 Well, so we're gonna go ahead and get started once again. If you are part of our Zoom webinar, be sure to set your chat to everyone, not just hosts and panelists, and make sure that you've shared your hello. So thank you, Anna. And again, for those on Zoom, if you have a question, please feel free to use the Q&A window in the menu on the bottom of your Zoom screen. And you can also send any troubleshooting questions or any general questions to us at nightskyinfoatastrosociety.org. And welcome once again to the December Night Sky Network webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in California. Tonight, we have Dr. Robert Nemeroff from the Astronomy Picture of the Day. And this is going to be Astronomy Picture of the Day 2023 Highlights. And so along with Jerry Bonnell, Dr. Robert Nemeroff has written, coordinated and edited NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day since 1995. Astronomy Picture of the Day archive contains the largest collection of annotated astronomical images on the internet. And Dr. Nemeroff is a professor of physics at Michigan Tech. He worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland before coming to Michigan Tech. He is perhaps best known scientifically for papers predicting, usually among others, several recovered microlensing phenomena and papers showing, usually among others, that gamma ray bursts were consistent with occurring at cosmological distances. He led a group that developed and deployed the first online fish-eye night sky monitor called ComCams, deploying later models to most major astronomical observatories. He has published as first author, oh, excuse me, he has published as first author and referred for every major journal in astronomy and astrophysics. His current research includes trying to limit attributes of our universe with distant gamma ray bursts and investigating the use of relativistic illumination fronts to orient astronomical nebulae. I apologize, I stumbled through that. But welcome nonetheless to Dr. Robert Nemeroff. Thank you very much. Okay, so I'll begin. I'm going to try to share my screen here. You might get a slight shock. So let's see, there. So I think I'm sharing my screen. So if that's not happening, please somebody tell me. I wanna, okay, so. We can see it. Okay, good. So official title, actually Viz idea of Vivian. So postcards from the universe 2023 to the astronomy picture of the day. So I am Robert J. Nemeroff and my colleague in creating astronomy picture of the day is Jerry T. Benow, but I'm not him. I'm usually just me. So I'm at Michigan Tech in northern part of Michigan. He's at NASA Goddard, but is through the University of Maryland. So this is for the night sky network in this astronomical science of Pacific and NASA. Okay, so not everybody knows what astronomy picture of the day is. So here's my what's APOD slide. So you can go there with just APOD.nasa.gov. And as was, as Kat said, we started in 1995 and over the 28 years, we've become one of NASA's most popular science websites. And we currently do over a million page views per day. Typically when we check our log files every university accesses APOD every day. And we're translated by volunteers into 20 world languages. And we have presence on most major social media sites. So if you're in Facebook, you can find us there, for example, Instagram too. Okay, so here we go. So I'm gonna start this year with the last year sort of. So reviewing December from last year. So in December, 2022, the Artemis I mission was in flight. And in fact, it was day 13 of the Artemis mission. And it was on the far side of the moon from Earth. And here you can see a really cool image. You can see not only both NASA logos, the meatball and the worm, but you can see two major objects of which you might be familiar. This is the Earth. I hope you can see my cursor. This is the moon. And since it's closer to the moon, the moon looks larger, but actually we know if the earth is larger. So the moon looks pretty small because the loop was pretty, pretty big. I went around the moon. So there's going to be Artemis II and III, and eventually NASA will put more people on the moon in the next couple of years. There's, NASA's not the only game in town anymore as there are other nations that do this and there are even other companies that have aspirations of doing this in the near future. You can fill in who you think they might be. All right, so here's a really cool image that was submitted to us. This is one of these amazing landscape images. So this ran, so all of these, you can see, you can see all of these as much as you want. You can just go to the APOT archive, and which has all of our images going back for 28 years. And this, you can look for December 13 in 2022, and you can just stare at this all night or until someone objects. So this is not a single image. This was a series of images all taken from, with the same camera and from the same location consecutively. So if your eyes were really good enough and you were lucky enough, you could see this, but the Aurora would be much fainter and the band of the Milky Way might be harder to pick out. But this is a really cool image. So here's the astrophotographer and he in this case is illuminating the foreground, which is in Lofoten, Norway, which is a very interesting rocky foreground. So this Aurora has two arcs to it. A meteor was caught in one of the shots. There are some bright stars, the big dippers up here, Vegas here, there's a planet, Jupiter's here, the Andromeda galaxy is here. So these landscape retrospectives are just really cool and a lot of astrophotographers, as you might know, go to some effort to put these together and we do run these and we think they're great. Okay, this was taken during the 2022 Geminids meteor shower. And these are the Mittens, these are Utah, these are plugs of volcanic plugs from the distant past. So this is Castor and Pollux in Gemini. So the meteors appear to come from the constellation Gemini and you can see an image of the many images of the Geminids from this year, one by looking behind me. So that's from this year and we'll get to that later. So these were not all seen at the same time. So this is a type of time lapse where the astrophotographer will catch individual meteors and then add them together to show where the radiant might be. And so these are educational. Many times we're happy to see images like this because even though you have to de-rotate the night sky, it