 We're going to start here. So I'm going to be recording on this end. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to the September NASA Night Sky Network member webinar. We're hosting tonight's webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California. We're very excited to present this webinar with our guest speaker, Dr. Emily Lebeck, from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. So welcome to everyone joining us on the live stream, on YouTube. We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the Night Sky Network, though we look forward to continuing to live stream them into the future. For more information about the NASA Night Sky Network and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, stay tuned and we'll put some links into the chat so you can see that. Well, before we introduce Emily, here's David Prosper with just a couple of announcements. Dave? All righty. So first of all, kind of relating to last week's webinar, NASA is seeking folks to share live feeds of the moon for NASA TV for a special broadcast on September 26 for International Observe of the Moon Night. So if you'd like to volunteer to share your view of the moon virtually for about an hour this Saturday, contact Andrew Shainer at shainershaner.li.usra.edu. And I'll put that in the chat right now. I'll just copy off of my notes. And we also have one other announcement. And it's actually kind of related to tonight's webinar, but also related to the Planetarium show and toolkit that Vivian and folks have been working on called Big Astronomy. So Vivian's not with us because she is extremely tired after doing a bunch of packing and prepping for the Big Astronomy Toolkits, which are going to be shipped by the end of this week. They're on their way to over 100 clubs, and they'll be on their way to more as you update your events on the Night Sky Network calendar. And these Toolkits are packed full of activities about dark skies, big observatories, and the people behind the science. And you can join the Big Astronomy Planetarium show on September 26. That is also International Observe of the Moon Night and Astronomy Day. There's a lot going on. And I'll put a link to that in the chat as well. And that is all I've got for you folks right now. And back to you, Brian. All right, thanks, Dave. So for those of you on Zoom, you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of the Zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other in the chat window. Make sure that you go down to the bottom and select all attendees and panelists, or maybe it's all panelists and attendees. It defaults to all panelists, and the only people that will see your greeting are Emily, David, and me. And so make sure that you select all panelists and attendees so that everyone can see your greeting. You can also let us know if you have any technical difficulties in the chat, or you can send us an email at nightskyinfo at astrosociety.org. If you have a question for our guest speaker, please type it into the Q&A window. That helps us keep track of it. We won't lose it. And we know right where it is. We won't have to scroll around in the chat trying to figure out where it is. And that will just really help us out if you would put your questions into the Q&A. So again, I want to welcome everyone to the September webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month, we welcome Dr. Emily Laveck to our webinar. Emily Laveck is an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, studying how the most massive stars in the universe evolve and die. She has observed for upwards of 50 nights on many of the planet's largest telescopes and flown over the Antarctic stratosphere in an experimental aircraft for her research. Her academic accolades include the 2014 Annie Jump Cannon Award, a 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a 2019 Contral Scholar Award, and the 2020 Newton-Lacy Pierce Prize. Congratulations on all of those honors. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii. Please welcome Dr. Emily Laveck. Hi, everybody. And thanks so much for joining us here tonight. I will go ahead and share my screen so that you can see my presentation for this evening, which will be focused around the book that I recently wrote. It was published back in August of this year, so a little over a month ago. And it's titled The Last Stargazers. And this book explores the sort of behind-the-scenes stories of what life is like as a professional astronomer. I wrote this book as my third book. My first two books were academic texts. And this was my first foray into writing for a broad audience and writing for sort of general books that you can sell in bookstores. And as I kind of got introduced to the world of publishing, one topic that kept coming up was people talking about the first lines of books. And people would hit upon famous first lines of classic books or the really gripping or memorable first lines of books that are well-remembered and classic today. And it got me thinking, OK, what's the first line of my book? This book sharing the adventures and sort of beauty and excitement of studying the cosmos and studying the farthest reaches and farthest corners of our universe. And the first line of The Last Stargazers is, have you tried turning it off and on again? And it seems a little underwhelming. This is mostly a question that we're all used to hearing from our internet provider over the phone when they're talking about our modem. But this phrase was actually said to me during one of the tensest and most startling observing nights of my entire career. So I had this said over the phone to me while sitting at the control room of the Subaru Telescope, a top Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. I was 24 years old at the time, and I was observing at Subaru for my PhD thesis research. I was happily pointing the telescope from galaxy to galaxy. I was studying the faint faraway galaxies that were hosting dying stars in the hopes of trying to use the chemistry of those galaxies to explain what the stars might be up to. And everything was going great. I was enjoying this precious night of telescope time that it had been specially allocated to me by a department committee until we suddenly heard this horrible, like, bloke sound from one of the computers in the room. And I remember freezing, looking over at the computer, and then looking at the only other person at the telescope with me, the trained telescope operator. So it was the astronomer I got to decide where the telescope was pointing, but the operator was in charge of actually running this building-sized scientific instrument. And I looked at her and said, OK, what was that sound? Was that anything bad? And she very calmly looked back at me and said, well, I think it's OK. I think the mirror is still on the telescope. And I was not aware that the mirror not being on the telescope was an option at a professional enormous telescope like this. So I started asking about what was going on, and she began explaining to me what the problem was. And to really understand the problem, it's worth mapping what things were like inside Subaru and the scale of telescope that we were dealing with. Subaru's primary mirror, so the main mirror of the telescope that's used to gather the light that we're observing, is 8.2 meters end to end. And for scale, here's me standing beneath the 8.1 meter mirror of the Gemini telescope in Chile. So it telescopes that's about the same size. So this is the size of mirror that we were dealing with at this telescope. This wasn't the mirror that had triggered the alarm. The mirror that had triggered the alarm was Subaru's secondary mirror. So if we look at a sort of schematic of what a giant telescope like this looks like, this is a picture of Palomar telescope in California when everything is going well and alarms aren't going off. The primary mirror is down near the bottom of this picture, and the secondary mirror is suspended high overhead. At Subaru, the secondary mirror is much smaller than the primary, but it's still about 400 pounds and it suspended 70 something feet in the air. Now, what the operator explained to me was that that alarm that we had heard was a warning that the mechanical supports holding up the secondary mirror might have failed. And what this meant is that if we tip to the telescope from side to side without those supports working properly, we were at risk of dumping the