 Okay, and welcome to the February webinar of the NASA night sky network this month We welcome Dean Regas to our webinar who have taken us on a whirlwind tour around the cosmos Dean's been been the astronomer for the Cincinnati Observatory since 2000 He's a renowned educator author national popularizer of astronomy an expert and observational astronomy also a former director of the Cincinnati area Project Astro Program, which is so I have the privilege of working with the team for several years and that program is much more So that's been about ten years ago that that we were working on It's been a great pleasure to be able to know Dean for that long Dean is also the co-host of stargazers a new twist on an iconic fact art astronomy program Which bears on over 100 PBS stations around the world He's the author of several books including the one that we're doing giving away this evening He's also a contributing editor to science also Magazine, so you probably have read something by him in there He won the 2008 out of this world award for astronomy education from He's done a lot of other writing and if you listen to NPR You may have heard him on science Friday with Ira Flado and this year He also began astronomy contest with Anna Heyman. Helen Heyman called the looking up So please welcome Dean Reedus Well, good evening everybody. Thank you very much for having me here today. Everybody hear me. Okay I'm coming to you from the Cincinnati Observatory and So we're not used to doing these webcasts here at night So we have a we have a pretty dark sky outside here even though we're in the heart of the city and I just got done Teaching a class on the night sky and of course in typical February Cincinnati fashion. It is completely cloudy So the good news I got to get out of class early The bad news is we don't get to see any stars But I know you all know this from quite a great experience the bane of our existence as clouds but well today, I'm very excited to talk to you guys about some projects that that I'm doing and some a little bit of a software Program that maybe some of you know of that can take us on a tour of the universe And so I was going to demo this with you guys This is a program that I use on a lot of my tour of the universe programs where I take people from the earth off to the farthest reaches of outer space and But first before I get to that I just give you a little background to My place and where I am I'm going to bring up the screen here and let's see if this will work. There we go So this is the place where I work. This is Cincinnati Observatory and Definitely you all have an open invitation to come visit any time We're a national historic landmark with some of the oldest telescopes in the world We have our one main building and then our secondary building Oh, that looks like oh, there it is Our secondary building looks like that and we have a very old telescope one of the oldest telescopes in the world made in 1845 made out of wood and brass 16 feet long 11 inches diameter 11 inch refractor. This is the most gorgeous scientific instrument. I've ever seen I mean the Harvard has the the newer one and the bigger one But man ours just looks pretty sweet and we let people look through it So this is open to the public pretty much every single day that people can look and see the sun safely with the solar filter And then at nighttime We let people look through this old telescope just a gorgeous thing and then we can show people the new telescope the new one from 1904 it's a 16 inch Clark refractor and This is an amazing scope to look through as well And so both scopes are in perfect working order and we use them on such a regular basis. So Anytime you're in the Cincinnati area you stop on by say Dean sent me and we'd love to show you around and show you the scopes Something that Brian mentioned in addition to my job at the observatory I'm also on the TV show called Stargazers and this is that show that used to be run by Jack Horkheimer And it's me and James Albury there on the left and we fly through space on hoverboards and tell you what's up in the sky So if you don't have this in your on your local PBS station Tell them to get it because it's free and we have one minute shows and five minute shows every every day And every week we have different shows, but they run pretty much daily And so you can check it out. You can also see it on the internet now I will dispel one myth and this is very weird when I started on the show I asked them if Jack ever got some weird questions and the weirdest question was somebody said Jack Do you really go into space or like I mean the graphics are good, but I mean they're not that good I mean come on. So this is what really happens We're standing in front of a green screen in North Miami, Florida, and there's me posing like a Ryan the hunter I the likeness is uncanny I'm sure and then they put the background in behind us who have to pretend we're all in different locations But anyway, we try to keep it pretty light-hearted and pretty fun with this So check out Stargazer. You can find that on the internet too very easily and then I've written a few books My first book was called facts from space that has about a thousand facts in it from all around the universe and then Two years ago I wrote a book called hundred things to see in the night sky This will take you on a great tour of the sky through all the seasons a great beginner's guide to find stars Constellations planets my top things to see top objects top events to look for and then the other book was well You know if I made a northern hemisphere book the publisher thought oh how tough could it be to write a southern hemisphere book? Why not do that and boy that was I was living in the southern hemisphere in my mind for quite a while but it's a fun book to check out if you ever go down to the southern hemisphere and farther south and And the other thing that Brian mentioned is this is kind of new well last year or two I started a podcast called looking up where we talk about astronomy topics and Popular astronomy things that are in the news. I have a co-host with Anna Heman She is also employee here the observatory and that the Stick for this thing is I'm the astronomer and she is the down-to-earth person that can keep me grounded and Make sure that I tell everything Is More to the average person that they can pallet and so it's a great little mix the two of us together that Kind of a fun thing so check out that wherever you find podcasts, so we have a new episode every two weeks So without further ado, this is