shows something very interesting and something very educational at the same time. All right, so we don't only run straight images, sometimes we run something that is so interesting and even if it's like a table or a figure, we're gonna run that. So this is another one we ran. This was in January, so we've moved into 2023. So the theme is this year. And this is just a periodic table and most people have seen periodic tables in school. But here's one that's coded a little differently. This periodic table tells you where these elements have come from. So for instance, there's hydrogen. So you might think, well, I don't have any hydrogen in me but you do if you're made of water and pretty much everybody watching this has a lot of water in them. That's just the way it is. So the hydrogen in the water in you came from the big van. And there's lots of other elements, some of which are needed for life. And you can just sort of look up there. Like carbon comes from dying low mass stars mostly but a little bit comes from exploding massive stars. So you can find your favorite element and where it came from. But one thing that this table doesn't really communicate as much as it could is that some are, astronomy is a frontier of trying to understand what's going on. It's not a book of knowledge that you read from. Astronomy is a frontier where you is continually being explored or continually finding out new things. So for instance, copper, 29, we don't really know completely exactly where all the copper comes from. And a lot of it's in wiring. Some of it's in the pipes in your house but we don't know the ultimate origin of that. It's probably having to do with exploding white glories and exploding massive stars, the fraction of which we don't know. Some of it might be emerging neutron stars. So this is one of the frontiers, the many frontiers that exist in observational and research astrophysics. Okay, so our sun went through a very deep minimum which meant that its surface was really boring a couple of years ago. A few years ago there were very few sunspots who were active regions. But right now our sun is unusually active, more active than it should be in this part of the solar cycle. Our sun is moving towards solar maximum in 2025. But along the way, even now, there's all kinds of filaments and active regions and this is a sunspot region here. So why is it so increased? Why is it so active? So we don't really know that. So even our brightest star has mysteries that we don't know. One good thing about our sun is even though it undergoes a 22 year cycle of magnetism, but every 11 years it flips, the amount of light that changes during this solar cycle is really not that different. So the billions of years of relative constancy has allowed, we think, enabled life to evolve on earth along with many other things. But we're currently unsure how active our sun will become in the next year or so. And we're constantly watching it. One interesting thing about the active sun is it throws off more flares and frontal mass ejections which thread their way through the magnetic field of the solar system and hit the magnetosphere of the earth and many of them come down usually toward the north and will create aurora better seen. So we could be in and we already are in for an increasingly interesting aurora season. And some of these aurora even a couple of months ago were visible as far south as Oklahoma, I think. And Spain, APOD was sent even some images from Spain that had aurora. So even if you live in San Francisco or almost anywhere in the continental of USA, you might have a shot at seeing aurora, but you gotta go to dark skies to see it. Okay, so one of the bright comments over the past year was kind of ZTF, which stands for Zicky's Wiki Transient Facility, which is a camera which monitors the sky. So this comet was just barely visible with the unaided eye, but here it was caught with a camera. So with a camera, you can integrate longer. Your eye will only integrate for about 10th of a second or so, maybe a little bit longer, but here you can keep the shutter open and accumulating photons for minutes. And so this comet is showing an eye on tail and a dust tail and it's shown over Yosemite Falls. And so here, the caption of the APOD, all APODs have a caption that tries to explain things and have links into the deeper web. So this comet is falling around the sun in a very elliptical orbit and this waterfall is falling toward the Earth. So we tried, actually I happened to write this caption, tried to show the commonality of gravity in causing a lot of what's seen. All right, so we live in the era, as you might know, of artificial intelligence. So this was the APOD that ran on January 24th in 2023. It was created by a deep AI. So the web space telescope would be able to get new data on an exoplanet system. It did not take this picture. This is not a photograph. This is an illustration. So based on eclipses of this nearby planet to its reddish star, small reddish star, one could get, estimate what the surface of this planet is like. So what I did in this case is I opened up an artificial intelligence generative image engine and I started feeding it terms about being close into its star and what it might look like there. And it spat back to me something that was completely unacceptable. It had all kinds of vegetation. And so I had to be more specific. I said, no, no, no, no, it's not. It's too close. I can't imagine that there's this kind of vegetation on that planet. So I said, what about lava flows? Put in some lava flows. And so after we went back and forth a bunch of times, we came to something that I thought was a reasonable estimation for what it might look like from the surface of this planet. So one of the cool things about artificial intelligence is that it allows you to imagine things that you can't actually see. So we don't have a probe on the surface of this planet, the sex or planet newly discovered and newly, new data on the sex or planet. But now we can make a better estimate of what it might look like from there relatively quickly too. After this was published, I got into discussion with people at NASA who realized that there was a problem, a problem that I didn't estimate. So we're very careful with copyrights at APOD, but it turns out that this engine was trained with images that might have been copyrighted. So after we thought about this for a little bit, we actually had to pull this image. So this image