organics upwelling from the interior where they've been cooked up. So you don't know everything that's going on Jupiter, unless you compare the visible image showing you the organics from inside with the heat map. That's really some real information there. Excuse me. Here is a spectral map, two spectral maps actually of Jupiter at 17 microns and 28.3 microns. These are emission lines of ortho and para-hydrogen. These are two forms of the hydrogen molecule in which the proton is spinning either. The two protons of the two atoms in the molecule are spinning either parallel to each other or anti-parallel to each other and the anti-parallel state is lower energy. And what this does, the ratio of the two forms of molecular hydrogen gives the thermal history of the gas because the two forms don't relax into each other on a short time scale. So it takes a long time to come back to equilibrium. So you can look at the ratio of some material and see what its temperature was years ago before the upwelling started. So that's really a very impressive piece of astrophysics. Looking at the thermal history of the gas that's now in Jupiter's atmosphere that's come from the interior of the planet, this was done using the X-E's instrument with a resolution of 55,000. That means that's the spectral pixels, so to speak, over 155,000th of the wavelength that were being observed. Here is now Mars, a spectrum of Mars. So at 7.2 microns where you can see the lines of, you see these are marked here. There's carbon dioxide, that's not exciting. But there's deuterated water. So it's a water molecule where one of the hydrogens is heavy hydrogen deuterium. And this is regular water, and this is deuterated water. And so the ratio of those two gives you the history of the water in the atmosphere of Mars because the water is destroyed by ultraviolet. The ultraviolet photons from the sun crack the water molecules and the hydrogen escape into space, and the oxygen rusts the rocks. But the heavy hydrogen deuterium escapes more slowly than the light hydrogen, regular hydrogen, which is called proteome. There's the obscure fact that regular hydrogen is called proteome. So the abundance of deuterium is it's overabundant relative to cosmic abundances in Mars' atmosphere, which is indications of fossil water destroyed. The amount of overabundance tells you that there was a certain amount of water, in fact, enough to make an ocean that's been destroyed. And the deuterium has been left behind as the fossil of the escape hydrogen. So this is pretty cool. We had all sorts of evidence, of course, that there's a wet or Mars, but to have this atmospheric evidence, which lets you do some bookkeeping about how much water has been lost, is very interesting that result. Sorry. Now, lots of you know about stellar occultations, where a foreground solar system object passes in front of a background star. And as a result, we can measure some of the properties of the foreground object. In this case, you're seeing Uranus's rings passing in front of a background star. This is how Uranus's rings were discovered by the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, Sophia's predecessor. So as the star, from our point of view, as the rings crossed in front of the star, there were these dropouts, which were symmetric, more or less, around the planet. This experiment was to measure the properties of Uranus's atmosphere. They weren't expecting to find the rings, what they sure did. And so some of those experimenters built one of those long ago Kuiper experimenters, built the high-speed photometer for Sophia that's used for occultation work on Sophia. And now, we had in 2015, there was a Pluto occultation. And here is the ground track, the center of the track, and the edges of the tracks of the different distance between this line and this line is actually the diameter of Pluto, which you see is about the size of Australia. Pretty much, it went right across New Zealand on a day when Sophia was in New Zealand. I mean, could you ask for better than that? So this dashed line is the three standard deviation uncertainty in the northern edge of the track. So what we were getting data from MIT the afternoon of the occultation so that we could refine Sophia's flight path to try and hit the center of the occultation track. And there's a particular reason that you would like to be in the center that I'll show in a moment. But the position of Pluto was not well known to even like 100 kilometers precision before this. This is three weeks before New Horizons arrived. And the experiment was partly to pioneer to make some measurements that might help the New Horizons people. And here was the 2011 Pluto occultation light curve where there's this little bump in the middle. And I was actually on this flight fortunate to have been on it. And this bump in the center is what's called the central flash when the Pluto's atmosphere is lit as a ring by the star directly behind Pluto. So you have to have Sophia, Pluto, and the star mutually centered perfectly to a precision of the sort of thickness of the atmosphere or a few tens of kilometers. And then you can see a central flash for a few seconds as the star lights up of the planet's atmosphere in the ring, the