secondary mirror right off the telescope. So if we were lucky, the secondary would plunge 70 feet to the floor of the dome and slam it to the concrete. If we were unlucky, it would hit the big primary mirror on the way down. So this was what the alarm was. I put in a call to the day crew for this telescope. So the folks that work on the mountain during daylight hours, making sure that everything is working perfectly and ready for a night of observing. And the day crew proceeded to inform me that the sound we'd heard was probably a false alarm, that the secondary mirror was probably still on the telescope and that it would probably be fixed, probably was doing a lot of work in this conversation. It would probably be fixed if I just turned the alarm on and off again. I was not super comfortable trying to treat a enormous telescope like a modem. And I had heard all sorts of stories about what would happen if you treated a telescope like this incorrectly and wound up causing severe damage. The field is filled with sort of horror stories of the things that can go wrong at telescopes. One of the most infamous stories that kept flashing through my mind while I was hearing these instructions was the story of the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia. So this is the beautiful 300 foot across dish of a cutting edge radio telescope built in remote West Virginia that one evening turned from this into this. The telescope had completely collapsed. This wound up being due to a tiny fault in one of the constructed pieces of the telescope. But in my mind at the time, I was sitting there going, well, somebody probably thought it was a false alarm. How did this happen and how do I avoid being the graduate student that killed the Subaru telescope because I didn't listen properly to warnings? So I was sitting there wondering if I could fix the telescope like a modem with a power cycle and what I should do about how my night plan was going because this one precious night was my only night on the telescope to do research for my PhD thesis. The following night, no matter whether there had been clouds or a mechanical problem or a false alarm, somebody else was going to be showing up at this telescope with their own scientific plan and their own program. And I would be out of luck for months, possibly even a year and my PhD thesis research could potentially grind to a halt. So I was sitting there wondering if I should turn the telescope on and off again, wondering what this meant for the future of my research and kind of stuck on what to do. And this is the story that winds up opening my book because it gives people a window into what it's like to actually be the person behind one of these telescopes and what it's actually like to work professionally at trying to answer questions about the mysteries of the universe while also dealing with the occasional computer glitch. So I wrote this book and tell stories like this to kind of give people this view of what being a professional scientist is like. Everybody is sold on space being cool. Everybody loves looking at these, you know, gorgeous color images from Hubble or telescopes like Subaru, these beautiful colorful galaxies and delicate gas clouds and star clusters. And when these wind up on the front page of the New York Times or on the front page of Sky and Telescope, people are dazzled to look at them. But people don't know nearly as much about what professional astronomers actually do. If you look up a stock photo of an astronomer, you tend to get pictures like this. So you tend to get men wearing lab coats for some reason and standing next to these cute little tripod telescopes in their backyards peering through them with their eyes. Now, this is a wonderful way to observe, but it's very different than what professional research astronomy is actually like. And when I was growing up, I remember wondering what this job would actually entail and whether it was a bigger version of what I did in my backyard or something totally different. I tell people that I've been interested in astronomy since I was a really little kid and this is my proof. This is me at age six. I'm proudly sporting my Hubble Space Telescope T-shirt because Hubble had launched earlier that year. And by then I was already sold on space. I was reading kids books on space. I was listening to books on tape. I thought black hole sounded like the coolest thing in the world. And I decided that I wanted to be a scientist and study space for the rest of my life. But I had no idea what a scientist's job was actually like. I learned about science as a profession from movies. So I would watch a movie like Twister or like Jurassic Park and think, well, okay, it seems like you spend most of your time being chased by whatever you're studying. Or I would watch a movie like Contact and be so taken with the romance of discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But I think even as a kid I knew that that probably wasn't what the job was like every day. So with movies as my only guide, I knew I loved science, but I didn't know what my day-to-day life or my job was gonna be like as a scientist until I was halfway through my college career. After my sophomore year at MIT, I got the chance to go on my first professional observing run. I traveled out to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Southern Arizona with my research advisor, Philip Massey. And he took me to this beautiful observatory for five, what wound up being perfect clear nights on one of the telescopes on the mountain. Now you can see from the picture that Kitt Peak hosts a bunch of spectacular world-class telescopes. So when I was there, I was sharing the dormitory in the cafeteria with a bunch of other astronomers. And on our very first night heading into dinner, Phil introduced me to a table full of astronomers and said, this is Emily. She's on her first professional observing night tonight here at Kitt Peak. And the table immediately got excited and started welcoming me, giving me tips on how to stay awake all night, on tricks to make my observing run go smoother. And then the tips and tricks quickly started evolving into storytelling and tall tales and these sort of epic mishap stories that they were so eager to tell me while we were sitting at dinner. Somebody would say, oh, did you ever hear about that guy that lost 15 minutes of observing time because he locked himself in the bathroom? And the story actually wound up being true that story is actually immortalized in that person's research paper where they explain losing 15 minutes of observing time due to a broken bathroom door handle. Someone else said, well, you know, I've been sitting in one of these domes and they get struck by lightning. And that's a pretty frequent occurrence at Kitt Peak. You've got these tall metal structures on top of the mountain. These telescopes will pretty frequently weather lightning strikes and they're built to survive them okay, but everyone who's been inside a dome when it's been struck says, oh, it's the loudest sound you have ever heard in your life. And the stories just kept coming and coming. Somebody mentioned a woman who'd gotten stung by a scorpion while she was working on Kitt Peak. Somebody else mentioned a guy that had a semi-tame raccoon climb into his lap during an observing run. Somebody else is saying, oh, have you ever heard the one about the telescope that got shot, which is a true story that I'll get to in a minute. And I remember sitting at dinner with my fork almost stuck halfway to my mouth, just going, I never want them to stop talking. I could listen to these stories all day. I also want to go running off to a telescope to see about getting some stories of my own. And later on, it kind of dawned on me what this storytelling was doing. This was a great way of kind of welcoming me to the field and introducing me to the job that I was about to undertake. And it served as this great window into what people's jobs and what people's lives as professional astronomers were like. So years later, that's what wound up shaping my book, The Last Stargazers. It gives people this behind-the-scenes peek at life in this very unusual profession. Out of 7.5 billion people on the planet, only about 50,000 of us are professional astronomers. So it's a pretty unusual perspective, but a pretty unusual job that I wanted to kind of welcome readers into exploring. It uses these stories and adventures behind how we