the what I want to delve into is give you guys a tour of the universe We're gonna blast off of the earth go out into space Make a few stops along the way and then see the whole universe from very very far away And so I'm gonna switch to another program here. Let's see if I can do that without any big hassle Oh, well, there's me back up there. All right. That's good. Let's see if I can bring up the program now This is a program that we use Called metaka. It's spelled mit aka and so the best way to find it is just do a Google search And because it's a very interesting program and so let's see. Let me bring it up here and So this is the program that comes up mit aka and The thing with this is it works great on PCs. They the Mac version now the maxing is not quite working There's a metaka plus that kind of worked but didn't work great But if you don't PC, this is a really powerful program How this program came about I have no idea it just appeared on the internet and somebody said check this out Dean You got this is really cool because you can go anywhere in space You can make it anytime you can click on something and go to that location And it is so easy to use is think of it as like the powers of 10 that you can actually drive yourself So I'm gonna demo this for you and this is kind of a similar program that I give When I go out and do outreach programs when I go to star parties when I go to Any kind of thing for the public that you'll kind of get an idea of how you can maybe use this for your own programs And I'm sure some of you've already used it before so I've got to switch to this thing called landing takeoff mode And so we're in the the only I guess the takeoff mode And so all I do is click on this and I can leave the earth behind here We go as we blast off of the earth and We come above above Japan of course, it's a Japanese program It should be coming above Japan and so here we can see the entire earth and once one fell swoop And we can look at different parts of the earth so you can click and drag and look at different parts of the earth So here we're looking at Asia and Africa and Europe in daytime come around here tonight time And so you can really demonstrate the Difference between day and night and so it's daytime when the Sun is When you're pointed towards the Sun and nighttime when you're pointed away from the Sun make a little clips there and there we go and The other thing that you can do then is so you can zoom in and out from any object Then you can also manipulate time so we can move time forward and show the earth rotating And we can play Superman and go backwards if we want but let's just keep going forward And so here we are we can show the earth rotating once every day We spin towards the daylight. It's a spin towards the Sun. It's daytime And one of the other little pluses is if we go up here above the North Pole We can demonstrate something about the seasons a little bit. We can see how as I spin the earth a section of the the globe is not getting any Sun It's 24 hours of darkness up there above the North Pole Whereas if we go to the southern hemisphere the seasons are reversed and you get 24 hours of daylight No, not for long. Oh my gosh. It's almost March, isn't it? And so we'll be getting close to equinox. We're gonna have 12 hours all over the place Let's go back up to the North Pole here and we'll get you a little dizzy and Now we're gonna blast off of the earth and go to the closest neighbor in space And this is one of the pluses of this program is I usually tell people that I have a couple themes to my talk And this theme number one is space is really big And so here just to see the scale of the earth Moon distance this is pretty startling to a lot of people seeing how far away the moon is from the earth This is 240,000 miles, but We can see the moon is a little speck there and there's the earth quite a distance away And this surprises so many folks they picture the moon would be a lot closer But here we should see the moon's orbit its pathway around the earth and I can speed up our time here a little bit We can watch the moon revolve around the earth So there we go and we can go all the way through a whole cycle and get the moon back and now we've shown a whole month And so this is great to show the difference between rotation the earth spinning and revolution the moon revolving around the earth It's also really shows how far humans went We're coming up to the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and this is what such a great feat is it took three days to fly to the moon They spent a few days on the moon three days to fly back But it's course. It's got to be rocket science. So you can't just fly at the moon You have to fly where the moon's gonna be in three days and that's what was so great about this feat It was such an amazing adventure to go all the way to the moon All right, so that's stop number one stop number two Well, let's back it up some more and now we can see at this scale the moon's orbit is gonna be almost nothing on this it's gonna disappear and now we're gonna start to see the orbit of the earth and We'll start to see a few other lines. I'll let you guess which orbit is that one and Then we got another one out here and then we got another one in there And so we back up a little bit more and now we can see our pathway around the Sun I'm gonna center on the Sun now so you double-click on any object and we'll center it up and I can still go in three dimensions so we can see all around and Let's pause right here for a little bit so we can see the inner solar system We have Mercury Venus Earth and Mars and their orbits We also have one extra little thing in here one a you this red circle is one Astronomical unit the average distance from the earth to the Sun and so let's move our time forward a little bit faster We're gonna go one day at a time and watch the planets circle the Sun So here we go, and we see a few interesting things. We see all the planets are going around the Sun in the same direction They are not going the same speed though. And so it looks like who's fastest Mercury Second fastest Venus third fastest earth fourth fastest Mars and so my old professors would say Dean That's a pattern certainly looks like it the close you are the Sun the faster you go Now one thing I've also learned is I give this talk to a fifth graders a lot So I do apologize in advance if I'm talking to you like a fifth grader at any point It's just a force of habit. So I apologize But one thing I did learn from fifth graders that if you were ever talking to a