you can't find. This is in general. So because it might have been trained with images that we shouldn't, but generative AI is undergoing lots of interesting revolutions. So new generative AI is going to be trained with images that are better defined image sets that we can use. So we're hopeful that in the next couple of years or maybe even this coming year in 2024, we'll be able to have generative AI images and redo this in a better way. So during 2023, there was a dramatic, in some sense, conjunction between Venus and Jupiter where they came together on the sky. So here we see successive days and the brighter one is Venus and the dimmer one is Jupiter and they got closer and closer. And one of the days there was a crescent moon that went flying by and they're not flying by. I mean, that night you would just look at it, it would just be sitting there, but the next night it'd be gone. And so they got quite close together and so this is actually quite interesting because when you would go out at sunrise, you would really notice this if you happen to look toward the east, the sun just for the sunrise, you'd say, wow, what are those two bright spots over there? And so here we were sent something from Germany that you can see the way people would, so this is a potential, this was a family, actual family and somebody's looking through a telescope and I'm not really sure because probably the telescope field of view might be too small to, well, these two are about separated by the diameter so maybe they could see that. And so through the telescope, you could see the phase of Venus and you could probably see cloud bands on Jupiter, but with just your unaided eye, so unaided eye events are really cool. You could just go out and look and you can see two of the brightest spots on the sky right near each other. So we got sent a lot of cool images for this and this is just one of the coolest ones. So we live in a golden age where spacecraft are being sent around many different planets in the solar system and asteroids in the solar system. So we still have Juno that's doing long elliptical loops around Jupiter. And so when it comes near the planet, it takes pictures and it also has lots of science goals, one of which is trying to find out the magnetic field of Jupiter and more detailed which we're finding it's a very complicated magnetic field more complicated than people were guessing. We're trying to find out if Jupiter has a solid core and although the jury's still out on that, it looks like there's several layers to the core. So that's still being studied. But here's one of the really cool pictures that came in from Juno as it swooped past Jupiter this past year. Here you can see lots of swirly clouds and the Earth would probably fit inside this big white oval. Typically the darker ones are lower. So it actually does dip into the atmospheric deck of Jupiter and the lighter ones are higher. But we just really liked this picture because it was first, you just really got a feeling for looking across Jupiter. It was really not just a circular planet with bands. It really had cool 3D structure with some of this. Okay, so I don't know how to pronounce this. This is Nyan Du possibly in the Milky Way. So one of the things that Western society is better realizing more recently is that there are stories of the night sky that go back generations at almost every place you can think. The native cultures all around the Earth have stories of the night sky. And the Western world has sort of adopted mostly the Greek mythology of the night sky, which is great. And the International Astronomical Union has now sanctioned constellations to be named by typically the Greek legends. But many parts of the sky have their own legends. And I think it's important to record those and remember those and consider them to be as important, if not more important, than the ones that are internationally recognized. It's good to have an international standard because then people in different cultures can talk about the same things. But the individual cultures themselves just have fascinating stories that are passed down through generations. So here we see a statue of a woman from Uruguay who was fought against colonization. And one thing that was popular in this culture in the Uruguayan culture of over 100 each years is that this band of the Milky Way Galaxy, which we just consider to be part of the band of the Milky Way Galaxy, in this culture is actually a big bird. And so now it's hard for me to look at this without saying, hey, yeah, that's kind of like a big bird. It's sort of like seeing a person in the moon. And in Western culture, it's usually a man in the moon. There's also a rabbit in the moon and different kinds of things in the moon of different cultures, but it's just really cool. So you can find a link about this and learn about the Nandu in the Milky Way on the June 20th APOD, but there's also a lot more information and in local cultures around. Okay, so this is from the Sky Survey. So this is a SDS, a Slow and Digital Sky Survey. So this has been going on for 20 years. So the Slow and Digital Sky Survey just piled the sky and looked at many different galaxies and quasars. So this is the nearby galaxies are here coded in the covers and the colors are pretty good because as you go further out from us and here we have redshift over on the left, you find out that galaxies are more and more redshifted. Now they don't necessarily appear more red although they do a little bit, but as you go out the galaxies are more and more redshifted but then the Sloan found and we knew otherwise, you start running into, you can't really see the outlying galaxies. You see the centers of the galaxies, particularly when they're active and that becomes active guy to new guy and they are mostly more blue and ultraviolet. So here we see the blue and ultraviolet as we get out to redshifts of one and two very deep into the universe. So you hear the look back time on the right and eventually even the centers of these galaxies are fading into the red. And so you see redshift in two ways. And so this map of the observable universe was released in 2023 and you can see the microwave background. So another aspect of artificial intelligence that affects our lives is this is a famous picture taken in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. So Neil Armstrong took a picture of Buzz Aldrin which is seen over here but with modern artificial intelligence