dwarf planets. This decrease and increase are gentler than they would be if Pluto didn't have an atmosphere. It would drop faster and come drop faster and come back up faster. So you see the total time here is a few hundred seconds. Now remember that this is one of Sophia's instruments on the 2015 occultation. We were within 25 kilometers of the shadow track center because of the updates we were receiving on the day of the occultation. Michael Persson from MIT and Jurgen Wolf from the German Sophia Institute were respectively the PIs of the two instruments that were making these observations. This happens to be from the Germans instrument because they let me have it first. But here is Pluto and the star not resolved. This is actually both objects looking like one object, but Pluto has not covered up the star. In this picture Pluto has covered up the star and you're only seeing Pluto. Let's see. OK, look at that central flash. That was the central flash in 2015 relative to the central flash in 2011. And we are sure that we are on the center of the track in this one or close enough. And again here, so the central flash was much more pronounced in 2015 and 2011 indicating that the atmosphere was more extensive in 2015 and 2011, which was a big puzzle until the New Horizons got there three weeks later and showed that Pluto is a geologically active world with apparently an atmosphere that has input to it from some sort of subsurface volcanism or something. Now let me go to a little movie of that and see if I can get that to happen. OK. Whoops, whoopsie doozy. Sophia taking off from Christchurch, New Zealand airport. There's the folks on board. And you'll see Pluto hide the star. It's dimmed. Now look for the central flash. Blink, there it is. So this is speeded up by a factor of 10. That was three minutes compressed into about 20 seconds. So astronomers get excited by little blinking dots. And you do too. There you go again. Blink, yeah. Central flash, very pronounced, very easy to see just by eye, central flash. Let's see. So now can I do this one more time? OK, share screen. OK, am I back to showing the, yes, good deal, all right. And as you come back, Laurie had a question. OK. And she says that Uranus is her favorite planet in the solar system. And I was actually wondering this too, because the central part of the graph that you had there was chopped off. And she was wondering how many miles or kilometers apart between Uranus and its rails. It's about, they're within the Roche radius, which is 2 and 1 half planetary radii. I think they're like twice the radius to planet away. So that's like of order. Let's see, it's bigger than Earth. It's something like 30,000, 40,000 kilometers, roughly speaking. Yeah, I don't hope that answers the question. But they're within the Roche radius, which is 2 and 1 half times the radius of the planet. So here's some of the close-ups of Pluto showing evidence of material coming from the inside and covering up terrain. So something's going on in Pluto. And that's a real puzzle if you're following this, because Pluto's way too small and there to be residual heat of formation. And the amount of radioactive substances should not be enough to be producing this kind of activity. But the tidal interactions with tyron are not enough either. Now how am I doing for time? Oh, I see a question. On the right side of the 2015 Pluto light curve has some streaks, whereas the left side does not. Does this mean anything? Let me go look, I'm not sure. Those, you mean these things here? I, those could be noise spikes. Or let me think, I want to be sure that I'm not making a misstatement here. These are reductions in the cut. So these are high low opacity pieces of the atmosphere. My guess is those are noise spikes, rather than anything significant. But I could be wrong about that. So I have now, I'm leaving the solar system and showing some of Sophia's results on stars and star formation. There is a protostar in the roo-o-o-fugee star forming region that is used as a backlight. So it's just a light source behind some of the nebular material that let Sophia, using the great spectrometer, identify deuterated hydroxyls. So instead of OH, it's OD. This is the absorption line. Now these folks think like radio astronomers. In fact, you can think of the great spectrometer on Sophia as being the highest frequency radio receiver that's not in a lab. It receives at 1 to 4 gigahertz. No, sorry, terahertz. Let's see. This should say terahertz. Yeah, so 1.4 terahertz. 