fifth grader about planets They love to hear about how old they are on other worlds because I say, okay Let's say you're 11 on earth. That means you've been around the Sun 11 times But if you lived on Mercury, you'd be like 45 and they're always like oh man That's so old and all the stuff and so it's a lot of fun Then they want to know how old they'd be on Venus how will they be on Mars? And so if you ever want to entertain fourth fifth and sixth graders, that is a topic of conversation I'll let you let you go with that You can also see that the earth is a little farther from the Sun at different points So we can see here. We are one astronomical unit. The earth is a little bit farther from the Sun in June There's our date there We go a little farther and we get to the farthest point is July So this always kind of scares people. It's like wait a second Why are we farther from the Sun in July and then we're closer to the Sun in January this program demonstrates that pretty well and also shows you it's not that big of a difference from one to the other And so if you get into your seasons talk you can talk about how it's not the distance to the Sun that causes the seasons It's the tilt of the earth well Boy, we haven't gone very far. We got a long way to go here. So let's back it up here Oh one thing I'd always do like to point out to groups is to tell them Mars You know if we want to go to Mars, it's gonna be a seven month journey So that's about how long it takes to fly from Mars to earth Mars, but when you get to Mars There's a little problem by the time you get there earth is going to be on the other side and So that's why any manned mission to Mars you've got to take your seven month journey to Mars And then it's one whole year on the planet You have to wait for earth to catch back up again, then you climb into spacecraft and you go seven months back to earth That's why Matt Damon ate all those potatoes in that movie It's this is one of those things is you gotta really this is why we haven't sent humans to Mars It is a two and a half two to two and a half year journey to there and back versus going to the moon was only about eight days They're in fact Well, let's back it up some more Between Mars and Jupiter we can see the asteroid belt and thousands and thousands of asteroids that are all circling around the Sun Also, and we've been looking at this from the top down. So if we look at it from the edge We can see the solar system is pretty flat This is the flat plane of our solar system right here and most of the asteroids are in that plane Also, some you can see are kind of off to the edge and you see that Diagonal slash going through our plane with the label PLU to oh man That troublesome Pluto doesn't want to line up with all the other planets. And so there it is crossing there so Let's back it up here and we'll make a couple little other stops We can stop at Jupiter for a quick little stop because well, we can zoom in on it and then see it's I Think at this point sixty seven moon sixty seven moons I don't think they have the new twelve one twelve moons on there But we have the nearer One's nearer the planet and we can zoom in on the planet see the stripes We can move our time around and get the red spot back over here There we go And even moon shadows you can simulate those with us. It's a pretty amazing program to To set this for any date and time also And we'll back it up again And then we'll make another planetary stop at Saturn and I'm doing this purely because it's my favorite planet And it's pretty sweet to look at. Here's its sixty two moons and the inner moons and the rings so this is a pretty pretty cool view to see these and you can simulate it all and zoom in and out and You can also show the moons going around the planet to They follow that same rule closer ones go faster than the farther ones One other thing I didn't do with Jupiter, but I can do with this I back up here and we can see the outer moons They don't quite go in the plane of The other moons look at them flying around They're like little fireflies going all different directions And so these small moons of Saturn are most likely captured out objects that are still going around Saturn in all different directions and all different trajectories It's kind of cool to see how they fly around Okay, so we're gonna back up here some more and Let's back it up. We'll center on the Sun again We're now at ten astronomical units ten times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is and we get out to the outer planets Uranus and Neptune and then look at all this stuff out here. Oh my gosh. What a mess Well, of course when we were kids, this was a lot simpler This model would have been a piece of cake to memorize We had all those nine things that went around the Sun Pluto being one of them if I want to show them moving I need to go one year at a time and We'll advance our time one year at a time and watch the objects go around the Sun at the very far distance So here we can see Pluto, Hamaea, Maki, Maki, Eris and lots of other things So yeah, when we were kids this stuff wasn't out there We didn't know about it and our telescopes got better in the 90s and 2000s And now we're up to well over a thousand objects that are going around the Sun that we know about that are out here I prefer the term plutoids myself Rather than Kuiper belt objects and Transneptunian objects and all that stuff. I think Pluto plutoids have a has a nice ring to it But you can definitely tell that the plutoids are not in the plane with the other planets and They are mostly icy in nature. They have different origin than the planets different pathways different orbits different makeup different sizes, so Sorry, there's no sympathy here for anybody that thinks Pluto is a planet Pluto is Way different than all the eight planets. It is very similar to these other things out here So I like calling Pluto plutoid myself, but I'll take your hate mail later If you're in your arguments later, but I do want to point out that when I was a kid Pluto was my favorite planet because it was the oddball because it was the weirdest one it switched places with Neptune It went way out and one way in it was the farthest. It was the smallest But now it looks like Pluto is not weird. It has all these other cousins And so Pluto is not as unique as maybe it Once once thought to be and so there is a new Pluto a new Weird object named Sedna and so Sedna. I don't think that's very new is it? It's been known for quite a while, but here's its orbit that takes it almost a thousand a use out