 or to let us know if you're having any technical difficulties you can also send us an email at night sky info at astro society.org if you have a question however that you'd like to ask our guest speakers please type that into the q&a otherwise they're really easy to lose it'll help us keep track and know whether or not we've answered your questions so without further ado welcome April is officially citizen science month and we are thrilled to have a guest host tonight to refer kids um that involves uh the disney channel national geographic pbs it's a really fun one you'll find it at citizen science month.org so this is what you might find if you come to size starter it's a place to find thousands of projects that we've organized from all over the internet and made them searchable so you can find projects that are related to astronomy you can find projects that require a telescope projects you can do near you events and so forth and probably most of you know what citizen science is but just in case you don't i don't want to make assumptions here it's typically a collaboration between scientists like those that you'll hear from in a couple of minutes who need help from the public the the rest of us and so we like to say that if you're curious or you're concerned about an issue and you're motivated to do something about it you will absolutely find a way to do that through citizen science the idea is that you're helping to collect or analyze data that somebody makes use of so it's not just a an opportunity for you to learn although you will you're actually actively involved in important research projects we're encouraging you tonight to go to size starter dot org forward slash astronomy mag short for magazine and you'll see an opportunity to to sign up for size starter everything is free we want you to sign up so that you can continue to find projects but also so that you can track your contributions across projects across websites and and applications and before i toss it back over to vivian this is also what you'll find on astronomy mag on size starter dot org forward slash astronomy mag the three projects that we're going to feature here today and when you click on either of those projects or all of those projects you'll find step by step instructions videos from the project scientists and just more ways to understand how to get involved in these projects on that page two you'll see an invitation to register to learn more about an event that we're doing next month it's the first ever nasa sit-side con that's short for citizen science con i guess conference it's a two-day event open and it's free and we'll have an ongoing series of open door events where you can jump in learn all about the nasa citizen science projects that are there hear from the project leaders and learn how to just get involved and make a difference thank you vivian well that's what it looks like thank you caroline for putting this slide in here it looks amazing thank you that's fabulous thank you all so much great thanks hairland hairland thanks darlene and i'm just going to hand it over to dave iker well thank you excuse me thank you very much vivian and thank you darlene and everyone for having me here it's a great joy a great pleasure to to be here with you and and everyone who's here who's made this event happen it's it's the the nasa night sky network it's astronomy magazine it's sci-starter we have three very exciting citizen science projects and we're going to hear about tonight and and leaders and and this is not just any old citizen science this is citizen science in a golden age of astronomy because as you many of you undoubtedly know we are in the greatest era ever in terms of the pace and the numbers of amazing discoveries and exploration that that is going on and it used to be you know years ago you know a generation ago people talked about you know citizens are you going to help scientists out with their work and research and you know it maybe wasn't quite exactly well now you really can you can do real science and and in a very legitimate way contribute to our understanding of what's going on this is tremendously exciting and and it's an honor to be a part of this and and just to talk just for one second about how we're going to do this we're going to don't be frustrated with the question and i know people are going to have a lot of questions and answers and this is you know fascinating experts here with us tonight we're gonna we're going to have one question between each of the presentations but then we're going to do a lot of questions if if we can at the end so we'll do one question between each of the speakers but don't be upset if your question doesn't go right away because we hope to have a lot of Q and A time toward the end of this great event so again without further ado i'm the editor of astronomy magazine thank you Vivian for mentioning that astronomy you can find out what we're doing at astronomy.com if you'd like we're very pleased and happy to be a part of this group in a way and without further ado i would like to introduce our first speaker who has maybe the coolest citizen science name for her project ever Aurora Soros Dr. Liz McDonald um she is she works for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and she leaves the Aurora Soros citizen science project which uses citizen science and social media to predict northern and southern lights aurora in 2018 Liz announced the discovery of a new type of aurora called Steve an acronym for strong thermal emission velocity enhancement you can report on whether or not you see Aurora at her website event site which she will undoubtedly tell you about and Liz is going to give us a full explanation i think now of this very exciting project all right thank you so much let me share my screen and share the sound so i have a video with sound uh no can't share the sound um is it sharing the screen looks great okay and it's the correct way perfect okay great well it's an honor to be here and to talk to all of you about the Aurora Soros citizen science project and Steve as just a preview is shown in this very beautiful photo by Paolo Fadosso Fadosi over the Alberta area and