do our research and how we study the universe to also share the science of what we're studying with people and express both the science itself and the sort of scientist excitement that we have as we look at some of the great astronomy discoveries of the recent past. To research this book, I actually got to go on some pretty fantastic adventures of my own. This is a small snapshot of some of the interesting things that I got to do. On the upper left, that's me standing in the center of the gravitational wave observatory out in Eastern Washington. So this spectacularly, exquisitely engineered place that's able to detect tiny ripples in the fabric of space time. On the lower left, that's another photo at the summit of Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. It was my home observatory from my PhD and a beautiful and fascinating, but very complicated place that I was very happy to get the chance to visit. In the bottom middle, I got the chance to go visit Palomar Observatory out in California. California hosts some exquisite historic observatories that I was so happy to finally get to see in person. And on the upper right is actually another observatory that I got to go visit. And this sometimes surprises people when I tell them about observing and I show them this photo. But this is a picture of Sophia, the stratospheric observatory for infrared astronomy. If you look just in front of that plane's tail, you can see a big square door. And behind that door is a telescope that can operate while this plane is flying in the stratosphere with that door open. By getting above most of the water vapor in our atmosphere, it's able to get observations that are totally impossible from the ground. And getting the chance to visit this observatory was such a fascinating part of researching this book. I do think though that my favorite research came from the picture on the bottom right, which is me holding my trusty voice recorder that I used to record interviews with a bunch of my colleagues. I wound up interviewing over a hundred of my fellow astronomers for this book. The book's narrative follows my career as an astronomer and the many different ways that we use to study the universe. But I also wanted to gather as many people's stories and as many people's perspectives as I possibly could on what life as a professional astronomer is like. I mostly let different people guide their interviews. Some people would just pour stories at me. Some people had thoughts on how the field was evolving. But I made sure to ask everybody these three questions. And I'm going to use these three questions as the guide for this talk, kind of highlighting a couple of my favorite answers that I got to each question. So the first thing I asked everyone was, what would surprise people the most about our jobs? So looking at my fellow professionals astronomers, I was saying, what do you think would take, what would somebody be taken aback by when reading this book? What's the biggest disconnect between what the average person thinks we do and what we actually do? Overwhelmingly, the most common answer was we don't look through eyepieces anymore. And it is mostly a reflection of the fact that a lot of us would get asked by people, oh, do you have a telescope in your backyard for your research? And many of us do have telescopes in our backyard, but it's not where we do our work anymore. We mainly have to record and store and photograph the data that we use. We don't look through eyepieces for our work, but it's not entirely true that we don't look through eyepieces period. Every once in a while, we are lucky enough to put an eyepiece on one of our professional grade telescopes and get a view through it. I got the chance to do this as part of my research for the book at the Swope One Meter Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. I was at Las Campanas doing book research and someone pointed out that nobody was observing on the Swope Telescope that night. There happened to be a group of us at the observatory who all weren't actively observing on that same evening. So someone said, well, let's head down there and stick an eyepiece on and actually do a little bit of stargazing just through this one meter telescope. A one meter is a total shrimp by professional astronomy standards, but as somebody who is also a fan of stargazing, this seemed like an enormous thing to actually be able to look through. So we all lined up and started looking through this eyepiece and we sounded not at all like trained astronomers of any kind because the only thing that you heard in the dome was, ooh, oh, it's so shiny. It's so red. Oh, this looks so cool. Like we sounded like little kids looking at Saturn for the first time. It was the best. So we eventually got through to looking at Adakarina. And this was the star that the telescope was pointing at when I got to look through it with my own eyes. Adakarina is exactly the sort of star that I study because I study very massive stars. Adakarina is an enormous star that back in the 1800s did something we still can't really explain. It sloughed off a huge amount of mass from its outer layers that got blown out in those two big bubbles that you can see in this picture. The star survived this weird outburst. It's still buried and embedded deep in that dust. But exactly why it did this and exactly what the star is doing now is still an open question. I had actually studied Adakarina with my colleagues, but getting to look at it with my eyes for the first time was incredible. You could see these delicate little bubbles of the mass that had been lost. You could see the bright red glow of the star itself deep inside the nebula. And I just remember standing there going, oh, this is so cool. So it was a fun example of professional astronomers getting as geeked out and excited by good old fashioned stargazing as anybody else. But when it comes to our actual research and how we store our data and analyze our data, it's kind of fun to look at the different photographic techniques that we use. Since we don't look through eyepieces, how do we observe? So back during the first half of the 20th century, the most common tool for observing was photographic plates. Photographic plates were these very thin, delicate pieces of glass that had been chemically treated on one side to darken when they were exposed to light. So you would take one of these plates, load it into a telescope's camera, point that telescope to something and then open the camera's shutter. And the plate would darken where light from a star or galaxy or planet would hit it until you got this nice little sort of black and white negative image of whatever it was you were studying. It sounds like a nice simple technique. Photographic plates were actually unbelievably fiddly to work with. They would come pre-delivered from Kodak and chemically treated, but astronomers were forever trying tricks to make these plates extra sensitive to light or extra sensitive to blue light or red light or infrared light. So they would bake the plates or freeze them or douse them in distilled water or ammonia. One person swore by rubbing lemon juice all over the plates. They would then have to slice these plates down to the exact size of whatever telescope camera they were using. They would then head to that telescope's camera and they would load the plate in. And if you can look very closely at the plate in this astronomer's hand, you can tell that it looks just a little bit bent. Sometimes the glass plates had to be bent very slightly to fit into the camera. So you would take this lovingly prepared chemically treated custom cut plate and start bending it and just hope it wouldn't snap. And all of this work would be done in the dark because the second you exposed the plate to light, it would start to darken and it would damage how good it would be as an observing tool. So you would get into all this work just to get the plates ready and then you would wind up sitting sometimes here, sometimes at the top of the telescope and you're the prime focus of the telescope's big primary mirror to be where the light from the stars was being focused. People would sit there all night loading plates in and out of this camera shivering through very long cold dark nights to get their observations. So it's a pretty arduous way to observe. And it might sound like it's a sort of, you know, beginnery or old fashioned or not that technical way to do astronomy. But