1,391 gigahertz. So the great spectrometer is a radio receiver, whereas all of the other instruments on Sophia are pixel detectors, photo-event, photoelectric detectors converting photons to electrons. This is a radio receiver detecting the wave nature. So these two molecules were found by Sophia. Of course, these molecules can be found in a lab on Earth, but this is the first time they've been found in the ISM. And that adds to a list of, I don't know, 75 or 100-ish molecules already known. So it's a modest contribution, but why they're interesting is they're part of the chemical pathways leading to, as it says here, water and organic molecules. So that's the ultimate question operating in that this experiment was investigating was. What kind of chemistry goes on in interstellar clouds even before planets form? What kind of organic stuff could have formed in the cloud from which Earth and the Sun formed and actually gotten organic synthesis underway before there was even a solid Earth? Here's an image of the star-forming region, Westerhoek III in Perseus. Westerhoek was a Dutch radio astronomer who made a catalog of H2 regions, ionized hydrogen regions. And this one has a massive star cluster. Now, this is the Spitzer image. The Spitzer had a 0.85-meter telescope, and it was a space telescope. So it was cryogenically cooled. It was awesomely sensitive. It was so sensitive that W3 burned it out. And so with Sophia, which you would think being less sensitive is never good, but by being less sensitive, by being not chilled to zero Kelvin before Kelvin, but rather operating at stratospheric temperatures of 200 to 220 Kelvin, we're less sensitive. And we have a three times bigger telescope so that we have higher spatial resolution. And so we can look at the burned out, what Spitzer could only see as a burned out bright area, and see the structure around the protostars and the individual protostars in this cloud, separating them from each other. So this is just an experiment to see what the morphology, the shapes of clusters of newborn stars are like, how they are. They're associated to how they affect the surrounding medium. Here is an image of, this is a Spitzer Space Telescope image of the center of the Orion Nebula around the trapezium. This is a Phi-Phi-Ls, Sophia's imaging spectrometer. Images of pieces of that at wavelengths of 63, 145, 157 microns, looking at neutral oxygen, neutral oxygen, and ionized carbon. These are spectral lines that allow, these wavelengths are the wavelengths of spectral lines that allow the energy to leak out of collapsing interstellar clouds, hastening the collapse. So these are part of the energy budget of star formation. If these lines didn't exist, if the energy couldn't leak out from the interior of the clouds and escape to space, the clouds would perhaps be in equilibrium and wouldn't collapse. But this is like these lines operate as drains that pull the plug out from the centers of these collapsing protostellar clouds and they're by hastening the collapse process. There's another, so this is ortho versus para H2D plus. So there's a weird molecule. It's a triple hydrogen, which has got two regular hydrogens and a sort of a deuterium taped on to it. And then we have ortho and para versions of it. And this is, the ratio gives the two types of hydrogens. The ratio gives the time since equilibrium between these two forms of the molecule were established. In other words, there's a molecular clock that tells you the age of material and lets us get an age of the star an independent way. Instead of just an estimate or a model, this gives an age of the cloud that's forming this protostar, which has just a telephone number for a name. So it's an age of greater than 10 to the sixth years, which actually was a surprise. They were expecting 10 to the five years based on other estimates. So this shows that some of the knowledge of the details of star formation are not settled yet. This cloud was at least 10 times older than it was thought to be given the state that it's in for the stage that the protostars embedded in it are. OK, let's see. Can I get another move on to another one? I think I'm going to skip that one. Well, no, I won't. This is actually, there's an observation with the great instrument where everybody knows that stars form by collapsing interstellar clouds. Yes, right. That's what everybody knows. But actually catching a cloud in the act of collapsing is very difficult because the stage is so short, astronomically speaking. It's only 10 to the five years, the freefall collapse stage, that it's very rare to find an object in that short, astronomically short stage. Statistically, you just have to examine thousands of objects before you find one that's in that brief stage before the slower contraction stage sets in of a protostar. But so that's what was done here. This was an observation by Sophia that added, let's see, I think six collapsing objects to a catalog totaling about 12 before this experiment was done. So now we're up to only 18 protostullar clouds where we're watching them collapse rather than inferring that they did collapse or inferring that they're about to collapse. That's pretty cool. This is a planetary nebula, the butterfly nebula. And here is a Hubble Space Telescope picture, which shows basically the emission from the gas. And this is the Sophia image where the different pieces of it are corresponded to each other. This shows emission from the dust that's condensing in the gas. So although, I guess you could say, well, I'm looking at sort of the same thing. Look at how huge Sophia's spatial resolution is at these long wavelengths. Hubble and Sophia are virtually the same size, 2 and 1 half meter telescopes. In fact, we like to point out we're slightly larger than Hubble someday, though. Excuse me, that won't matter. But at a wavelength of, let's say, half of my ikran, visible light, this is Hubble's spatial resolution, diffraction