i will talk much more about that i want to acknowledge our funders and partners and all of the citizen scientists who contribute especially the Alberta aurora chasers and really celebrate citizen scientists here in in the month so next i just wanted to give on the right hand side here the link to our project you can also tweet us and tell us if you've seen aurora and we actually can pick that up and put it on our map we started this project not knowing fully what we were getting into and how kind of disrupted it is and how innovative the results might be um but you know we were facing a dearth of data and there's also it's extremely hard to tell you exactly when the aurora will be visible over Bellevue and uh you know that leads to a lot of people um not being as successful as they could be but uh almost 10 years ago we realized that with social media and smartphones we could start to create a platform for alerting people in near real time that other people near them were reporting aurora so it kind of works like an e bird in space and also reaches out to new audiences and really increases the numbers of people that can see aurora so this is one super busy slide about our project which has all these different aspects but you can see some of the beautiful citizen science submitted photos um in the the little gif here and um we've had uh a number of reports um millions of tweets that we've looked at a lot of papers um if you look at the website uh it will be displaying the map of where the aurora should be visible overhead as well as where people are reporting aurora or potentially tweeting about aurora and then um you can contribute there as well as if you're somebody somewhere that can't even see aurora you can still look at the tweets and help us upvote them and find really the real time tweets so um that has been going on since the last solar maximum when the sun was really active the sun has not been that active in recent years but it's starting to pick back up and we are also revamping our website for newer technologies as well so you will be seeing that soon so talking a little bit about steve and how the photos have really helped our citizen science project grow um you know here's one beautiful example of steve from manitoba actually um uh by christa trinder and uh you know these pictures just pop they just you know people are riveted by them they want to tell that they want to know the story they want to know what the heck this is and um it's actually also has a scientific benefit that uh we're starting to um especially for aurora which are caused by the precipitation of particles from space into the upper atmosphere and how that releases light as our cameras get better and better and commercial cameras are now as good as the scientific grade cameras for a few decades ago um we can see more photons and so we can see the visible manifestations of the upper atmosphere and the near earth magnetic space environment in a way that we never could before and that's actually led us to discover um something that was overlooked and that's steve which is shown here in a little cartoon version kind of as a very narrow east west aligned ribbon that cuts across um canada and the u.s the northern u.s in this case while the aurora is far to the north and so it's really this sub auroral phenomena that's been quite overlooked and um the discovery isn't the photos themselves because actually people have been photographing it for a number of years the discovery was really the um meaning and the understanding of what steve is which happened after we combined uh the photos from citizen scientists uh all over um especially in albert and scotchwin and manitoba um with traditional uh scientific grade cameras fielded by the university of calgary that are also all over canada um and combine that as well with the european space um agencies satellite called swarm and it was seeing the particles that actually cause the aurora are you guys hearing the sound now the aurora and they started noticing something that was overhead as well when they were seeing the aurora far to the northern regions it was unlike most aurora talked to the scientists we didn't know what it was and together they said we'll keep taking observations and we'll call it steve in the meantime steve is mostly a very narrow purple arc and sometimes it has these little green features that go along with it as well that are kind of like waving fingers or a picket fence that means that there's plasma physics happening up there to cause that light and to make these little discrete features that we don't understand yet we now have some satellite observations from the isa satellite called swarm that show uh that steve optically is associated with a very strong flow in the particles in the ionosphere the upper level of our atmosphere steve is important for a number of reasons it's really exciting that people armed with cameras all over the globe can capture something that we didn't fully understand and shed new light on that it's also really exciting that this happens further to the south where there are more people so it might be a kind of aurora that more people can see than the usual kind we're now able to look up at the sky and see things about the aurora and this sub auroral region that we never understood before and then we can correlate that with our traditional observations and lead to greater understanding sorry for repeating myself I didn't think the sound in the video was going to work but it's much better the edited version of me with the pictures in the background as well so yes and so steve has really grown and gone viral across the world which has really been very engaging and contributed to greater understanding of the process of doing science and how you know it was teamwork and how we all listen to each other in order to you know not dismiss this as something just another type of normal aurora but it's also been translated into many different languages and the story has been told at many different levels and one of my favorite is the wow in the world podcast for kids it's so fun it's such a fun version of steve and they they really highlight the science also so