techniques this can be reversed, this visor can be reversed and here we can see Neil Armstrong on the moon taking a picture. So in a sense this is a selfie from the moon in 1969. And you can see some of the experiments that were set up and you can see the lunar module and it's just really cool that how increased computing power and artificial intelligence is affecting even the astronomy imagery that we see and can appreciate. So the web space telescope is up there and it's taken great images, particularly the infrared although the web space telescope does go into the orange. So it does see a little bit of visible in the red and orange range but some people are sending in images that are composites between ground-based telescopes which this is not, maybe a little bit and the Hubble space telescope which goes into the ultraviolet and the web space telescope which is bigger than Hubble but is more toward the infrared. So here we see it's somewhat image processed, the ring nebula which you can see with your backyard telescope from a dark occasion but you can't see it like this. So this is a planetary nebula so our sun will be throwing off its outer layers and might make a little bit look a little bit like this. The central white dwarf is in here, I think it's this one and there's just tremendous detail here most of which is understood but some of which is not and so we're still researching even one of the most brightest nebulas you can see with your backyard telescope. The ring nebula from Hubble and web is just spectacular for me to look at. So there was another bright comment that got just to the edge of naked eye unaided eye visibility in 2023 this was toward the just a few months ago comet Nishimura and here you can see a deep camera image and you can see the eye on tail and you can see the bright green coma. So now and maybe every year there is a comet that gets to the edge of unaided eye visibility and if we're lucky it gets much brighter. So we've been lucky in our run of APOD over the past 20 years so we're able to have some that were really bright and just were spectacular to go outside and see. This one was more of a camera comet but if you had a good camera and you knew where to look usually in your sunrise or sunset you could get some really good images and you could just about make it out even without your camera. Here's another image taken just before sunrise and here you can see the very bright venus and you can see the long tail Nado which is visible with the unaided eye of comet Nishimura, okay. So JWST, James Webb Space Telescope is just doing great observations of local planets of stars in the deep universe of exoplanets. So here is a star forming, a star that's forming and the star is forming inside this dusk disk here but along the way it's shooting out jets and these jets are visible in the infrared and in the red and this high resolution image from JWST really captures this well. And one question is do all stars that form go through a jet forming phase? And you know, we're not really sure because we only see, we can't watch a star all during that phase because it just takes too long but here we can see the jets that are formed from this Fermi-Karrow object number 211 and you can see different shells of moving out from the condensing gas along the poles are colliding with each other and creating quite a glow. So in a thousand years, couple thousand years, 10,000 years this should look somewhat different. This will change on the time scale of thousands of years. Okay, so this is Osiris Rex as you might know more than a year ago bumped into asteroid Bennu and Bennu is an asteroid that goes near the Earth and collected a sample. So a bunch of like a cup full of material and then it was ejected and came back toward Earth and then it landed in the Utah desert and here you can see it landing. Here it is sitting on the Utah desert before it was collected. So we're really interested in what Bennu is. Does it have a lot of carbon in its soil? So we don't really know. Does it have some unusual elemental mix? Maybe we can mine nearby asteroids and find unusual elements or valuable elements there which we couldn't mine in the short term but maybe in the long term we could. Maybe we could learn about carbon that then fell to Earth from other asteroids and comets and maybe help seed or help life develop on Earth or Mars. So this is all we're gonna learn about this as the samples from Bennu are analyzed in many laboratories across not only the US but in Europe. Ah, so this is an interesting one. So as we, in April, October, six, 2023 was the 100th year anniversary of a very interesting discovery on a glass plate. So this is the glass plate and the person who discovered this was Edwin Hubble and this resolved the Curtis-Chapley debate. The Curtis-Chapley debate was either the spiral nebula that we see out there. We see many times at that point they saw many types of nebula but the spiral nebula like the Andromeda nebula was that just gas or was it actually another galaxy like our own home Milky Way galaxy? And a hundred years ago, people didn't know. There was a big debate, the astronomical community was split and that's why there was the famous Curtis-Chapley debate and where people debated different sides of that. And then finally, on October 6th, 1923, Edwin Hubble was looking at glass slides from the 100 meter, 100 foot telescope on Paramar and he wrote VAR because he saw a spot in this nebula that changed its brightness and it was a variable star. And if it's a dim variable star and the variability tells you its actual brightness or estimate of it, then it had to mean that this Andromeda galaxy was actually a galaxy composed of stars like our Milky Way. And so only a hundred years ago, did we really appreciate that there's this vast universe out there filled with galaxies. And since then, all these galaxies in the discovery of the distant universe like the Sonjital sky survey slide and all the images we're seeing from Hubble and James Webb and others, it's just there are only a recent knowledge. Humanities, there are people alive today who were alive when it wasn't really well known that our galaxy was one of many galaxies in a vast universe. And this was the slide that made a big difference. So there was a annual eclipse of the sun in 2023. This presages the big total eclipse of the sun that will move across the United States on April 8th. And the Night Sky Network and the Astronautics