limited. And this is Sophia's spatial resolution at 20 to 30 microns. That's the best we can do. That's a point source at the central star. Anyway, what you're looking at here is the outflow from this object, this evolved object, a post-bain sequence star, the gas flowing out of it into space rejoining the interstellar medium and the dust condensing, the solid particles, which will then be, perhaps, incorporated into the future generations of planets. Let's see, this is another image of a different planetary nebula, the NGC7027. And this is an oxygen spectral image. So this is an image in the emission of oxygen atoms at this wavelength. And what this is showing, by stepping through different wavelengths, through different velocities, you get the structure of the motions in the expanding cloud, the expanding planetary nebula. That's been exhaled by a dying sort of solar mass star. Excuse me, leaving a white dwarf behind. This is the spectral resolution. I mean, spatial resolution. Sorry, I'm the Sophia instrument at this tremendously long wavelength. It's like, it's basically wavelength in microns divided by 10 is your arc seconds of spatial resolution. So it's like six arc second beam here. OK, now I know I'm running out of time. This is one of my favorite images from Sophia of all. This is a Hubble image of the center of the galaxy. The scale here is just a few parsecs. This is the center cluster. So it's a star cluster with about 2 million, a few million. I'm forgetting the right number, of stars bunched up in a parsec. Imagine what the night sky looks like here at this very center of the galaxy. Now, my PhD advisor, Eric Becklin, discovered the center of the galaxy by scanning over with a near infrared detector, scanning over the whole Sagittarius region and finding where the stars peaked up in their density. And that was his PhD thesis back in 1968. Well, so we know where the center of the galaxy is to a high precision from that. And right in the center there is Sagittarius A star, this unique radio source that's associated with. That's now understood to be a supermassive black hole. Barry Fitzgerald asked, how often do you refocus during these imaging sessions, being that temperature, I would guess, remains somewhat. We refocus a few times during the night. The temperature of the telescope, as it reaches equilibrium, of course, changes the metric of the telescope. So we do have to refocus. But as a point that you might not realize is with the infrared imagery, the sky is glowing. The brightness of the night sky at 10 microns is minus 1 magnitude per square arc second. There's a serious worth of brightness per square arc second of the night sky. And we're trying to pick out the objects behind that. So our exposure times are fractions of a second. And then we stack those images later. We fill up the wells and the detectors if we went for any amount of time. So we're taking bursts of hundreds of images in a fraction of a minute, less than a minute, stopping. And then if you need a refocus, you can just do that quickly. So refocusing is not long, long, long integrations. We do that sometimes with the spectrometers. But with the imagers, typical exposure time is a 10th of a second on Sophia. Oops, sorry. So I wanted to show this. This is what Sophia sees at 2032 and 37 microns. Wow, I don't see anything in common between these two pictures, do you? Oh, well, actually, look now. This is a dense ring of molecular gas orbiting the central black hole and the center clusters. The center cluster is a couple of million solar masses and the center black hole is about 4 million. So this is orbiting that and the white white, excuse me, material stripped off the inside of the torus and pouring down into the central supermassive black holes. It's hotter than the rest of the material and it's, you can see it there. Can you see signs of the denser parts of the torus as obscurations around here? I'm running my cursor in the Hubble image, which is the same scale as the Sophia image. And you can see some of the star field is partly blacked out. That's the denser parts of this torus. If you didn't have this image, you would have no idea what's going on in here. Not that we have a whole lot of idea anyway, but this show, this is what Hubble sees, what Sophia sees. Case closed as far as I'm concerned, as far as Sophia being worth the investment for the knowledge that it's bringing us about these phenomena. I think I'm running out of time. So I might, you know, I'll offer these slides to Brian to send out to anybody who wants them. I hope that's OK, Brian. Yeah, we'd like to be able to post these onto the Outreach Resource page for this on the NSN website. I do want to note that we do have, you might remember Missy Holzer flew with Theresa Moody on Sophia a few years ago. She's on this and I don't know whether she's willing to come on and say hello, but maybe just say, hey, great experience or something. I don't know, Missy, if you're willing, you know, feel free to say hi. Yeah, I tell you, it was unbelievable experience to go up there for a couple different nights a couple years back, and we had the wonderful opportunity doing it with Dana. So we got the expertise of Dana with us, and so it was just