and and the way that science works and of course the aurora is not just a scientific phenomenon it's also really important to people's lives and well-being and it's like an addiction to chase it and so we we want to help people do that safely and increase access and and increase understanding and so we're we're doing that with a variety of different projects and you can definitely check out our blog for more information about our project blog dot aurora source dot org and you can also even follow phenomenal steve on twitter and this is not me this is run by a citizen scientist and just has a great personality as well so that's it thank you so much if you want me to nerd out more on steve i do have one you know more in more depth backup slide on that that's fantastic liz thank you very much for that and i believe that vivian is going to sort a question am i correct vivian on that oh dear we've actually lost vivian temporarily and so i'm trying to sort out what we've got here while uh you all we're talking so okay uh oh poor vivian we need to retrieve vivian so we do have one question here and so why don't we go ahead and um and uh so vincent asked what are the new discoveries happening now related to steve and citizen scientists oh that's a great question thank you vincent who uh is probably the same vincent who's a phenomenal undergraduate student with his own aurora camera in north dakota called no dak um but some of the new discoveries about steve most recently in january um we actually published a paper on some of the picket fence features and not just the discrete picket fence um that you see kind of like fingers but also there's even tinier sub elements of that that look like they kind of look like a point source of aurora that gets smeared out in the um camera's image and those are like also completely crazy little features that are not consistent with particle precipitation and the traditional version of how aurora is formed so using citizen scientist images and um uh triangulating on the height of these new features um that was also done uh with um photographers but also a citizen scientist himself michael hannacle from germany actually did the analysis of the triangulation and has made his own catalog of a whole bunch of steve um events as well as sub features and and he's one of the ones who noticed these tiny features as well as the lead author who's um professor josh semeter from boston university so we can put the link to that paper or uh press release in the chat as well thanks fantastic thank you liz that is really terrific and very interesting and groundbreaking of course too congratulations on that and and now we're going to go on to dr patrick tritehardt um who uh i have seen before good to see you again patrick you too and you're going to tell us about a spiral graph yes another exciting project and patrick is an astrophysicist whose research is focused on the morphology of disc galaxies and also takes part in public outreach activities that increase access to astronomy science in general one of these project is spiral graph which we'll hear about tonight in which you can help scientists measure the curvature of spiral arms in galaxies by participating in the spiral graph uh program which is part of zooniverse and and i presume you'll give a website url as well yes i'll do that at the end yeah excellent take it away patrick if you all right let me share my screen okay yeah so i'm thanks thanks for inviting me uh i'm an astronomer at the uh north carolina museum of natural sciences um and as uh you know as as was mentioned i'm interested in spiral galaxies um so let me let me give you a little bit of background as to what this project's about and then how it actually works what we can what we can learn from it um so spiral galaxies make up about make up most of the galaxies that we see in the nearby universe and so this little diagram here is Hubble classification diagram of of galaxies you can see the spirals here on the right side of this tuning fourth diagram and you can see that there are two main types of spiral galaxies there are so-called barred spiral galaxies and then non-barred spiral galaxies and these non-barred spiral galaxies they essentially have a bulge in the center and then the arms wrapped around the bulge of the galaxy so you can see that more clearly here so here's the bulge you can see the spiral arms wrapping around that and the barred spiral galaxies are similar only they have a linear structure running through running through the bulge and then the arms tend to come off the ends of that linear structure and we call that the bar so uh so these are the two main types of spiral galaxies but one thing you'll also notice is that with spiral galaxies the way the way that this classification system is broken down is that you can see here on the left side the spiral arms are much more tightly wrapped than they are here on the right side and so we can actually group galaxies into uh into a classification scheme uh based on based on how tightly wrapped the arms are and how large the bulge is so these uh SA type galaxies or the SBA type galaxies have a large bulge and very tightly wrapped arms and these SC or SBC galaxies have smaller bulges and much more open arms so if we if we pay attention to um the galaxy if we look at every single galaxy essentially in the universe we see including our own Milky Way we see that every galaxy tends to have a supermassive black hole in its nucleus within that bulge um and that's these these black holes the reason why we call them supermassive is because they range from millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and so this this sorry this flickery animation because my computer's a little low on ram um these these are animations kind of showing uh the stellar orbits around an unseen object in our own Milky Way in the center of our own Milky Way um and these stars are orbiting around uh an object that's four million times the mass of the sun compressed into a very small volume and so the only thing it can be is a super massive black hole and so this is how we know that there's a supermassive black hole in the center of our own galaxy so