from the Sun To see it moving. I have to go a hundred years at a time and Advanced time there. It's so it's going slowly when it's far away fast when it's close Takes about 12,000 years to go around the Sun almost and So if you like oddballs Sedna is the new Pluto I'm gonna make up t-shirts that says that Sedna is the new Pluto I'm not as bad as Neil deGrasse Tyson. That says they get over it I you know, I still I want to be positive so Sedna is the one that we're looking at and Sedna's weird orbit is maybe an indication that there's something else out here What's been called planet nine could be out here among the orc cloud? This is where the long period comets live that make really big orbits around the Sun some of the orbits Can even go all the way out to one light year the distance light travels in a year and a comet with an orbit out To here would be about one million years to go around the Sun one time So this is the whole solar system in this in this big circle and planet nine if it exists is somewhere in here and That's always fun as an observational astronomer. I always joke with the theoretical folks, you know like oh, yeah On paper it's gonna be right there and I have to always chuckle and say well doesn't count till you see it So but anyway any day now hopefully Mike Brown and company are gonna find planet nine and we can put it on the map So this is the solar system out here to about here This is the basically the gravitational reach of our Sun and our Sun is the Center of this. It's our one star in our solar system and we'll zoom on in real fast here to check it out so if we want to if we want to go to the next level we want to go to the next star and I point this out because a lot of people get confused about What's the solar system? What's the galaxy? What's you know these different levels to this and and so it's definitely Really cool to point out that you know our solar system has one star That's the Sun and everything else out here all those other stars are their own solar systems So let's back it up. We'll go back out to one light year again And we're gonna go to our nearest star system to the Sun and I call it a system because it's not a Solitary star. There's Alpha Centauri the system It's a triple star system two big yellow Suns and one little red one that orbits around the other two and it's always fascinating to to share this Imaginary view from the triple Suns With an audience if anybody's familiar with any Star Wars movie or any kind of movie where there's multiple Suns in the sky You tell them about Alpha Centauri where you have two yellow Suns and one little red one and just their imaginations can go kind of pretty crazy with this and Then I have to bring them down to earth and remember my theme. Do you remember my theme? Space is really big. Well travel time if we want to fly to Alpha Centauri Approxima Centauri the closer star and it's only a mere 25 trillion miles It would take you with the fastest spacecraft. We've made Yeah, take you still about 74,000 years to get there And so whenever I tell that to the fifth graders inevitably one of the fifth graders yells out I'd be dead I'm like, yeah. Yeah, you would be dead. That is correct 74,000 years just to get there Even if we sped things up a little bit. Let's say we went 10 times faster It's still gonna take you forever to get there and that's what I like about the stars in this way Is there this there's such vast distances? There's this untouchable thing, but we can study them from all even from back here on the earth Let's go back out some more because that's only our closest star and then we can back up here to see some stars like Sirius and Procyon and out to 30 light years we get to Fomalot, Altair, Vega, Pollux, Capella, Caster, out to a hundred light years and this is all in three dimensions So this star is all around us And now you're starting to feel boy, we're getting a little small here can the scheme of things You get out here to a thousand light years where we get to Canopus, Spica, Polaris, Alberio, Beetle, Juice, Rigel, out to Denneb, one of the farthest stars you can see with the naked eye And now you're starting to feel a boy This every one of those dots is a star every one of those is a sun that somebody has seen in a telescope And we back up some more and then we find that all those stars are just one tiny part of one arm of the Milky Way galaxy and Man that just jumps to a whole another level to see our whole galaxy 200 to 400 billion stars making this flat pinwheel shape This is our galaxy that we live in and we're not even in the center We're out here towards the edge like two-thirds out to the center And I always like this program because I like others 200 to 400 billion stars and ours is That one. I'm glad they let me point it out pretty easily because I don't think I'd find it otherwise Now this has been a big jump to get out here to the Milky Way and it's you know Not only are we not the the center of the universe or that the Sun goes around the earth or any that We're not even in the center of our galaxy. We're out here in the on the the edges Now I think that's probably a good thing because in the center of our galaxy This is where most of the stars are jam-packed so we can zoom in and see the center of the galaxy Where it's going to get very bright very fast and as we get to the very heart of the galaxy We get to explore Something an object that is very deep dark mysterious massive Anything that falls into it disappears and it warps space and time around it That's our simulated view of the black hole in the center of the galaxy And so this is the equivalent of four million suns all in one spot a mass of four million Suns and the gravity is so intense that what even warps the lines on the program man. That's intense Now and now everybody always wants to know well, what's like? What's it like if you fall in? Well, nobody knows and I don't want to find out myself personally and luckily this black hole so far away from us Nothing's ever gonna. We're not gonna fall into it These stars that are nearby better watch out though, and we're watching them pretty carefully So we're gonna leave the black hole behind and go out a little bit farther So we're almost to the edge. Well, I guess maybe not. We really haven't gone very far We've only gone now to a couple thousand Yeah, maybe a hundred thousand light years There's our hundred thousand light years circle And we can see a few other of our dwarf galaxies around us large Magellanic cloud the small Magellanic cloud some other dwarf galaxies that are