Society of the Pacific is if you wanna be involved in that, please look at their literature because you can be involved in that. And if you go to the right place, you will see a total eclipse of the sun. If you stay right where you are, you will see a partially eclipse of the sun. This was an annual eclipse of the sun in October that you had to be in the right place to see an annual eclipse or you would see also from the US you would see a partial eclipse. But to see this eclipse, even the partial eclipse, and here you can see the annual eclipse, you didn't necessarily have to look up to see the moon in front of the sun. You could look down and see that light going through breaks in trees or you could actually do this with your hand and make little openings that would then create little spots on the ground. But those spots aren't really spots. Those spots are pinhole cameras, pinhole lenses where you can see many images of the moon in front of the sun and here you see many of them. And here you can actually see the outline of the tree. So we were hoping to get a really cool image on that day so we could, on the day of the annual eclipse, we could run a cool image the next day and we did. So this was that image and it was really cool and it was pretty popular, but not as popular as the next day's image. So this one I was a little skeptical of when it first came in and I had to do some background checking. This was called eclipse ranks because this is a picture from Oregon and here you can see the moon in front of the sun and you can see the annular ring and you can see some clouds that aren't dark enough to block this out. So these two people along with a third, the person taking the image, did a lot of investigations to where they could take some really cool images where they could be silhouetted in front of the anniversary eclipse. So this takes a lot of planning. So they did this and they were all involved but there was one thing that one of them didn't know and that was a question that she would be asked during the anniversary eclipse and here it was. And so the answer was yes. And the image was sent us and we investigated it and we just thought this was a great story and I'm kind of wondering what they're gonna do during the totally eclipse in April, but this was a cool image and it was really popular. We were very glad to receive it. So back to Juno, Juno orbiting Jupiter has taken a close sweep past Io, one of the more unusual moons in the solar system. So here we can see Io's surface doesn't have a lot of impact craters. It has a lot of volcanic craters because Io is turning itself inside out with its volcanism. And in fact, during this past in October, if you look really close near the top, you can see a volcano erupting. So this is the first of three close passes that Juno will be making past Io. The other two, one is at the very end of this year in December 30th and the other one is in February. And we even closer then and we'll get even better images of this very, very unusual moon, which is just about the size of our moon, Earth's moon. So the Lucy spacecraft of NASA is headed out toward the asteroid belt and it's when reaching the inner part of the asteroid and it got its image of the first of its asteroids, it will visit several asteroids. So this is Dinkinesh and I might be mispronouncing it because in my position, I see a lot of names but I don't hear a lot of names. So Dinkinesh is an asteroid kilometers across, not massive enough to make it into a sphere. But one thing we didn't know is that it was actually a double asteroid. And as we kept watching it, we didn't know it was a triple asteroid because this is one actually two. So we're trying to find out what kind of asteroids are in the solar system out near Jupiter. In the Lagrangian points near Jupiter, that will tell us about the early solar system back then and what condensed in and around Jupiter. So Lucy is just getting started. So we have two major rovers that are rolling around Mars. So this one is Perseverance along with, and there's also the Curiosity rover, they're on slightly different parts of Mars. So one thing that they can see, Ingenuity is sort of a friend of Perseverance that can fly and is still doing that. But you're all gonna play a movie and you'll be able to see this dust devil. We have dust devils here on Earth but this is a Martian dust devil. This is a 20 minute time lapse and you will be able to see it move across the surface of Mars. So we can actually see things move on Mars. But you might admire all the rocks on Mars and the color of Mars and the hills on Mars as discovered by Perseverance, which is looking for signs of water and possible signs that there used to be life on ancient Mars. So I'm gonna play the video now and hopefully you can see the dust devil moving. That was so much fun, we're gonna do it again. So here's what you don't know. This is another place where artificial intelligence actually had a play. So someone, a lot of imagery is now created even from NASA images. It's created by citizen scientists who download NASA images and do something with it. They make a better image. They have in this case, they made several images of the dust devil that were taken and they made that into a movie by feeding it to a artificial intelligence processing engine. So we don't, this thing was possible before the modern invention of artificial intelligence but AI makes it easier. This is just one really cool thing that can happen with artificial intelligence and we're gonna play it a third time because we're kind of short. So if you were on service of Mars, you could see a dust devil move across. Okay, I didn't wanna play it again. So during this past year, there was a new space telescope in orbit and it was the Euclid Space Telescope which was championed and launched essentially by the European Space Agency. It does have a NASA instrument on it but this is a telescope that's going to take wide-angle images of the sky deeper than before. This is the perseus cluster of galaxies so almost every spot you see here is itself a galaxy and these galaxies are interacting gravitationally but you can see pretty deep with this. So as Euclid tiles the sky, we're gonna be looking for humanity and astronomers will be looking for distortions of background galaxies so they're slightly distorted and that will tell us about dark energy and dark matter in the universe out to higher reaches than we've ever able to look for