we learned astonishing things from data taken with photographic plates. My favorite example of this is the discovery of Sethiids and some of their first use. So Sethiid variables were discovered and explained were explained by Henrietta Swan Levitt. She was studying glass photographic plate observations of Sethiid variables taken from a telescope in Peru. And she eventually noticed a connection between how these stars varied and how bright they were. So I know a lot of folks here are very familiar at Sethiids, but for those who are watching and learning about these for the first time, Sethiids are a type of variable star that will get brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer over and over again regularly over a period of days. What Henrietta Swan Levitt noticed was that the brightness of a Sethiid variable was connected to how long it took it to complete one of those dimming and brightening and dimming again cycles. She was actually able to draw a nice neat line connecting how bright one of these stars was on average with how long it took it to complete a cycle. This was really exciting because it meant that if you knew how long one of those variation cycles was, you knew how bright the star should be. You could then compare how bright it should be to how bright it appeared and figure out how far away it was. So it made Sethiids a great example of something called a standard candle, a standardized tool of brightness that we can use to measure how far away something is. Years later, Edwin Hubble actually was observing nearby objects using photographic plates and he took this particular plate. This was an observation of what at the time was known as the Andromeda nebula. It was this fuzzy spiral thing nearby in our sky. And there was a great debate raging at the time over whether Andromeda the nebula was just a nearby fuzzball in our own galaxy or whether it represented another galaxy very far away. If it was in fact another galaxy that completely shook up and changed our picture of how big we thought the universe was and the extent of what else was out there beyond our own Milky Way. While Hubble was observing Andromeda, he detected a Sethiid variable, the same type of star that Henrietta Swan-Levitt had been studying in the outskirts of this nebula. You can see it marked on this glass plate with that red var that he wrote. That discovery meant that he could measure the distance to the Andromeda nebula. And when he did, he proved that it was the Andromeda galaxy. We had other galaxies far beyond our own. Our perception of how big the universe was had changed dramatically. And it was all thanks to work done on photographic plates. Now today we have higher tech observations. We store our data digitally and we've done a great job of creating these beautiful, very photogenic observations that people love looking at on the front page of Sky and Telescope. But all of this ties back to the same kind of research that we were able to do using photographic plates. So this idea of using photographic technology instead of just looking through telescopes with our eyes is one of the things that a lot of my colleagues thought would surprise people about professional astronomers jobs. Another common answer was we really have some surprising adventures while doing our jobs. I think when a lot of people picture a professional scientist they picture somebody in one of those lab coats kind of hunkered down in a basement somewhere geeking out in front of a laptop and not really getting to go anywhere or do anything from. We spend plenty of time in front of our laptops studying the beautiful data that we get from telescopes but we also have some pretty wild adventures in pursuit of getting this data. And one of my favorite stories of a rather dramatic and absurd thing that happened to an astronomer while taking observations happened here in Washington state. And it happened at Manastash Ridge Observatory. So this is a small observatory in Central Washington that's used by the University of Washington. And back in 1980, a University of Washington graduate student named Doug Geisler was observing by himself a top Manastash Ridge at this telescope. He was actually also observing for his PhD thesis. He was getting his first night of thesis observations. And like any good scientist, he was keeping very meticulous notes of the beautiful night that he had had taking data for his PhD. You can see he carefully noted that he observed for 10 hours and he didn't lose any hours. So hours lost was zero. If it had been cloudy, maybe he would have written hours lost one to clouds or maybe hours lost two to a telescope malfunction but his night was perfect. The sky conditions were excellent. He described the beautiful night with really great image quality. It was a great night. So Doug wrote this log entry and then went to bed. And you can notice the date of the log entry of May 18th, 1980. So when I tell the story in the Pacific Northwest, that's the point when the crowd kind of goes, oh, because people recognize the date. Doug during the night heard this sort of weird rumbling noise. It was around eight or nine a.m. while he was sleeping. And he didn't really think much of it. He kind of half woke up and then went back to sleep. And then he woke up in a stronger morning time around noon to step outside of the observatory and start his day. He opened the door of the observatory into a world that had gone completely black. He would grab a flashlight and the flashlight beam would only make it about 10 feet in front of him before getting swallowed up by the air. There was this awful sour brinstone smell everywhere. And Doug was just standing in the doorway going, my God, I'm standing in the end of the world. He thought he was standing in nuclear fallout from an attack or some other epic disaster. And back then you couldn't just like grab your phone and look for a news notification. So he went running back into the building, dashing for a radio to try and find out if there was anyone still broadcasting that could tell him why on earth the world was missing. And what he eventually found out connected back to that rumble he'd heard earlier in the morning. That morning, Mount St. Helens had erupted. Now, Mount St. Helens was a pretty good distance away from Manastashra's observatory. But when Mount St. Helens erupted, it actually basically blew off part of the side of the mountain. So the eruption was very sideways and then got picked up by prevailing winds. So this is what the eruption of Mount St. Helens was like from Doug's perspective. The volcano erupted and blew its plume right over Manastashra's observatory and right over Doug. So this explained what he was seeing out the window. Once he knew the explanation, he very carefully, again, like a good scientist wrote a detailed log entry. He was clearly not going to be observing that evening. So he noted that he had lost six hours and the reason was volcano. He noted that the sky condition was black and smelly and carefully noted exactly how he had come to this conclusion. He then very nicely covered the telescope and all of the instruments because he knew that that falling ash could be potentially corrosive and damage the equipment before he wound up driving home. So this log entry has now become the stuff of legend in the Pacific Northwest astronomy community and it remains one of the more dramatic sort of volcano weather natural event stories that I have ever heard from somebody as part of an observing trip. So this has now lent my book. It's chapter four title. So chapter four is now titled hours lost six reason volcano as an homage to Doug's observing log. So this is a little snapshot of all the chapter titles in the book and to get the full view of all of them, I strongly encourage you to get and read the book but you can see a glimpse of what chapter fives title is too. That chapter is titled the harm from the bullets was extraordinarily small which is again maybe a slightly surprising title to get in a book about astronomy. And this ties into people's answer to my second question that I asked all of my colleagues. I loved asking people what their most memorable second hand observing story was or 10th hand observing story. I wanted to hear the stories that they told to other people without any ability to vouch for them being true. The story that had been embellished and turned into a tall tale and just entered the legendarium of the field. I