when we look at other galaxies so for instance uh i'm sure everybody's seen this image of uh this radio image of of the center of an elliptical galaxy that shows essentially this the supermassive black hole in that galaxy um so every every galaxy we looked at seems to have a supermassive black hole in the center but it's really unclear as to how these things form they're so massive and they appear so quickly in the in the formations of galaxies in the evolution of galaxies that it's really unclear how they could how they could form so quickly and and grow so rapidly um there there are a couple there are a couple of ideas as to how this can happen in that um you can have uh essentially just giant gas clouds that collapse and uh collapse directly into very massive black holes that then merge and form the supermassive black holes and that can happen very quickly in the beginning of a galaxy um or you could have stars uh very massive stars that form very very quickly burn out very very quickly you know explode as supernovas form stellar mass black holes and then those merge together very quickly and and form these you know form these seeds for supermassive black holes it's really it's really unclear what the formation mechanism is um but one of the keys may be trying to find a rare type of black hole called an intermediate mass black hole so these supermassive black holes range from millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and stellar mass black holes range from you know let's say 10 to a thousand times the mass of the sun um these intermediate mass black holes that we don't really see range from thousands to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun and really there are almost none that we have found there there are maybe a dozen candidates and maybe you know two or three actually confirmed intermediate mass black holes so one of the interesting things uh would be to try to find more of these intermediate mass black holes in galaxies and see what's different about these galaxies compared to essentially every other galaxy and maybe that can help explain uh the evolution of normal galaxies so so that they grow with these supermassive black holes whereas these intermediate these galaxies with intermediate mass black holes we can see what's different about them and maybe what makes what what stopped them from growing into supermassive black holes so we can look at these outliers to kind of figure out what's going on normally um and one way we can do that is based on a paper that was published in 2017 or actually before that in the early early 2010s um and what was found was that there seems to be a relationship between how tightly wrapped the arms are in a galaxy and the mass of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy so what we can do is essentially measure how tightly wrapped the arms are and we can use this use this plot essentially this cartoon plot to kind of determine the mass of the black hole that way and so this is a really quick cheap way to measure to estimate the mass of black holes in galaxies for a large number of galaxies we can do this very very quickly with a large number of galaxies I mean generally the other way of measuring it is again looking at the scattering of stars by the black hole which takes a lot of telescope time you know it's it's it's it's essentially hard to do but just looking at images of galaxies measuring how tightly wrapped the arms are I mean it's a very quick and easy way to do it so when we look at when we look at this plot when we look at most galaxies that we see in the universe or that we've that we've been able to measure this with we say that most galaxies tend to lie uh it within this blue oval over here so out out here you know tightly wrapped arms essentially high mass black holes but if we can look at enough galaxies if we can measure this winding parameter and estimate the black hole mass for enough galaxies maybe we can get a few sprinkled down here that could potentially have intermediate mass black holes um and so that was that was one of the reasons why we wanted to start this project is because uh we thought that maybe we could find some intermediate mass black holes but there are other parameters that that the spiral arm winding matches with as well so one of the issues is that when you when you just use like sky survey images of galaxies they tend to be not very good um and so this is an example of one of these images and so you can kind of get a sense that this is a spiral galaxy but really the contrast between where the arms are and where the arms aren't is very very low there's there's very little difference between that and so to do this in any kind of automated way is actually very very difficult for a computer because it can't trace out where the arms are compared to compared to the gaps between the arms but humans are very good at pattern recognition and they can actually see you can actually see kind of uh get a sense of where the arms are so for instance I can see the bulge right here and I can get a sense that there's an arm wrapping something like this oops right there so this is so this is a little cartoon uh kind of coming that shows shows kind of the solution we came up with so the idea was what if we show people images of galaxies have them just trace out where they think the spiral arms are and just throw away the image and measure the tracing and if we get enough people to look at everything you know each each individual galaxy we can come to some kind of agreement as to where the arms are and then just measure measure where people agree and come up with a measurement for the winding of the spiral arms so we developed this project we called it spiral graph this is just what the home page looks like and I'll show you a link in just a second um but whether the way the project works is we show you an image of a galaxy and the images we have they should all be spiral galaxy but what we found in the very beginning is that actually they aren't all spiral galaxies there's some of these galaxies have been misclassified as spirals so what we do is we show people an image of a galaxy and then we ask them is this