weak lensing before. And so this is all through the Euclid Space Telescope which has other science objectives. So it's a real space telescope in orbit and so we really have three big space telescopes up there. Okay, as reported in 2023 but actually occurred in 2021, the Earth was struck by an unusually energetic particle. Now many energetic particles when they hit the top of the Earth's atmosphere they create a spray of other particles because the Earth's atmosphere will break that particle up and as that particle hits other particles, it's other particles, other particles, creates lots of particles that hits the Earth. These are electrons, these are protons, these are muons, which are long story. So the particle that hit up here might have been a proton, might have been a heavy element of carbon, maybe even more heavy. And so this was just created a tremendous shower here that was unusual and it created several unknowns that are being investigated. First of all, one unknown was where did this thing come from? And so you look, you can trace this back and you can roughly say what comes from this part of the sky, well, what's there? And the answer is nothing obvious. So somehow this energetic particle was created by nothing obvious. The other thing is that how do you get a particle that has this kind of energy, TV energy, high in the TV range? So this hit above Utah. So this is an array in Utah. However, it was reported by a collaborator in Japan, which is why it says that. So there are still these arrays, there are many arrays that determined that measure cosmic rays and cosmic, the high energy gamma rays, they're in Argentina, they're in Utah, they're in Mexico, they're in Japan, they're in China. And so it's an exciting time for measuring high energy showers, as they're called, cosmic rays showers. Okay. So there's cool images still coming in from the Hubble Space Telescope. So this is from the Eagle Nebula. The Eagle Nebula have the pillars of creation, but if you zoom in on different parts of the Eagle Nebula, you see some other really cool stuff. So these look like torches, but they look like torches because they're illuminated by stars that are forming near the ends. So this is like a cavalcade of torches. And so these stars have an energetic wind that are going off and emitting high energy radiation that are evaporating their cocoons that have created them. And in this case, it looks like a torch. And there's little torches down here. So stars are forming here, as stars are forming in many nebula that we're able to see. And Hubble is particularly good at seeing this. Wind is good at seeing through some of this dust, so we can see through closer to the stars that are forming. So here you see the shot behind us. This was taken over Nianhu Lake in China, and I'm blocking out two people who are expert astrophotographers and took many images. Here you can see the Orion Nebula, the constellation of Orion. You can actually see the Orion Nebula too. And you can see Castor and Pollux and Gemini where these are coming from. And they did a really good job of getting many different geminids. Gemini meteors, which are tiny little bits of sand that sometimes have some ice or little bits of metal in them. And so you can see them as they streak across the sky and evaporate. Very few of these hit the ground. They're usually too small. What does happen is you get some twittering stuff that falls very slowly, but you don't have to wear your helmet and duck. This was a really good geminids because the moon did not interfere very much. Sometimes you get a meteor shower when you have a bright moon nearby, and that makes it harder to see the dimmer once. So we were fortunate, and we knew ahead of time that this would be a geminids that was pretty dark. And again, this is one of the things that you could see around the Earth. So it's really cool that we get images and people see this from every major place where people can see the sky. It's the night sky, as the International Astronomy Union likes to say recently and that unites humanity, and it continually does and will continue to do so. So I'm gonna leave you with a video. And this video is a real-time sunset. So this is what the sun sets looking like from looking across the ocean in Hawaii. But what you will see during this real-time sunset in the next 60 seconds is the atmosphere of the Earth causing distortions on the sun, which is completely round to the best, I mean, besides a little bit of filaments and stuff like that. But you will see the Earth's atmosphere create distortions, but you will also see a green orb created by the atmosphere. And you can see little green flashes that occur as it goes. So I will hit this video and let me turn it back. See it go down. So this is really what it looks like if you could zoom in on this. And the edge of the sun is falsely shown to be unusually jagged and it looks like it's sinking into the sea. But it's setting. Falsely insides. So there you see a green flash but you'll see more because this was a highly layered atmosphere. You don't always see this kind of structure as the sun sets. Many times the sun is more seductive. So you don't usually see one side being slightly that much different from the other. And here we see the sunset more and more. It's smaller and smaller. And it's from the distance of the girls. And now you're going to see the last green. And there it is, green flash. Gone in a second. But actually at the end it was also a blue flash because it became even blue for even a smaller fraction of the time as it disappeared. And then the sky was not completely dark because we see some sunlight that reflects off the Earth's atmosphere. But that was it. That was the sunset. You saw half the sun disappear. So with that, I will open it up. We will have some time for questions and I'm happy to take your questions. So I will take away the, I will stop sharing my screen. And again, I want to thank the Astronomical Society Pacific of the Night Sky Network for inviting me on. I'm very happy to be here. It's really one of the highlights of my year to address this learning and interested crowd. Thank you. Thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to have you. And it's also a pleasure to see these images because no two are alike. They're always so interesting and they're always so much fun to, especially, I've personally never seen a green flash and so seeing that in real time, through the video is really, really