nearby and Then we can back it up to see our next major galaxy, and I think everybody probably knows what that one is There we go up at the top About two and a half million light years away the Andromeda galaxies. That's the next big spiral galaxy out And so there's the Andromeda galaxy when I zoom in with its satellite galaxies and So we're looking at one trillion stars, and I try to imagine what is that like what does one trillion stars look like and It's you know because we see this in a telescope and it boy it doesn't look all that special It looks like a blobby gray thing But when we get these you know long exposure photographs and we can see the spiral arms. We can see the structure But what boggles my mind is that this is up there in the sky in the fall in the winter It's up there in the sky, but as a city dweller. I don't get to see it I never can see it with the naked eye, and that's what doesn't make any sense is how can one trillion stars? Not be visible in my night sky That's how far away this galaxy is it's hard to wrap your brain around distances, but when I explain one trillion stars invisible That that's how far this is this is galaxy is Well, we got another galaxy just a little farther away just a hop over there is the Triangulum galaxy a mirror 40 billion stars Yeah, that's not even worth talking about too much, right? I mean come on We don't have time for a little galaxies and so We've got one more level and Yeah, we do have a little problem with Leo a a a I got to work on that I think I need to work on the code on that one, but anyway, that's a galaxy But at this level we have one more jump to go We're out at the galaxy level and at this point every dot in the background is not a star Every dot is a galaxy of stars each one of these dots represents a galaxy that has been Viewed through a telescope one way or the other and so I'm gonna back us up and show you how many galaxies That we have seen so far in our telescopes here we go and that's the universe well kind of That's what the universe looks like from where we are and that's only the universe that we've seen so far We can kind of see the structure of the galaxies in here It looks kind of like a butterfly shape and this is based on two things one is this is the plane of our galaxy So all those billions and billions of stars are blocking our view so we can't see this way in this way as well The other problem with this is well, there's holes in our map. That's because they ran out of money So we get the astronomers some more money they fill in these holes We figure out how to look through the galaxy which we're getting pretty we're almost getting it down now So these things these holes are going to be filled in and so if this is a representative sample of all the galaxies in the Universe we're looking at two trillion galaxies in our universe each with billions and billions of stars in it The farthest thing out here. This is the farthest stuff that we can detect. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation This is the leftover heat of the creation of the universe the big bang This is the farthest stuff that we can detect only a few degrees difference than absolute zero But still amazing that we can see this all that way 13 billion light years away So that's all of it everything in our universe and so Boy, there's a lot of other questions you can get from this or was this the only universe are there other universes just It outside of ours are there multiple universes are there infinite number of universes? well Sure, I'm open to anything but right now that there's no evidence We don't have any evidence that there are other universes out there and could there be other universes? Sure, might we ever detect them? Maybe I don't know. I do have a Philosophy unfortunately, that's a little bit contrary to most of the multiverse theory Because I have a definition of the universe. That's maybe a little different than most folks my definition of the universe is Everything all the stars all the galaxies everything that we can detect is in the universe so Follow my train of logic here if we detect another universe It is not another universe because once we see it it becomes our universe. Oh yeah, so My my web of logic says there are no other universes, but I understand that's pretty faulty logic, but anyway, I try Well at the edge of the universe here It's getting a little cold so I think it's time to fly us back home and Since we are gonna fly home here and time is a little short I'm going to target the earth and I'm gonna fly home very fast And I do realize there is no sound in outer space, but I'm going to use sound effects. So hold on to your seats So we went all the way to the edge of the universe and back to the earth and I got you home Oh boy, I got you home a little late at the bottom. It's July 1st 29,762 whoops. Oh boy, sorry about that. You're your family's have been worried sick about you So with my apologies Well, so I think this is pretty crystal clear of my theme of space is really big I think this captures that so well that you can so Manipulatable that you can just go to different places and really Dig into this and the other thing that this strikes me is Sure, it's gonna make your audience feel very tiny. That is true But this is also what's so exciting about our field is that even though we're teeny tiny creatures living on this little planet circling around a mediocre star and a average galaxy in a cold dark universe We're unbelievably smart teeny tiny creatures Look at what we've done from this little planet this little observatory called earth and we can use our Your crafty creatures we can use our instruments to find all these things out in space to study The sizes and temperatures and makeups of stars to find planets around other stars to see galaxies 13 billion light years away So for teeny tiny creatures, I'm super excited to be in the forefront of This best of all the sciences of astronomy is every day we get to add to this map every day We find a new asteroid we put it on the map. We just found a whole fleet of stars We're gonna put that on the map and galaxies and this is our our journey through the universe and so this is a Really powerful program and it is super easy to use all you have as those buttons in the bottom left that zoom in and out bottom bottom buttons on the up top upper right that you can Change your time forward and backwards it is so easy to use So I hope you guys try it out and you know if you have an audience This is a cool thing to do and if you ever Need me to come and visit I'd be