uh essentially a non-interacting spiral galaxy so in that is it structured and not merging or is it something else is it a smooth galaxy is it a merging galaxy is it otherwise somehow untraceable um and if the answer is b then we ask you to trace out the spiral structure of the galaxy you observe so so just to give you an example this is an example of a merging galaxy down here that was classified as a spiral by somebody by by another group um and obviously it's very disorganized um it's not centered in the image there's this very little regular structure to it so this this really is a merging emerging galaxy here whereas this one is clearly a well-defined spiral galaxy that doesn't seem to be interacting with anything else so you can clearly see the spiral structure here and so if you select b then we just have you trace it out which you can see in this gift right here um and so what we've done uh so we've been running this project for about a year and we have only recently run out of data uh and so we're now waiting to collect more data waiting waiting to have more uh images unique images of spiral galaxies so that way we can actually have people uh trace you trace out more galaxies but what we our initial so we had two batches of galaxies uh our first batch had about 6 000 and our second batch had about 14 000 and in each batch we'd had people classify uh galaxies each galaxy 15 times and then trace them uh if if they thought it was a traceable galaxy and from our uh initial results we found here out of the 6 000 galaxies we found that about 2300 of them had very good agreement that there were spiral galaxies um here there were about about 4 000 galaxies that were marginal but then there were clearly some over here where everybody agreed it was not a spiral galaxy so there were about 51 galaxies that were clearly not spiral galaxies at all but you can see that there there were a number there are about 300 galaxies that everybody agreed this is the spiral galaxy so this was our cutoff mark here so we have about out of a batch out of our first batch of 6 000 we have about 2300 really viable galaxies although we do have data for all these other ones as well and so to give you an example of what of what people have done uh this image here on the left is one of the galaxies we've shown volunteers and you can see again you can you get a sense of where the spiral structure is um the difference between the arms and interarm regions isn't very high but you can clearly see the spiral arms um and then over here on the right this is the aggregate tracings from 15 volunteers of this of this galaxy and the software we have can uh if we plug if we plug the left image into our software it has a harder time measuring the winding of the arms than if we plug in this right image over here um and we we're able to get really good measurements of these spiral galaxies so uh so not only can we get for instance using this black hole uh spiral arm winding relationship not only can we estimate the masses of black holes in the centers but there are also other relationships we can get from this just from measuring the winding of the spiral arms uh we can get the the mass of the stellar bulge in the center of the galaxy we can get the maximum rotation velocity of the galaxy and from the maximum rotation velocity that also tells us something about the amount of dark matter that galaxy contains as well which is also amazing i mean it's pretty amazing that we can get both uh information about the very center of the galaxy and then essentially the entire galaxy as a whole as well just from just from measuring how tightly wrapped the arms are um so not only are we going to get a lot of information from these spiral tracings that people produce but we are we can also use the tracings to create an ai program to hopefully map out the spiral arms in galaxies by just plugging in an image uh and hopefully we won't need people to do this anymore at all so we have enough data now that we think we could actually train up an ai to to learn where the spiral arms are in an image and actually map them out for us um and so this is actually a project that we plan on doing in the future once once we get all this data analyzed we actually plan on trying to create this this machine learning program to do this um so as promised uh here at the end uh we have uh the uh the link uh basically this this what url will take you to uh the sty starter page with uh with a link to the spiral graph project website but then also if you follow us on social media especially the the spiral graph twitter handle um you can stay tuned for updates we can let you know when we have more data that we can have people trace and things like that but we'll also be posting you know results as as we get them as well so um so you can follow us on the on the web page for the project or you can follow us on twitter or instagram as well we can you can stay up to date with what's happening with the project fantastic thank you pat very much for that and for that fascinating detail do we have a question that we can fetch for you we are it's really hard we've got some really great questions but uh this looks like a good one and so uh uh darien asks uh how do you measure how tightly wound a galaxy spiral arms are when the galaxy is oblique to earth's perspective right yeah so the issue is is we we have to weed out those galaxies that are completely edge on um so there's a certain there's a certain inclination range that's actually useful so obviously if it's completely edge on you can't see the spiral structure at all but if it's if it's at some um you know modest angle we can we can do some math right so basically we can we can um essentially rotate the image and stretch it out so that way it's circular so that way it looks like its face on and then we then we what we do is we show that artificially deprojected image to to the volunteers and have them trace out the trace out the galaxy so we try to make all the galaxies look the same we try to make them all look like their face on even though you know obviously not every galaxy can be face on but we try to make them all look face on so that way we have