cool. So we do have a handful of questions. And this one that comes from Gregory, this one you may not have an answer to. It may just come down to astrophotography personal preference. But why do most imagers of the sun in hydrogen alpha color the sun yellow? Hydrogen alpha is a 656.3 nanometers which is deep red and the image should be in its natural color. I don't know if you've noticed that some folks prefer yellow or red or if they've specified why in their image submissions and maybe you can give us a little insight on that. Well, I can tell you my thoughts on that. So yeah, we get a lot of images and hydrogen alpha is great because it gives you a lot of detail. So a lot of people, a lot of astrophotographers take many times broad spectrum but they take hydrogen alpha to get the tail of nebula. It also gives you some detail on the sun. But many times what's popular is what people expect. So many times astrophotographers are gonna color things the way people expect it to be. People expect the sun to be yellow which it's really not even to your eye. When you look up, the sun's pretty much white and most of the sunlight that comes through the Earth's atmosphere is actually tinged toward the greens. But the local lore is that the sun is yellow and when the sun is near the horizon many times it does appear somewhat yellow. So it's really just observer bias and giving people what they expect. So another question comes from Irene and this is actually a question that I've also had. May we use images shown here on Facebook or Facebook or other social media? Is there, I know that with copyright you have to make sure that you copyright the author of the photo but how would it work with APOD? Okay, so good question. So if you use the APOD images in a classroom setting particularly in a private classroom you're absolutely fine. So please use APOD in your classroom. If you use APOD images and you acknowledge that they're from APOD then you can use them pretty much anywhere. But what you can't do is extract the image and use it as if it was in the public domain and use it in any way that you wanted. Because when people submit their images to APOD they're not putting them in the public domain. Thank you so much. All right, and so this is going back to the Dust Devil video that you showed us. Why is the background in the photo of the Dust Devil on Mars white in color? Is it simply the atmosphere of Mars during the day? Okay, so the atmosphere of Mars is usually kind of orangish because there's a lot of dust usually. It can change, not being on Mars myself I've seen a lot of images. So I'm going off of what I've read in the images I've seen. Many times if you were on Mars you would see it to be the dust color of the rusting surface. However, there are times when the atmosphere would also be somewhat blue, just like with Earth's atmosphere because it would be scattering. So it's sort of a battle between the two. So this image was taken toward the horizon. So I have a feeling that the color was pretty well as it was, but you can on almost all the APODs we give links so you can find out more detailed information as to exactly what it was. And we almost always give a link to the astrophotographer or someone who's prepared the image or the NASA team that created it. So you can go and ask them directly and they will know more detail than we will know. But my best bet is it really was somewhat orange. Thank you. And now going back to our green flash sun setting. In the video of the sun setting, the images or the edges of the sun descended into the ocean were rounded, why? That was a question that came through the chat. Wow, they were rounded. Okay, never really thought about that. You write the sun pretty much as a pretty sharp edge as we see it, it's a pretty sharp disc. So I'm gonna guess and say that our earth atmosphere not only creates things blurry on the scale of arc seconds but when you're near the horizon and with all the scattering due to the earth, I think it actually makes probably into the arc minute. And so I think what you're seeing is blur beyond the arc second range due to the earth atmosphere but I'm guessing. Okay, so now this is a two-part question. This question is coming in from YouTube. How many submissions do you get per day? Okay, so good question. We get a lot. So we get about 20 good images submitted for everyone that we're able to use. So that's good for us. And it's good for the general public who gets to see a selection out of a whole bunch because once you see one selected from 20, it's gonna be pretty good. But unfortunately it means that there are 19, not exactly 20, there are around 19 that are good images that don't make it. So one thing we do is we post images to a Facebook group called Facebook APOD.SKY called Sky on Facebook. So when we have a good image or an educational image or an image that we like and we're thinking about and we wanna see how popular it is, we will post it to APOD.SKY and we post two or three images a day there. And so a good image is submitted is more likely to be on our focus group APOD.SKY than it is to make it on APOD central through APOD.nasa.gov. So you will see more images there, but I feel like I have to apologize to the many great imagers who send us great images that we're just unable to use. Keep going, keep doing great work. And many times astrophotography is an end in itself. You should be proud for creating a great image. And that's good for you, your friends and your local astronomy group. So now coming back to the conversation about AI, when do you maybe think AI will be integrated with conventional astronomy in terms of imaging? Like, when do you feel that it's going to be fully integrated where this is just kind of the norm? Good question. So it's already being integrated. It depends on how sophisticated your processing is. So my understanding is now people can take out plane trails and satellite trails by feeding images into artificial intelligence engines. It also gets into the definition as to what is just programming and what is artificially intelligent programming. So there's some kind of fuzzy line there that it's not really clear where you're crossing. So it's not generative AI, but for years now, people have been taking the ability to process images more easily with sophisticated software is growing more and more powerful and enabling more and more people to create sophisticated astronomical imagery. And some of that falls into