happy to do that too and give you guys a little talk about this Because this is one of my favorite programs do and the reaction you get from audiences is just so powerful that they're They're just like blown away So it's just a great Program to use and thank you so much for let me share it with you And I'd be happy to take some questions of folks have them or any comments Well, that's fantastic Dean. That's a really powerful piece of software. And so we do have a few questions here excellent of a couple of people and we're probably gonna Probably have to be an interactive one and you're probably have to go back to it several people are wondering If you could show us where approximately the voyagers are Sure, so where are the voyagers? That's a good question. Okay, so let me go back here. We'll share we'll do that We'll do this. Okay, where are the voyagers? Okay? Well, it is the year 29,000 but still at the we will ignore that part So let's go out here. The voyagers are out I believe they're over a hundred a use out now And my vague memory is one of them is at 130 or something like that But I might be off by a little bit if nothing else there's somewhere around this this region and so you think they left 40 years ago and They are out this far, which is incredible to be out this far, but in the scheme of things. I always like those those news stories every so often the media picks up on that the voyagers have left the solar system and you know They've hit this new region of the solar system and I always laugh about that because you know They got a long way to go to leave the solar system in my mind They got to get out to here where the comets are and get past the comets and they've got about the Tens of thousands of years till they're gonna get out there But yeah, so in the scheme of things the voyagers are pretty darn close and we did have the New horizon spacecraft fly past Pluto That was a nine and a half year journey to get to Pluto and then redirected to the other object the One I think it's called Ultima Tulia is now they're calling it the one that looks like a double object That's not too much farther out here, but yeah, that's that's out where the voyagers are So so how far are our pioneer they're not quite as far as the voyagers and so where would they be located in? Yeah, still similar similar distances. They were slower spacecraft. So the the voyagers I think I can't remember if it's one or two that's out farther than the other I can never remember because I think it was two that they redirected to the other planets And one just kept on zooming out there But I can never I can't keep them all straight But they're all still in that that hundred to hundred fifty a you range so still Relatively close after forty some years, but I do believe the voyagers have passed. They're farther out than the pioneers I believe that's correct. Yes. I think that that's correct Mainly because the pioneers were going quite a bit slower. Yes. Yes, that is correct. Yeah Hey, so early on and this is would be kind of a so a lot of the material did you program some of the material into this or was this all On board the the program that you get all the circles and all the distance It is all pre-programmed. I have no Experience whatsoever and doing any of that. So I wouldn't even know the first place to even start. That's what's so so great this was all pre-made by somebody for some mysterious reason, but Everything that I've done with it seems as accurate as possible The way that the the planets go around the Sun has been improved and it made more accurate the way that The positions of the stars the position the galaxies everything I've tested has been it's been spot on so the Crudos to the metaka team wherever they are wherever they are It's one of those when it when it first came out the instructions were only in Japanese And I had to like go through it as as well as I could just on my own But it's now they have an English version and they have other different Versions new or new updates they put on to it And so this one that I was using might not be the newest of the updates, but it also can be Altered you can enter something. So I think we had one of our interns that he put in a Asteroid that he wanted to highlight and He also figured out how you could start from wherever you're from from so if you want to start from Cincinnati You could zoom off from Cincinnati. So it is something you can alter the programming for yourself, too. I Know early on Ron had noted What was wondering about what plane was used for the light circle But then I think as we backed out that it became much more evident what it was and so somebody Actually put something in that was useful. All right different landmarks. It seems exactly exactly Yeah, they wanted to have the you know the plane of the solar system and the plane of the galaxy and so yeah They have been to show how they they crisscross and and that's really kind of cool Stephanie asked a question. She says does this have the capability of showing the constellations from the different areas of the solar system Universe could you put up the Installation lines and then move around to see what the relative distances are to the stars in the constellation That's a real good question. So when they they issued another one called metaka plus that was out for a while And that one you could do that with this one. I wasn't so sure Because I haven't done it lately. So let me double check. We'll just go here and have a little fun Yeah, metaka plus could do it really well this one. I don't know if it ever did Let's see if we can put in the constellations. I don't think they will let you do it Unfortunately so you could go to some some specific places. They'll let you go to the Pleiades star cluster That's kind of any casters the six star system And then you can go to there's the black hole you go the M13 and then Virgo cluster and drama galaxy spacecraft. So here we go Boy, that would have been easier if I would have known that ahead of time go to Voyager So I don't know where it is. Oh, I guess there it is Okay, there's a hundred boy if I zoom in what's gonna happen. Oh Man, I got a zoom in a lot. I'm rolling. I'm rolling getting closer getting closer Boy, I don't know. I don't see a spacecraft. Is anything getting bigger? Oh Oh my gosh, there it is I know that's right. Yeah, so because if I back up the scale here to There goes. Goodbye Yeah, so I don't think this one has the capability to do The constellations But yeah, you can try Mataka plus that oh wait a second. What's this? Oh My goodness