kind of a standard um a standard way of showing showing galaxies to the volunteers fantastic thank you so much patrick for that um and let's go quickly because we want to have some good q and a time um here to an old friend of astronomy magazine stan odenwald there was a time when you would mention smartphone astrophotography astro imaging with a smartphone not terribly long ago and it would produce uh some rolling of the eyes from most people in astronomy but uh that has changed dramatically with the capabilities of these phones and the guy who's literally written the book on this is stan odenwald um and and mastered it and stan is an astronomer at nasa's goddard spaceflight center as well during stem resource development at the national institute of aether and participates in many nasa programs in space science and math education one of his most recent projects is the smartphone astrophotography program which we'll hear about tonight which encourages people to take photos of the moon planets and star clusters with their telescope and smartphone and they can help measure light pollution as well while doing it um so get your phone charged up find out how to do it let's listen to stan and you're going to give us uh the pertinent urls as well i hope stan yep that's right uh thank you david um i consider my projects to be kind of the book end to uh projects like aurosaurus and spiral graph uh which are projects that are targeted on specific astronomical or geophysical uh concepts and uh and objects uh what i like to do and what i've enjoyed doing since i was an amateur astronomer as a teenager is taking all-sky photographs using uh you know common equipment that i had available to me um and for the most part you know as a teenager in the 1960s and early 70s you know you had to go to flea markets to get yourself a single lens reflex camera for 15 20 bucks and then find yourself a tripod and then you'd set that up in your backyard and take uh timed exposures of the night sky well from suburban open california you know that had its its challenges because of light pollution uh things got a lot better once i got a car and could actually go uh camping in you know samedy and get into the high sears where there's no light pollution so uh that was a lot of fun but anyway so what i'm interested in is is sort of the the change in our sky quality over long periods of time um a night sky light pollution is a project that i put together which looks at uh urban and rural uh light pollution in the sky and with that program you basically set your smartphone on a tripod and take a photograph of the sky and submit that to the the project which then is added to the archive um and correlated with other light pollution indices that that are available uh satellite streetwalk satellite street streak watcher i fucking get my own program pronounced correctly um came up because uh it turns out that space x is putting thousands of satellites in the earth orbit and uh if you look at the the twilight sky or the early morning sky uh an hour before you know sunrise or an hour after sunrise uh you will see the streaks of these satellites going across your sky and it's the strangest thing that you've ever seen in your life um in the 60s and the early days when there wasn't a whole lot of commercialization of the space yet satellites were very rare phenomena to see in the sky and so you could take wonderful deep sky photographs and not worry about getting streaks and these sorts of things going across your image uh today that's almost impossible to do if you're trying to photograph objects um you know around astronomical twilight which is 45 minutes after sunset or 45 minutes before sunrise you will see these satellites streaking across your field of view so uh the satellite streak watcher is is all about archiving this and to show the degradation of our night sky uh over a period of time starting now because they're just now starting to put these satellites up and so in five years you know there'll be a gazillion of these satellites going across the sky um and so this would be an archive of images showing the degradation of the night sky the early evening and early morning night sky uh which has some sort of interest in terms of assessing the quality of our experience of the sky uh there are many segments of society that value the night sky for religious and other purposes so I thought it would be a good idea to keep track of just how rapidly we're losing this valuable natural resource uh we talk about night sky light pollution and the loss of our night sky because of urban light but even if you're in a completely dark site you're going to have these streaks and artificial satellites and all kinds of things buzzing across your field of view um increasing over time now smartphone astrophotography is sort of the third project in this triumph here um here the idea is simply to take a photograph of the night sky using a smartphone or some other small camera that's uh easily available for most people uh and just photograph objects in the sky astronomical objects you can do whitefield photography you can do star trail photography you can do photography through a binocular or through a small telescope the idea is to sort of try out different camera systems and see just how well they perform uh in detecting and photographing in a nice way some of these astronomical objects that includes total solar eclipses of which people are fascinated by it also includes aurora as as liz has mentioned there's a lot of interest in photographing aurora and it turns out that smartphones are really quite capable of doing a respectable job of photographing those sorts of objects there are also other things that that you might not think about as being sort of astronomical objects in a sense um how many of you have seen a phenomena called a sun dog or uh odd or halos of light surrounding the moon or uh halos surrounding the sun from arctic locations uh these are also well they're called perihelia if it's involving the sun uh the equivalent for moon i have not the faintest idea what that term is uh it's called a lunar halo um you know those are also fair game uh so anything in