the category of artificial intelligence. So for instance, we had an image last year and the year before of the Andromeda Galaxy. And people think, well, that's what the Andromeda Galaxy looks like, but you know what, not really. Because to get a long exposure image of the Andromeda Galaxy as many people in the Night Sky Network know, you have to take images that have satellite trails on them. Maybe Starlink trails now and planes that go across and stuck pixels. So what looks like a clean image of the Andromeda Galaxy has actually been processed. And it's many times been processed with AI. So what's real and what's AI becoming? So AI sometimes helps you create what it would look like if you were above the Earth's atmosphere, if you didn't have satellites and if you didn't have stuck pixels, if your eye could see that deep. And if you could see slightly into the infrared, that's what the images show. Thank you so much. So now there was a question about the image with the Benu, with the Cyrus Rex, with the lander. Were there any impact craters or it was just a clean parachute landing with just minimal dust? Oh, in the Utah desert? I think, okay, I don't think there was an impact crater. I think the reason for that is something it's called parachutes. So previously when the Genesis mission came back to Earth, the parachutes didn't deploy. And so it hit the Earth hard and made a small crater. But this time with parachutes, it didn't make, I'm pretty sure anything that would look pretty much like crater. So it's good thing that NASA got there first because in theory, someone could have been driving through the Utah desert with their pickup truck and said, hey, look at this. They could have loaded on the truck and he drove away. But NASA knew it was gonna come down pretty much. And so NASA was there first. Awesome. And I believe we have time for maybe just one more question. Now, thinking back to 1995, when you first started this, did you ever think it was gonna grow into this phenomenon that it has now where people vie pretty hard to get their images posted to APOD and that it's bragging rights. It's really, it's the badge of honor when you get an image on APOD. Did you ever think it was gonna grow to that? I don't think we really envisioned exactly what would happen. We had some idea that it would be useful in the classroom that was one of our goals. We were hoping that it'd be useful around the classroom. Also, one of the things way back in 1995 is that people were attaching images to emails back then, because there was the web, but it was just growing up. And so you would get an email and it would have an image attached and they would say something about the image. If you were lucky, it would be a press release. That would give you a good long text about the image, but nobody wants to read the whole press release. But to our horror in a way, some of the descriptions are, I don't know what this is, but it certainly looks cool to wrong descriptions. So what we wanted is we wanted it to be a smart web that was growing up and not a stupid web, where people would just say, here's a strange image from some kind of telescope. Don't know what it is, but it's sure cool. So we wanted people to have a place to go that would describe in relatively short texts what it is and if they wanted to know more, they could link into it. And we envisioned that it would be useful in classrooms. So, but we had 14 page views the first day, which was more than we, we don't even know how they found out about us back then. 14 page views, wow. So, and we've been growing ever since. And so we're happy to be up. We don't, some people considered APOD to be a competition and we don't think of it that way. We think of it as just, if it was a bunch of amateur astronomers and astrophotographers and astronomers sitting around and they had all these images to choose from, what image would they say is the image of that day that they want to talk about the most? We try to recognize that. It could be a highly educational image. It could be a highly topical image. It could be a really cool deep image, but it would be the one that would get the most buzz just from people talking about. So we don't necessarily create the astronomical at the APOD of the day, the astronomy of the day is we recognize what it might be or what we think it would do. So that's how, so that's our modus operandi since 1995. And so in the future, we might be changing our look because NASA wants us to modernize and we also might be bringing on assistant editors and we're also getting older. So hopefully NASA is asking us who we're gonna hand it off to. So we're looking at the future plans of APOD, but for the next year, hopefully we'll again remain as it is, but we are looking toward the more distant future so that there will be into the more distant future and astronomy picture of the day. I love that. Now, only because you brought it up, you said that first day, you had 14 views. How many do you get now on average per day? Well, okay, so our log files say we, I don't check every day, but the last day I did check was about a month ago when we had 1.8 million page views. Now, people think that's 8, 1.8 different people. It's not that many people. And there are bots that hit us and there are people who look at many different views on the same day. So it's not 1.8 million different people today, but what's easy for the log file to show is how many times there's a line in there. And so we have that many page views typically now per day. On our main NASA site, but we're all translated into, we have social media, we have other sites that are in different languages, not only on social media, but directly on the web. So it's going to be slightly larger there, but I think the English sites are still the largest. Thank you so much. All right, so with that, I definitely want to thank you so much, Dr. Nemeroff, for spending your time with us at Night Sky Network. And once again, for our Zoom attendees, there is a survey that you can go ahead and fill out. And after you filled out the survey, you will be entered to win a copy of Dr. Nemeroff's book. And that is Faster Than Light. I will go ahead and post that survey link into the chat here. Join us next month on Thursday, January 25th, where we will hear from Miguel Fernandez on Finding Aliens on Earth. And that is all for this evening. We are wishing you a happy and healthy new year. Keep looking up and we will see you next month.