here. I am supposed to be the expert on this Although I don't see any lines Well, there's always stuff to mess around with illustrations. Whoops. Oh There we go. There's some lines Too far in the depths of the solar system I think so So there's Alpha Centauri and something. Oh, there we go. I'm already messing up something Yeah, so you can do it a little bit, but Let's see if we go back to let's go back to the earth here and we'll scale it back in There we go You scale a little closer Yeah, so there's the constellations out there and we can see there's the southern cross for instance So if you leave the earth, I wonder yeah, how how Distorted it ends up getting I mean you have to go pretty far to actually see it change significantly Yeah, I guess you lose some lines in there But You get at least a few constellations, but not the whole thing. Oh, there's a Ryan gets all messed up. That's cool Yeah, it's like it starts to give a least a little bit of a sense Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know that those stars aren't all equal distance exactly Yeah, and that's one of the things I you know, there's always more with this program that I'm still finding Again because of the lack of instructions, you just have to play around with it until you find this stuff Well, that's the best way just keep pushing buttons until it does what you think it should do exactly exactly But I do apologize for folks watching. It's never fun to watch somebody try to figure out a program I do apologize for that. That's like Okay, well Lewis asked he's got a you know, it's kind of a comment But it's a question you're to these always told there's no such thing as the center of the universe because the entire universe Spraying And it's been determined that every galaxy is accelerating away from all other galaxies or each accelerating object as a direction Backtrace the directions in time where they all Kind of with the way that you demonstrated this it made it up here that there was a center Oh, yeah, utilize this to Well, yeah, you caught me on something here And then what you caught me on was the all everything I just showed you was a total illusion All that that I showed you is what the universe looks like from our position And that's the the whole thing is that it appears that we're in the center And there's two ways to look at this is one is the universe infinite And if it is infinite that it goes on in all directions forever Then you are in the center by definition wherever you are if I move two feet to the left I'm still in the center you as the observer or the center of the universe if it is not infinite which There's a lot of debate about that if it is it then this is all just appearance that it looks like we're in the center But that it's really not that way. It's just how we are from the observer from as us as observers. This is a These are questions that are so deep and I would say if anybody out there actually knows the answer How do you imagine everything? This is this is our our feeble attempt at trying to See what the view would look like if you are standing up looking at the whole universe And so this is this is a very effective map, but is it actually reality? That's the tricky thing because so well all these things we're looking at in the distance are also things in the past So when we're looking farther away, we're also looking at things that are older and not actually happening So this is getting into some super deep questions and these are also some answers that boy we don't know it's one of those things is how do you imagine infinity and I sure can't answer that myself this is this is my best guess Well, it's kind of back to that Obviously, we have a preferred thing of reference because it's ours But then again somebody costs the universe they're gonna look up and think that they're in the middle Well, and maybe we're all the middle everybody's the middle that's the this is you know when When your parents told you the earth didn't revolve around you. Yeah, you tell yeah, but I am the center of the universe There's a t-shirt one some hundred times that said, you know center of the universe. It's pointing to you. Yeah, that's right That's right exactly. Well, you know kind of in that same, you know being here I guess Jeremiah outside how far away the James Webb Space Telescope see past the Hubble using this program will Disenables those to be able to see past the cosmic background Yeah, that is a tough prospect seeing past the cosmic background that is In my mind with our current technology impossible that sets it so the idea of seeing past that it's like this wall that that we can't see past and There the reason for that is Well, when we're looking in space, we're also looking back in time So when we are see the sun set that's actually the sun takes eight minutes for its light to get it to us So the sun had already set eight minutes ago. You're just now getting the information And when you look at stars, that's where they were years ago So they're not really in that spot when we look at those galaxies those galaxies that are the youngest galaxies There are 13 billion light years away. Those are also 13 billion years old That is not where they are anymore. They just look like that and we can't look past the cosmic background Radiation because if we go back any farther, that's before time existed Whoa, that's deep man. Yeah, cuz so you so if we could see past that then we would see Before the universe and we don't know what was before the universe. Was there anything before the universe? Those are things that from what I can tell I don't think that I don't want to go out on limb and say We'll never figure that out, but it's gonna be tough So what sauce so with all the objects we've seen this guy I What are the percentages of those big products stars galaxies men made so it's sort of just rough numbers so I suppose I depends on whether we're using a Instrument of some sort or our eyes Yeah, so with the naked eye Chances are what you're seeing are stars and you know with on a really clear dark sky You can see thousands of stars in a urban location if you're in the city you might see a couple dozen to a hundred stars and pretty much every one of those is gonna be a Actual star there are five planets. You can see with the naked eye. We've got Mercury Venus Jupiter Mars and Saturn those are the five planets you'd see without a telescope and right now Jupiter is in the morning I hope everybody got up early this morning to see the Jupiter moon Conjunction if you saw a little star Nick the bright star next