the sky that you think is interesting that's related to your appreciation of the sky the night sky or or other things is is fair game for this activity um so far in these three projects we have close to a thousand people who have submitted close to a thousand uh photographs of a variety of things from star clusters seen through small telescopes of the smartphone uh to wide field photographs that show uh legions of starlink satellites marching across the sky now the idea is to get a large enough archive of these things to show the variety of things that you could see in the sky and in this case photograph uh as a way of assessing how this variety changes over time now also with uh night sky night sky light pollution uh there are also activities to keep track of just how badly that is deteriorating uh all of these things all of these images are uploaded to a set of archives uh i use a platform called uh anecdata.org so the way that you would do this is that you would take a photograph with your smartphone uh you would download it to your laptop step two step three is you would log on to anecdata.org and get yourself registered then you would select uh one of these three projects in this case smartphone astrophotography is a project and so you would join the project and then you would upload that image from your laptop to the project uh observation page your observation page asks you for some fairly bare bones information what is the object name and things like that but it also captures the the gps location of your phone at the time the photo was taken and also the photo itself you can interrogate the photo image file and recover a lot of information about for instance the camera optics the exposure setting that was used on the camera the gps coordinates and things like that and so all of that information is then available in the gallery of photos and in fact if you're joining this smartphone astrophotography project or satellite streak watcher or night sky light pollution you can actually download these images yourself or you can open up the gallery and see all the other contributions by other people the really cool thing is that all of this information is geotagged and within the anecdata.org app you can display the map that shows where all of these pictures have been taken and all these observations have been made around the world and so one challenge is to find places where nobody has thought of taking photos and go there and go there on vacation set up your tripod in the middle of the sahara desert or the top of the eiffel tower i don't care where but you know have fun be creative about it and try to come up with some really interesting well-framed and artsy photographs of astronomical objects all right as david mentioned i i have written the book on smartphone astrophotography for nasa and you can download it at the url spacemath.jsfc.nasa.gov or you can just simply google spacemath at nasa and it'll go to the main front page and there you will find the pdf file that you can download so that's about it have fun and enjoy the the night sky while we still have it was muted there forgive me thank you stan we had an unfortunate incident early on in our program here and that is we lost vivian to an ill timed neighborhood power outage so so we'll hope next time that vivian is back leading this parade onward but but i think brian you've been helping to questions we have a good question here from lori lori asks if folks can shoot the pick on their smartphone and then also upload without having to go through a pc uh yeah you can you can certainly do that uh it's it's well you know it's it's actually more direct uh so the idea is you would go to your app store and download anecdata.org and then you would open up the anecdata dot well the anecdata app register give yourself a username and a password and then once you're through you can select smartphone astrophotography and then click on make an observation and it'll have a thing in there that says upload a photo and then you just simply click on that it goes to your uh your photo archive on your smartphone and uploads the image so yeah that's a very direct way of doing it uh but if you're using a nicon or other kinds of cameras that are not smartphones then the laptop method is the one you'd probably be using excellent have we other questions for any of the three panelists who've presented to us so nicely tonight we do and so um we have a number of questions here and so let's kind of go back to the beginning so william asked that he lives at 41 degrees north latitude he's only seen a live aurora once in his life how far north does he have to go to see the real thing yeah that's a great question many people are interested at those latitudes it's really tough unless you are in really dark sky places and also you're watching the groups or the data or signed up for an alert to catch the you know half an hour when maybe there's a little bit of aurora visible once every two years but you can always go north or south under the auroral oval the kind of everyday auroral oval where it really doesn't take much of the continuously variable solar wind to be giving energy into the earth's magnetic field and releasing it in the form of spectacular aurora all over the sky places you can go that are well situated under the auroral oval include fairbanks alaska yellow knife canada which is a small town but you can get there by a normal plane um iceland and uh like tromso norway and other places in scandinavia as well those are your best bet don't go in the summer all right well we could stay with uh liz here and so dav asked uh he might have missed it but what does steve stand for strong thermal emission velocity enhancement um and i also heard there was a question of how did it get named it got named by a citizen scientist uh who came up with kind of a placeholder name kind of a funny name based on a movie a kid's movie called over the hedge and they the characters see this hedge in their forest and the they're scared of it and instead of being scared of it they just call it steve so um some of the citizen scientists we collaborate with uh all thought that was a great name and it really