an unbelievably fabulous experience. And what's even better now is being trained as an ambassador, is going out and sharing the word about Sophia. And it just brings back such wonderful memories, and I just get so excited. And I get to my Jersey girl speak, and I speak so fast because I just loved it. I just love to share the content of Sophia. So terrific experience. I had a lot of fun, too. I skipped over some stuff. This is M82. There's the supernova. This is the near-infrared image of the supernova. This is near-infrared spectra and wavelengths that most of this spectral range does not reach even Manakea. This is stuff that you couldn't do from even a mountain top on Earth. There's a stretch right here that's doable from the ground, and there's another stretch right here that's doable from the ground. And this is impossible from the ground. This is impossible from the ground. Sorry, yeah, here. So I was on board this flight, and the investigators were taking the spectrum of the supernova and the near-infrared. And this came off, basically came off of the strip charter. That's not what it was. It was a display on the console. And they looked at each other. They said, what is that? They had no idea. No idea what we were looking at. Are those emission lines, or are those deep absorption lines between a continuum? Didn't know. Well, the paper's been published since, and what those are are cobalt and nickel, highly ionized cobalt and nickel emission lines produced by the supernova explosion. Yeah, cobalt tripled, doubly ionized cobalt, doubly organized cobalt, singly ionized cobalt. Yeah. But then we were doing groundbreaking stuff here because the features, the spectral features, were basically inaccessible from the ground. What you're seeing is the nucleosynthesis, as Andy Fracknoy, our friends, and Davidson, my buddy and colleague at Foothill College, likes to say supernovae make jewelry. That's everything past 26, and the periodic table is produced by a supernova. This is a spectral image of M82 showing the motions of the gas and a carbon, neutral carbon at 157 microns. And what the investigators concluded was that they were seeing both the rotation of the M82 galaxy, more or less, edge on, plus a huge galactic wind. You've heard of stellar winds. How about a galactic wind from a star burst? This galaxy is making 100 times, stars in 100 times the rate the Milky Way does for reasons that are maybe not well understood, probably due to the fact that it's being tidally affected by M81 nearby. But anyway, M82 is making 1,000 stars a year, and the Milky Way makes 10 stars a year. And the result is this galactic wind that we're trying to study with this experiment on the Fifi LS imaging spectrometer. What have I got here? So Dana, we are at the top of the hour. That was my last flight. Oh, it was. Well, that was good timing. So do you want to say something about that? Excuse me. Your last slide. No, actually, this was a topic. I had two different slides, and now I wish I'd shown this one. But it's the one about demonstrating that there actually is in fall in one of these protostellar objects. This shows the redshifted versus the system center of that spectral feature. Yeah. Well, I discovered in the chat there that not only did we have Missy, who had flown, but we have Helen Tavoro, who was in cycle two. And so I promoted her. And so she wanted to say hi as well. All these people, you're groupies, Dana. That's wonderful. This is Helen. Hi, Helen. Very nice that you're on. I hope you're doing well. Yes, I am. I just want to say that it was such a great opportunity to go on a flight. And we got a lot of girls interested in science and observatory just because they have a role model or something. And I showed the pictures. And everybody got really excited. And even the teachers who follow us, they brought more kids in the classroom for experiments. But I just have to mention that the best thing that happened to me during the flight was seeing the Aurora Borealis from the stratosphere. That was unforgivable. I still close my eyes and I see that. We go pretty far north sometimes. And we get a wonderful display at the right time. Yes. Well, Dana, if that's the end, why don't you go ahead and stop sharing? Stop sharing. Too much sharing. And we're going to wrap things up here. But I want to say thank you. You're a real trooper to continue through this with not feeling well. And so my hat's off to you to continue to join us even when you were feeling under the weather. But hopefully, you'll get better, better soon. I apologize to everyone for those awful noises. But we got through it. Well, that's all for tonight, everyone. You'll go to find this webinar. And Dana, unfortunately, you're going to be immortalized at the Night Sky Network on our YouTube channel because we post these on there. You'll go to find this webinar along with many others on the Night Sky Network outreach resources section on the website. Each webinars page also features additional resources and activities. And we will post tonight's presentation on our YouTube channel so that you can take a look at it again and look at those slides. And we will get those slides from Dana and get those up on the outreach resource page.