wanted to find these stories, track them down and use them because I knew that if they captured my fellow astronomers imagination they would be fun stories to put into a book and capture a general audience's imagination. So by far when I asked this what's your favorite sort of in hand observing story from your colleagues. People would say, do you have the one about the telescope that got shot? And I did indeed track down the full story behind the telescope that got shot which is a real story. It happened at a telescope in Texas. It happened to the telescope on the screen the 107 inch telescope at McDonald Observatory. So remember that 107 inches refers to the size of the telescope's primary mirror and that primary mirror was unfortunately the victim of the telescope shooting. An observatory employee was disturbed and possibly involved with some substances that shouldn't have been involved in the story. And one evening got it into his head that he was bent on destroying the 107 inch telescopes mirror. He went storming into this telescope a brandishing handgun and demanded that the telescope be lowered so that he could look right down the barrel. Fortunately, no people were injured in this but once the mirror and the telescope was actually lowered he emptied the clip of the handgun into the telescope's mirror. It sounds horrifying and it sounds very dramatic but when you think about 107 inch across mirror and then think about what a professionally poured enormous mirror looks like you might imagine how this actually went. These mirrors are made of melted and carefully shaped borosilicate glass which means that they're about this thick in the case of the 107 inch. Picture your favorite Pyrox baking dish and then make it a foot and a half thick. So when you fire a bullet into that this is pretty much what happens. It's kind of like throwing a dart into a dartboard. You just get this sort of fuck effect and the bullet lands, buries itself and not a whole lot happens. You don't get this dramatic shattering or destructive effect. The gunman was pretty underwhelmed when this happened. He tossed the empty gun aside and then started trying to go after the mirror with a hammer. But at that point he was safely subdued. He was let away and the sheriff was called. The sheriff took one look at this mirror and went, oh my God, the telescope's been utterly destroyed. What a tragedy. This mirror is never going to be the scene because the sheriff was looking straight down the telescope and seeing the big giant hole in the center of the primary mirror. We know as astronomers that that hole is a common feature in telescope primary mirrors. We cut it so that light can be focused from a secondary mirror through the center of the primary to make it through to a camera or instrument behind the primary mirror. But without the sheriff knowing that I think he just thought that a cannonball had been shot through the middle of the telescope. In reality, all that happened was those little bullets just kind of embedding themselves in the glass and the observatory staff was able to get in, dig the bullets out, paint over the holes and just declare that the 107 inch telescope was now the 106 inch telescope. So the telescope was able to resume observations almost right away, but word got out in the community. Like the sheriff said it was destroyed. It made the news. Like somebody's completely wrecked this beautiful new 107 inch telescope. And the observatory director actually had to issue a statement on one of the astronomy bulletin networks. These bulletins are usually used for things like, hey, we found any supernala or hey, we've got a variable star that we're studying. And he had to put out one explaining that the harm suffered from the bullets was extraordinarily small. So it's gotta be one of the more unusual astronomical bulletins that's ever been posted. And it lent my book's chapter five, its title. So this was for sure one of the big legendary stories that has gotten told and retold and taken on a life of its own in the astronomy community. The other one that I kept hearing about was one that people sort of half remembered. They would say, well, what about those weird radio bursts that happened at that telescope somewhere that turned out to not be from space. They were from something funny here on earth. Do you have the story about those? And I did wind up tracking down that story for the book as well. And it's one of my favorite examples of a sort of accidental serendipitous detection in astronomy. So this happened at the Parks Observatory radio telescope down in Australia. And back in 2007, Parks detected this brief, brilliant blast of radio light. So to explain what radio light is, just as a quick reminder, visible light is the light that we see with our eyes. It's the light that we see as we look around. Radio light has a much longer wavelength. So it's detected using these big mesh dishes and antennae like the Parks radio telescope you can see in the background here. And it means that the kind of light that would cause interference to a radio telescope is very different than the kind of light that we think about when we think about what we see. If your eyes could see radio light right now, sitting wherever you are watching this presentation, you would see your Wi-Fi network causing all sorts of interference. You might see little bursts from a car driving down the street because the spark plugs in that car's engine create little blasts of radio light. You might get some interference from fluorescent bulbs over your head or from some of the other technology in your room. If you have your cell phone nearby, you'd be getting some interference. So there's all sorts of ground-based bits of distraction that can interfere with a radio telescope's ultimate goal of trying to observe the universe. So when this very weird blast of radio light arrived at Parks in 2007, some people were very excited. We'd never seen brief radio bursts like this from space, and there was a lot of curiosity about what could have caused it. But when this idea was floated to the observatory staff, people pointed out, oh, we've been detecting bursts like that all the time. We get these, they're probably from the ground. We don't quite know what they are, but surely these bursts aren't coming from deep space. They can just be explained by some terrestrial phenomenon. This explanation sat until an astronomer named Emily Petrov came along. She was interested in studying radio bursts from space. She knew that they could potentially be new and compelling and interesting objects. But in order to explain those, she had to explain all the other bursts that Parks was detecting. She knew that these bursts, which were nicknamed peritons after a mythological creature that looks like one thing, but is something else, these things could potentially be interfering with real science, but to get at the real science, we had to explain what these peritons were. So she got the whole observatory staff involved and got everybody interested in trying to figure out what exactly could be causing this interference. And the first break in the case came when people started noticing that the peritons were clustered around the lunchtime hour, a result that they put out in their paper where they ultimately explain what was happening. Space is pretty weird, but space does not care what time lunchtime is in Australia. So this pointed to a really terrestrial origin. Now, if you look at where Parks is as a whole, you can see the big main dish. And you can see the three administrative buildings on site that housed offices where people would work, work on data, operate the telescope and make themselves lunch in one of the on-site microwaves. So people started looking at the microwaves as a potential culprit for explaining these peritons, these radio blasts. And they proceeded to very carefully and scientifically study the microwaves. If you read this whole scientific paper, it's just a delight, because clearly someone read more about microwave operations than they ever wanted to. There's this breakdown of exactly what make and model the microwaves are exactly how they operate and how people ran them. They described running them on the site on high and low power for different durations. They always microwaved a ceramic mug of water because what if the thing inside the microwave could cause a problem? They did this over and over and they never made a periton. And what