stuck um and the scientists like it too most of them all right well let's go over to uh patrick and so i mean i kind of combined two questions one from william and one from john um one is uh the latest on the cause of the spiral arms and then the other is uh clues about the bars of the alexis getting formed and so kind of about how the uh structures are formed both ways in the in the spiral galaxies yeah those are those are good questions uh that's those are active topics of research um so let me talk about the bars first so bars in galaxy bars and spiral galaxies are actually very common they're they make up when you look at spiral galaxies most spiral galaxies are actually barred so the real question is why don't galaxies have bars um and so it's it's actually pretty easy to create a bar in a galaxy you just need a small satellite galaxy at some point to kind of distort the uh let's say circular orbits that make up a spiral galaxy you just need something to come by tug on a tug on the orbits a little bit kind of elongate them and uh elongate them and offset them from each other and then you can easily create the spiral structure and bars kind of form out of that as well so it's they're actually they're actually pretty common um and actually pretty easy to form so now how do spiral how does spiral structure actually stay maintained um so the best the best explanation we have is there's something called density wave theory which essentially means that you have um let's say orbits of material orbits of gas clouds kind of moving moving through a disk uh and then there are regions of high density so basically what will happen is these gas clouds will kind of bunch up in regions and collide with each other form stars ignite uh and kind of light up those dense regions and show you that spiral structure um but recent somewhat recently there's there's been there's been another theory proposed as how to create and maintain uh spiral structure and it's called a manifold theory and I think I'm not I'm not uh real up to date on that but I think the idea is that essentially you have um these three-dimensional kind of tube-like structures that kind of emanate from the bulge of a galaxy and the stars and the material kind of move through those tube-like structures in kind of a chaotic in a chaotic fashion but they're contained within those tube-like structures those manifolds um and so that there's actually some evidence for it this evidence against it as well so it's there's a little bit of a competition there but I think I think still most people kind of agree that it's density wave theory and and a lot of the a lot of the work that I've done kind of upholds that the density wave theory as it proposed as opposed to the the manifold theory for arm structure all right excellent I I think we're beginning to run low on time maybe we do one more question Brian if you have one more good one yeah let's do one more question and uh we'll go back to uh stan for this one Darian asked is the new iphone 12 night sky photography capability significantly better than android phones and are there any recommended astrophotography apps that work well for a smartphone for doing astrophotography extremely good questions any of the recent vintage smartphones all perform comparably they all use basically the same kind of imager sensor technology and you'll be very satisfied with the faint light level photography you can do with all of these they typically have apps that allow you to take images and stack them stacking is an important way of enhancing the sensitivity of astronomical images modern day smartphones the ones in the last few years that have come out have the stacking ability as a standard app feature for their low light level photography so all you do is get your camera on a tripod point it at the sky tap the app start it up and it'll automatically take uh the the requisite number of images to get right down to six seventh and eighth magnitude stars that's why you get these beautiful pictures of the milky way that you see over and over again taken with smartphone and you should see that kind of performance in all of the recent models at this point fantastic thank you stan and and thanks to everyone we have filled our hour and it was fantastic we learned a great deal from all of you tonight it was very entertaining and there's a lot of opportunity to get involved with these things and to really help push science forward in a very exciting era so thank you liz thank you patrick thank you stan thank you vivian thank you darlene thank you brian thanks to everyone it's been a great joy i hope you enjoyed watching it and and go to these websites and follow up on the projects there's a great deal of fun to be had as well as a real science here so thanks to everyone so much we'll sign off for tonight and i hope to talk to you all again very soon and before we go i want to remind everyone we do have two more webinars coming up well actually we have several in the pipeline but one of which you'll be particularly interested in next month before we get to that one on may 20th we will have dr kasey hawnaball who is going to bring us up to date on the Artemis program and on june 22 we're going to have dr carl badams who's going to give us a this a great title i love it supersonic snowballs inhale the science of sun grazing comets and and about how you can help with a citizen science project um looking at sun grazing comets and so that's definitely related to what we did this evening so i love that title that's great stuff to to look forward to thanks so much to so thank you everyone this this will show up on the night sky network youtube page as well as the night sky network web page by tomorrow so thank you very much everyone david thank you very much panelists thank you very much for joining us this has been a delight and vivians out there in cyber land someplace in a in a without electricity so maybe she's not with us anymore she'll be back next time though she will so thank you david thank you Elizabeth thank you patrick donna megan everyone darling thank you thanks so much everyone have a wonderful night and and follow up and uh help us push science