to the moon It was actually Jupiter and then we have another moon Planet conjunction on Saturday morning where the moon is going to be next to Venus So outside of those five planets everything else up there. You're seeing is pretty much a star Of course, then you have satellites that it might be flying overhead as well The International Space Station is by far the brightest and easiest to see but then you also have Well, I shouldn't say brightest. There's iridium flares iridium satellites can really brighten up very fast and then fade away and so There's a lot of apps that you can use to follow satellites or satellite tracker. There's one called the A Sputnik that I use to follow when satellites are going overhead but pretty much every one of those are stars up there that you see and One of the facts that that really blows people's minds is that you show all those stars up there every single one of Them is bigger than our Sun Everyone that you can see with the naked eye There's one exception a teeny tiny star in the constellation of Riddness That is just a smidge and smaller than our Sun But you good luck finding that one all the other things are way bigger than our Sun In fact, most those stars up there are like these behemoths like Beetlejuice and Rigel that are Abnormal stars that we're seeing at night and from these tremendous distances Right. Well, we're right at the top of the hour I want to do one more question and then we want to you know, you're on Eastern time And so it's might be getting close to your bedtime. Although you are a astronomer inside. I'm an astronomer. This is nothing I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started. I got my coffee here. I'm ready to go. Actually, it's not coffee It's camomile. I'm going to sleep so we're gonna go one more question and And so this is another one You don't kind of I think this will expand some people's minds for that so Virginia asked what would happen to the universe without What would happen to the universe without gravity? Whoa, man That's a tough one to picture. What would the universe be like with that gravity? Well, I Think I would be floating away as we speak and so would everybody Let me think so what forces would be would take over if we had some forces that would take over that would That would mess up everything. I mean, we wouldn't have anything on earth There probably wouldn't be an earth there wouldn't be a sun This is it's the forces of gravity that have brought things together to form into things So if let's say Gravity disappeared on earth not only would you fly off of the earth all pieces of the earth would just go off into space if you would go If you would start to Walking one way. That's it. You would just keep going that way. There'd be no friction that you'd have to slow you down That's boy. That's like one of the most frightening things that I could think of Is gravity suddenly turning off because it yeah, it doesn't just affect you it affects every single thing out there and it was one of those Things that you know, we think of this the Sun and the gas giant planets that they're all made of gases and a lot of people say Well, how do they stay together? If they're just gases aren't they just floating away like gases on earth, but you know gases have masses also And so those the grad they have a gravitational force and so Jupiter is a ball of gases That's held together by the gravity of those gases and same with the Sun So if we had no gravity there would be nothing nothing would be chaos everything would be floating everywhere and We wouldn't be having this nice conversation I Know that would be kind of Think about that you have to stop and think about these things and so, you know Weak and strong nuclear forces wouldn't do anything like their magnetic force now You got all the molecules but then on the outside They'd be pulling you to some extent because of the lunch arms, you know, you know, it would get very very complicated and so I Know and you know gravity is one of those tough forces and it's always there and You know, I always think of if anybody is a big fan of the the cartoon the tick Whenever the tick falls places, he's always like gravity. It's a harsh mistress. I always think of that and that's true Gravity is will win out in the end. That's what happens. You will always gravity will always will always get you Yeah Well, that's a good place to end and so thank you very much Dean This has been absolutely fantastic having you here. Thank you for sharing the tour with the with the new software that I haven't seen before That's a really powerful piece. I love the graphics on it It's it seems like it's much easier to use than some of the other Classics, I'm sorry night or still only and things like that. Yeah most definitely and I'll I'll send you guys a link to it But really all you have to do is do a Google search for metaka MIT aka and you can follow that on there, too And and be sure to check out the Stargazers page, too So you can watch Stargazer show and anytime anybody's in Cincinnati drop by the observatory. We'd love to have you I know a few people we found David Nike on the link and we posted it and a few people actually Downloaded it and discovered that there were some potential security issues with their Virus really. Oh, it's it. Yeah, cuz I know I had a problem with Stellarium once that I got something that downloaded with it and They got that all figured out. But yeah, metaka usually goes pretty smooth if nothing else, I also you can just get it I have it on there on a On a drop box and you can you can like put it on a thumb drive and take it from place to place, too So it's easy to do in this case It was um, they don't have SSL enabled on their web server So some if you're downloading a zip file or something from some antivirus software like oh, no, no, no, no, right, right? Yeah, they're having a lot of SSL fun lately We had an issue with the night's good networks moon feed from the US Naval Observatory because they had changed their SSL certificate They had oh, why the clear sky charts across the country were also affected by that, but they know, okay Well hang on for a minute we're gonna end this and then we're gonna come back for the raffle So that's all for tonight everyone you can find this webinar along with many others on the night's good network Website in the outreach resources section each webinars page also features additional resources that includes We'll also post tonight's presentation on the night sky network YouTube channel in the next few days. Thanks and good night