somebody finally figured out was that they were being really good scientists and they were acting like people conducting an experiment. They weren't acting like hungry people microwaving something. So if you've microwaved your dinner or your popcorn, you know what it's like when you're hungry and waiting and the microwave is still counting down. You stand there and it's going five, four, three, and then you go fine. And you open the microwave door to stop the microwave. So you open the door before the microwave is quite done and it does that last little spin down once the door is open. Now, when they tried that, they successfully made a periton. Opening the microwave while it was still running proved to be the key to explaining this fleet of bursts that the park's telescope had discovered. And when they went back through the data, they explained all of these detections except the one from 2007. That had been a real burst of radio light from space. Now today, people are studying fast radio bursts as an entire subfield of astronomy. We still don't quite know what's causing them. We know it's not microwaves, but these are now a really active and exciting field of study because we were able to isolate the scientific phenomenon from the interference that they had going on around them. So to wrap up, the last question that I asked my colleagues was how astronomy has changed since they've begun observing. And I got a couple of different answers that kind of paralleled one another in terms of what they meant for our jobs. The first one was pointing out that the technology we use is changing. We saw the amazing things that we could do with the technology of photographic plates and this precious plate from Edwin Hubble that changed our entire shape of how we understand the universe. But today, when we observe Andromeda, we don't get an image like this. We get an image like this. This is part of an enormous Hubble survey studying individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy. We can isolate the individual stars one by one and measure their temperatures and how bright they are, how they evolve, whether we think they're getting ready to die. So the abilities offered to us by Hubble and by some of the next generation telescopes that we're building are really incredible. And the reach that we have into the universe as a result is really exciting. So this has unarguably changed the types of questions that we're able to ask and the types of answers we're able to hunt down. It's also wound up changing our job as stargazers. So this is another picture of me from my research for this book and I'm standing in front of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory which is currently under construction in Chile. So the observatory is named for the woman who discovered dark matter, which is wonderful. And it represents a really new and unique type of observation that's going to be done. All the telescopes that I've talked about so far here are telescopes that we get to apply for time on, be assigned time on, travel to or occasionally operate remotely and point to a list of objects that we're interested in or a pre-planned program that every individual astronomer designs according to their research questions and the things that they want to solve. Rubin Observatory is going to work a bit differently. Rubin Observatory is going to be serving an enormous swath of the Chilean sky. It's going to be moving back and forth across the sky imaging the same patches in a few filters over and over again for 10 years. It's going to ultimately wind up giving us a decade long movie of what the Southern sky is like. And when I explain this to some folks, they kind of wonder, well, what is a movie that the sky tell you? The sky doesn't really change, right? It's just sort of a picture of the constellations. And of course, an observatory serving the sky to the depth of a huge telescope sees all sorts of tiny changes happening all the time. You'll see tons of stars getting brighter and dimmer like Sethiids or other types of variable stars. You'll see stars dying as a supernova and emitting this bright blast of light or disappearing and leaving behind nothing because the star may have collapsed into a black hole. You might discover new asteroids just sort of scooting across the frame in that video. So the power of a huge survey telescope like this is incredible, but doing that doesn't require an astronomer to go to the telescope and point it to a particular place. The telescope has a program that it's going to follow. Ruben Observatory will be run by a real tiny handful of people working on the mountain making sure that it runs safely. The data from the observatory will be put online and astronomers all over the world will be faced with this wealth of data from the telescope that they can then download and study. It means that the science we're going to be able to do is incredible, but it also means that we're not there. We're not on the mountain anymore and the scientific questions that we're answering are amazing, but they're specifically the questions that we can address with data like this with imaging data of the sky over and over again as it changes. Now for comparison, when I was in Chile, I visited the Vera Ruben Observatory right after visiting Las Campanas Observatory on another beautiful mountain top in Chile. And Las Campanas was where I got to make one of the coolest and most exciting discoveries of my career. While I was at Las Campanas, I was studying a type of star known as a Thorn-Jitkov object. So to explain what a Thorn-Jitkov object is, these are stars that we think come from the merger of two former massive stars. I, in my research, specialize in studying red supergiants, so very massive, very cold stars nearing the ends of their lives. During my research, I discovered a few red supergiants that looked a little weird or a little unusual. They were varying more than we expected them to vary or they were a little too dusty or their chemistry was a little weird. And Anna Zhitkov of the name Thorn-Jitkov object actually emailed me and said, have you ever thought about looking for stars like this? And to explain what these stars are, I have an animation talking about how they form. We imagine two massive stars sitting together in a binary. So these are two blue supergiants, much more massive than our sun, burning through their interior fuel much faster and quickly ending their lives. So when the more massive star dies as a supernova, it collapses. You get this immense fireworks show of a supernova and what's left behind is the neutron degenerate husk of that star. When that star's companion then puffs up and expands into a red supergiant, it swallows that neutron star. And the neutron star actually spirals into the center of the red supergiant, ultimately disrupts and replaces its core and you wind up with this. It's a star that outwardly looks just like a normal luminous red star, but instead of a nuclear fusing core, the same type of core that our sun would have or that any star that you see in the sky would have. It has a core supported by principles of quantum physics, supported by incredibly dense piles of neutrons. This idea had been posed back in the 1970s and people had thought about looking for Thorinjitkov objects, but we'd never successfully found one. We used an assigned night on Las Campanas Observatory where we could go to the telescope and use it to study whatever we thought was interesting to search for Thorinjitkov objects. We had a list of very bright cool stars that we wanted to study and we needed to look very specifically at the chemistry of these stars. The telltale sign of a neutron star buried inside a red supergiant like this would be little chemical signatures from elements that had been stirred up from deep in the star. We made our list, we headed to the telescope and the night that we were getting ready to observe. One of my colleagues said, you know what, let's just add a few more stars, just in case. Let's add a few very cold stars, very weird stars just so that we can say that we've searched every possible candidate we can. Now later that night, we were going through our observations and taking data as it came in. And I think people imagine data from a telescope coming in looking like the Hubble Space Telescope and in reality, it's gorgeous, it looks like this. So we were taking what's called spectroscopic data where we sorted out the light of the star according to wavelength and looked for any little bright or dark patches that would tell us that an element was blocking light or emitting light somewhere in the star and atmosphere. We had the data come in, it looked like this. I could maybe half interpret it and understand it. I had a colleague with me, Midia Morell, who was an expert at using this telescope and using this particular technique. She took one look at this picture when it appeared on our computer screen and said, I don't know what that is but I know that I like it. And she was noticing these little bright patches that wound up being telltale signs of hydrogen glowing in these stars' atmospheres. Now that hydrogen was glowing because we think the star was pulsing and unstable and that turned out to be a telltale sign of what we now think was the first discovery of a thornjit.object. So this blew our minds. We were so excited to have found one of these and it happened thanks to this star that we added to our list at the last minute. We found that star thanks to sitting at the telescope as the data came in and having an expert who had done this type of observing for decades, looking at the screen and saying, ah, something strange. It's the best phrase you can hear in science. Something's funny about that. So this made for a wonderful stargazing experience and it made for a great scientific discovery. And this is one of the points that I try to drive home to people in the last stargazers. Ruben Observatory is going to be an astonishing scientific tool. The things that we'll learn about the southern sky and the things that we'll learn about how the sky changes with time will be absolutely unmatched by anything that we have now. It's also just one of the many tools that we have as our disposal. We want to be able to use telescopes like Ruben Observatory to conduct these massive surveys and get wealths of data that we can study from our homes and study on our computers. We want telescopes like the Magellan telescopes where we discovered thornjitgov objects where we can change our minds at the last minute and point at something just because it might be weird and find that funny thing and explore it a little more and really take advantage of the serendipity of science that leads to so many great discoveries. We want some of the historic observatories like the Observatory on the lower left here, Lick Observatory in California where we might have small telescopes but we also have telescopes that can study nearby stars and study puzzles pretty close to us in our own universe. And we want telescopes at a variety of wavelengths. We want things like the radio telescopes of the very large array in New Mexico. So we really need this full suite of tools available to us in order to do our research. And the final thing that I always like pointing out is that tools like this are important to the research that we do as astronomers and the research itself is so important to how we stargaze as humans and how we can excite tomorrow's stargazers. This final picture in my talk was not taken with a beautiful world-class telescope or even a terribly nice camera. This was taken with my iPhone from a gloriously light polluted park here in Seattle. And it was taken of comet Neowise during its close pass by Earth a couple of months ago. Getting out to see this comet and taking a picture of it really drove home to me the value of astronomy because I get asked a lot of times, you know, why do we do this? Why is astronomy worth it? What does it really offer to people? And there's all sorts of nice answers about how we learn about new technology and we learn new physics. But to me, there's a very simple and important beauty in astronomy. I remember standing in this park and taking this picture surrounded by other people. But this was also happening in the midst of the pandemic. We were all standing at least six feet apart from one another. Everyone was wearing masks. Everyone was sharing this sad and tragic experience of living through a global event like a pandemic. And we were also sharing the joyful experience of looking up at the same point in the sky and pointing our iPhones at this little tiny comet and trying to get a good picture of this fuzzball. And to me, that's something that astronomy really offers to people. It offers us that shared human experience and that sense of unity through beautiful, triumphant, happy things. Something like taking our first picture of a black hole or something like seeing a comet when it flies by Earth or wondering if there's intelligent life somewhere in the universe. These are all questions that we can all ask together and it's something that astronomy can really bring us together around as it tries to answer these questions. So on that note, I will put my book's information back up and I'm happy to take any questions that people might have. Thank you so much. All right. As one of the people in our office has said, astronomy is the most democratic of all scientists because all you have anyone can go outside and look up. Okay, we do have a number of questions that have come in and so let's kind of start with one that's been there for quite some time. So Rich asks, what book or other resource would you recommend as an introduction to stellar evolution perhaps either for a general audience or for readers comfortable with math and equations? I guess that might be two different types of books. So. No, that's a good question. So it's a question that's right in my wheelhouse too because stellar evolution is actually my research specialty and I've written a graduate level textbook with a co-author, Hennie Lamers, on understanding stellar evolution. That's actually the title of the book. So if you have some physics and calculus and differential equations backgrounds then I can recommend that book. If you wanna go a little bit simpler then a lot of introductory astronomy textbooks spend a lot of time on stellar evolution because studying sort of the physics of stars and how they work is really one of the building block topics in professional astronomy. So something like Carolyn Osley's modern stellar astrophysics is a classic textbook for undergraduate level research. We all nicknamed it the big orange book. I wish I had a copy with me in the room but it's about this thick and bright orange. For a more popular book I'm not sure that there is a sort of general audience like welcome to how stars work book. This has in fact occurred to me when people ask me if I'm thinking about writing another book anytime soon. But I can point you to some of these sort of undergraduate level texts if you want a good exploration of stellar evolution and how it works. Right. You Ron asked, staying with stars here you work with giant stars. Has the dimming of the beetle juice been completely explained? Excellent question. So I wanna disclaimer this was not a plant. I had no idea that this question was coming but I've actually specifically been researching the dimming of beetle juice. I think we have a very good explanation for why beetle juice did what it did but I think explained might be going a bit too far. So back in around October, November of last year beetle juice started dimming very dramatically. And we didn't at the time have an explanation as to why we just saw its visible brightness plunge. And what we eventually managed to suss out and this was research that I did with a couple of my collaborators was that beetle juice had most likely puffed off a large amount of dust from its outer layers. It had shed some mass and then the mass from the surface of the star had condensed into dust and wound up blocking our view of the star and making it seem dimmer. This has now been backed up by a bunch of different observations. I actually loved seeing the whole field get so excited about beetle juice because it meant everyone was studying red super giants. We got observations in the infrared and the radio, other optical observations. And in the end, it looks like the dust explanation is the main explanation. But we did see beetle juice get dim and then bright again. And it looks like it might be getting dimmer again. We're still trying to get data on it. We know that beetle juice varies pretty regularly with time. So we're trying to connect that weird burst of dust production with how beetle juice behaves normally. And we still don't understand a lot about how normal stars produce dust after losing mass. So it's explained and that we think we know what happened but we still don't quite know why. All right. Okay, so, Phillip Also, why does the red giant with the neutron star core look like two interacting stars? So the picture of the two interacting stars came from, it was actually an artist rendition that somebody drew when our discovery made the news, which we, as scientists, by the way, never get any say in what somebody draws. It just shows up on top of an article. But I actually loved this picture because it was showing the neutron star in the process of, or showing the Tarnjikov object in the process of forming. So that would have been the red supergiant and the neutron star in a very close binary where mass is starting to get dragged off of the red supergiant onto the neutron star as it spirals in. So during the formation of a Tarnjikov object, we'd expect it would look like two interacting stars. We're actually still working out exactly what that would look like, whether we would see a blast of X-ray light or a blast of radio light or even a gravitational wave, some signature of the Tarnjikov object forming. But as that's starting, it's gonna look like two interacting stars and eventually then the neutron star just gets eaten. All right. So let's see, Bobette asks, is there a chance for a supernova fairly close by in our lifetime? Oh, this is a wonderful question. And I actually write about imagining what a nearby supernova would look like in the last Stargazers. I hope there is, because it'd be so cool. People sometimes ask me if a nearby supernova would be dangerous at all. And even a pretty nearby supernova like Betelgeuse, it's about 650 light years away. Betelgeuse dying and giving us a supernova would not be dangerous. It would just look awesome because we think that a really nearby supernova like this would get as bright as the full moon. If this happened while the star was up during the day, it would be visible in the daytime sky. One thing we're really not good at that was predicting when stars are going to die. We can't look at a star and say, oh, that one's got 10,000 years left or 2 million years left or a day and a half left. I do know that the last naked eye supernovae visible from Earth happened in the year 1054 and then the year 1572. And then lucky people living in the late 1500s just not too many decades later in 1604. And since then we have not had a naked eye supernova. And according to how many stars we have in the Milky Way and how often we think they should die, we should get one about every 100 years. So I keep imagining, okay, what if one happens tonight? What would we suddenly see if we all went outside and looked up and went, whoa, and oh, it would be a great, it would be a great experience. It would be similar to Comet Neo-Y's. Everybody would have a picture of it on their phones. I'm sure it would get a hashtag and every professional astronomer you know would just go nuts. It would be great. Well, if on average it's 100 years, that means we've got four, they're waiting in the wings and so forth. Right? If only that was how statistics worked. Okay, John asks, you know, did you also interview astronomers who use space-based telescopes to gather their stories? Oh, thank you for asking this. Cause this is another thing that's in the back of my mind is what sort of book would come next. I had to limit the scope of the book as is. So you can, I keep a copy of the book nearby and you can see that it's a solid 300 page and change book. This absolutely could have been three times as long just based on the stories people told me and I left so much on the cutting room floor. So I stuck to ground-based telescopes and I stuck to professional astronomers because there are amazing stories from amateur observers. And there's mind-blowing stories of the adventures of putting telescopes in space. This will most likely be the content for a future book. One thing I can share is that I am also currently working on, I'm about to go film a lecture series for the Great Courses. And that series will include stories behind how the Hubble Space Telescope was launched or the folks who invented the first ultraviolet cameras. There's a, I think, radically under celebrated astronomer named George Carruthers who invented an ultraviolet camera that actually went to the moon and observed from the surface of the moon aboard Apollo 16. So there's all these great stories about how space-based observing worked, but I had to contain them into a separate book or else this would have been an absolute doorstop of a book. Okay, we're gonna, we're getting past the top of the hour so we're gonna go for two more questions here. And so William has a question. Why does Chile have so many different telescopes? Oh, why does Chile have so many different telescopes? Chile is one of the best sites on the planet for observational astronomy. I'd really say that Chile and Hawaii are the two best places to go if you want really beautiful sky conditions and really beautiful dark sky environments. And I am not a meteorologist or any kind of expert on this, but I do know that the location of the Andean foothills is perfect for this. You have air coming off of the Pacific Ocean and then pouring up over the foothills toward the Andes and you wind up with this unbelievably still crisp air. So our image quality is just spectacular in Chile. It's really cool to go visit some of the professional observatories there. I remember standing on the summit for that photo at Viewer Reuben Observatory. And if I looked to the left, I could see the Gemini telescope, just a couple of humps away because Gemini and Reuben Observatory actually share the same mountain. And then off in the distance in another direction, I could see another observatory and all the little domes just kind of spread out along the mountaintop. It looked like a little string of pearls. So it's a beautiful place for astronomy and I love how sort of all in the community there has gone on building and supporting these observatories. All right. So I apologize for the questions that we won't get to here, but I wanna kind of take one question that's here and kind of add to it. And so Ron asked, what was the favorite instrument you have ever used for observing? But I also wanna kind of tag onto that. You have all these stories about other people observing and other people's experiences. What's your favorite of your own story? My favorite of my own story. So my favorite instrument, I think is the one that I showed at that picture at the end where you saw these horrible looking gray stripes and a couple blobs. I'm a spectroscopist by training. So I tend to take beautiful data, I think, that winds up looking like a squiggly line. I've disappointed reporters who have said, oh, do you have a really beautiful picture of your research that we can use in this ad? And I say, sure. And I send them this black squiggle. But I love the power of instruments like that. That was taken with Mike, which is in a shell, so very high resolution spectrograph at Las Campanas Observatory. I love them because they can teach us so much about the chemistry of stars. As for my favorite observing experience, I write about that in The Last Star Gazers, but it is tied to Sophia. So this telescope that can fly up and observe out the open back door of a 747 in the stratosphere. I don't think it gets more memorable than that. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. So all of you that are out there, that's all for tonight. Thank you, Emily, for joining us this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in. So you go to find this webinar along with many others on the Night Sky Network website in the Outreach Resources section. Each webinar's page also features some additional resources and activities. We will post tonight's presentation on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel, actually, because it's live streamed and automatically populates that in the next few days. Join us for our next webinar on October 29th. This is gonna be very timely. This was not planned. This was in the works before that. We have Dr. Kathleen Campbell from NASA's Astrobiology Institute who will share with us how NASA is searching for life within the solar system. It's kind of a timely thing in the news. And so, you know, maybe we'll get some insight into that next month when we hear from Dr. Campbell. So thank you everyone for joining us and clear skies and keep looking up. And just turn the.